FLASH #40-FEB '26

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Flash Issue #40 Feb 2026

featuring
Swetha Amit, Yaba A. Armah, Mikki Aronoff, Hugh Behm-Steinberg, Marie Capasso, Abigail Holman, Koss, Melissa Llanes Brownlee, Jayne Martin, Colleen Kearney Rich, Emily Rinkema, mike sluchinski, James Keith Smith, Chelsea Stickle, Jennifer Thomas, Tina S. Zhu

Friday, February 20th at 7 PM Eastern
SoFloPoJo Issue 40 FLASH Launch Reading
featuring authors from our February 2026 Issue
Please Register in Advance to receive the link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/SQpkGHs9Q7eNYBjnkdrIUQ

Swetha Amit

The Rose Bush
The scent of the red rose petals lingered on my hands as I plucked one from the bush near the front yard. A gust of wind blew, nearly knocking off the "For Sale" sign. The house was completely emptied. Furniture had been sold. Her books, toys, and clothes were donated to the shelter. Only this rose bush remained. Even the red petals would wither by next month with the arrival of fall in Palo Alto.
Maya was always drawn to the roses, just like the bees that rested on them. I would have stayed if only things hadn't turned out the way they did. I wonder what drew people to roses despite the risk of getting pricked by thorns. They serve many occasions—Valentine's Day, weddings, anniversaries, and even funerals. I wonder if they were aware of the different moods they evoked. Probably that's why they appeared in various shades—red, yellow, pink, and white. Yet, it was the red ones that always attracted people.
I heard the broker come in with some prospective buyers. He introduced them—a couple in their forties. They smiled politely before the broker led them inside. I wondered if they had kids. Losing one was hard. My mind drifted back to that day six months ago, when police officers knocked on the door. Their faces displayed a kaleidoscope of pity and seriousness. Silence filled the house with the irreparable loss when twelve-year-old Maya, on her bike, was hit by a speeding car. I clutched the rose stem tightly. The prick of the thorns was nothing compared to the pain embedded in my veins.
"Lovely bush," the woman's voice interrupted me. "We might prune it, though. Our nine-year-old is allergic to roses."
I wondered if she had a girl or a boy. I didn't ask. She didn't tell. It looked like the house had found its new owners when the broker said he'd set up a meeting with the couple the following week. I nodded and watched them leave. The woman's words about pruning the rose bush echoed in my mind. I continued clutching the stem, feeling intoxicated by the scent of the petals, which carried memories of Maya’s laughter and vibrancy. Living here would be torture, especially after her death and the separation from my husband. I was preparing myself to grow old alone in an apartment in Santa Cruz. Perhaps I would derive comfort listening to the roar of the waves and the shrill cry of the seagulls. Perhaps I'll have orchids in my apartment instead. Perhaps someday I'll drive through this Palo Alto midtown neighborhood as a visitor. Perhaps without the rosebush, new paint, and furniture, I would have found the strength to see this house in a new light. Perhaps I could even be thankful I had it all once. I began to feel a slight pain. I glanced at my hand where a petal rested, smeared with blood oozing from my fingers. The smell of the rose grew pungent.

Swetha Amit 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, Best Small Fiction, and Best Microfiction..

