Hiking
Twigs snap underfoot like fireworks bursting in the distance. When I raise the bottle to my mouth I see that it is empty. I chuck the clear plastic item into the bushes to my right.
“It’s peaceful,” I say. “You can hear the birds singing. I like it.”
“Walking is stupid,” Sally says. “We should have gone to the cinema or something.”
We go to the cinema. Sally chooses the film and I have to sit through hours of some boring love story.
My feet dangle over the side of the cliff. The view is spectacular: the whole of the city is spread out below me like a miniature village. The mountains beyond the city stretch so high into the sky their tips are concealed by clouds. The air is clear and fresh. I wish I could stay up here forever. I don’t want to ever have to go back to my stupid job, my stupid girlfriend, my stupid life.
“I’m tired, Jim,” Sally whines from behind me. All we’ve done is walked a couple of hundred yards. “Let’s stop for a drink. Pass me the vodka and coke out of your bag.”
“It’s just not working out,” I say. The plates in front of us that were once covered with delicious food are now empty. I try and avoid looking Sally in the eye but I can see enough of her to know she is sad.
“I’ll change,” she says. She reaches out and takes my hand. “We’ll do what you want to do. We don’t have to go to the cinema; we can go hiking instead. Give me a chance. I can be a better girlfriend.”
Sandra walks at such a ferocious pace I struggle to keep up. I push myself and walk as fast as I physically can but Sandra keeps getting further and further away. I pant gently. Sweat makes my t-shirt stick to my torso.
“You’ve got to start going to the gym,” Sandra says. We are sat side by side on our red sofa. “You’re unfit; you need to start doing cardio and stuff.”
“I hate the gym,” I say. “I like hiking. If I need more exercise I’ll just hike more.”
“You can’t keep up, Jim. You’re always falling behind. Hiking with you when you’re this unfit is boring: I have to walk so bloody slowly.”
“It’s not a race,” I say even though I know that it is.
Dominik Slusarczyk is an artist who makes everything from music to painting. He was educated at The University of Nottingham where he got a degree in biochemistry. His fiction has been published in various literary magazines including moonShine Review and SHiFT – A Journal of Literary Oddities. His fiction was selected in The Fictionette Monthly Flash Fiction Contest.
Oh, You Kid(s)
Snake Bit
​
Look at the mams on that lady Frank said.
The air was sultry and vapors were rising from the ground.
We stood in mute witness and looked at her in a knowing way.
Looking at the magazine I remembered my mother’s big breasts in a tight white top.
Grunting in the gloom of the fort it looked like Frank was punching his stomach.
Once they gave us scissors for an art project and he tried to cut off his pants legs to make shorts.
His pants speaking of such were down to his shoes.
Frank would one day work in a college lab milking venom into test tubes.
Firecracker Fish
​
Back at the pond my brother Walter and Frank’s brother Lennie were alternating casts.
They talked about a band they wanted to start with the name Legal Tender.
Or maybe Deep Fried Gizzard What Size Shoe or Your Name Here.
Their playing wasn’t any good either but they did have attitude.
Lennie caught a flopping white perch and prepped it up with a lit M-80.
He cast the firecracker fish into the center of the pond.
When it went off there was a submerged explosion and a mute mushroom bubbled up.
The cut filament of the line curled on the water’s surface like a sneer.
Tight White Top
​
Later in my room I thought about what Frank had showed me at the fort.
I lay on my stomach and rubbed my dink on the bed.
If my brother had a magazine like that I would have found it.
Like in my parents’ bedroom a coin jar on the floor of the closet under my father’s dirty shorts.
Treasure for soda and candy and caps for my pistol at the little store in the center of town.
The next time alone in the house I’d go through my parents’ stuff more than ever before.
Maybe find my mother in a photo like that.
It would be like finding a bigger jar of spare change.
Jon Fain is a writer and editor living in Massachusetts. Some of his recent publications include short stories in A Thin Slice of Anxiety and The Argyle Literary Magazine, flash fictions in Shooter Literary Magazine and Midsummer Dream House, micro fictions in Blink-Ink and ScribesMICRO, and a chapbook of flash fiction, Pass the Panpharmacon! from Greying Ghost Press.
Stephen
I don’t normally talk to strangers but I saw him, zigzagging towards me, probing the hedges with a stick, and peering down at his feet.
An escapee, he said. Escaped from a film set. A documentary about nature but with ex-circus animals. We’re shooting over there, he said, waiving indiscriminately in the air. His name is Stephen, he added, shooing away dead branches. Clouds, thick and fast, began lowering heavily to the ground. Then he added that the escapee had got scared by another snake actor, the poor thing, as I watched him walk past me and keep calling his snake by name.
At home, I checked my bed sheets, under the bed and around the curtain rail. The glass bowl with beach stones I compulsively collect for no reason. I thought of calling him, but the last time he called me after I had escaped, I didn’t turn up. I didn’t want to be found.
