Flash #39 Nov '25

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Flash Issue #39 Nov 2025

Joanna Acevedo, Swetha Amit, Tina Barry, Myna Chang, Mea Cohen, Karina Dove Escobar, Gary Fincke, Marie Gethins, Sammy Greenspan, Phebe Jewell, Lucinda Kempe, Scott E. Russell, Beth Sherman, Alison Wassell, Alice Wilson

Joanna Acevedo

Athens, 2023

It had seemed unlikely, but George had found a place for all of us to dance, navigating the crowded corridors of the Athens nightlife district like the professional he was. The other girls wanted drinks and pushed their way to the crowded bar. George had his sunglasses on and his floral shirt, bordering on Hawaiian print, was easy to spot in the crowd, so I never felt worried about losing him. His skin was pulsing different colors, blue and green, like the lava lamp I had begged my parents for as a child, but he said that was normal. Not wanting to be outdone, I detached one arm and then the other and switched them, left to right; this way I had more flexibility. The whole time I had been in Greece, George had navigated the places we visited, sometimes translating when he introduced me and sometimes leaving me in the dark. I spoke lots of secret languages but Greek wasn’t one of them.I didn’t want to admit it but I didn’t like it when he paid attention to other people, particularly women. He had warned me that it was part of his job but I guessed he just liked it. We knew each other well despite everything. We spoke the same salt and blood and gesture and ambition. The age difference was a coincidence or it was a consequence. I was three years older than the last time we had been on the same continent and in that time I had cultivated my own freelance editing business and also a drug problem. The time difference had thrown me out of whack. The Earth wasn’t a sphere anymore, it was all over the news, it had turned into more of a rhombus shape but scientists were still running all kinds of tests. I kept myself busy when we were alone because I wasn’t used to telling the truth so much. I didn’t want to admit it but I was addicted to chaos. At home in Brooklyn I switched people’s mail around in the mailboxes and I used telepathy to mess with the traffic lights. I was a creature or I was a golem or I was the monster under the bed but I wouldn’t confirm anything because I was worried about being judged. We were sitting at a table outside after purchasing afternoon coffees and George told me he respected me as an artist and an adult which I guessed meant he didn’t when we had first met; I had been twenty-three. I was older and I was smarter and I knew how to protect myself. Later it occurred to me that I wasn’t sure why I needed his approval. Just so you know, he was the kind of guy who kept his sunglasses on at night in a dance club. His dancing, God, his dancing. His skin pulsing all different colors and tentacles curling out of his abdomen. I asked him if he had drugs, any kind of drugs, I would take anything if it stopped the feelings I was having, but when he asked me what feelings were those I couldn’t describe them. Words failed me. Later I thought it had all been a dream but then I woke up and he was doing pull-ups on the bar he had hung in the doorway between his bedroom and the small hallway that led to the living room and suddenly everything was as it always had been. He had no air conditioning. The pizza was stolen. We were puzzle pieces and his plants needed water. I ordered a pilsner and paid five euro. The music had infected me and time was something that moved around, you couldn’t really pin it down or identify one moment, everything was always happening and it would always be happening so there was no point in trying to understand it. I knew it was him who texted me that he saw me in Maria Hernandez Park that afternoon, and I knew it was him who crammed into the tiny elevator. I loved him but I wasn’t in love with him. It took some convincing but eventually I rode on the back of his Vespa; it was dusk and the wind was in my hair. I was in Greece for 10 days but I didn’t see any historical sites or learn a word of Greek.

Joanna Acevedo is the author of three books and two chapbooks. Born and raised in New York City, she received her MFA from New York University in 2021. Her writing crosses genres, focusing on creating accessible resources for emerging writers. Currently, she's exploring new platforms to host and develop revolutionary approaches to literary publishing and the creative arts. Learn more about her and her work by visiting her website: https://www.joannaacevedo.net

Swetha Amit

The Photograph

I run my hands over the old books on Ma’s shelf, which she and I read together during teatime in my childhood. Ma is sitting in her armchair, gazing at the San Francisco sunset clouds. There’s a photo album on her lap. The room begins to darken. I turn on the light and go into the kitchen to make a cup of hot ginger tea for Ma. I return and offer her the tea, which she accepts with a blank expression. I pick up a copy of Little Women. The scent of the pale yellow, tattered pages, combined with the aroma of ginger tea, brings a wave of nostalgia.
“Remember this one, Ma, you always said how much I reminded you of Jo.”
She takes a sip of the tea and looks at me.
“Did you forget to add sugar?”
“I added one spoon, Ma.”
“Tastes a little bitter,” she says, but continues drinking it.
She places the cup on the coffee table beside her armchair. Then she opens the photo album. I can see snapshots of my tenth birthday celebration at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. There was one of Ma and me on the Ferris wheel, clicked by Pa. Later, when we all looked at this photograph, he exclaimed, fondly, “My two little women in my life.”
“Ma, I can’t believe how you were yelling throughout that ride,” I chuckle.
In that photo, I am wearing a pink dress, with my then-long black hair pulled into two braids, and braces on my teeth.
“Such an adorable girl,” Ma runs her fingers over that photograph, her eyes wistful.
My chest feels tight.
“That adorable girl is next to you, Ma. She is now a single, working, twenty-five-year-old woman with a bob cut and no braces,” I whisper.
Ma’s eyes remain fixed on that photo, as if she had been transported back in time and frozen there. That time when Pa was still alive, and she was still the ambitious corporate woman with a sharp memory.
The sun dips, and the sky turns a shade of bruised purple. I place my hand on Ma’s shoulder.
She looks up.
“Nice of you to visit and make tea.”
“My pleasure,” I choke back a sob.
Later, as I walk back to my apartment two blocks away, Ma’s house becomes just a dot.
“That adorable girl will keep visiting, Ma,” I holler.