Yaba A. Armah

Sh*thole
  It slithers into my bedroom slowly, but without hesitancy: the putrid whisper of something dead, something salty, something flushed from the sea. Safflo Momoni. I hear the static hush of frying palm oil, and imagine my mother standing over the flame, grinding the cured fish into the crackling oil. It reminds me of Paris, spreading pungent french cheese over freshly baked baguette; it tasted delicious; it smelled like shit. Very expensive shit.
            A fly buzzes in, drunk on the aroma. I get up to close my bedroom door. Once the flies get into the kitchen they like to explore. Behind me, I can feel the musty exhalations of a clogged shower drain, and a grimy toilet. Today, I will clean the bathroom and my life. A fine coating of black mould settles over the latter. This is the time to run.
            It is 6:30 am and outside, on our front porch, the sun is already blazing. I smell burning tyres, burning long grass, and... sweet fried dough. Last year, my grandfather returned from the States for the first time in twenty years, and each morning he woke up to this smell, he would proclaim, "The whole of Accra is smoking weed!" I miss him. I miss watching the laze of Accra seep into his bones, relaxing his rigid gate into a deep swagger. He smuggled a cutting of chocolate mint from Pennsylvania through Ghana customs for me and the illegal immigrant is thriving in a clay pot on our porch. I bend over the full emerald bush and inhale. It smells of icicles and lime. This is something I did. I grew this. Some of the black mould dissipates.
            I re-enter the house through the kitchen. A massive saucepan bubbles on an open fire. Inside, the funky Momoni, melted in red oil, has been tempered with okro, onions, crabs, pigs’ feet, snails, cow hide, smoked fish, and tomatoes. It will be sweet and salty. Spicy, and confident in its heavy-handedness. It reminds me of drip art, a tableau of bold colours splattered with careful abandon. It shouldn't work, but it does. It reminds me of my first trip home from college. After three years of pizza, and six months battling the sudden revocation of my student visa, I scooped a finger full of okro stew into my mouth, and my taste buds weeped.

Yaba A. Armah is a Ghanaian fiction writer obsessed with the Japanese art of doing one thing extremely well. She has already mastered hand-washing dishes and stacking them by shape, size, and colour. Next on her list, creating perfectly spiced, highly addictive, African fiction. She is @ghdcompany on Substack.

Mikki Aronoff

BUGGY

Itch

She’s a flit, a flirt, a savage vamp, teasing the steam of your breath as you swill her whip-zip and whine. Pin her down, she scoots. Fingertip-trace her orbit, she’ll nip skin and drink, raise a bump as big as the moon that waned that warm wet night you met.

🦟

The Devout Waiter Tries to Pry the Couple Apart but the Prurient Manager Shoos Him Away

They’re NOT praying! the server protests, staring aghast as insect instincts kick in—right there on top of Patio Table 9, male astride ravenous female, licentious, head bending to her gluttony, working his legs to carry on mounting while she chews off his face then cleans hers like a cat.

🪰

When I Tell My Sweetie I’m Buggy for Him

he gets all fly-eyed, countless compound lenses swiveling and sweeping like store-opening beacons, as if scanning for dappled grey flanks, carriage wheels. A yoke. No, not that kind, I chirr, dissolving in the sugar of him. So — you wanna get hitched? George asks, hand outstretched, beaming, the stubborn old fool.

Mikki Aronoff lives in New Mexico, where she writes tiny stories and advocates for animals. She has stories in Best Microfiction 2024/2025 and Best Small Fictions 2024/2025.
More at https://www.facebook.com/mikki.aronoff/

Hugh Behm-Steinberg

Why Occasionally It’s Hard to Just Be Friends with People Who Practice Witchcraft