Kapka Nilan (she, her) was born and raised in Bulgaria and currently lives in England where she writes, takes pictures of out-of-place things. Her short fiction has been published in MacQueen’s Quinterly, Flash Fiction Magazine, Mad Swirl, Bath Flash Fiction Award. Her recent fiction can be read at www.kapkanilan.wordpress.com
Almost Sisters
When the new parental unit fell apart, we were flung to opposite coasts again, the country feeling
vaster than ever, miles and miles of corn, hay and flat earth between us.
When my parents had divorced, so had hers. They reshuffled so one of our mothers ended up
with the other’s father, back on the same coast. And we were almost sisters again. Every
weekend and after school together, everything else fading into the background. Once we snuck
into the kitchen, made whiskey sours when we were alone, getting drunk, throwing up, cleaning
it up as best we could.
Before that we’d lived on opposite coasts, exchanged long, hand-scrawled letters sent via airmail
in onion-skin envelopes, sealing-waxed shut. Summer visits stretched long, lolling on the
pudding-stone wall in humid, cricket-fueled nights. Walks to the ice cream shop by day. One
chocolate with sprinkles, one coffee plain, licking drips from waffle cones, sitting in the park,
watching sharp-tongued boys play baseball or bury bees in the dirt.
Earlier still, our parents had been best friends. Us too. Two skinny little girls with tangled brown
hair, staying up too late talking, weaving stories about alien creatures, a blanket tented over our
heads, flashlight casting an eerie glow inside our mouths. Mornings we’d jump the fence of the
deserted lot we dubbed the “cold patch” with its solitary, windowless concrete block of a
building. Spy den? Gangster hangout? Top-secret research facility? Whatever it was we’d face it
together, arm in arm.
Kathryn Silver-Hajo’s work was selected for the 2023 Wigleaf Top 50 Longlist and nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and Best American Food Writing. Kathryn’s work appears in Atticus Review, CRAFT, Emerge Literary, Ghost Parachute, New Flash Fiction Review, Pithead Chapel, Ruby Literary, The Phare, and other lovely journals. Her flash collection Wolfsong and novel Roots of The Banyan Tree were both published in 2023. More at: kathrynsilverhajo.com; facebook.com/kathryn.silverhajo; twitter.com/KSilverHajo; instagram.com/kathrynsilverhajo
Like a Dung Beetle
His dark hair shines purple and wavers in the light thrown from the scented candles squatting all
along the bar. Strings of muscle flex as he moves boxes of full bottles in from the back. She’s
never recovered her sense of smell or taste after the COVID, so she can only imagine the aroma
of him wafting over her as he settles a muddy, what she thinks must be chocolate-infused,
cocktail next to her hand. “On the house,” he says, in what she thinks could be a squeak, but it’s
hard to tell with the music’s volume. She stays until closing time, when he picks her up off the
stool as though she’s at least forty pounds lighter than she is and slides her up onto the bar — his
voice-shortcomings don’t matter now. Not one damn bit.
Garry has had other women before Ursula, so, before he invites her to his house attached to the
back of the pub, he knows enough to open windows and spritz essential oils to mask the earthy
smell lurking just near the basement door. The place is immaculate, and they make out in every
room, but the basement. Ursula can’t believe her luck. “He’s so beautiful and strong, like a god
or something has rolled into my life,” she says to anyone who will listen. Though she’s baffled
by how few people are actually listening — friends lifting hands to noses and keeping their
distance when she’s near. Can’t figure it out.
Ursula’s nervous to ask Garry over to her house for the first time because she’s never been the
best housekeeper, but once he’s there she can see that he doesn’t seem to mind. In fact, the next
morning, she wakes up to brushing and sliding noises coming from downstairs, then some high-
pitched squeals, not unlike those to which she’s grown accustomed during their frantic
lovemaking. She sneaks down to see that her main floor is now spotless. Finds him sweating in
the kitchen — pushing, heaving, and rolling a large ball, of what looks to be damp dust and dirt
studded with crumbs, receipts, string, hair, and all manner of litter, right out the backdoor into the
yard. Then he turns and mouth-wide smiles at Ursula, asks her if she’ll move into his house
attached to the back of the pub and she says yes.
Louella Lester is a writer/photographer in Winnipeg, Canada, author of Glass Bricks (At Bay Press), a contributing editor at New Flash Fiction Review, and has a story selected for Best Microfiction 2024. Her writing appears/is forthcoming in a variety of journals/anthologies, most recently: MacQueen’s Quinterly, Gooseberry Pie, Hooghly Review, Bright Flash, Paragraph Planet, SoFloPoJo, The Ekphrastic Review, Cult. Magazine, The Dribble Drabble Review.
The Older Sister’s Wisdom and Strength is No Myth
You see a woman, but I am asking you to respond instead to what I tell you. As a young one, I was fuzzy all over, my mouth open and waiting for the world to drop into it. I nested in an eagle’s abandoned linty lineny nest with my sister. Our half-brother was part eagle and part owl, and we were not close. Our mother was nibbled and snipped daily by the eagle she had taken up with. My so-called brother and I fought, shrieking, each day over the last plum or lizard egg. He taunted me that eagles eat owls, so I should watch my back. I spun my head around, constantly vigilant. But yesterday he left with his father, the eagle, and they never came back. I will protect my mother and sister from now on. Watch me in flight, my wings spread over the earth, the late afternoon sun a brilliance visible through their diaphanous strength.
