by Anne Howkins

maybe I wouldn’t have learnt the correct way to look at a painting. Think light and shadow, see the humility, the vulnerability, but here I am, in front of Rembrandt’s Night Watch, and yes, I see it, the chaos, the girl looking at the powerful, red-sashed man, I get it.  

Now you’ve slinked away like a guttering flame, I’d like to say thank you for all those times you pointed out what Constable, or Turner, or Cezanne had hidden in the shadows. For all those times you talked about the building of layer upon layer on an empty canvas—the way those layers became scumbled, burying what lay beneath. For all those times you stood with me, directing me to the source of light, to trace its delicate illumination of a lace collar, its cruel glare on an old woman’s wrinkles. For all those times you talked about colour; Vermeer’s miring himself in debt to paint a girl’s headdress ultramarine, Turner’s daubed red buoy mocking Constable’s over-use of the same shade.

And I wanted to let you know, I saw you in that gallery a couple of years ago with a woman. I recognised the look on her face before I realised it was you, pointing and talking, and it was too soon for me, that day, there were too many of the layers you’d painted still to be brushed away. It was too soon for me, that day, to look at your face, to catch that familiar flash of blue eyes blazing as you lectured your entranced companion, and just a glimpse of a faded red scarf was enough to send me trembling out onto the street.

But if you were here now, I’d just say that Rembrandt chose to shine his light on the girl, and she’s glowing. 

* * *

ANNE HOWKINS' little stories have appeared at WestWord, Flash 500, Free Flash Fiction, NFFD, Cranked Anvil, The Hoolets Nook and TrashCatLit. Anne also looks after the finances of a charity, walks and spends time with her adored grandson. 
Bluesky @anneh23.bsky.social

by Dustin P Brown

He couldn’t tell her how he felt; it was too mean. His grandmother had taught him to keep his mouth shut if nothing good would come out of it.

Still, he wanted to. The pilot warned of turbulence in a crackly voice. He wanted to scream at the woman, all the horrible things he couldn’t say out loud. She wasn’t real to him. She could be a void to toss bad thoughts into.

But he didn’t. Instead, he ignored her feet on the back of his plane seat, same way he’d been ignoring the lump near his scrotum. Couldn’t do it. It’s what killed his Poppa all those years ago. Oops, there’s the bump, oops now you’re in a casket covered in unflattering makeup.

He could yell all of this at the feet shoving cushion into his spine. He could do it. It was all he wanted in that moment, but he didn’t. He literally bit his tongue, chewed it up into used gum, really tapped that rage down into the pit of his stomach where it throbbed next to the lump. Then he waved off a drink-cart-pushing flight attendant.

Did death hurt? Was he just afraid of pain? No, there was more. The unknown. The same fear his grandmother would soothe in her bedroom late at night when he’d spend the night at their house as a child. The way she’d flick on a nightlight and solve all his problems in a moment. Moments can be so powerful. A diagnosis. The insistent throbbing of an impolite woman’s feet against your back. A last breath. A light in the dark.

* * *

Dustin P Brown is a Michigan-born, Spain-based author of poetry and prose. He received his BA in Creative Writing from Western Michigan University and currently works as an editor and interpreter. 
Instagram: @dpbrownwrites / BlueSky: @dpbrownwrites.bsky.social‬
Author site: https://dustinpbrown.wixsite.com/author

by M.D. Smith

“We’ll grow old together,” you whispered that night under the streetlamp, your thumb tracing circles on my wrist. I believed you. That was our first lie—the sweetest one we ever told.

Eight months later, you moved to Chicago to teach. I stayed in Virginia Beach, running my father’s store. We promised distance wouldn’t matter. Your blue-ink letters arrived every Friday, smelling faintly of cinnamon and cigarette smoke. You wrote of your students, your loneliness, and once of a dream where we were gray-haired, still together on a porch somewhere, still in love. I carried that letter until it fell apart.

I always wrote you back.

Time moved on. You married a kind man. I married a good woman named Claire. We built separate lives, but sometimes, when the night went still, I’d wonder if you were looking at the same moon.

Decades later, your handwriting returned, shaky, fragile.

“I’m sick,” you wrote. “I wanted you to know I kept our lie alive longer than I meant to. Maybe love doesn’t die. It just changes its address.”

Claire read the letter and said quietly, “You should go.”

You were waiting on your daughter’s porch, eyes bright despite the disease. We spoke for hours. When the sun dipped low, you asked, “Do you still believe it?”

“I think love did conquer time,” I said. “Just not the way we thought.”
You smiled. Three weeks later, you were gone.