            I’m having coffee with Ashley, the witch next door; like a sore tooth I can’t stop playing with, I want to ask her where witches do their shopping. Is there a witch store around here us non-witches can never know about or we’d be trapped forever once we knew what was what? I’d like to know that, even if I didn’t really want to know.
             “Spill it,” Ashley says, because of course witches are extra good at reading people – it’s part of the job description after all.
            “Where do you get your supplies?” I finally ask. “For potions or spells or, you know,” I whisper, “magic stuff.”
            “Mostly farmers’ markets or the grocery store, I guess,” Ashley replies. “Sometimes Costco when I need to buy things in bulk.”
            “Where? I’ve never seen a witch’s section at Costco, unless they keep it way in the back behind the beef jerky and canned tomatoes.”
            “Why the fascination, Sally? Are you looking to try your hand at making potions?”
            “No,” I say, though I often wondered what it might be like if I could just whip something up. I think it would be like possessing a delicious kind of secret, something you’d whisper into someone’s ear when you have a button you’d like to finally unbutton.
            Come on over, I’d tell Jacob. I made something really delicious Just. For. You.
            “The thing non-witches don’t understand is that any action can be a spell, or any item an ingredient,” Ashley says. “It’s just a matter of intention and experience.”
            She grabs a sugar packet from the container on the side of the table and stirs it into her coffee, twirling the spoon three times and muttering something that makes me nervous, the start of a conversation maybe I don’t want to hear.
            Each time she twirls the spoon around, the bracelets on her wrist clickity clack.
            “Drink this,” she says, and she slides her coffee over to me.
            “What did you just do?”
            “Sally,” Ashley says. “Do you really want to know for sure whether Jacob is cheating or not?”
            I stare at the cup. It looks absolutely like a half full cup of coffee, complete with lipstick stains on the side.
            “Take a sip and find out.”
            Ashley grins, like she already knows what I am going to do, nudging it closer, and closer, and closer, her bracelets going click and clack each time she touches the saucer. Like I’m going to grab the cup and drain it all in one gulp. Like I’m going to lick the inside of the cup, and the saucer too.
            Just before I do exactly that, Ashley says, “Now put your thumb in your mouth.”
            I feel my face flush.
            In the middle of this coffee shop I’m surrounded by people who are a lot smarter than me, who are curious to see what I will ultimately choose to do, about Jacob, this half full and way too sweet cup of coffee. Like they know. Like they’ve always known.
            I begin sucking my thumb like I’m a three-year old.
            “Now draw a circle with your thumb around the saucer.” When Ashley sees I have trouble doing that she just stares at me. Everyone stares at me. No clicks. No clacks.
            I’m staring at the coffee cup like it’s a bag of the best candy in all the world, except it belongs to somebody else, someone who might give me the whole thing if I don’t take a single piece for myself.
            But I do what Ashley tells me to do, and the coffee cup goes back to being a coffee cup, the people in the coffee shop just regular people.
            Ashley finishes the coffee. Her nails looked like they could use another coat of polish.
            “Understanding what you need, and what exactly you will choose to do about it, that’s the first lesson, Sally.” Ashley’s bracelets slide down to her wrists as she finishes her coffee. Her nails are beautiful once more.
            “The first lesson’s free,” she says, setting the empty cup in front of me.
            “How much is the second?” I ask.
            The bracelets slide up her arm as she hands me the saucer to lick clean.

Hugh Behm-Steinberg’s fiction can be found in X-Ray, The Pinch, Invisible City, Heavy Feather Review, and The Offing. His short story "Taylor Swift" won the Barthelme Prize from Gulf Coast, and his story "Goodwill" was picked as one of Wigleaf’s Top Fifty Very Short Fictions. A collection of prose poems and microfiction, Animal Children, was published by Nomadic/Black Lawrence Press. He lives in Barcelona, where he is the fiction editor of Mercurius. https://linktr.ee/hughsteinberg.

Marie Capasso

If I Could Say It

Hi there, it’s me, just letting you know that we got here okay. Lauren did great on the flight and the house we’re in is really nice, very clean.[1] We stopped at a Costco on the drive out and got two rotisserie chickens and a bag of frozen peppers and onions, and black beans, and gluten free tortillas.[2] We did Bryce Canyon today and hiked the Queen’s Garden Trail to the Navajo Loop.[3] Lauren started crying the second we got to the rim of the canyon.[4] Okay, that’s really it, I’m pretty tired, just letting you know I’m alive.[5]

