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 Steven Lemprière

Fearful of the dark, Jake cried while observing his first solar eclipse. Four-years-old, teetering on five, his elder brother told him the moon was hungry and  it would eat the sun. Something Jake accepted as gospel when it took a small, tentative nibble from the sun’s perimeter and then gorged on what remained. He’d felt his heart race as an eerie silence replaced the farmyard’s ever-present birdsong, before noticing the comforting weight of his grandfather’s hand resting on his shoulder. A reassuring touch, both warm and firm, that turned the tide of his crippling anxiety. Crouching down beside Jake, his grandfather had looked him dead in the eyes. “The moon doesn’t like hot food,” he said. His usual gravelly voice, now a hushed whisper, “Just wait, and see,” and sure enough, the sun reappeared, like the vegetables Jake sheepishly chewed, and the birds rediscovered their voices.

Age and experience had widened Jake’s eyes to the wonders of the cosmos, captivating his imagination. Now a tenured astrophysicist at an Ivy League college, he travelled extensively, visiting observatories scattered around the globe, many set in remote and majestic landscapes. However, his current assignment, as the chief scientific officer aboard the International Space Station, would see him launched on an exciting new trajectory.

Amazingly, Jake’s tour coincided with an eclipse. Pure chance, but one of deep personal significance. Viewed from the earth’s thermosphere, he again felt his heart race as four-hundred kilometres below their orbit, its shadow traversed a vast tract of land which he knew encompassed his home state. The gravity of the event hadn’t escaped him. A breathtaking sight, that seen from a viewpoint that few would ever witness, prompted joyous, but also wistful, tears as he recalled his grandfather’s soothing words.

* * *

STEVEN LEMPRIÈRE’s flash has appeared or is forthcoming in Flash Fiction Magazine, The Drabble, Friday Flash Fiction, 50-Word Stories, 50 Give or Take and Punk Noir Magazine. He spends his time between the West Coast of Ireland and South-West France.

by Tejaswinee Roychowdhury

A faint mix of cologne and sandalwood agarbatti hangs in the air, where “relax” is a whisper behind my head.

The city jangles outside the plebeian studio. Relax. Oiled fingers sneak into my scalp. Relax. Their moves seem unpredictable, but I catch a rhythm. Relax. My eyelids flutter like paper blinds caught in a Nor’wester. Relax. Baby blue walls repainted in patches. Relax. A disarray of old photographs—gods and men hanging off bent-up nails. Relax. Chipped wooden chairs offering faux leather seats, beaten down by shifting buttocks. Relax. Barbering tools neatly lined up on a dirty blue laminate, struggling to remain glued to drawer tops. Relax. Plastic-cased mirrors with random spots and old stickers curling up at the corners. Relax. Tires screech, a truck blares out a sharp set of horns, and muffled men voice strong opinions. Relax. A thumb and an index finger create patterns on the skin over my sternocleidomastoids. Relax. Things begin to fade—the everyday Indian doesn’t care for the ambience, just the service. Relax.

* * *

TEJASWINEE ROYCHOWDHURY likes to write, mostly fiction and poetry, has publications worldwide, and edits The Hooghly Review. She is pursuing a Ph.D. in Law from the University of Calcutta and can be found on X @TejaswineeRC and IG @tejaswineeroychowdhury.

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 Chris Cottom

​Go full mortgage on a fixer-upper in Forest Gate. Love the way Beth swears she can’t live with this prissy Laura Ashley shit, wrestles the wallpaper stripper like it’s a hissing serpent. Try different finishes in different rooms; go bold in the bedroom with Salsa Red or Jungle Ginger.
 
Watch Beth mark out a spare-room mural with puddleducks and beaky geese. Start with the ceiling, careless about speckling her raven curls with Haystack Gold. When she splodges you in Jersey Cow Brown, let her lead you to the shower to loofah it off.
 
Assemble mood boards for Beth’s new business: mid-tone caramels, indulgent ochres, earthy terracottas. Let her chatter about tonal contrast, about Crushed Aloe and Distressed Leather. Photograph her remodelled basements, her faux-marble bathrooms, her kiddies’ bedrooms.
 