Your final letter arrived after the funeral:
“If you’re reading this, watch the sunrise at the ocean and think of me. That’s where I’ll be.”

I went. The tide whispered your name, and for one impossible moment, I felt your hand in mine again.
​
Maybe love is just the lie we keep believing. Our unfulfilled promises wash over me like the surf.

* * *

M.D. SMITH of Huntsville, Alabama, writer of over 350 flash stories, has published digitally in Frontier Times, Flash Fiction Magazine, Bewildering Stories, and many more. Retired from running a television station, he lives with his wife of 64 years and three cats. 

Marc Littman

They called Todd Go-Go Boy because he was always on the go yet he ran about in a very small world. See, Todd couldn’t afford to go anywhere, no money and tethered to a rusty old trailer with a rusty old mother who drank away whatever money he scrounged from hustling odd jobs in a neighborhood where everyone hustled.

      But Todd escaped reality by roaming the Internet booking exotic trips from the bowels of Death Valley to the sublime heights of Mount Everest and canceling his reservations in the nick of time before his mother’s credit card could be charged. Still, the dreamy prospects of finally taking off plastered a bright smile on Go-Go Boy’s face and blinded his eyes.

      That might explain why Go-Go Boy failed to sense the thug on his tail one late night exiting the liquor store with a nightcap for mother. Now Go-Go Boy doesn’t need to make reservations or cancel. He goes where his soul pleases whenever and wherever.   

* * *

Marc Littman is a former journalist who now writes fiction. He lives in Los Angeles.

by Allison Renner

When my grandmother died, I went with her. I floated just behind, through the ceiling and over the roof. As she surged toward the sea, I took one last glance down at the lush treetops, wishing I could reach for her so she’d know she didn’t have to make this journey alone. I remember her arranging my tea set just so, completing puzzles with both our hands pushing down the final piece, me struggling to stay awake while she watched the late-night talk show, baking snickerdoodles while the rest of the family talked in the den. The silence of us reading together on the couch, side by side as we are now, waiting for the waves to wash our spirits away.

* * *

ALLISON RENNER is the author of Green Light: The Gatsby Cycle and Won’t Be By Your Side. Her fiction has appeared in Ghost Parachute, SoFloPoJo, Ink in Thirds, Gooseberry Pie, and others. She can be found at allisonrennerwrites.com.

by Shama

Water chalked out marks on the apartment walls,
roping me in; the macaque screeched--
its toy lungs failing.

The rising brine strengthened
its noose. I swatted flies circling
the swollen coffee table.

The carpet's frayed hands
released their hold of Lego bricks,
from which you once made a house.

Mothballs rolled down and rattled
in the drain filter as I pulled the plug
and scavenged my leftover pieces

from your jetsam.

* * *

Shama has work featured in Gyroscope Review, ONE ART, The Pierian, and elsewhere. She writes from an old dusty corner of the earth and can sometimes be found on Bluesky @entangledrhyme.bsky.social and IG @entangledrhyme.

Anne Marie Lyall

Seth placed his mother by the hearth. It had been her favourite spot. Until that night. When she’d stormed out. Swore never to set foot in his house again.

He supposed she’d kept her word.

Banjo whimpered as he sniffed the opaque jar. He had always been fond of mother. 

* * *

ANNE MARIE LYALL is from Scotland. She can almost see Loch Lomond on a clear day. She is published in the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize Anthology, 101 Words, Cafe Lit and long listed in the Myslexia Flash Fiction Competition.  

by Ariel M. Goldenthal

You told me that the ocean held your family’s secrets for centuries and that the rope tethering us ashore could fray without warning. We danced along the edge of the icy water, your hand in mine, smooth rocks coarse against fresh cuts on the soles of my feet.

You said the stairs were too steep; the electrical, too old for me to be alone by the sea. You didn’t tell me you’d be the nightmare worse than the wind-scraping of oak tree branches against shutters.

Now the house keeps all my secrets and more than the remnants of your pain.   

* * *

ARIEL M. GOLDENTHAL is an associate professor of English at George Mason University. Her work has appeared in The Citron Review, Fractured Lit, Exposition Review, and others. Read more at www.arielmgoldenthal.com. 

by Shanti Chandrasekhar

Mother remained stoic when my father, her husband of fifty-five years, died. With her firstborn on his deathbed now, she howls, gibbers. Hysterical.

My sister, who shuttles between the hospital and Mother’s home, yells from somewhere in the room, “Ma? Stop!” Her shrill command betrays her threatened mettle.

“How?” Mother asks me, the word trembling between her sobs.

