“If this was the Middle Ages, I'd be shunned.” “Shunned because you had meniscus surgery?” She forgets how funny he was when he got high.  She stops at the light and turns her head. His left leg, swaddled in a cocoon of cotton padding secured with an Ace bandage, stretches across the back seat.  “Without modern medicine I’d be a dead man limping, cast off to the outskirts, forced to rely on the charity of the few benevolent souls who took pity on me.” He scratches under the dressing with the business end of an ice scraper. “Who knows what would happen with the kids? You'd be forced to sell your body so we could eat.” “We’d definitely starve.” She hits the blinker, decides not to needle him this time about how they’d get along fine without his pin money. “How much Percocet did they give you?”  “Enough to make me feel goooood.” He titters, a high-pitched giggle she hasn’t heard in years, maybe since when the kids were in training pants. “Listen.” He pushes himself up on his elbows. “You’d have men crawling over each other to get with you. I’d be first in line. I’m sherioush.” “I know you are, honey.” She’s banished him to the guest room for less. But she smiles, all teeth, in the rearview mirror. “That’s really sweet.”  The light changes. She turns off the blinker, hits the gas. “Why didn’t you turn?”  “The kids won’t be home for another hour. Let’s take a drive.”  Her eyes catch his in the rearview mirror. His face erupts with the lopsided grin of a five-year-old; he waves as if noticing her for the first time.  “Lie back and relax, goofball. And tell me all about our life as medieval outcasts.”     --- Jim Parisi is a freshly unemployed editor who lives in Washington, D.C., with his long-suffering wife and their sweet but highly reactive boxer-pitbull mix. He has published personal essays about music for ihavethatonvinyl.com.  

In the last weeks before my mother died, a fox began appearing on our front porch. Always at twilight. Always facing the door. It didn’t scratch or howl. It didn’t pace or flee. It sat there, still, eyes fixed on the brass doorknob as if waiting to be let in. Its coat was too clean, too red. Its presence too deliberate.  But we watched it from the kitchen window, my mother and I. She in her robe, flowers faded from the wash. Me with a hand on her shoulder, though I never knew what comfort felt like to her. “It’s not a real fox,” she said once. “It’s a message. You just don’t know how to read it. Yet.” That night, I dreamed it stepped through the door, walked the house like it remembered the rooms. Its paws made no sound, and its breath fogged the mirror above the sink as it stood on its haunches. When it turned to me, its eyes were unmistakably my mother’s. Not in color or shape, but in a way I can’t describe without sounding ridiculous. You’d just have to have known her. After she passed, the fox stopped coming to the porch. I left a saucer of milk out for a week, then a piece of bread, then nothing. Seasons turned. The ivy swallowed the stoop’s railing. The door swelled in its frame. I tried to move on. While clearing out the attic, I found a sketch she’d drawn, pencil on yellowing paper. A fox was seated neatly in front of a door, and above it, in her handwriting: If I forget how to find you, leave the light on. That night I lit a candle in the hall. And when I woke, there were paw prints along the corridor. Small. Clean. --- Cate McGowan’s the author of four books. Her collection of poems, Sacrificial Steel, is forthcoming from Driftwood Press in 2025. Brill published McGowan’s collection of memoir essays, Writing is Revision, in 2024. Her short story collection, True Places Never Are, won the Moon City Press Short Fiction Award.

When the bomb rolled out of Rennie’s mouth and smashed down onto the dinner table, there was just time enough for you to marvel at how something as tiny and weightless as a single word could land with such impact, but then the shockwave blasted you into the exosphere, where you hung by ice-numbed fingertips on the dark curve of space, gaping at the devastated table below; the splintered wine glasses, the slap of burgundy on white linen, crystal shards winking from the spinach salad, and the gravy-spattered guests, who avoided looking at where you were or where you had been because Ellen had put so much effort into the Chicken Marsala and Rennie didn’t mean it like that, of course, and because as long as they didn’t look toward your chair or see you fighting to breathe at the edge of space, dinner would not be ruined, nothing would have happened, so they continued to eat with their heat-twisted silverware, picking at mushrooms from between the cracks in their plates, crooning in such soothing honey-sweet tones that you found yourself descending back to the table, eating alongside them, wondering whether there really had been a bomb and whether you really had gone to space, and you were almost convinced that you’d imagined it all except that with every bite, glass crunched between your teeth, and your tongue was absolutely lacerated. --- Barbara Diggs’s flash fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Wigleaf, SmokeLong Quarterly, Fractured Lit, Emerge Literary Journal, and Your Impossible Voice and Best Microfictions 2025. She has also won Highly Commend awards with Bath Flash Fiction and The Bridport Prize. She lives in Paris, France. Bluesky: bdiggswrites.bsky.social.