In your kitchen awash with swatches of Lost Lake and Atlantic Surf, ask your seven-year wife if it’s time to redo the spare room in Classic White, turn it into an office. Dab her tears with a handy length of curtain lining. Hold her tight until she pushes away with a sad little nod.
 
Wait until her workshop in colour psychology; spread your dust sheets as the front door closes. Bid goodbye to the pigs and chicks, the carthorse and the collie, the tractor and the barn. Be sure to use low-tack masking tape. You don’t want anything to tear as you start to pull away.

* * *

CHRIS COTTOM lives near Macclesfield, UK. One of his stories was read aloud on the Esk Valley Railway between Middlesbrough and Whitby. In the early 1970s he lived next door to JRR Tolkien.
Bluesky: @chriscottom.bsky.social

by Veronica L.

Lorena took a sip of wine. The intense ruby red, tending towards garnet, reflected the terracotta tones of the Roman sunset. For the first time, she admired that sunset alone, surrounded by a scene still capable of moving her.

Rome, her adopted city, for two decades the stage of stolen kisses under the Colosseum. Rome, a silent witness to many nights of love under a generous moon. 

Slow rhythms, a comfortable life, built brick by brick. Those same bricks that had gradually ceased to be the sign of solid foundations and had become an imposing wall between her and her husband. An overwhelming gap for those who can no longer see themselves in the other’s eyes.  

* * *
​
Veronica L. is an Italy-based writer with a PhD in Iberian and Ibero-American Languages and Literatures. She has authored several non-fiction books, some published in English by Anglo-Saxon presses, along with works of fiction. Her short story The Poor Copy appeared in Adelaide Literary Magazine (No. 73, February 2025).

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 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 Middlesbrough and Whitby. In the early 1970s he lived next door to JRR Tolkien.
@chriscottom.bsky.social

by Beth Sherman

​I wake one morning, after uneasy dreams, to find myself transformed into a lesser, long-nosed bat. Nights, I hang upside down in your attic or flit through your garden, lapping nectar from bee balm. Endangered. Despised. With my pointy ears, short tail and brown fur, I look harmless enough, like a chipmunk with wings. I can fly now, hitching a ride on the wind’s back, somersaulting through clouds. My hearing has improved. Sound waves determine your exact location: office, park, bar. I know the name of each girl you bed, each lovely lie you tell. Try to get rid of me. Try. I dare you. Plant mothballs in the eaves. Lay your sticky traps. Plug holes in the roof. I am your shadow now, black as an evening glove, translucent as spilled moonlight. While you sleep, I aim for your hair, my fangs tickling your eyebrows.

* * *

​Beth Sherman’s writing has been published in more than 100 literary journals, including 100 Word Story, Fictive Dream, Tiny Molecules and Bending Genres. Her work is featured in Best Microfiction 2024 and she can be reached @bsherm36 on Instagram, Blusky, or 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 Beth Sherman

A memory. Me, age 11, in the backyard of a stranger’s house, watching a pileated woodpecker tap a sweet gum tree. Ack ack ack ack ack ack ack, the bird calls, in a shrill, urgent voice. My father is inside — this'll just take 10 minutes and then we'll get some ice cream. I can almost taste peanut butter swirls, almost smell toffee bits crumbled on top. I pluck a blade of grass, touch its slippery green to my cheek.

All the curtains in the house are drawn. Tilting my head, I see the woodpecker vacuuming ants down its beak. I don’t own a watch, but it’s been more than ten minutes, so long that I wonder if my father will ever come out or if the house has swallowed him whole.

Later, when my mother asks where we’ve been, I don’t mention the woodpecker or the curtain house or the strange look on my father’s face when he got in the car, like he’d been lost in the woods and just spotted a breadcrumb, or that the ice cream place was closed when we got there. We drove around, I say, which was partially, mostly true.

* * *

Beth Sherman’s writing has been published in more than 100 literary journals, including 100 Word Story, Fictive Dream, Tiny Molecules and Bending Genres. Her work is featured in Best Microfiction 2024 and she can be reached @bsherm36 on Instagram, Blusky, or X.

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.