Swetha is an MFA Graduate from the University of San Francisco. The author of a memoir, A Turbulent Mind, and three chapbooks. Her words appear in Had, Bending Genres, Ghost Parachute, Gone Lawn, Cream City Review, and others. A member of the Writers Grotto, her stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fiction.

Tina Barry

How We Keep Them

Each dot of the sky gathered another: periwinkle, ultramarine and sapphire,
topaz, cerulean, until the sea fluffed its curls, the sky bumped a bright bonnet.
Everything blue-hued but us: ebullient, berry-dotted pancakes sloppy with syrup.

Mother’s dress in the back of her closet, lingering in a plastic wardrobe bag.
A silk cocktail frock, silver-green molded to make breathing a chore. Fifty years
and the armpits reek of her: whisky sours, husky-voice, hose-spray of Norelle.

During a reading of a poet’s tortured relationship with his father, a woman
is distracted by an insistent buzz emanating from her bag. On the screen
of her throbbing phone: a photo of her ex. His one talent: ruining her pleasure.

Its frame heavy, gaudy gold. Someone had loved the painting, despite its thick oils,
muddy background. The work of an amateur. Flowers – a gathering of suns corralled
in a coarse country vase. Brilliant, even with the lights out.

No one dangles life’s mementos from their wrists anymore: tiny oval frames open
to photos of the grands: teeth missing, sloppy pigtails; gold tennis rackets, skate keys.
Memories ink skin now. Jingling diaries have lost their charm.

Tina Barry is the author of I Tell Henrietta (Aim Higher, Inc., 2024) with art by Kristin Flynn, Beautiful Raft and Mall Flower (Big Table Publishing). Her writing can be found in SoFloPoJo, Flash-Frontier, Nixes Mate, ONE ART: a journal of poetry, Rattle, Verse Daily, The Best Small Fictions 2020 and 2016, and elsewhere. Tina has five Pushcart Prize nominations and several Best of the Net and Best Microfiction nods. She teaches at The Poetry Barn and Writers.com.

Myna Chang

Jimmy. Fucking. Bang.

It’s a Friday in July when he rolls into town, 40 years gone and now here he is, sex-on-wheels Jimmy Bang, windows down, cruising slow, like we’re all still fresh and hot and ready for it.
We rekindle at the old party lot, abandoned Texaco rising from memory, blocking out the LED glare of the new plastic food joint and the teenagers with their weird fake music, their K-pop, hyper-pop, their whatever-the-fuck-pop, mosquito notes pinging unclaimed as they gape at moms and math teachers and uncle Johns turned seventeen again, and yeah, what’re you looking at? we’re cassette tapes on rewind, we’re letter jackets, mirror shades, we’re Candie’s heels strutting sunburned and hungry into the crushed-glass night.
We send the kids home, yeah, amateur hour’s over, and our throaty rumble takes back the blacktop, bad-boy bands shifting into overdrive, AC/DC into ZZ Top into Loverboy, and here’s Jimmy Crash Bang handing out cold brews, just as tang as we remember, old-style cans we haven’t seen since high school, yeah, he’s got the good stuff, he’s Gimme Jimmy Bang, he’s cool-kissed sun-kissed, he’s didn’t-we-all-kiss, and now that we’re all together again we’re streetlights shooting sparks and taking names, we’re Coppertone slick, engines racing quarter-mile strip, we’re slim-hipped skinny-dipped and cherry-gloss-lipped, wanting-it-all again, and we all shiver for Jimmy’s fuck-me purr, wanna go again?
And we do, we do wanna go again, we’re one more time and don’t stop now, we’re how did we ever forget this? riding high all the way to dawn, finally spent as sunlight breaks the spell, pours the years back into us, we’re hangovers and too old for this shit, we’re bleary eyes and coffee shakes, and then the news hits town—an online knell, our Jimmy passed from this world just last night, far away strangers pining gone too soon and in a better place, but they don’t get it, don’t understand our streetlight magic, he was Jimmy Fucking Bang and he wouldn’t leave us behind, not without another drag down Main, air guitar strung low, ours first, ours last, bringing us one more fling, hanging tight with the gang.
We gather at twilight, bloodshot, soft worn, we’re four-doors-beige, eyes to the streetlights, brightest bulb in the string sparking even brighter now, waiting there for us, didn’t we say we’d always stick together? and we’re straight from the heart when we pour one out for him, old-style cans all around, nothing less for Jimmy Bang, nothing less for us, but we were cool, weren’t we? whispering goodbye for now, ceding our blacktop to this new batch of kids, laughing ’cause they can’t even drive a stick.

