We braved ferocious thorns to pick luscious tayberries. Petal-drenched in butterfly sunshine, liquescing, mouths laughing crimson juice and our pricked fingers dripping sweetness.
You again, years later: defeated, damaged, devastated by life. You buy homemade tayberry jam. Don’t recognise me. Don’t remember.
But you will, when you taste summer’s promise.
Deborah writes at an old desk surrounded by five hundred pet bugs.
My mother keeps secretly replacing my little sister’s dead goldfish.
My newly adopted sister keeps randomly telling strangers at the store, “My mommy died!” and “I’m going to the beach!” My mother–our mother–nods, tired.
Two things can be true: There is a dead goldfish. There is a replacement.
Rachel Hapanowicz is currently a teacher in Cincinnati public schools where she is an expert at making cool lingo very uncool to her students, being from Ohio, and finding the best karaoke spots in town.
That winter, he found endless ways to make her blush—mostly by telling dirty jokes or secret desires, late in the evening when the wind beat the windows and rattled their bones. Then he’d warm his hands against her burning cheeks. In this way, they made it through the nights.
Sam Hall is a young writer from England. When he’s not writing, Sam likes to worry about not writing.
You rub your eyes and enter a galaxy. Stars explode in the back of your eyelids as you careen through a bright tunnel. For a split second, you find yourself at the edge of the universe, when suddenly you are hauled back to Earth.
You feel more awake than ever.
Yuhyun Hwang is a high school student and writer who lives in Seoul, South Korea. She loves to read, write, and paint in her free time.
An old boat dreams in a patch of brittle reeds, lulled by the elegy of summer passing.
Sentiments of paddle dips and skimming through duckweed. Giggles over water striders.
The plunk and bob of casting lines. Kisses from dazzle-dancing dragonflies.
Pining for a chance to chaperone one last moonlit romance.
Deb DiTomaso lives in Connecticut with her husband, a dog, and a bunch of chickens. She’s a career nurse with a lifelong passion for crafting stories. Her work has been placed as a finalist in CT Tassy Walden Awards for New Voices in Children’s Literature.
mountains protect
the quaint village
keeping it remote
although unmapped
the hamlet is spotted
by whirling drones
excited tourists
skip through the gates
spilling into streets
hiding in shadows
villagers tremble
silencing their lutes
once the music stops
the tourists retreat
no longer enchanted
at nightfall
villagers gather
strumming anew
Roberta Beach Jacobson is an author, poet, painter. She makes her home in Iowa.
Wickham Wax Works docent, Marilyn, unearthing from cold storage the figures for the “Wickham Soothsayers” installation, levered open the last wooden crate to find her late granny, Florence, staring up at her. Marilyn carefully pried her long lost Magic 8-Ball from Granny’s wax fingers, wondering if it still held answers.
Susan Heisner, aka the wyowordslinger, writes for fun and connection.
Ti’ci is bullied, so she feeds the monster in the mirror and it gurgles excitedly, learning, repeating:
“You’re so ugly”
“Toothpick”
“That skin though”
When Ti’ci disappears, the monster escapes the mirror, lumps of flesh convulsing. It grows limbs, a glare, and a snarl, and replaces her.
The cycle persists.
Stephanie is just a girl who enjoys reading manhwas and writing about things she observes. She has short fiction in a few places including 101 words, but otherwise she’s just a young’un.
The story of the week for August 5 to 9 is…
Anniversary Gift by Meg Pokrass
Big anniversary coming, so Vincenzo Perrugia stole the Mona Lisa. She’ll cover the water damage, he winked, pacing their stuffy apartment, hanging a nail on the spotted wall. What will she think? his wife blushed. Tried to imagine her understanding voice, her way of touching them both in the dark.
Meg Pokrass is the Series Co-Editor of Best Microfiction. Her new collection, The First Law of Holes: New and Selected will be published by Dzanc Books.