Vanessa Fogg has long been one of my favorite writers. Several of her short stories are on my secret “all-time best” list, so it’s a treat to learn about her new collection, The House of Illusionis…

A gathering of recent speculative flash & micro fiction, each presenting a tiny-yet-powerful universe. How tiny? About one-thousand words for flash; four-hundred words for micro. The word count…

Oscar descends earthen steps compressed under his straw-soled feet. The cave walls ooze and drip on the books, on his bed; mud is life.

A gathering of recent speculative flash & micro fiction, each presenting a tiny-yet-powerful universe. How tiny? About one-thousand words for flash; four-hundred words for micro. The word count…

Radiant mice tell me they want to live in my house. It’s night and I’m trying to sleep and I don’t think I want any roommates, not even when they glow and sing a cappella at midnight. You can’t stay here, I say. This is the wrong place for you. The mice show me their feet. Look, they say. We have clever mice feet. We will build temples for you. A wave of frothy mud fills my floor and the mice use their clever little feet to sculpt it into miniature Roman structures; a replica Colosseum, a small-scale Pantheon, a petite aqueduct. They hum ballads while they work and I wonder where they studied architecture. The mice pat the frothy mud into a bust of a scowling emperor. Not Caracalla, I say. He looks so angry. They re-sculpt him into a waterfall that tastes like sanctuary and cotton candy; and they create rosebud roads and starshine bridges and parks filled with velvet pillows; and they sing me disco songs that make my not-so-clever feet tap light, so I tell them it’s not the wrong place for them after all, they can live in my desk drawer, if they want, forever, if they want, as long as they don’t mind the stray paper clips.   --- Myna Chang is the author of The Potential of Radio and Rain (CutBank Books). Her writing has been selected for Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and WW Norton’s Flash Fiction America. Find her at MynaChang.com or on Bluesky at @MynaChang. 'Paperclip Empire' was first published in Gone Lawn, Issue 40 in Spring 2021.

I’m in the back seat of a Holden Monaro parked up the road from my place kissing a boy whose name I don’t remember when they say on the car radio John Lennon’s been shot. I tell him I have to go, and I run home. Mum and Dad have already heard on the news. Only in America, Mum says. They’re passing round a joint and drinking red wine at four o’clock in the afternoon, listening to Sergeant Pepper on the stereo. Dad gets up to change the record, takes Imagine from the place on the shelf, it’s positioned alphabetically between Help and Let It Be. He carefully removes the vinyl from the sleeve, holds it up to the light to check for scratches, then lays it on the turntable and removes the dust with a blue velvet cleaner. The record spins and we sit on the floor round the coffee table to listen. When we get to the second track, Crippled Inside, Dad says John wrote it about Paul McCartney after The Beatles broke up. Dad says the Beatles fell out over a woman from New York, they hated her in England, it should never have happened, if they hadn’t chased Yoko away, Paul and John would still be writing the greatest songs in the world, John and Yoko would be living in England with their friends and John wouldn’t have been shot outside his own apartment in front of the love of his life. Your mum takes a drag on the dooby, she says, yes. Because that’s what it’s like in America, they elect cowboys for President and everyone walks round packing heat like they think they could be the next leader of the free world, like they think they could be motherfucking John Wayne.   --- Gillian O'Shaughnessy is a reader and writer from Walyalup, Fremantle in Western Australia. She has work in X-R-A-Y, Splonk, Night Parrot Press, Jellyfish Review and Literary Namjooning, among others. She's a submissions editor for SmokeLong Quarterly.