Myna Chang is the author of The Potential of Radio and Rain (CutBank Books). Her writing has been selected for Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and WW Norton’s Flash Fiction America. She hosts Electric Sheep SF and publishes MicroVerse Recommended Reading. Find her at MynaChang.com or on Bluesky at @MynaChang.

Mea Cohen

Summer on the Inside

There is a stretch of August sun behind my sternum. It burns soft and constant. My ribs are slats of a porch swing, creaking gently as I breathe, and somewhere behind them, cicadas buzz, relentless, electric. My spine is a line of un-mowed, bleached grass, bending but rooted, catching wind. Salt lives in the corners of my eyes and sweat beads along the collar of my memory.

Inside my chest, somewhere between the ventricles, there's a diving board. I can feel the splash echo down my limbs, the shock of chlorinated joy in every joint. My lungs swell with the weight of sunburned laughter, the ache of too much light. I have freckles beneath my skin like constellations I can’t see, can only feel.

There is a sticky sweetness in my veins. Not blood. Juice, maybe, or the melt of a popsicle running down a forearm. I keep fireflies in the soft tissue behind my eyes. They flicker when I close them.

Even in cold rooms, even under fluorescent hum, there is a pulse in me that smells of sunscreen and crushed mint. Summer isn’t outside anymore. It lives in my muscle, my marrow.

I’ve got summer on the inside. It’s not a season now. It’s a system.

Born and raised in Palisades, NY, Mea Cohen is a writer now based in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Her work has appeared in West Trade Review, OKAY Donkey, Big Whoopie Deal, Barely South Review, and more. In 2024, she was nominated for best micro-fiction. She earned her MFA in creative writing and literature from Stony Brook University, where she was a Contributing Editor for The Southampton Review. She is the Founder and Editor in Chief for The Palisades Review.

Karina Dove Escobar

At The Bar of Unusual Poisons

At the Bar of Unusual Poisons, Mary sat down for a drink.

The barkeep was caught in a vigorous tango with a cocktail shaker, his hands grasping it over his shoulder like a wild untameable thing, the sound of the ice cubes against metal clamorous and rhythmic. He stood before a display of crystal decanters stopped with crystal stoppers. Each container was filled with vivid, effervescent liquid. Some appeared to be bubbling and frothing within so violently that they were pushing their stoppers up, then down, creating a gentle clinking sound in the background. Other canisters stood stoic. Though their gelatinous and syrupy interiors weren’t as mesmerizing to look at, Mary was sure they held their own when dripped down a gullet.

“What’s your drug of choice?” The barkeep asked her.

“Daydreams,” she said wistfully.

“Ah! A sweet tooth!” He said, bobbing his head like the stoppers behind him. He was quite the knowledgeable mixologist. He reached for a diamond-shaped canister, its many faces gleamed so that she could hardly see the color behind the glare. As he decanted the vague liquid into her glass a thin fog rose up in a cloud over the rim, then dissipated. Before handing her the glass, he added a sprig of freshly harvested Hope.

“From the garden,” he said. The sprig had the tiniest little buds along its stem.

She accepted the glass, surprised at how warm it felt despite containing icecubes.

And minutes later, she was watching him make other customers their drinks, her eyes glazed over.

Outwardly, she was staring at the barkeep, but in her mind’s eye, she was in that black tux with that black bowtie at her throat, with her head full of recipes and know-how. It was she who was shaking those icecubes into submission.

How good she would be, doling out reveries! Given the chance, she could see herself juggling the goblets, catching one on the back of her neck. She’d pair unique flavors all while impressing people with her banter and wit. Maybe she’d even soften some hearts, wipe some tears. Hell, she could even save someone’s life!

Who knows how long Mary sat there, all rosy-cheeked and rosy-eyed. Eventually, her bladder was what stirred her. She turned on her barstool, scanning the walls for a restroom. But, her eyes alighted upon a person, instead. Her therapist. There she was, only a couple yards away, sitting alone at a little roundtable. She was dressed in that chunky sweater that exuded comfort, confidentiality,… and accountability. It was then that Mary saw that her therapist was looking right back at her.

Watching the exchange, and it being a small town and all, the very experienced barkeep whisked their way, practically slinging a shot glass toward each woman.

“On the house!” He cried.

The shotglass was full of an inky telltale sludge. Shame.

Her therapist’s eyes widened professionally at her. They silently said, You don’t have to drink it. It’s alright. I’m here, too.

But, Mary was too quick. She picked it up and swallowed it greedily. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand when she was done, leaving a viscous tar-smear across the thin ridges of her metatarsals. She could feel the goo sliding down into her gut. It slicked the roof of her mouth. It was already coating the insides of her intestines, it seemed. All she could feel was self-loathing. She savored the feeling, feeling it was a deserved one. Here she was, wasting precious time. Just as she’d been encouraged and warned not to. This was a textbook example of maladaptive daydreaming. This was everything she shouldn’t be doing.