Recess whistles and basketball hoop rattles do nothing to hinder my carving of clairvoyant contraptions in the dirt. Using handfuls of gravel and playground mulch, I sculpt a weary patch of earth behind the monkey bars into organic shapes resembling analog clocks.  A shadow drifts over my handiwork. “What’s it do?” Your bug-bite-swollen ankles stroll into view. My gaze trails upward, taking in your bandaged scrapes and gold star stickers. I’m surprised you aren’t busy hogging the swing set with your light-up-sneakers posse.  “It sees into the future.” I point to a jump rope splayed in the grass. “Sit on that line there.” You sit crisscross in the weeds, watching me push stone buttons and turn twig dials. At first glance, you’re still folding knots into clover stems. Only when I scrunch my eyes shut and sift through a subsequent plane of existence does your fate unfold. You’ll be the first to hit puberty. Your friends won’t act as loyal as they preach. You’ll seek wrong sources of comfort. You’ll drink yourself stupid and try to kiss me at prom. Four others, too. Your name will circulate through the hallways as whispers. Your “gap year” won’t have a definitive ending. You’ll travel the country and vlog your independence. Among thousands of followers, none of this support will come from your parents. You’ll hop into cars of strangers and wake in places you won’t know the names of. Nobody will know yours. You’ll barely know yourself. The rest is hazy. What reels us back is your voice, soft and hoarse through gaps in your baby teeth. “Did it work?” I blink, registering the crescents of grime formed under my nails. My fingers twitch. “No.” With one swipe of the hand, I scrape the time machine into the grass.   --- Bethany Cutkomp is a writer of surreal and existential works from St. Louis, Missouri. Her writing appears in Stanchion, trampset, HAD, Ghost Parachute, The Hooghly Review, and more. Find her on social media at @bdcutkomp.

Their therapist suggests trying new things. They opt for role play. So far, so awkward. Too much discussion of scenarios and character motivations.  "Who are these people, really?" A asks. "Where have they been and where do they want to go?" "No, we're overthinking this," B replies. "We need to pick something and run with it." They scribble ideas on pieces of paper. B picks one and unfolds it. "Sexy nurse, eh? Very original." A’s eye-roll: "You said we were overthinking it." B’s suggestive eyebrow raise: "Well, I did say we needed to commit." When they reconvene in the bedroom that evening, it's as two sexy nurses. Two very different and very attractive healthcare professionals, but with no hapless patient for them to seduce.  "What now?" A wonders. "What's the scenario? These two nurses want to get off, okay. But how do they get there?" They ponder workplace drama. When they look up hospital organisational structures online, the results aren't particularly sexy. They discover the average nurse's pay in their region, and become incensed. They recall their real-life interactions with nurses over the years. Those who helped mend broken arms, guided through difficult labours, explained complicated things. They remember the kindness. Galvanised, they compose letters to elected representatives, demanding better working conditions. They attend protests. Never cross picket lines. Make stern demands of election canvassers. And they remember why they married each other. --- Cathy de Buitleir is a writer based in Dublin, Ireland. Her short fiction appears in The Interpreter’s House and The Martello Journal. She holds an MA in Film and Television Studies. She works as a technical writer.

