I have my father’s charisma. It wasn’t a gift—I stole it while he slept. Now I dominate the room, my voice crushing the endless chatter of the guests, forcing all eyes to mine.
And in the back, hunched against a wall, my father glares wordlessly, wishing he were me.
Marc Young lives in Seattle and writes speculative fiction, sometimes using more than 50 words.
Green as the sea. Green as envy. Green as the eye of the dragon who raided Ms. Hobblefinch’s garden. She grew monstrously big greens. And would invite her friends to drink red wine and smoke. They used to laugh and tell tall tales, of what they had fed the garden.
Erick Lima is a wanderer and writer.
The story of the week for April 6 to 10 is…
A Prescription by Jinjia Grace Hu
Sixty grams of blighted wheat. Twenty grams of licorice. Ten dried dates. One longan. Four rose buds, and a few Goji berries.
A note I found tucked in the very back of Ma’s bottom drawer two weeks after her death, three years after Pa’s. A Chinese herbal prescription for heartbreak.
Jinjia Grace Hu was born in Nanjing, China, and lives in New York with her cat, Almond. She is an MFA candidate in creative writing at Columbia University. Her stories appear or are forthcoming in The First Line, The Bloomin’ Onion, Bright Flash Literary Review, and elsewhere.
I frisbee the flattest rock into the water. The ocean roars, but you are silent, arms folded, looking away from me. Sullen because you hate the beach. I hold my breath and wait to see if the rock will skip. If it does, I stay. If it doesn’t, I leave.
Candace Webb (she/her) writes from Belmont, MA on the traditional territory of the Pawtucket people and the Massachusetts tribal nation, where she lives with her partner, two children, and two cats. Her human companions are tame; her cats are not. You can find her work in Five on the Fifth, Emerge Literary Journal, and Defenestration. Her work was nominated for the Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize anthologies in 2022, and she was a finalist in Room Magazine’s 2022 Short Forms Contest. She is a reader for Flash Fiction Magazine.
Thoughts and actions begin, and go nowhere.
Birds are different. A wing shifts, a body turns, and it passes through the whole flock. They take off as one, landing somewhere far.
If birds are capable of holding a conviction, it’s that evolution is not all it’s cracked up to be.
J.S. O’Keefe’s work spans short stories, essays, and poems. They have been featured in a variety of publications, including AntipodeanSF, Roi Faineant, 101 Words, Everyday Fiction, Spillwords, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, 50 Word Stories, ScribesMicro, Dissident Voice, 50GT, etc.
Mama’s rubbing sunscreen all over my face.
“We’re at the White House,” I say.
“No,” Mama says. “The Statue of Liberty, but not the real one, neither.”
Lotion gets in my eye, and I start to cry.
“Washington’s born here, y’know,” she says, and for a moment I believe her.
Oliver Cubillos is a writer and filmmaker from Los Angeles, California. He holds a BFA in Media Arts Production with a minor in literature from Emerson College. His work is published or forthcoming in Heavy Feather Review, BULL Magazine, Free Flash Fiction, and elsewhere.
Not a jealous bone in his body—robots are made of metal after all—Rob should have been the perfect bodyguard, an unlikely rival for the affections of Jim’s girlfriend.
Programmed to be charming, entertaining, and attentive, Rob stole both her heart and the tickets for Jim’s planned honeymoon cruise.
John H. Dromey has had short fiction, humor, and poetry published in many different venues.
She bakes me in different sizes, adding vanilla pudding inside, warm like her heart no one sees. I’m frosty, they say, eyeing my cream cheese icing—the pudding, the interior, unseen. They swallow bundtinis, bite into bundtlets, slice bundt cakes. They cut or bite or swallow my heart. Like hers.
Shanti Chandrasekhar, who savors every bit of banana bundt cakes, wrote this story based on a prompt.
The Story of the Month is chosen from the Story of the Week winners announced from the past month.
The finalists for March were:
Return of the Muse by Bob Thurber
Busy not missing you by Zoe M.
self-conference by Maria Cargille
Can’t Tell You Why by Bob Thurber
Where I Would’ve Held Her by Tad K.
The winner of the March 2026 Story of the Month is…
Can’t Tell You Why
Editor’s Note: You might be curious why Bob Thurber has two stories up as finalists for the same Story of the Month award! I typically only post one story per month from each author, but I group stories into months based on when the Story of the Week post goes up, which sometimes slides into the next month. That was the case with Return of the Muse, which was posted on February 26 but fell into the March story of the month window.