Would life have been easier if you had died? You left. My heart struggled, fearful and uncertain. Sadness watered my heart, transforming tears into caterpillars. You found purpose with a new love. I stretched and lifted skyward, chasing butterflies, searching new joy.
Then you died, and no, it wasn’t easier.
Eileen is forever chasing butterflies metaphorically as a source of hope and inspiration.
Belly pressed against the warm sand.
Through half closed eyes, the golden hairs on my forearm bend like grass in the breeze.
The foamy ocean edge reaches up,
falls back,
tugging the sun burned memory of you out to sea.
We all swam here that day we got the call.
Dave lives in Sydney, Australia and works across various creative disciplines. Follow at instagram.com/davidnormanbonney
You loved my fool.
The gooseberry bush grew uninvited, yet you took such care of it.
But now you’re gone, I let the thorns etch my skin and hook my flesh.
Yes, you could be prickly at times, but I’d rather you were still here to make me feel alive.
R.H. lives in Nottingham, UK, has several short stories published, and co-founded the Sutton Bonington Campus Creative Writing Group as a staff wellbeing event.
As a Darksider, I live in the absence of color: the impenetrable depth of the universe, the blazing of a star. Black and white.
Lightsiders can see sunsets of gold, pink, and violet. But also parchment earth, bloody scarlet of war, gray ash of nuclear blasts.
Still, I envy them.
Sherri Bale writes to the tune of waves crashing on the beach and the scent of salt in her nostrils.
The road stretched on into the night, a mournful song on the radio. The car’s driver was alone. Beside him sat a full bottle and a cabin reservation for two. He focused not on the song, the full bottle, or the empty car. His sad eyes focused on the road.
Robert Trueblood is an amateur writer, professional bookkeeper, GM, and possible Vampire from Alberta, Canada.
I’m the ghost drifting in yesterday’s misfortune. Mother was murdered, Christmas, years before, before I was a woman, a drunk. I swallow whiskey, pills, hold snapshots, blare music, drowning in sorrow until you appear in a dream, delivering the words, “Release it, Mama’s dancing in the wind, floating amongst stars.”
Angela Carlton lives outside Atlanta with her husband and two
daughters. Her fiction has been published in EWR, Every Day Fiction, Pedestal Magazine, Long Story Short, 6S, High Noon and Friday Flash Fiction among others. Her story “Swallowed” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2023.
I’m picking at the callous on my hands while he talks. He says he’s been crying for the last few nights. He tells me he’s missed work. I dig deeper with my nails, peeling off thick layers of white crust, as if I’ll find helpful words underneath the hardened skin.
Joseph Lewis is a monkey at a typewriter who occasionally produces work coherent enough to be considered fiction. Currently he is making peanuts while he studies and works as an online English language and literature tutor.
It hurt when she was taken from us so suddenly; after an unexpected diagnosis, immediate hospitalisation, and just a couple of weeks of furtive visits, she was gone. While her husband and children grieved, I couldn’t even attend the funeral, still the invisible and unknown member of her family.
Alastair Millar is an archaeologist by training and translator by trade, living in the Czech Republic. His flash fiction (and social media handles) can be found through linktr.ee/alastairmillar.
I buried myself in my Flash comic, pretending to be unaffected by Grandpa’s inability to remember me.
Pointing to the cover, Dad whispered, “Remember when your hero got trapped in the Speed Force, and he started experiencing time out of order?”
I nodded.
“My hero’s going through the same thing.”
David Dezell Turner is an astrodynamics PhD student at the University of Colorado Boulder. When he isn’t giving directions to real spaceships, he’s writing about fictional ones. Check out more of his work at daviddezellturner.com.
Memories of a maternity ward should be happy.
Crying babies.
Proud fathers.
The counting of fingers and toes.
Exhausted, but exuberant, mothers.
Except for one.
There, in the corner.
The one facing the wall.
The one without a baby.
That was me.
Memories of a maternity ward should be happy.
Susan Gale Wickes is a writer from Indiana.