by Chris Cottom

I get home to find Marion radiant and every bookcase empty.
"Happy retirement," she says, handing me a Kindle.
Even family photos, it appears, aren’t sacrosanct.
"Digital storage is eco-responsible," she says, as her scanner-shredder swallows our wedding album.
"But we can’t digitise my LPs. My Flying Burrito Brothers, my Motown Chartbusters."
"I have seen the future of rock ’n’ roll," says my once hippy-chick wife. "It’s called Spotify."
 
She drags me around a canal-side complex for the over sixties.
"I’m happy where we are," I say. "And none of these flats have kitchens."
"We’ll eat out. I’ve done a cost-analysis."
"What about making a sandwich? A cup of coffee?"
"Duh! Ever heard of meal deals, David? And there’s a coffee shop across the bridge. Called Nomad."
"I feel like I’m a nomad."
 
On our way to sign the lease, Marion takes me to the whole-life memory scanner at the health centre.
"Copies everything onto an SD card," she says. "Ideal for when we start losing it."
I step to one side. "Ladies first."
I slip the technician a wad of fifties, tell him to press Wipe. Then I get out the lease and ask him to shred it.

* * *

Chris Cottom lives near Macclesfield, UK. One of his stories was read aloud on the Esk Valley Railway between Middlesborough and Whitby. In the early 1970s he lived next door to JRR Tolkien.
@chriscottom.bsky.social
@chris_cottom1 (on X)

by Joseph E. Arechavala

I sat across the tree stump from Him, waiting. Waiting for Him to answer my plea. The songbirds softly chirped their last calls before sunset, and the evening mist was beginning to gather. "Do you fancy a game of chess?" He asked, in a quiet voice. 

I looked down to see the board. I honestly hadn't even noticed it sitting there. I was a bit surprised it wasn't harsh black and white Gothic, or sleekly modern walnut and maple. Instead, I saw white and green jade pieces, simply carved, resting on the white and green board, waiting. Like me.

"I suck at chess," I offered. "You'd win easily."

"Sometimes it's not about winning or losing. Sometimes, it's just about having a nice, quiet game to pass the time and talk."

"I didn't expect to have this much time with You. I figured You'd be busy collecting souls."

"It's my day off. There are many of us, you know. And even an Angel needs to recharge every once in a while." He gazed off, as though looking at some destination in the distance.

"Well?" I pressed.

"It's not your time." His hand paused above the board, then He chose, and moved a pawn. "We have rules to follow, you know." He looked up from from His move, light blond hair falling across one blue eye, an expectant expression on His face.

I sighed. 

"But I think we can bend them this once. Let's have a nice, quiet game though, first."

I looked down, chose a pawn, and moved it two spaces forward. "Let's.”

* * *

​Joseph E. Arechavala is a lifelong resident of NJ and graduate of Rutgers University who has had poems and stories published. He has a novel, Darkness Persists, available on Amazon and is working on an anthology.

by Mathieu Parsy

Once inseparable, jealousy over a boy caused a landslide that buried their friendship. Their chests turned into large crevices, overgrown with trees and foliage. Tectonic plates shifted in search of a mutual core, but the continents didn’t align. As new rock formations spanned the distance, the divide remained. Their magnetic fields wavered—drawn close, yet skewed off course.
 
And eruptions disturbed the stagnation, the magma of their discontent reshaping the landscape.
 
From the Atlantic ridge, Isadora can only glimpse the tip of a crag surrounded by murky waters, mist filling the air. Chirping warblers peck at her chest—out-of-tune memories. It aches. Her skin splits; warblers burrow into her heart. She cups the wound to contain the pain.
 
One day, Isadora splays her fingers to peek through the gap between her breasts. She sees the other side of the Eurasian plate, where her friend lives. Green hills and dense forests have grown there. And then she spots her friend—she bears a similar hole in her thorax. There’s no bird there. Only an abandoned nest.

