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Best thing about Plastic Darlene is she’ll never be hooked up on life support, feeding tube snaking out her throat.
I’ll never have to question whether the machine is draining out her life like a clicking mechanical vampire.
Will never go mad tearing out the cords.
Tim Boiteau lives in Michigan. He is a Writers of the Future winner and author of The Nilwere (Grendel Press, 2024).
I walked out into the night. I stood out there and it was windy and cold and nobody was out there but me. I thought about you. I stood there thinking about how you’d left me like this— a person who stood outside at night alone for no reason.
Meg Pokrass lives in the Scottish Highlands. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals including New England Review, Electric Literature and Five Points. She’s the founding editor of Best Microfiction.
The story of the week for September 28 to October 2 is…
Pizza Fog in an F-150 by Robert Allen Arnold
and
Personal Effects by Jim Parisi
She bounced over like she always did.
Big smile. Pen poised.
“Eggs, coffee?”
“Thanks Susie.”
“My pleasure.”
But really, it was my pleasure.
These precious few seconds every morning
with this lovely girl.
Until the day she wasn’t there.
Just a message on my table.
Please scan the QR code.
It was a dark and stormy night many years ago in the city of London when Colin set off on his bicycle to ride around the world. He only made it as far as Hong Kong where he found work as a copywriter and is still planning his ride home.
After he invites her to escape beery ’90s karaoke, they eat seedless watermelon beside a humming dishwasher. Their mouths flood with someone else’s fruit. They wash their fingers in silent mode—smiling, blinking. Whose kitchen is this, again? One of them wonders. The other is already pretending. Ours. Ours. Ours.
Adele Gallogly lives and writes in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of places, including the 2025 Bridport Prize Anthology, Flash the Court, NUNUM, and Gastropoda. Find her on IG/BlueSky: @AdeleGallogly.
I loved him from the moment we met. It all felt so exhilarating and new. I melted into his sweet blue eyes and a smile that would forever steal my heart.
He’s 25 now. Soon he will be singing praises of his own.
My first grandchild is due this week.
Lisa Chambers is a Texas girl and writer. Love always wins.
I thought I knew you well. Obviously I was wrong. For your birthday, I bought the fancy caramels sold in the red tin. They were pricey.
“Yuck,” you said. “These are the imported ones.”
So now I have no boyfriend and a half-empty container of the most delicious caramels imaginable.
Roberta Beach Jacobson (she/her) was born in Massachusetts, but has also lived in Oho, Illinois, Iowa, and Europe (Germany and Greece). She is the author of Demitasse Fiction: One Minute Reads for Busy People. She edits Five Fleas Itchy Poetry and smols poetry journal. In her blended family, Roberta is the mother of two, grandmother of five.
My grandmother, never quiet nor proud. With bold hair, once dark, then light, stubbornly not gone. The woman who walked a week after a car shattered her knee. The woman who beat cancer thrice, and insisted she would easily do it again. Speaking quietly, telling me:
“I think I’m satisfied.”
Paige Templeton is a young writer from California. In her free time, she writes poetry and paints.
It’s freezing outside, hot pizza boxes on the front seat, fogging the windows. He’s risking his life for what – pepperoni?
He arrives at her house, the pizzas cold and hard.
“You need to learn to cook,” she says.
He bites his tongue, still hungry and forty dollars farther from home.
Robert Allen Arnold is a native of Seattle who now lives near the Pacific Ocean.
His work has appeared in a variety of publications, anthologies and media.
Cutting. Rolling. Coaxing her clawed fingers, ravaged by arthritis. Once they held whisper-thin needles, stitched intricate tapestries, bathed her six children. Today, her hands can barely roll the meatballs, barely get the tray into the oven. But they will. It’s her birthday, and once again the house will be full.
Sarah Barbo isn’t sure how to write a clever, amusing bio even though she hopes she is those things sometimes. She does love to write. Find her in the Colorado mountains and at sarahbarbo.com.