My back slides down the wall. I sit on the floor, holding the phone. Far away from my mother, from my sister, from my dying brother.

Mother’s wail echoes across the Atlantic. It devastates, it haunts, it bridges. It glues us together. It does what her pretend stoicism couldn’t.

* * *

​SHANTI CHANDRASEKHAR’s words have appeared in Persimmon Tree, Bright Flash Literary Review, 50-Word Stories, Flash Fiction Magazine, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and elsewhere. She writes and lives in Maryland.

by Lois Anne DeLong

She always loved sunsets, he recalled. If her schedule permitted, she stopped everything when the first red streaks appeared in the sky.  If they were together, he would wrap his arms around her, and they would stand in silence until the last drop of color drained from the sky.

They met in Key West, a place where the sunset is celebrated every night. He was seeking temporary escape from a staggering series of failures. Her history had been equally difficult, yet somehow she had retained a deep well of inner joy that was triggered every time the day made its fiery surrender.

When she passed away—ironically just as streaks of red and orange made their first appearance within a crystal blue Montauk sky—he could no longer continue these end of day celebrations. Every night, as the sun made its descent, he would close the curtains, turn on the TV, or retreat to a dark and noisy bar.

But, today, a sunset caught him by surprise. He went to draw the curtains, but the reflection of the fading rays off the snow stopped him in his tracks. He stared deeply at that shimmering mirror of ice and snow and caught the reflection of a man buried in darkness. Not his beloved’s darkness, which she likened to a warm, encompassing blanket. No, this was a darkness filled with monsters, most of them of his own making.

As he slowly lifted his eyes to the skies, he decided the curtains would remain open tonight. He poured a glass of wine and moved closer to the glass.  Pulling the warm blanket of her darkness around him, he toasted the night as it slowly rolled in.

* * *

LOIS ANNE DELONG is a freelance writer from Queens, New York, and is active in the Woodside Writers literary forum. Her work has appeared in Dear Booze, Short Beasts, Bright Flash Literary Review, DarkWinter Literary Journal, and The Bluebird Word. 

by Colleen Addison

In those days his madness struck me as magic. He made drinking cups from foxglove flowers, replaced buttons with the heads of dandelions. Stories fell out of him about the fairies living in mushroom rings. As I grew older, I saw how the cups leaked; how the blossoms withered and grew grey. I saw how neighbours shifted away from him, fearful of any perceived association. I was angry but stopped short of wearing a hat like his, a long-abandoned coalhood he said kept off the rain better than any poncho. I felt trapped, jealous of his playful nature and reluctant to condone it, furious at the condemnation he endured while secretly harbouring a similar discomfort. One day when I trotted up the multicoloured cobblestones of his garden path, I saw emptiness in his house windows. Where had he gone? My eyes fell, surprised and envious, on a ring of mushrooms. 

* * *

COLLEEN ADDISON completed a PhD in health information; she then promptly got sick herself. Her work has been published in Halfway Down the Stairs, River Teeth, and Little Free Lit Mag. 

by Jennifer Griffin Gaul

The blue dots scatter across my chest like a constellation. These stars have lit my life before. They burned on my husband before they burned on me. In less than four months his were gone, their promise unfulfilled. Mine have remained. So like a ship from days of old I will use them to navigate my way.

* * *

JENNIFER GRIFFIN GAUL is a pianist and music educator who writes in the moments of silence when not making music. 

by Patricia Russo

The old man is weaving a net out of ashes
in which to catch a name.
She can tell his eyes are burning
but he won’t stop to wipe them.
She’d like to stroke his head 
as she passes behind him
but he’d only shrug her off.
She has names in every pocket
tucked inside twists of pretty paper
but he wouldn’t thank her
for any of them
so she keeps them for the children
who visit her shyly
on certain afternoons
when a quarter moon
is visible in the sky.

* * *

PATRICIA RUSSO's work has appeared in One Art, The Sunlight Press, Vagabond City, A Sufferer's Digest, Hex Literary, Eulogy Press, Revolution John, and Crow and Cross Keys.

by Steven Bruce

We’ve learnt to carry it
like a sack of half-rotten potatoes,
the skin split,
the smell lingering behind us.

The days drag on,
each one more worn,
duller than the last.

There’s no choice
but to keep walking,
heavy footed,
eyes on the clouds.

With hope,
that somewhere ahead
we’ll find a place
to set it down.

* * * 

STEVEN BRUCE is a multiple award-winning author. His poetry and short stories have appeared in numerous international anthologies and magazines. In 2018, he graduated from Teesside University with a Master of Arts in Creative Writing. Born in England, Steven now resides in Poland.