In the grand scheme of things we are sitting on a giant sphere of ice swirling in space, cold steam flowing off, speed slowing by degrees. In the less grand scheme of things we are sitting next to one another in your front room, holding hands, because I have just asked you the question. We have done well to ignore the outside world these last few weeks. We have remained calm while the heated clamouring and desperation around us hastened the freeze. Hoarding by the hordes; nature busy snow-furring and rime-coating; birds dropping from the skies; the world turning eyeball white; the air full of a trillion last gasped goodbyes... We play at hibernation, pretending that when the Great Thaw comes and we drip back into consciousness, shaking ourselves warm like bears ready for spring, we will carry on laughing, working, sleeping, marrying as if only a second has passed. ...forests crisped, gas guzzled, houses cracking, windows shattering, frost patterns creeping across sleeping faces, and the slowing of breath by degrees... My nerves puff out in cold spats as I wait for your answer. You laugh and I do too – the in-breaths grazing our throats. You hiss yesss, the suspiration crystallising and dropping into hundreds of diamond chips. ...the Sun turning from blazing to blasé; kids fed up of forever winters; cold searing their skins hotter than hell. The last minute to do something long gone... After the promised melts, after our heart-beats retune, after we crack free, preserved and perfect from icy casts, I will withdraw the box from my pocket, remove the engagement ring from its cushion and slip it on your warming finger. And you will laugh and say again that I leave everything to the last minute.   --- First published online by Retreat West in March 2022.  Sharon loves almond croissants but shudders at pretzels. Her short stories and flash have been published in Fictive Dream, Bath Anthology and The Phare. She's flies through Bluesky @sharon54.bsky.social.

Day 1 Seven of them stand beside the glass casket in the forest clearing. They cry: great heaving sobs.      ‘She was as beauteous as the dawn.’     ‘As pure as snow.’     ‘As fit as a butcher’s dog.’  A scuffle, a slap, a chuckle. Boys will be boys. I lie on a bed of flowers and know I am sorely missed. Who will clean their kitchen? Who will cook their dinner?   Their tears mingle with the rain that splatters the glass and I am glad. Day 2 ‘She was as soft as a peach,’ ‘As sweet as an apple.’ ‘As wet as a watermelon.’ A stifled giggle. A phlegm-filled cough. Who will bake their bread? Who will sew their socks? Day 3 Only one today. Grunts as he tries to shift the crystal lid. He isn’t strong enough. More grunts. I can tell him by his grunting. I can tell all of them by their grunting. The glass is cold in the forest night. I find I do not mind so much. Day 4 In the distance, seven friends Hi-Ho their way to work; fade to nothing. Thrushes sing aria after aria, note upon trilling note. They don’t need lunch on the table or dishes washed or carpets swept. I dream I am a songbird. Day 5 The sun rises.  A fern uncurls. A spider crawls across the coffin lid. I am shadowed in cobwebs, shrouded in a mist of silver thread. Day 6 A new man. Dark hair, wide shoulders. He sweeps away the cobwebs, pushes the lid aside. His breath is as sweet as mountain air. Me, ripe as a cherry. Ruby lips parted. He bends closer, closer.     ‘If you touch me, I will rip your balls off.’  Clomp of man in retreat. Whinny of horse. Silence.  Bird song, triumphant. --- Jack Morris lives in Brighton, UK. Her work has been published by Kaleidotrope, NFFD, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Free Flash Fiction, Willesden Herald, Roi Fainéant Press, Propelling Pencil and others. Jack is the Editor of Neither Fish Nor Foul, curator of bold, playful fiction. You can find Jack at @jackmmorris.bsky.social