* * *

Mathieu Parsy is a Canadian writer who grew up on the French Riviera and now lives in Toronto, where he works in the travel industry. His writing has been featured in FEED, Panoply, and Brilliant Flash Fiction.
Instagram: @mathieu_parsy.

by Nissa Harlow

She died. But her soul didn’t leave her body like it should have.

Maybe it figured the old graveyard, full yet forgotten, was a good place to spend eternity.

So it stayed, clothing her bones, keeping the flesh company as time melted it slowly away.

The camera lies abandoned at her side, images of headstones captured in pixels within. She didn’t take a photo of the stone that caught her heel, nor the one that now stands guard at her head, its age-blunted corner smeared with blood.

When they find her bones, someone will take a picture. It seems fitting.

* * *

​Nissa Harlow lives in British Columbia, Canada where she dreams up strange stories and writes some of them down. Her short fiction has been published in Weird Lit Magazine and 50-Word Stories. You can find her online at nissaharlow.com.

by CJ Erick

They came from the sky in shining, oblong ships.

When they came for our water, we gave them our last icebergs and sent them back to their home world with festivals.

When they came for our grain, our fruits, our sugar, we helped them harvest, gave them seed, and taught them to plant.

When they came for our children, we wept and begged them, and watched in anger as they lifted away, our homes and hearts emptier.

When they came for our wine and chocolate, we built jump-drive plasma ships and our suicide commanders burnt their world to ashes.
​
Amen.

* * *

CJ Erick has published with Brilliant Flash Fiction, Camden Park Press, and others. His short fiction received a Pushcart nomination and inclusion in The Best Small Fictions 2023 anthology. He writes in multiple genres, self-publishes a space fantasy series.

by Thomas J. Misuraca

Footsteps upstairs. Reminding me of my old apartment living days.

The upstairs residence switched renters quicker than the leases allowed. No matter how well I knew my upstairs neighbors, I heard them more than I saw them. 

Edna, the little old French lady, woke up with the sun every morning and stomped over my head as if she were a charging rhino. She dropped things constantly, scaring the life out of me with the sudden crashing on my head.

Gil, the large Latino, had a softer step. Most days I heard nothing of him, but at night, he paced the floor endlessly. 

The one guy I never met was a night owl. I heard him running around his bedroom as I was about to fall asleep. Then a second set of footsteps joined him until they transformed into bed springs squeaking. 

Footsteps upstairs. A whole other life I could only imagine from their sound. 
​
Footsteps upstairs. I counted the days until I no longer had to hear them.

As I awake in my new home to the sound of thunderous footsteps, I remember…

Nobody lives above me. 

* * *

​Tom Misuraca has had over 150 short stories and two novels published. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2021. He’s also a multi-award winning playwright with over 150 short plays and 13 full-lengths produced globally.

by Michael Brockley

My white German shepherd’s ghost sleeps in the passenger seat as I wrestle my road-weary Silverado onto the Ghost Road. We have survived half-resurrection and tombstone blues in magic cities. And practiced nighthawk songs with devils in blue dresses. Sadie barks as I shuffle through the biography of a phantom. As I grope for the name of Bluebeard’s first wife. Lady Blue or Black Cherry. Last night a blue angel serenaded us with a song coaxed from a rose drum. I’ll let Sadie sleep through the cross-dog hours. Through the three shades of dream. Even ghost dogs get the blues.

* * *

Michael Brockley is a retired school psychologist who lives in Muncie, Indiana. His poems have appeared in The Prose Poem, Superpresent, and Dreams of Rust and Glass, Volume 2. Poems are forthcoming in Last Stanza Poetry Journal and confetti. 

by Natasha Mihell

Wraith; fearless. She inscribes a course over root, under branch, kicking up snow glitter with her leaping. Borne by shadow, she ignites. Relentless. The forest is noiseless no longer; she sings into its maw. It returns the favor. She smiles. She has known loneliness, and hers does not live here.

