by Kelleigh Cram

After driving for days, it’s the cows that do it.

A flock of them in a field, some standing, some grazing, some stealing a lazy nap in the afternoon sun. Activities that seem careless to us, performed with steadfast diligence.

 I slow down to watch them, these cows. Something is off. They have brown fur with white faces, like they are wearing their skulls inside out. Ghost cows. Are they real? I pull off on the side of the road and get out of the car. The gate is open, so I let myself in.

You call my name but I ignore you, walking up to one of the cows until we are standing face to face. I spread my fingers over its head, right between the eyes, the scratchy texture of cracked bone piercing my palm. So it is a skull, worn in reverse.
           
You run up from behind, your breath hot and rapid against my neck.
Wait, where were we going again?

When you grab my shoulder everything snaps into place: our bedroom, my feet sinking into the mattress, the cow painting looming over me.

“Why don’t you lie back down,” you say.

I yank my hand away as though it has betrayed me, revealing the portrait of a cow’s face. You guide me by the arm back to the car—or is it the bed? And once again we are on the highway, the ghost cows with their reversible skulls fading in the rearview mirror.

* * *

KELLEIGH CRAM resides in a small town near Savannah, Georgia. Her work has been featured in Ponder Review, Bright Flash Literary Review, and Right Hand Pointing.

by Louella Lester

No one lives above us, but there is a woman who is part of the refugee family that lives across the hall. When she is there alone her screams sometimes escape. Slide right under our door where they wait for translation.

* * *

Louella Lester is a writer/photographer in Winnipeg, Canada, author of Glass Bricks, contributing editor at NFFR, and is included in Best Microfiction 2024.
​Instagram: @louellalester  
Bluesky: @louellalester.bsky.social    

by Anne Howkins

Sea and sky are indecipherable—at night there’s a moonlit line that might be the horizon. Sometimes the flood laps at the weather girl’s bedroom window, seductively shush-shushing that it means no harm. Sometimes it growls the anguish of the drowned.

Without power or paper, the weather girl records her observations in knots. She’s ransacked the house, harvesting anything that can be unravelled, combed, spun, twisted, until every surface is strewn with something like rope, and the wardrobes and cupboards gape empty.

She’s woven and knotted pressure, windspeed and rainfall into whirligig clusters. Her fingers weep blood as the malevolent sky mocks her furious recording. On days when the heavens are silver, not cast iron, when the winds are gentle, yet deviously warm, she allows the ropes to divide. She threads them with rings, necklaces, beads and buttons, treasured memories marking love she hopes isn’t lost. When the barometer falls, again, again, and the house begins moaning, she plaits the strands back together, securing everything precious. She weaves her own undoing into the tapestries, until her limbs feel empty, ready to hold something again, hold her husband again.

At night she wraps herself in her knotted yarns, caressing, letting her fingers explore the chasms she’s seen, she’s created. Sometimes she burrows her nails deep, finds the day her husband left. When her fingers stroke the remnants of love, her heart untethers, her lungs loosen and she weeps, letting the rhythm of the endlessly cruel rain rattling the roof rock her back and forth.

She leaves on a night when the moonlit line is more than a dream. She spools ropes into a sail, launches herself towards the east, hoping her forecast is accurate and the grasping hands of the drowned keep to themselves.

Hoping there is something dry out there.

* * *

Anne loves the challenge of telling stories in very few words. Her stories have appeared in print and online at WestWord, Flash 500, Reflex Fiction, Flash Fiction Magazine, National Flash Fiction Day, Lunate, Strands International and Bath Flash Fiction.

by Christy Hartman

I grate a teaspoon of nutmeg into the bowl; preparing Finn’s favourite cake is a rare reprieve from my burden. Winter-fever picks off more villagers daily, snuffing them like Mass candles after the Saints are beseeched. 
 
My throat is raw, eyes red-rimmed from hours wailing for wee Orla Murphy. Finn had slouched on the cottage’s porch with the other men. Futility and grief hung thick in the air. The women inside met my keening with their own cries. My vigil only ceased when the child’s spirit drifted through the open window. I retreated to my home, hidden beyond the mist.
 
I’m reaching into the oven when despair’s veil descends again. I shrug on my cloak and succumb to the pull, wild hair flowing behind me, untamed as the river that dragged me under, sealing my fate. Back then I was Clodagh, devoted fiancé; now I am only Banshee. 
 
I feel his essence fading as I approach the cabin, his fear twisting into me. Fever radiates through the open door. My should-have-been mother-in-law kneels at Finn’s bedside. I writhe above the cabin; my guttural screams shake the walls. When his tortured body finally succumbs, his soul soars past. I give chase, crying out as he slips from view, into the fog shrouding the moor. 
 
Cloves and cinnamon scent the air around my house. I pause at the window. Finn is there. My Finn. I weep with self-serving relief. Crossing the threshold, I am eternally reunited with my love.

* * *

Christy Hartman pens short fiction from her home between the ocean and mountains of Vancouver Island Canada. She writes about the chasm between love and loss and picking out the morsels of magic in life’s quiet moments.

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!