For my first personalized rejection, I received a postcard with a single handwritten word. “Sorry”. On good days, I think of it as an apology. On bad days, I’m sure it was a critique. But on any day, it’s better than nothing, because an editor read my work and responded.
David Holloway lives in Savannah Georgia and has had work published in Gargoyle, The Antihumanist, and Agnes and True.
The story of the week for July 11 to 15 is…
Butterflies by Deborah Tapper
Angela volunteers for Waterfront and argues with campers over lifejackets from sunrise until dusk. She hoses off the sailboats, the rowboats, the canoes. Angela loves archery, not boats. But even more, she loves Dev, the advanced-beginner swim teacher, dutifully instructing adolescents, directly next to the boat lagoon.
Chara Campanella is an Emmy-nominated writer/ producer whose work can be seen everywhere children have eyeballs. See more at yawpshop.com.
The boss’s boss wishes to see me regarding a promotion, or to fire me. Buzz of each featured in breakroom discussions. I straighten my clothes, exhale before heading into the big cheese’s inner sanctum. Ready and willing to lead the Midwest division. Or box up my desk. People are talking.
Todd Mercer won a Dyer-Ives Poetry Prize (2022) for “Overextended” and had “The Drive to Experience Weightlessness” long-listed for this year’s Micro Madness Awards at Flash Frontier. Recent work appears in Best of Plum Tree Tavern, Dunes Review, and Spartan.
Their radar shadow caused widespread panic, evoking everything from unknown weapons to aliens. Now they ghost down, shimmering and flamboyant, vivid patterns overwhelming the air. Settle into welcoming flowers, elegant mouthparts uncurling, uncaring. Why should they care? They’ve existed for 200 million years.
We’re merely a wingbeat in their time.
Deborah writes at an old desk surrounded by five hundred pet bugs.
I once saved a thought for a gray, rainy day;
the sunshine was bright when I hid it away.
When a storm came along, it was too wet to play.
I could not find it then, so my plans went agley
and wherever it was, it is still there today.
Ken Gosse prefers writing short, rhymed traditional verse with whimsy and humor. First published in First Literary Review–East in November 2016, he is also in 50-Word Stories, Pure Slush, Parody, Home Planet News Online, and other publications. Raised in the Chicago suburbs, now retired, he and his wife have lived in Mesa, AZ, over twenty years.
Puddles were forming.
It was too late to cross safely.
We risked it.
“Save yourself,” said my father
When the current pulled us off course.
It was good advice.
I’ve been doing it ever since.
I learned something else that day⸺
When in peril, others will stand by
And watch.
Jenny Logan lives in Edinburgh. She is regularly featured by Friday Flash Fiction and has stories selected for publication by Dark Rose Press and Iron Faerie Publishing.
Carefully retrieved, the smooth ceramic warms my palms.
The bag promised none of the memories that soon blossom in my mind.
Just as well, for if the tea makers knew their power over me I might be broke on chamomile alone. Nonetheless, I thank them for echoes of the past.
Elody Dawn is a joyful mother of three. She studied anthropology before turning to writing full-time. In partnership with her husband, she writes on relationships and how to form deeper connections with the ones that you love.
Secrets whispered in the park, she finds, become facts. Light ones, slight ones, but facts all the same.
To be picked up by the wind.
And occasionally the big girls.
Blown like fallen blossom around town.
Settling on pavements, doorsteps.
And before long you’ll find the priest knows your name.
Rachel Canwell is a writer and teacher living in Cumbria. She is currently working on a flash collection and her first novel which was shortlisted for the Retreat West Pitch to Win 2021. Her short fiction has been published in Sledgehammer Lit, Pigeon Review, Reflex Press, Selcouth Station and The Birdseed amongst others. See more at bookbound.blog/writing.
I’ve always wondered what it was like to fly. Gliding between the sky and the earth, attached to neither. The midnight air whipping against my face, hair flying out behind me, believing for a second that I am immune to the chains of gravity.
But the ground came too soon.
Sarah Nassar is an English Literature student living and writing in Egypt. She has one published story called “Of Guns and Roses”.