* * *

Natasha Mihell is an artist-at-heart living amidst the forests and urban decay of Canada’s West Coast. Her writing explores the reclamation of self-love, hope, and power, amidst systems and circumstances that threaten hearts and minds. Connect at natashamihell.com and @natashamihell on Instagram. 

by Miranda Ray

He started out growing matchbooks in his backyard when he was ten. Every year, and every subsequent science fair, his craft evolved until he was growing birdhouses, doghouses, toolsheds, and drive-through espresso stands. By the time he turned twenty, he could seed the earth with a shingle, a doorknob, an unbitted key, and grow a one-bedroom one-bath house complete with an antique claw foot tub.

The houses gestated in two weeks, and could be moved into by the third. In six months, he had single-handedly solved the homelessness problem on all six habitable continents. The middle class moved out of suburbia in droves, trading Venetian blinds for venation wallpaper, electricity and wind power for chloroplasts and photosynthesis.

He was the youngest living recipient of the Nobel Prize, and went on several well-documented dates with many well-received actresses. He was invited to demonstrate at TED Talks, and was the keynote speaker at the New Earth Summit. In autumn, when houses around the world were just starting to change their colors, he delivered a rousing commencement speech at the University of Oxford and unveiled an orchard of new dormitories. Amid rapturous applause, a lone student put her hand up and asked:

"So what's the plan for when the roofs fall off in winter?"

* * *

Miranda was raised on a small island in the Pacific Northwest. She is the author of Lustily Ever After, the first erotic audiobook musical for adults. Visit her online at www.mirandaray.com, or find her @dammitmiranda on Instagram.

by Lisa Lahey

We don’t act like them, the xenophobes
and kinemortophobes,
each of us with a peculiar
look and a lamentable odour.
We’d love to run among the blue green grass
on frozen glass mountains,
with the cannibals
and their turquoise camels.
There is the one who sheds her skin 
every birthday so she can grow
while the skin melts into the ground.
There is another whose eyes
are moonlit lasers that x-ray every bone
and dream in a demon’s head.
You fear us all, that’s why we stay hidden.
It isn’t fair, shetani,
but what is?

* * *

Lisa Lahey's short stories and poetry have been published in 34th Parallel Magazine, Five on the Fifth, Bindweed Anthology, Spadina Literary Review, Vita Poetica, Ariel Chart Review, VerbalArt Journal, and Altered Reality.

by Sarah Das Gupta

Witches steal the milk from cattle,
shapeshift into brown hares.
In the hidden witches’ garden
grow pink foxglove fingers,
yellow clumps of spindly ragwort,
deadly to man or beast.
Witches ride in the Wild Hunt
high in inky darkness,
they form dark silhouettes
across the face of the harvest moon.
In elder trees they hide,
under the spiked blackthorn,
among monkshood and aconitum,
mixing strange concoctions,
bringing certain death and gloom.
Yellow and red flames
consumed them once.
Yet in the darkness of the pinewood,
in that other land under the hill,
they survive, to curse and cure us still.

* * *

Sarah Das Gupta is a slowly emerging poet from Cambridge, UK who started writing a year ago when her mobility became limited to 20 metres. Her work has been published in over 20 countries and she has been nominated this year for Best of the Net and a Dwarf Star award.

by Lucy Barker

I watch you enter. Sunlight penetrates the stained-glass, suffusing your pale cheek.
Once, from that  pulpit, the Reverend Swales preached forgiveness, his gimlet eyes resting upon me; the sinner of his flock.

I reach out. I have come too close. Startled, you flee towards the headstones encircling those weathered walls. My empty, unmarked grave lies beyond; above the wind-buffeted waves raging far below.

He waits for you by the lych gate.

With venomous whispers I bid you not to go.
​
Convinced it is merely the rustling of trees, you rush inexorably towards him; oblivious of my pursuing shadow.

* * *

Lucy is a retired tutor living on the beautiful South Coast of England, which inspires much of her work. For some strange reason she is fascinated by the eerie and macabre, but that’s another story!