Luanne Castle’s recent fiction can be found in Bending Genres, The Dribble Drabble Review, Does It Have Pockets, South 85 Journal, and The Ekphrastic Review. She has written several award-winning poetry books. She lives with five cats in Arizona along a wash that wildlife use as a thoroughfare.
A Compassionate Gentleman
I locked my front door then walked to the corner and turned onto Christian Street, imagining the inescapable disaster. Every detail of it, even sounds: the gas hisses as it fills the kitchen and rolls into the living room, billows up the stairs, rises heavenward like a spirit; it floats into the bedroom, where I had just folded the comforter, arranging it on top of the mattress; across the shadowy hall from the bedroom, water drips down the shower curtain into the tub plink plink as the spirit noses around the floor; the images shimmer as though raked by the slow sweep of a lighthouse beam. I took another step, the ground shifted, bright squares and triangles flew up in the air red green like confetti, tiny razors sliced my cheeks and forehead, a copperish taste flooded my mouth.
Sprawled on the ground, bloodied, I felt relief. It had happened. My house leveled. A shockwave roaring down the alley.
A compassionate gentleman reached out his hand.
“The uneven asphalt,” he said.
He carried me to a nearby stoop, my arms and legs dangling like a pieta, then waved to a paramedic who happened to be smoking at the corner grocery. Passersby stopped. Not to gawk, but to help.
“Please, neighbors,” he said, looking up. “Go and do likewise.”
Now, at home, my broken nose throbbing, sutures crisscrossing my face like tracks in a switchyard, like Saint Sebastian’s wounds, I feel an apology is needed.
“Those people whose steps I bled over,” I say to the gentleman, gesturing toward the front door. I begin to lift myself from the sofa.
“No,” he says, smoothing my hair. My vision is blurred, and it’s hard to make out his
face. I ease back down onto the cushions. He squeezes my hand. A gentle touch. I can feel that familiar feeling of pride emanating from my smile. He puts his finger to my lips, leaning in close. “No need,” he whispers. My smile disappears.
My savior, my lover. He abounds with deeds of kindness.
Mario Moussa is a writer living in Philadelphia. His stories have appeared in Write City, Flash Fiction Magazine, Litbreak, and elsewhere.
The Logic of Ectotherms
Today my husband is having a magnificent black spot on his nose removed by a surgeon. The roots of the spot, the doctor says, are like mussels attached to a reef of cartilage. “This would scare anyone,” my husband replies. I’m at home in the kitchen, dusting-off a tuna casserole recipe, remembering that sharks will surface while a seal is dreaming. They know what is missing from everything. As clippers snip away at his damage, sharks match their body temperatures to the water around them. There is the logic of ectotherms; how a nose is nothing but heated rock.
In a dream I ask him to marry me all over again, but only if the physiological variables change. I ask him by writing it on an old underwater photograph of myself taken in Maui on our honeymoon. “Please marry me again but next time, less variables,” I say. This means we must dive down and visit the sharks, look them straight in their sleepy eyes while they circle our dreaming faces. He lowers his palm to my head while formulating a plan. I'm swimming around in my button-down sweater, monitoring brainwave activity, trying not to breathe.
MEG POKRASS is the author of nine collections of flash fiction and two novellas in flash. Her work has been published in three Norton anthologies of flash including Flash Fiction America, New Micro, and Flash Fiction International; Best Small Fictions 2018, 2019, 2022, and 2023; Wigleaf Top 50; and hundreds of literary journals including Electric Literature, McSweeney’s, Washington Square Review, Split Lip, storySouth, and Passages North. Her new collection, The First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories by Meg Pokrass, is forthcoming from Dzanc Books in late 2024.
City Smells
Dimly lit under the street lamps in an old alley at midnight, a nostalgia wells up. A perceptible city
smell tickles the nostrils in humidity fuelled singed heat. Yeah, the lamps bestow light on the strays
lying down on empty alleys—clean, and silent as the rains wash away any debris otherwise
invisible to the naked eye, slants through the midnight street lamp—dark, heavy, and blue. To an
ever-wakening and heightened sensory perception, a city sleeps, unhinged like exposed skeletons.
The city smells, however, another smell pushing through the winds and more pervasive, makes
breathing hard; terrified barks and human squeals tear up the skies.The rains are now gone but
smoke burn rises in the atmosphere, buckets drop cling-clang on the ground in haste; sirens of fire
trucks, and a few explosions sounding off an alarm. The strays stop barking. Squeals are quiet too.
The burning dissipates. Silence descends; the city smell crawls back, buried into the ground.
Mehreen Ahmed is a Bangladeshi-born Australian novelist. Her novel The Pacifist and novella, The Blue Red Lyrae have been acclaimed by Midwest Book Review and Drunken Druid Editor's Choice. She has published with BlazeVox, Dark Winter Literary Magazine, Argyle Literary Magazine, The Bombay Review, Muse India, to name a few. Her short stories have won contests and been nominated for The Best of the Net (four times) Pushcart, and James Tait.