_________________________________________________________
[1] The first time I took a plane by myself, I closed my eyes during takeoff and wished I had a hand to hold. This time I turned my palm up in the space between our seats without speaking and Lauren took it. I held her hand until I was sure she had fallen asleep, curled into herself.
[2] We had a small argument about how much food is enough food while standing in front of rotating chickens in St. George, Utah. I know she’s not eating enough and wish I could pick up a fork and pretend it was a train chuga-chuga-choo-chooing bites into her mouth. Wish she would chew it and enjoy the flavors on her tongue. Wish she would swallow and be satiated and whole.
[3] The trail started off going downhill, these beautiful orange rocks to my right and a canyon to my left with spindly pine trees growing up from the chasm. And when I slid, just a little, on some gravel I was immediately in a panic. It was exactly the same kind of fear as when I fell last year and was too scared to keep roller skating. Pure animal dread. I didn’t think it was real, when they say that the body remembers.
[4] About half an hour into the hike I cried, too. We reached this passage of small rolling hills, the path rising and falling in gentle waves. We rounded bends and passed through red ochre archways and walked beside pillars of stone made narrow by water over thousands of years. Which is really beautiful, but at an outcropping of rocks is this Utah juniper tree that you could tell was hundreds of years old just by looking at it: roots exposed and hearty, thick ridged bark and a trunk that was growing horizontal, practically parallel to the ground, twisted around itself in the middle and then pointed ever so slightly upward with needles that reached for the sky. I let myself stand there and cry, feeling the years it took to grow this way. Each painful knot, joyful breeze, and bug that used grooves of bark like a highway. The rain (thank god for the rain) and everything roots can pull from clay. The moment she turned away. The moment she knew she could only move forward. Ever so slightly forward against the passage of time.
[5] I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive.

Marie Capasso is a fiction writer and staff member at matchbook literary magazine. She lives, reads, and writes in The Bronx. You can find her walking great distances in lieu of the subway and will unapologetically listen to the same song on repeat. She will pet any cat she can.

Abigail Holman

The Tortoise and the Hare

            Hare bounded away, leaving Tortoise to choke on a cloud of dust as he stumbled along behind her. Almost the entire Meadow had gathered to watch the competition. From the largest elephant to the smallest gnat, all sported their Sunday best and looked on in anticipation (the Sheep donned fedoras and neon-green blazers, which can hardly be considered a Sunday best but is highly fashionable, for sheep).
            When Hare took off, the eager audience chased after her, abandoning Tortoise. Even City Mouse, plump as ever from his lavish diet, scampered behind the throng.
             “You fools!” Tortoise screamed. “Slow and steady wins the race!”
            Among those absent from the event was Lion, who had found himself caught in a hunter’s net in the forest. Mouse discovered the entrapped Lion and laughed hysterically, despite the latter’s pleas to repay his kindness towards her (the video of Lion’s whimpers soon went viral in the Meadow, prompting a rescue team to come to his aid).
            The Boy Who Cried Wolf cried “Wolf!” The Sheep, knowing he was never wrong, scanned the Grasslands in excitement. Soon, Wolf joined the congregation, wearing a fedora and a neon-green blazer. The Sheep welcomed him, and they all took off together to see if Hare could complete the race.
            But Hare had already reached the finish line, to the delight of the animal population. The Ant Colony had bet against her and had to give her their winter supply. Grasshopper, who had made a fortune playing gig after gig, graciously offered them his storehouse of food (fiddle-playing Grasshoppers are generally in high demand).
             “Congratulations,” said Fox, who was Mayor of the Meadow, and highly loved and trusted by all the animals. “You deserved that victory!”
            Everyone agreed. Tortoise had seized her land, sending Hare and her eight babies into the cold. The race was proposed – by Tortoise – to settle the conflict. Now, Hare could keep her property and feed her babies through the winter.
            Exhausted from the race, Hare collapsed in a heap, and Fox suggested that Swan carry the victor across the Pond to reclaim her home. Swan bashfully agreed, embarrassed. She hated being the center of attention, and often wished she were black like Crow so she could blend in better.
            So, the crowd escorted the worthy champion to the Bank and sent her off with cheers. Grasshopper serenaded Hare’s departure on his fiddle, much to the dismay of the bitter Ant Colony. The Boy Who Cried Wolf cried “Lion!” because Lion had finally returned to teach Mouse a lesson. Wolf and the Sheep marched off together, still sporting their matching flashy outfits. Mayor Fox returned to his post by the river, where he faithfully provided free rides to Gingerbread Men. Country Mouse, overwhelmed by the cacophony, exclaimed to City Mouse that she would much rather live in the town with him. And Tortoise, ignoring the few citizens who still cheered him on, loitered beside the path to rest.