Now, Mary couldn’t meet her therapist’s eyes. Doing so would break the spell. Staring at the floorboards, she hobbled to the bathroom, her cheeks flushing in sync with the toilets.

I wonder what her poison of preference is, Mary thought queasily. Patience to the point of inertia? Compassion to the point of self-sacrifice? It was with these thoughts that Mary glanced over her shoulder, back toward her therapist. Mary spied an empty glass not far from her therapist’s hand. In it, she recognized a sprig of Hope. Above it, there was the full moon of her therapist’s face. Her therapist was still looking at her. Dreamily.

Karina Dove Escobar is a queer offshoot of the Colombian and Lithuanian diasporas. She's a lil explorative rhizome determined to find her own, unique way. Read her other words in Necessary Fiction, The Interpreter’s House, Hunger Mountain Review, NUNUM's 2025 Opolis Anthology, and more.

Gary Fincke

Pricks

“Shut that thing up,” the kid says. He holds his phone at arm’s length like a prick who’s taking a picture of himself and then slaps it back against his ear.

The loud baby and I are way across the room. The loud baby is laughing. I wait for him to finish his call, then I go Thelma and Louise on him. I owe somebody’s swear jar a fistful of quarters. An older guy I’ve seen around never takes his eyes off the bass fishing on the tv. I want to put the kid’s face through the window. A couple of salesmen make a point of coming over, the guy from Parts flirts with Lyssa. I’m a regular; the prick kid, I’d bet, is just passing through.

He flips his phone shut and walks to the Michelin display like he has a friend meeting him there to inspect tread patterns, but all he does is inhale that rubber smell from new tires until Roy, the service manager, says, “Ellen, you’re ready to roll.” Roy has another invoice beside mine, but he makes silly faces at the loud baby, and I’m paid and carrying her out the door, tires aligned and brakes adjusted, before Roy says, “Bobby Crowe?” as if the room is packed with strangers.

When I tell my husband Edwin the story, he puts his finger to his lips. “The baby will be saying “goddamn” and “go to hell” before she learns to walk.” He doesn’t repeat “prick” and “asshole,” not even in a whisper.

Maybe he should whisper about today’s newspaper, the front page filled with our town’s terrible story, including sidebars about Clay Erhard, our local killer and his victim. How the reporter emphasizes that Erhard isn’t some outsider, as if that means he’s not a monster. Right next to that is Erhard in a tuxedo. Like he got to pick which picture they print. Like the police let him search the house until he found it. His bald head and glasses, all dressed up to conduct the grade school band like he’s Leonard Bernstein instead of an ugly prick who’s taught music at the elementary school for thirty years. At least I won’t see that face when Lyssa is squeaking and honking on something or other in six or seven years.

The newspaper says that Erhard had walked down the aisle, and the minister had shouted “No!” just as Erhard leveled his gun, fired, and shouted, “Now, we’re done.” As if what happened later made any kind of difference, it says that two congregation members grabbed and held that ugly prick after the shooting.

In a sidebar, the newspaper goes on about Clay Erhard’s career at the elementary school before it says that Denise Erhard taught music at the elementary school in the next-door district for nearly thirty years herself. That she was the church organist and the choir director, which means Erhard walked past every last one of those churchgoers with that gun before he fired.

The newspaper doesn’t mention that Denise was in my book club and that we were friends. When I get to the part about how Erhard will be given a psychological evaluation, I stop. “Some lawyer will say he’s crazy,” I tell Edwin.

“He was at the time,” Edwin says, as if he’s ok with the ugly prick dancing around murder.

“He doesn’t sound crazy,” I say. “It says here he called Denise a filthy bitch.”

“They shouldn’t have put that in the paper. They should just say he shouted obscenities.”

“You sound like you’re auditioning for the book burners on the school board,” I say. “I bet he said worse.”

Edwin loops his tie into a perfect knot to remind me he has to go to work and doesn’t have time to argue. He plants a peck on my forehead and sighs. “Nobody ever mentions that if enough have guns, some will use them on others.”

“On wives, you mean?” I say.

“Husbands, too,” he says, “and children” as if he wants me to hate him.

Then he’s out the door before I can tell him that I’d bet Clay Erhard thought he’d fixed everything after he fired his gun. Like some kind of stupid kid, he believed he could close the past without closing the future. That’s what he meant to say, at least, though his words printed by the paper were “I had to end it, that’s all.”

All these selfish pricks. Thinking like impatient gods.

Gary Fincke's latest flash collection is The History of the Baker's Dozen (Pelekinesis 2024). He is co-editor of the annual anthology Best Microfiction.

Marie Gethins

When two orbiting bodies become tidally locked and have no momentum exchange with the outside universe, they may spin together forever.

He ordered fries. Just fries. No ketchup or ranch. Fries. Double order.

I underlined double on my pad for the cook, then suggested the fella get a salad alongside. Kinda like how I might negotiate with my kids. He said, ‘You’re not my mother or my wife.’

