One evening at the Westend Grill, Reid looked up from his chili to see his dead uncle sitting across the table.
Uncle Kirby sported his usual half-smile and red-checkered shirt. He nodded at the bowl.
“I liked lots of crackers in mine, too,” he said.
Reid crumbled in another saltine.
Jim Anderson is a retired college teacher who lives and writes in south-eastern Michigan.
My cat sat on the corner of my desk and watched me type. Every day for twelve years. Sometimes she’d tap my keyboard to correct my spelling. Today she wasn’t there. So I put a picture of her there instead. But the picture doesn’t spell any better than I do.
Michaele Jordan is the author of Mirror Maze. See more at michaelejordan.com.
Of course we’re wondering about the dead bus stop crow. Raven? Grackle? A smash of black on cement, witch-guts gross. We see the suited man who’s been hounding us before school, his Jehovah pamphlets flapping: “WHERE are YOU going?”
We bend to the bird, searching for its ears. Whisper: go.
Adele Gallogly’s very short stories have been published in FlashFlood, Writers’ Hour, Six-Sentences, and Paragraph Planet. You can follow her on BlueSky.
I wake and wander riverside
on a crisp winter morning.
Sunshine chases chills
from my bones
while my heart warms
with wonder
that I am welcome here
in what will always be
Aboriginal land.
My history not white-washed
but somehow forgiven.
My love for this place
a gift of grace.
Fiona H Evans has lived for 25 years in the suburb of Bayswater, by the Swan River in Perth. She walks the riverside every day in a place named Birralyn by local Noongar people long before it became Bayswater. Ever changing, ever the same, this place is as beautiful as it was 25 years ago. Probably as beautiful as it was a hundred years ago. Or 45,000 years ago, which is how long we have evidence of Noongar people living here. But of course, they’ve been here longer. This was always their land.
The woman strokes century-old, burgundy-colored poems on crumbling letterhead to time-travel. Memories magically appear. She is five years old standing behind her beloved grandmother, watching while the poet writes. The child wants to be old too, an author, like her idol. Not a lost ghost visiting from the distant future.
Former journalist and technical writer Lilian Pomeroy Edmonds is working on a poetry anthology with braided essays inspired by her grandmother’s poems written from 1899-1932. You can browse her work on Substack at wavingfromadistance.substack.com.
The train left the station.
Maya stood alone, holding a letter she would never send. Snow slowly covered her nearly-empty battery pack. She watched her footprints disappear. For the first time she felt calm and steady. She didn’t need to say goodbye. She didn’t want to. She wasn’t programmed to.
Paul T. is a rising sophomore at Suffield Academy in Connecticut. Originally from Thailand, Paul enjoys literature and exploring foreign languages.
What if I hadn’t moved to this city and rented the apartment, right next to hers?
What if our paths hadn’t crossed at the bus stop, the coffee shop, the market?
What if she had let me love her and she had loved me back?
Would she still be alive?
Rita Riebel Mitchell writes in the Pinelands of South Jersey where she lives amongst the trees with her husband. Her work appears in HAD, Flash Fiction Magazine, Versification, and more. Find her at ritariebelmitchell.com/friday-micro/.
See that bumped up decommissioned work truck from the Murphy’s Glass fleet? The kids are driving it down to the tournament. Lifeguarding nationals, a crew of them on a double overnight. Red trunks, fresh certifications, fragile youth. Stop detecting foreshadowing! Nothing’s going wrong. Just chill till those kids get home.
Evan Harris is the author of The Quit, a satire of the self-help genre. In the past, her short fiction was published in The Iowa Review, Fence, and The Brooklyn Rail among other publications. Most currently, her flash fiction has appeared online in Bending Genres, and Fictive Dream. She writes book reviews for her home town newspaper The East Hampton Star.
The story of the week for August 18 to 22 is…
Skyward by John Singh
The grass is barren
And I am the one to blame.
After a long millennium of wishing,
There are no more shooting stars.
I’ve used them all up,
Selfishly.
They are tired.
Or maybe they don’t want to see me anymore.
My wishes are too noisy for their brief passing.
Eden Pela is a writer, poet, hobby-level photographer, and rising senior at the University of Pennsylvania studying English Literature. She has an associate’s degree in Creative Writing from Brookdale Community College and writes feature articles for MXDWN and Mood of Living. Her literary influences are early modernist/realist writers like Fernando Pessoa, Hemingway, and George Orwell. Drawing on her experiences in Nigeria and the United States, she has found solace in writing prose and poetry that reflect those cultural differences. She currently lives between New Jersey and Philadelphia, spending her time writing/submitting to other literary magazines, as well as managing The Vagabond’s Verse with as much passion as one can have for its creation.