We pass my favourite octopus, Paul and I, on the way to my office at the Aquarium. Paul doesn’t kiss me. I want to pause, watch the octopus parkour across its tank – shrinking into the smallest corner, then exploding across the glass in a tangle of limbs – but something marble in Paul stops me. In their tank, the deadly box jellyfish are in their fertile medusa phase. They float, amniotic. When Paul says ‘I don’t think I can do this anymore, I’m sorry,’ I don’t understand him. ‘The jellyfish?’ I ask, watching the translucent veils of protein pulse through the water. And then I understand, that with these few words he is ending our decade together, my thirties. I press my palm hard against the glass of the tank and it goes all the way through until it too is palely-pink and lucent. My body shimmers with anger. I can’t feel the water, and, cupping one of the jellyfish in my hand, I feel no pain either. My staff look the other way. Paul watches - confused as I pull the jellyfish from the tank, nervous as I pull the long and trailing tendrils from the water, as they become one with my curling hair, until I am a gorgon with flailing tentacles of venom. He says ‘I can explain,’ but before the words are finished, he makes the mistake of looking me in the eye and starts to petrify, feet solidified to the ground, legs held in place, arms out, mouth frozen in a stony scream. No-one takes any notice. I leave him there – visitors to the Aquarium flowing around his statue like water – and I pulse towards the exit, my own medusa phase almost at an empty end.   --- Fiona McKay is the author of the Novella-in-Flash The Top Road, AdHoc Fiction (2023), the Flash Fiction collection Drawn and Quartered, Alien Buddha Press (2023), and The Lives of the Dead, a Novella-in-Flash, is forthcoming from AdHoc Fiction (2025). She was a SmokeLong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow in 2023. Her Flash Fiction is in Bath Flash, Gone Lawn, New Flash Fiction Review, Pithead Chapel, The Forge, Variant Lit, Ghost Parachute, trampset, Bending Genres, Fractured Lit, Peatsmoke and others. Her work is included in Best Small Fictions 2024. She lives in Dublin, Ireland. She is on X (formerly Twitter) @fionaemckayryan and Bluesky @fionamckay.bsky.social.

We’re fanny-deep in a loch on a Tuesday morning in June. Margaret has managed to get herself into the water and out as far as her feet don’t touch with a cigarette still on the go. How is that even possible? Floating there in a flowery cap from 1973, fag clenched in Prairie Red lips.  ‘Only gets worse the longer you stand there’ Gerda says, pulling me with her.  ‘C’mon,’ Peggy behind me, urging me in. My knees are screaming, hips, belly, tits bobbing in their lycra sling, cold needling every wrench and kick. What are we doing? Margaret takes the last draw of her cigarette and lobs the but across the water.  ‘Litterin,’ says Peggy.  ‘She’ll no listen,’ says Gerda. ‘Law unto herself’   Margaret swims meandering laps out and back.  ‘Dook your shoulders under, hen. It’s the only way.’  The water rings my neck, a freezing noose. I gasp and push my arms out, fighting back, inching into the liquid dawn. Everything is sharp. Clear. I sink and rise again spluttering, ice-hearted.  ‘Cures what ails you,’ Margaret says hoisting herself up the beach, water dripping from her arse. She skins off her swimsuit and shakes herself like a dog, bare body rolling this way and that in the rising sun. ‘Fuck I feel good,’ she yells, as she throws a poncho over her head.  When I come out, they towel and dress me. Pull up my pants, button my shirt as I stand helpless, crying. Margaret drives us home, cigarette dancing in the corner of her mouth as she talks.  'When we get there, we’ll see you inside. Say hello to that man of yours. The others nod. Shame burns, but the freeze round my throat begins to melt. --- Audrey Niven is a Scottish writer and Creative Coach based in London. Her work is published in multiple anthologies including Bath Flash Fiction Award and NFFD with nominations for Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize. She is the founder and EIC of The Propelling Pencil.

Before the flood we made our own sandbags. Filled old hessian sacks with sand until our hands became orange and our backs ached. Our patch of lawn gained a flamingo­ – an escapee from the wildlife centre – who eyed us suspiciously. The radio burbled out updates until there was nothing to hear but fuzzy static. Granny appeared from upstairs clutching a figurine of some saint that was meant to save us, and walked right past the pygmy marmoset sitting in the fruit bowl. She smiled serenely at us like we were packing for a holiday, as she watched us shovelling. All afternoon we laid the sandbags at the front of the house, ignoring the meerkats on the trampoline. They stood like sentries watching us until Jake threw them cheese cubes and they scattered. Mum said we would regret throwing away good food. Have we done enough? I asked Dad and he said that the time for doing enough had been twenty years ago and he was sorry that this is what it had come to. At dusk Granny placed Saint Florian on the highest point of our barricade and went to bed, mumbling a loop of prayers. When the waters returned it was almost a relief. The otter swam out the door with the current that surged up through the drains, while the marmoset shrieked and threw tangerines at us in disgust. The flamingo’s legs buckled like willow branches and disappeared into the torrent. I like to think the pelican placed Granny’s statuette in the dry cave of its huge beak and flew somewhere safe. So that’s what I told her in the morning when she and the meerkats appeared for breakfast, all of them nodding, palms pressed together in prayer.  --- Catherine Ogston has had flash fiction published by Bath Flash, Reflex Press, Flash 500, TL;DR Press, The Phare and others. Upcoming in Best Microfiction 2025. Longer work has been published by New Writing Scotland, Leicester Writes Short Story Prize, Scottish Arts Trust, Fabuly and others. Short/long listed at Exeter Novel, Caledonia Novel, Kelpies Prize and others.