Abigail Holman is a recent graduate from Winthrop University in South Carolina. While there, she studied Music Technology and Film Production.

Koss

Obituary – Grandma Ellen
Three jobs, three daughters, a thief. Kroger, the school bus, the orchard. What a mother does. The husbands went missing, and nearly, your leg. You picked a great time to go. There is a place where things aren’t hard. The cinders of your walls still stand weightless near the highway, your three-bedroom box unrecognizable. I pass them on the occasional lonely Highland ride. Remember when I was 8 and sat quietly (and I might add, happily) at your table, you blurted “You’re so intense. Your life will be very hard?” I think you were projecting, Grandma, even if you were right. I get your anger now having lived here longer … when people just make no sense. I thought your paint by numbers were beautiful, their subdued colored horses with calming skies corralled in blonde wood frames. I wish I owned one. I know you were too tired to talk that last day. It’s okay.

Obituary – Grandpa Roy
Never complained about us burdens, nor your mother’s ways, nor the meanness you suffered, genius Detroit boy, fast as a snake, numbers rattling in your head. Dropped out of school at 14 to work and pay rent, your future as provider hard coded. So many possibilities just out of reach. But there was Fisher Body and the line. A father is sometimes this: the dream-dead guy, the one who gets up, goes to the factory, and keeps his mouth shut about some things while ranting about others over dinner. You never said much, really, but loved in your abused-kid way. You knew what it was to be short changed. We all did.

Obituary – Great Aunt Lee
You didn’t mean to burn down the Flint Hotel—it was alcohol, drugs, and a cigarette. Hotels are so temporary. Like your mother and Roy, you were smart. You had a nose for business and cultivated an easy, charming air, some vestige of your West Virginia roots. Did well without any college. Hudson’s promoted you as high as a woman, then, could go. Your home life, however, was another thing. Charlie, your doctor boyfriend kept you in drugs. Like Roy, you were always in your own way, just something you couldn’t shake, an addiction, a married man, a troubled past. I remember you sweet with eyes glossy, owl-large, and alert, perched stiff in your blazer and skirt. You always looked to be going somewhere. You were all ready when death came. No one died in the fire.

Obituary – Grandpa Bud
The factory life, long days, card games in relief, the small things to look forward to, guitars, camping trips dwarfed by matriarchs, your piles of tasks, more than you banked on. Those crazy girls, those crazy boys, the dialysis. Your nature seemed saintly, but I’d see you go off to the woods, talking to yourself, your head down. I couldn’t make out the words. What chores and tragedies you beared. Judy said you were schizophrenic. Undiagnosed. Everyone was a molester or schizophrenic or both in her head, and while most probably were, I’m believing you’re an angel somewhere. Never a mean word did I hear. You were just a Bud with a guitar the universe plucked early. Also, a pussy-whipped man.

Obituary – Great Grandma Nellie
A beauty parlor, yours, immaculate with pink and black tile where ghosts of rollered ladies in torpedo bras gossip and smoke cigarettes into infinity. You said you were never old ‘til you couldn’t put your foot in the sink. Eventually, you couldn’t. Emphysema. Smoked next to the tanks. You only get one chance. Go out in flames, Grandma.

Koss has publications in Chiron Review, Michigan Quarterly (Mixtapes), Cincinnati Review (miCro), Spillway, diode poetry, Five Points, Midway Journal, Permafrost, SoFloPoJo, Spoon River Poetry Review, Moonpark Review, San Pedro River Review, Best Small Fictions 2020, and many others. Their chapbook, Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect, a Lammy finalist, is available from Diode Editions. Their work has appeared in Best Small Fictions, was longlisted twice for the Wigleaf Top 50. Learn more at https://koss-works.com.