No wedding band on that finger—no surprise.

Forty-five, maybe fifty, and eating like some pimply teen. Snakeskin boots and a rabbit fur jacket. Gold pinkie ring with a square-cut diamond. Black plaid shirt tucked into jeans with a turquoise and silver belt-buckle the size of my hand.

‘Anything to drink?’

‘Tap water, a pitcher full.’

‘Lemon? Ice?’

He side-eyed me. Even my ex got better manners.

I brought his order, lit his candle with my red BIC and he said, ‘What time does your shift end, Hon?’ Doing my best Dolly Parton, I sang the first verse of 9 to 5, even though it was already eight. Wouldn’t you know, some smartass put it on the jukebox? Those opening piano chords thumped off café walls. Sent him skedaddling right along that booth bench. He stretched to his six-foot plus, heels tapping tiles, swung me round like we were at the county fair.

Chassay. Dosido. Pousette. He smiled—teeth as white as sea salt. I giggled like I was sixteen.

Someone shouted there’s been a crash in the parking lot; two semis had plowed right smack into each other. The trucker boys popped out of their cabs, fists a-flying. ‘FIGHT!’ The whole place raced past us to the front winders, crowding in to watch the show.

Me and Mr. Boots? We chewed up that extra floor space: twirling, twirling, twirling, twirling, twirling, twirling, twirling, twirling, twirling, twirling, twirling, twirling, twirling, twirling.

Marie Gethins lives in Cork, Ireland. Her work has been selected for BIFFY50, Best Microfictions, and Best Small Fictions. She is the flash fiction editor for Banshee, and a co-editor of Splonk.

Sammy Greenspan

The Baby Was Not Theirs

People brought casseroles. Why? Because there was a dead baby. The baby was not theirs. Its birth and demise were distant. Yet for those who crammed into the kitchen drinking tea, on the couch drinking coffee, dropping cake crumbs on the carpet, this death was an imminent, unbearable weight.

What was one to do with so many flowers? Flowers sat on the windowsill, spilled onto the counter already encumbered with fresh casseroles, rewarmed casseroles, crusted casserole dishes needing washed. Excess flowers migrated to the curb out front, where passersby guiltily scooped up a bouquet, a potted orchid. If one could have left casseroles this way they too would have migrated curbside, but dishes must be cleaned and returned. So the casseroles sat on the table for visitors to pick at till the remnants could be discarded, the dishes washed and returned.

On the second day, one person went back to work. Two people stayed home, the small one out of school for the summer, the elder one retired, happy to feel needed by the small one; not so happy to be left to fend for the visitors. After a brief flush of interest in the cakes, the small one found the proliferation of flowers and food disturbing. The food smelled bad, thick with sauces; the flowers were cloying. They made the child sneeze. So the child sat in the yard on the swing. The grandparent was too busy with visitors to take the child to the park, read a book or even push the swing.

The grandparent was drained from so much sympathy and wished only to lock the door and clean out the mess of food and flowers. One needed to move on. All this weeping and hand-wringing was unseemly. But one could not appear ungrateful. One must welcome the stranger, all these people who felt some kinship with the youngers. How could one small family know so many people with so much overflowing pity?

On the third day, there were still a few stragglers. At least they brought no more flowers. Angry from boredom, the little one sat on the swing clutching a small photo the grandparent had produced from a drawer, of the baby they all came to mourn. The little one had never met the baby and did not know what mourn meant. Did it mean eat all day among too many people? The baby in the picture lay on its belly, little chin braced in both palms. It looked like an old person, with its wrinkly forehead. It was wearing a striped blue cap and it stared directly into the child’s face, revealing nothing.

Finally the grandparent called the small one inside. The air smelled funny, but the rug had been vacuumed and the flowers were gone. A silence of no people hung over the rooms. The grandparent made a peanut butter sandwich, cut it in half, and the two sat together on the front stoop, eating their halves, not talking about the baby.

Sammy Greenspan’s writing appears in chapbooks, anthologies, and journals, most recently Westchester Review and Nimrod, and forthcoming in Map Literary. She’s worked as a waitress, studio assistant, pediatrician, and homeschool wrangler. Sammy shepherds Alewife Writers, and runs the indie literary small press, Kattywompus Press, in Melrose MA, where she is editing a new poetry anthology, The Going-Away Country. www.kattywompuspress.com

Phebe Jewell

Breadcrumbs

Her first thought is of the birds. Who will feed them?
  She sits up in bed, stares at the dead hands, frozen claws attached to her wrists. She tries to wiggle her fingers, but they stay flat beside her. What use is she now if her hands hold nothing?
     Even in this new country she’s the one who picks up after her grandchildren and her busy son with his bossy wife. She chops vegetables, folds clothes. No one asks her opinion, only that she sweep the front porch every day. Too old to learn the new language, she studies the sky and the wind. Early each morning, while everyone sleeps, she escapes to the park, calls to the birds as she scatters breadcrumbs.
  Once her family realizes she’s not going to get better the squawking will begin. But she did not fly thousands of miles across oceans and continents to sit in a corner, listening to them argue about who will feed her.
  The birds need to know. She slips outside in her nightgown, walks barefoot to the park. She meets their glassy-eyed stare with a shake of her head. As birds gather, she murmurs. Fly away, find food somewhere else.
  She speaks louder, flapping her arms, but they crowd around even more, waiting for breadcrumbs to fall from her hands. Arms high, she flaps harder. The birds rise, wings forming a circle around her, and she is lifted above the park. Soaring over the neighborhood, the flock banks into an updraft, heading east toward the lake.