* Be dead to the moment as you go outside, noticing nothing, not the pulsating rainbow of garden greens, malachite apples, pistachio shadows, moist mossy crevices. * Breathe through your mouth so the sickening whiff of sweet-rotten windfalls doesn’t catch in your throat.  * Find an optimum spot where the fruit is low hanging, and don’t focus on the foul sappy mounds beneath your wellies or the monsters that lurk in their rotten insides. * Never imagine mouthparts, or mandibular sharpness, or side-to-side shearing or abdominal pincers. * Think in facts because facts dispel fear. Earwig, name derived from old English wicga, which means beetle, and ēare, which means, well… ear which entomologists suggest refers to the appearance of hindwings which when unfolded resemble a human ear. Absolutely nothing to do with crawling into human ears then, to feast on the sweet-rotten pap of windfallen brains. * Pick three hard-green fruits and if a breath of wind rustles the leaves above your head, do not imagine bristly bodies landing in your leaf-litter hair. * Tear back inside to the clean not-green kitchen and stare at the TV which you left on for its bluescreen light. Stare into that light, at the bright orange face on the rolling news. * Watch the tangerine man spit poison from his tight little mouth and feel a deeper fear immerge. Find yourself instinctively filling your head with an army of facts, but the power of information only makes matters worse, this isn’t irrational fear of something that can do you no harm, but reasonable fear based on adult understanding. * See the tiny hairs on your naked forearms itch themselves upright in logical loathing, in sentient terror. * Feel the earwig fear recede into the background for the first time in over forty years.    --- Jan Kaneen writes flash and short stories and her new collection of both, Hostile Environments is available to pre-order here, from at Northodox Press.

“Put a gun in it,” he says. He exhales a cigarette breath even though he hasn’t smoked in months. “It’s not that kind of story,” I say. “It’s about family connection.” “Without a gun, you won’t get a movie deal,” he says. “When you put a gun in a story, someone gets hurt or dies.” I reach for his hand to stop his galloping fingers. I look into his eyes. Most of him is still there. The opinionated part, at least. He gives me his that’s-the-way-it-is look. “If the story’s up to snuff, someone has to die,” he says. “It makes readers care.” Our hands let go of each other. “My stories aren’t about death,” I say. “Yes, they are. What happens to the fish?” I sigh. My hands hold each other.  “Don’t you care about them?” he says. “I do,” I say. “I’ll revise it so they catch and release.” Now his fingers on both hands drum. “Cop out,” he says. I take a deep breath. “It isn’t about fish. It’s supposed to show the father and daughter casting out and reeling each other back. It’s a metaphor for holding onto something elusive.” “Malarkey,” he says. “Add a gun.” I clasp my hands as if prayer could help. “No gun,” I say. “If it’s there certain things will happen.” I give him my own that’s-the-way-it-is look. He raises both hands. “If you put a fish in the story, nobody has to catch it. If you put in a cigarette, nobody has to smoke,” he says. “You’re the writer. Fix it so nobody uses the gun.” My father—sitting in a wheelchair, stale breath, his fingers drumming—leans toward me. “You can still control your story,” he says. I nod and drum along with him. --- Debra A.Daniel has published two novellas-in-flash, A Family of Great Falls and The Roster (AdHoc Fiction), Woman Commits Suicide in Dishwasher (novel), and two poetry chapbooks, The Downward Turn of August and As Is. She’s a Pushcart and Best Short Fictions nominee. She won The Los Angeles Review short fiction prize, received the SC Arts Commission Poetry Fellowship, the Guy Owen Poetry Prize, and awards from the Poetry Society of SC. Work has been longlisted and shortlisted in many contests and has appeared in: Snow Crow, Legerdemain, LA Review, Smokelong, Kakalak, Inkwell, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River, and others.