Trash day. Left the garage with a bag in each hand and rounded the building, thinking only of the cold. On the way back, a glint of orange on the ground, maybe sunrise on a shard of ice. But it was a magnetic letter A from a child’s toy alphabet.

Michael Nickels-Wisdom has written very short verse since 1990 after discovering haiku in the public library where he worked for 38 years before retiring, and then very short prose since 2001. Some of the prose has appeared in World Haiku Review, A Hundred Gourds, and Scifaikuest.