LUCY MAC: The Final Cadence

Artistic, Submissions, , , ,

Lili grips the piano, coughing. Bloody notes splatter her half-composed score.

She must finish. Barely twenty-four, her life a semi-quaver in history’s melody, but her music will live forever.

Breathless, she plays.

Death hesitates, his skeletal hand on her shoulder, ivory fingers tapping along, obsessed with knowing how it ends.

Lucy Mac writes short stories, flash fiction, and microfiction. She won the New Writers 100-word competition 2025 and has been longlisted for New York Midnight, Bath Flash Fiction, Yeovil Literary Prize, and Not Quite Write. Find her on Instagram/Bluesky at @lucymacwrites.

GREG HILL: Dark Matter and Special Relativity

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“According to the cosmic microwave background, the universe is expanding at sixty-seven kilometers per second per megaparsec. But measurements using Cepheid variables suggest it’s almost exactly seventy.”

“Dad, I was asking whether you’re actually six feet or five eleven.”

“What I’m saying is… I mean… It depends on who’s asking.”

Greg Hill is a poet and a flash fiction writer in West Hartford, Connecticut. His work has appeared in Barzakh, Grub Street, HAD, NonBinary Review, and elsewhere. He and his wife enjoy the struggle of raising three determined feminists. See more on his website

CAROL HUEBSCH REEVES: Patience

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My once fertile mind lies fallow. Where colors and music danced, now nothing takes root. Wounded, my imagination searches endlessly for a healing balm.

I know it is there—hiding in a butterfly’s wings, or a summer day, or a burst of laughter.

I need only believe that is so.

A prolific writer, Carol is loving the freedom and challenge of Flash Fiction. Her memoir, “All the Little Miracles,” was published in 2022. She is frequently published in Flash Fiction Magazine and 50 Word Stories.

LOUIE RIVERS: Grease Monkey

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The customer laughs when he sees my dirty hands. “Grease monkey.” I laugh too. Rent is due on Friday. By closing, oil has settled into every crack of my skin. At home, my little sister asks if I fixed another car. I tell her yes. Groceries cost money. She smiles.

Louie Rivers is a writer from Mississippi whose work explores labor, family, faith, and Southern life through microfiction and poetry.

DEBORAH TAPPER: When The Planets Aligned

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Syzygy was just another word that summer, lost among moonlit beaches, sunburned shoulders, laughing salt kisses. We caught the stars together, caging them in cupped hands. Traded dreams and wove futures from impossibilities, never believing our worlds could drift apart again.

Maybe you still look up too, sometimes. And remember.

Deborah writes at an old desk surrounded by five hundred pet bugs.

BOB THURBER: Myth of a Life

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Once upon a time, in a bed that was not my own, I wandered through a dream that was not mine, and woke abruptly from a sleep that was not mine, to find strangers staring directly into my eyes, uninvited guests making themselves at home in the memory of me.

Bob Thurber is the author of six books. Regarded as a master of Flash and Micro Fiction, his work has appeared in Esquire and other magazines, been anthologized 60 times, received a long list of awards, and been utilized in schools and colleges throughout the world. He resides in Massachusetts. Visit his website at BobThurber.net.

NICK MENDILLO: All Things

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I met a man on the street recently who claimed that everything was a metaphor.

“Is that right?” I had asked him. “Because I’m pretty sure that’s a knife you got there.”

It was late, so I handed him my wallet, and that son of a gun stabbed me anyway.

Nick Mendillo is a Rhode Island-based writer, artist, and educator. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in outlets including Had Journal, Novellum Magazine, and NINE. He’s also a professional cheeseburger chef.

TERRI YANETTI: How Stars Appear in the Sky

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A woman, as tall as the hills and with silvery hair, wades barefoot up the river at night. She scatters star seeds in the east from a pouch spun of spider silk and moonlight. Sometimes, she’ll wield a copper crescent pick to flick away withering stars and wish them well.

Terri Yannetti is a Connecticut-based newspaper writer. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Star*LIne, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and 3rd Wednesday. This is her first flash fiction submission.

JIMMY MACK: Roe

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The tribes chanted in harmonious unison, their drums the oars pushing the salmon further upstream beyond newly demolished boundaries. Guided solely by memories not directly theirs, they are driven to reach the Klamath basin to spawn a new, free generation who never knew their parents’ odyssey, yet somehow never forgot.

Jimmy is a writer from Portland, Oregon. Having worked in the horticultural side of life for over 30 years, he is now working on a book about his backpacking adventures around South Asia in the early 1990s.