Found it under her mattress. Wasn’t looking, just changing sheets.
Pages of song lyrics. Then drawings. Then letters, written like she was already gone.
I put it back. Exactly how I found it.
At dinner, she said, “Why are you being weird?”
“Burn the plans,” I said. “Keep the songs.”
Paul D’Arcy tells stories. All real. Most brief. You can read more at pauldrc.com.
The demolition crew didn’t speak; they arrived in their crawler crane, set up, and struck. Space after space—a broken heart, wedding bells, a joyous birth, a thousand banquets, a million dance steps, three seductions, a betrayal, a midnight vigil, a wake. The wrecking ball swung back, then drove away.
Ralph Goldswain writes microfiction for pleasure in his London home. He also likes experiencing all the things London offers.
Grandma warned us of faerie rings and being banished from home for life.
Yet she always left out cups of milk for pixies. They repaid favors.
Thought they were stories until I saw the milk caps circling her grave. Guess the pixies repaid her. In death, she could return home.
Alethea Paul is primarily a speculative flash fiction writer who dabbles (and drabbles) in literary. Her work has appeared in Factor Four Magazine, ScribesMICRO, Adventitious and Brilliant Flash Fiction.
She nuzzles the egg with her beak, desperately hoping.
The egg is warm from the warmth of her belly.
If only she could cause her child to emerge using the fierce power of her will alone!
Her partner watches, the egg’s siblings at his side. The cygnets want to swim.
Eleanor Buffam is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and musician based in Leith, Edinburgh. Alongside short stories, she is currently co-writing a sci-fi trilogy.
The story of the week for May 25 to 29 is…
The First Nip by Jimmy Mack
Crestfallen, needing air, he stepped outside.
A neighbor’s voice, so close and urgent in the dark, startled him. “Look!” she said. Just in time he caught the streak of a meteor, and in its disappearance another bright trace against the stars.
“Look!” he said.
And that had to be enough.
M. Henninger-Voss is an award-winning historian, a personalist, and writer of essays, fiction, and poetry.
The urn’s cold, hard exterior matched the heart of the man it held. When I hurled it off the pier—the same pier where Mother disappeared—it sank quickly, swallowed by the incoming tide as if the sea understood what it meant for me to erase him from my life.
Bud Pharo is a permanently disabled American who writes short stories and flash fiction. His work has been featured in a number of literary magazines, both in print and online.
The radiator clicks without warming the room. He crosses out sentences until the paper softens beneath his hand. Outside, trucks hiss along the highway. Inside, unfinished thoughts press against his teeth. Near dawn, one finally escapes him whole enough to survive the page before morning enters the room.
Louie Rivers is an emerging poet from Mississippi whose work explores labor, isolation, and emotional endurance through compressed imagery and lyric intensity.
I wasn’t driving, even though my dad’s knee was a bruised balloon. My job was to converse. We talked about Nebraska’s only good quality: sunflower fields for miles. We laughed, pretending he wasn’t dropping me off and driving back cross-country by himself, only to arrive at an empty home.
Cozette Annemarie Calderon is an undergraduate student at The New School where she studies Literary Studies. She was previously the Editor-in-Chief for The Benicia Paw. Now, she is a copy editor for the New School Free Press. She is based in New York City and Vallejo, California where she works as an American Sign Language interpreter.
The psych ward is ten paces long.
The washroom beyond? Just five.
So what’s behind the rest?
I’ve mapped this whole place – voids everywhere. And they all link up.
Is every building like this? Whole cities, parallel worlds, meshed with ours?
“Harmless obsession,” my caseworker reckons.
Tomorrow I’m breaking through.
William Mitchell lives in East Sussex in the South of England. He is an award-winning author, having had early success with various Horror and Science Fiction publications before winning the Writers of the Future contest in 2012. His first novel, CREATIONS, came out in 2014 with John Hunt Publishing.