Phebe Jewell's flash appears in numerous journals, most recently Gooseberry Pie, JMWW Lit, Ghost Parachute, and Does It Have Pockets?. A teacher at Seattle Central College, she also volunteers with the Freedom Education Project Puget Sound, a nonprofit providing college courses for incarcerated women, trans-identified, and gender non-conforming people in Washington State. Read her at https://phebejewellwrites.com.

Lucinda Kempe

"Lucinda Kempe" illustration by Eleni Gavrielatos

The Last Time I Saw Elvis

The last time I saw Elvis he was nude and playing in Tara’s mother’s pool. He kept coming out and jackhammering back into the water. He was singing Blue Swede Shoes, and a pair had been parked near Tara’s mother, who lay in a recliner sipping something yellow and green in a slim glass with a tiny rainbow-colored umbrella. Every time Elvis emerged from the water like a sea god she shouted, “You’re the King, baby!”
  He'd bow then return to the diving board and cannonball back into the water spraying Tara’s mother with surf whereon she’d laugh and laugh and shout.
  I began tabulating how many times Elvis dived and Tara’s mother shouted. The more she shouted the bigger Elvis’s swagger. Looked like he was at a weird beauty pageant for nudists. They were like an engine revving or guests at Vegas hotel who’d won a lot of money. It was a circus with just two clowns and me. I’d never seen so much drama outside of my house.
  Funny thing is they didn’t notice me. Or maybe they did. Melodramatic types like my mother and grandmother loved an audience for their shrieking sessions. The audience being me. This was something I wasn’t familiar with, something sweet. As if Elvis and Tara’s mother were kids having a blast misbehaving. It was obvious they loved each other whereas at my house love translated into hurt. It was fun until Tara’s poodle got out and starting chasing Elvis around the pool. Elvis hightailed it to edge of the diving board. The poodle stood at the opposite end of the board barking. Elvis edged out ever further and began crying, “I hate dogs. Make it go away.”
  Tara’s mother grabbled the dog by the collar and brought it inside.
  So, there was just me and a nude Elvis in the suddenly less hectic yard. I thought about asking him what he thought about all the hoopla with his family fighting over his estate and loosing Priscilla and their grandson’s suicide. I also thought to tell him about my father’s killing himself, but I stopped myself when he started to sing.
  Instead of his usual swoony voice he began singing in a soprano. Then a radio joined in the background. Tara’s mother reappeared in a kimono, and she had another bigger umbrella. She second lined as Elvis sang, and I found myself singing in Elvis’s voice and I felt like his daughter and Tara’s mother was my mother and this was better than Ed Sullivan and so much better than being at home.
  When the song ended, I was alone, alone except for Tara’s big black poodle Elvis standing before me wearing a goofy expression. I think he enjoyed my tale, and I felt better having released all that sadness. I could never have told Tara. She was oblivious like her mother, which is why I liked them.
  I preferred dogs to people any day.

Lucinda Kempe’s work is forthcoming in Salvage (China Miéville editor), the Summerset Review, SoFloPoJo, Unbroken Journal, Bull, Does It Have Pockets, Gooseberry Pie, New Flash Fiction Review, and Centaur, among places. An excerpt of her memoir was short listed for the Fish Memoir Prize in April 2021. She lives on Long Island where she exorcises with words. You can find her here: https://lucindakempe.substack.com

Eleni Gavrielatos is an illustrator, potter, and cum laude graduate of Alfred University, School of Art & Design. Her work has been exhibited at the Art Students League, the Long Island Museum, and the Mill Pond House and has been published online at Jellyfish Review and forthcoming at Centaur. Her portfolio website is elenigavrielatos.com.

Scott E. Russell

Everpressing

            Let me tell you this, known to all and always. Every morning the rains come. The sun shines brightsky hot for the afternoon, sets off the dry thunderstorms that roll through around dinnertime, once said.
            By dusk, and then some time later, more moon than sun, the heat of the day catches up with the skin of the water—the pools and puddles lucky enough to have trickled into buildingshade, avoiding the evapoburns seeding the clouds—and the nightfog rolls in from every direction.
            Every night, every morning, every afternoon.
            I say every, but there’s little regularity to be found here. Random is the pattern. Prediction is for faith-healers and timecasters, and a weatherperson, once said, can do not much more than speak the obvious as it is happening.
            I say every, because it helps to think this way. I can’t abide the dark any less than the light any more than anyone else, and we all find our idle mythos in the hours between. Mind, my mind my eyeseer, it’s fixed on weather. I find it soothes, quiets. Meditative, once said. This is it right here, now this, I hold it in my hand, I feel it against my neck, everpressing.
            Heat pain, rain flood, sky blind, sweat drown.
            Sun fire and moon death.
            Shh, shh, hear that? It speaks and I listen. We move, now, with the treeshade dividing the sun. From here, this as perch as post, as meaning as fulfillment, I watch the lines around that the others trace. Out too long lacking their own treeshade and they start to wilt, you’ll see. Lucky you so far to not know sundrift in your somate or memory. It’s the first stage, step one, I’ll show you how, but not just yet. You have to dance before you can walk.
            Like me, see my feet dance. Quick step, easy burn, low energy.
            We choose very little, so must stand on groundfire. You will adjust, but the burn comes on fast. Scream if you can spare the throatsweat, if it helps in the immediate, but that only makes stasis reach longer. Screaming is not for me. It is forbidden in my mythos, but to each their own, once said. I used to, but as now I live with a forever bodyscream of the heatpain, there is no need to lay that burden on the others here. Ears, we say, well I say, are for sweating, not for obliging your gripes of the obvious.
            Why sweating? I am, you will see, part fox, the oversized ears of the desert, the pfennig fox, I think. Not as you see me now, here in the brightsky, but it is a—this is the prediction, my prediction. Adaptation, evolution, niche living, once said once said. We all are foxes, will be. My mythos holds this as true for me, and true held for and by the others here, too. It is good that there is a commons, something shared, not an every, but a little piece. Like a sign signal, a sigil, a shakehand secret. Some thing to nod at, our way to dance together.
            You aren’t a fox, too, are you? No, then? Oh oh okay, I see in you a myce.
            You are new, you didn’t know. Pfennigs and myce—look, it’s more symbolic than a real and natural and fated need to pounce on and devour you whole for the water content more than any hunger. I am not that much returned. Looking around, I don’t see others there. Not yet, but also, not every.
            Be wary, little myce, and best you run off now. Find kin and ken your own dance. Give mine back to me, it looks sillywrong on your feet. This treeshade is foreshortening anyway. No room at the inn, once said.
            Come around, though, after the next nightfog. I hope I won’t be thirsty then, either, but time will tell, once said. I have more to say of the weather and the dance, of water and fire. Retelling is in my mythos, unlike screaming.

Scott E. Russell is 42 years old and lives in New Haven, Connecticut. They are new but passionate about creative writing, having discovered that all their unrealized software/art project ideas could be fed into a writer’s world-building hopper. Scott has published in Blood Tree Literature, Pile Press, Sunday Mornings at the River, Querencia Press, and the tiny journal, with additional writing available on scotterussell.com.

Beth Sherman

My Mother is the Everglades

where it’s always tropical and gators crawl out of the swamp unexpectedly and off-road buggies drive too fast, kicking up wet clumps of mud. She’s got tupelos, mangroves, bald cypress, sweet bay willows. But she mourns the trees she’ll never see – prickly California cacti flowering in the dark.
  When she’s feeling ornery, she switches the safely marked trail signs so the tourists get lost and stumble into a panther den. Dismantles tents. Overturns picnic tables. Unleashes her army of snakes that writhe like they think they have somewhere to go.
  She tries to protect white tail deer in the fall, turkeys in the spring, feral hogs all year round. A futile task. Hunters are everywhere.
  When I visit her, I go by kayak, paddling by pickerelweed, their spear-shaped leaves shielding frogs and finches from predators. She won’t birdwatch. They alight on her branches and it doesn’t matter what species they are or whether she’s encountered them before. They can fly. She can’t. That’s all she needs to know.
  In drought season, she prays for rain, for the memory of water’s cool wet breath. The scent of rotting foliage. When a foolish Boy Scout leaves an ember burning, she blows on it, hoping the sparks will die down.
  Her motto: Leave No Trace.
  Deep in her swamp, a ghost orchid grows. Leafless, creamy white, delicate petals splayed. Tangled roots clinging to a tree. She prizes its endangered bloom, hides the flower from poachers the way she hides herself from me.

Beth Sherman has had more than 150 stories published in literary journals, including Flash Frog, Fictive Dream, Bending Genres, and Smokelong Quarterly. Her work is featured in Best Microfiction 2024 and the upcoming Best Small Fictions 2025. She’s also a multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee. She can be reached on social media @bsherm36.

Alison Wassell

Shopping With Mother

My five-years-dead mother sits on my shoulder in the supermarket.

“Those ‘ripen at home’ bananas almost never turn yellow, you know,” she whispers, in the fruit and veg aisle.

“Reach right to the back. That’s where the fresher stuff is,” she advises, as I examine almost out of date yoghurts and tubs of coleslaw.

A moment on the lips…” she cautions, when I’m momentarily tempted by the BOGOF chocolate eclairs.

Mostly, it feels good to have her ghost around, reminding me to always check inside the egg carton for cracked shells before I buy, warning me not to be fooled by low fat foods that are full of sugar, or that the additives in those Haribo will have the kids high as kites before lunch.

Sometimes, though, she oversteps the mark.

“Really?” she says, as I pick up a jumbo jar of pickled gherkins. I stay silent, but she refuses to let it rest.

“The only time I ever remember you wanting gherkins was when…”

I try to distract her by diverting to the clothing section, let her raise her invisible eyebrows at the latest fashions, the skirts she says look more like belts, the low-cut tops that leave nothing to the imagination.

“Beige makes you look washed out, Dear. Go for something a bit brighter,” she says to an unsuspecting customer, forgetting for a moment that no-one but me can hear her.

“Mutton dressed as lamb,” she tells another. Any other time, we’d both start to giggle and I’d have to pretend to look at something funny on my phone. But it doesn’t feel like a day for laughter.

When I swerve our usual shortcut through the baby products aisle, she knows for certain.

“For God’s sake, Girl. At your age? Should have been more careful, if you can’t afford another.” When the tears start, she softens.

“No use crying now over spilt milk. You’ll cope, the way you always do.” I don’t point out that the other times I always had her to help, but she’s an old hand at reading my mind.

“I’ve still got your back,” she assures me.

In the meat aisle a crowd has gathered around a teenager slapping yellow stickers on not-long-for-this-world pork chops, chicken breasts and the cheaper cuts of meat. My mother was never one to walk away from a bargain.

“Take a look. You never know what you might find,” she says. I get my toes trampled on by seasoned sticker hunters and by the time I get to the front all that’s left is a bit of brisket.

“An afternoon in the slow cooker will have that melt-in-your-mouth tender.” I can almost taste it, the way she would have served it, with her not-from-a-packet Yorkshire puddings and the roast potatoes she always got crispy on the outside, fluffy on the inside in a way I’ve never quite mastered.

I’m about to drop it into my trolley when I notice a woman in a cashmere cardigan tossing full-price rib-eye steaks into her basket without a second thought as though they’re budget range sausages.

Maybe it’s the judgemental way she looks me up and down when she realises I’m watching her. Maybe it’s my hormones. Or maybe it’s because I’ve had my fill of millionaire politicians claiming I could feed my family for 30p a day if only I learned to cook. I find myself wondering why, for once, I can’t have what she has.

I wait until the aisle is empty, then carefully peel the yellow sticker off the bargain brisket, shielding it with my body, making sure no security cameras can catch me. I’m about to stick it on something better, something I deserve, something I tell myself my mother would want me to have, when I hear that voice again.

“Shame on you, Girl. That’s not the way you were raised.”

Alison Wassell is a writer of short and very short fiction from Merseyside UK. Her words have been published by Fictive Dream, Does It Have Pockets, Trash Cat Lit, The Phare, Frazzled Lit, Bath Flash Fiction, FlashFlood Journal, The Disappointed Housewife, and elsewhere.

Alice Wilson

What Happened in The Blue Swamp

I’d never been to the blue swamp before. You had to be a big age to go there and I wasn’t sure at what age I’d get big but I sure as heck knew that eight wasn’t so big because I still had velcro on my shoes.

Ma was at her scrubbing, pregnant again despite the heat, and we ran and scrabbled like rats through the hay bales piled high in the barns, looking for bird eggs. There must have still been six or so of us at that time.

It wasn’t long before I went to the blue swamp for the first time with Pa that Matthew fell right off the top of the tallest hay bale onto the hood of the broken down tractor. His head was all turned around and his legs didn’t look right, but that barn owl egg was still in his hand, just perfect.

Ma took a turn after that. Pa said the grief got in her waters and turned her sour like the rain butt at the end of the pig stys that gets a green skin in June.

If I’d have knowed I was going to the blue swamp I would have packed my cloth doll Mary-Ellen and a grit biscuit maybe but Pa didn’t fix to tell me nothing.

There is another version of this story where Matthew never fell off the hay bales in the barn and Ma’s waters didn’t turn sour with grief and I never woulda had to go to the blue swamp with Pa before my big age. Maybe in that version the barn owl egg would have broke instead of Matthew.

When I think back now to that first time in the blue, I wonder how I didn’t mess myself what with all the wild magic roaming around there, skittering through the reeds and making the frogs go strange.

But I was too busy hollerin into the swamp holes like Pa showed me and haulin on the bait line to see if we couldn’t catch a Will o the Wisp. Pa said human hollerin scared them outta their swamp holes like smoke in the rabbits dens on the hill beyond the cow fields and that always seemed to work.

And then Pa was so happy he said we coulda had buns for tea if there were any buns to be had because now Ma’s waters would go clear again and she might leave off the scrubbing long enough to treat her old man to a smile.

It coulda been that I caught the wrong sorta Wisp but when I asked Pa he said no honey we couldn’t have known there’s nothing we couldda done and then went back to smokin his pipe and staring. I asked for a spoon of jam and he almost said go ask your Ma before he remembered.

Alice Wilson is an academic and writer based in the North of England. Her fiction has been published in The Apple Valley Review, Yale University Press, The Sunlight Press. and others, and was selected to feature in Sonder Press Best Small Fictions 2022.