Melissa Llanes Brownlee

dig da imu, dig da imu, i stay digging da imu

I sing as the heat of the afternoon sun warms my sweaty back kule kule uncle shouts at me over the protests of the pig that just got delivered, its legs tied together, and uncle lifts it onto the makeshift table of plywood and sawhorses, and I keep singing in my head as he slits its throat and the squealing stops dig da imu, dig da imu grateful that my job is to prep the imu for the pig and not the other way around, and finish digging the hole until its waist deep and I get out and start throwing all of the rocks in, putting down an even layer stay keep it flat, or else, Kaua, stay keep it flat, or else, Kaua as I block out the sound of the knife slicing and scraping, the blood dripping off the table, the flies starting to gather, and place the kiawe wood over the rocks gotta heat it up, gotta heat it up I try not to dance as I throw chunks of the wood I cut earlier in the morning, but I swivel a little, and uncle screams stop being one mahu and get back to work, or else and I’m silent inside and out as he pulls the entrails, scraping the insides, the water hose washing the emptied body clean

Melissa Llanes Brownlee (she/her), a native Hawaiian writer living in Japan, has work published and forthcoming in Pithead Chapel, Fractured Lit, Ghost Parachute, Moon City Review, and Prairie Schooner, and honored in Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and Wigleaf Top 50. Read Hard Skin (2022) and Kahi and Lua (2022) and check out her new collection, Bitter over Sweet (2025), from Santa Fe Writers Project. She tweets @lumchanmfa and talks story at melissallanesbrownlee.com.

Jayne Martin

Modern Love

“I love you,” she said. And maybe it was true this time. Or maybe if she said it often enough it
would be true. The most important thing was that he believed her, and he said it back.

Jayne Martin is a Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfictions nominee, and recipient of Vestal Review’s VERA award. She is the author of Tender Cuts, a collection of microfiction from Vine Leaves Press, and The Daddy Chronicles-Memoir of a Fatherless Daughter, published by Whiskey Tit Books. She lives in California, but dreams of living in Paris. Website: www.jaynemartin-writer.com Facebook: Jayne Martin-Auteur. Twitter: @Jayne_Martin

Colleen Kearney Rich

Summer Evening, 1947

The couple and the lighted porch are the stars of this summer night. The house is closed tight, curtains drawn, because it is late and folks have gone to bed or perhaps to give the couple privacy. Or instead of privacy, there could be judgement inside. Disapproval of how she is dressed, with her fancy pink two-piece outfit showing so much of her untanned skin. Disappointment in her “entertaining” a gentleman on the porch at such a late hour. And let’s face it, he’s no gentleman. He looks like he wandered by on his way home from the downtown pool hall. Maybe he saw her on that brightly lit porch and was drawn to that searchlight in the darkness like a moth in these last few hours before a new day. She has dreams, you can tell. She sees herself somewhere beyond this tiny town, perhaps as an actress waiting to be discovered poolside in LA. Or this could be the end. Perhaps this boy is shipping out to boot camp in the morning, and this outfit is her gift.

Colleen Kearney Rich is the author of the chapbooks Things You Won't Tell Your Therapist (Finishing Line Press, 2019) and Bunnyman Bridge (A3 Press, 2021). Her writing has been published in the literary journals SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Matchbook, and Pithead Chapel, among others. One of the founding editors of So to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language and Art, she has an MFA from George Mason University in Virginia, where she also works.

Emily Rinkema

Better

Our youth pastor, Gary, who’s only a few years older than us, points at a cardboard box sitting on a folding table in the middle of the otherwise empty church basement.
            “What’s inside?” he asks, and we know we’re in for a metaphor, some lesson that he’s about to impart as if we’re a future congregation rather than three sixteen-year-old boys whose parents made us come. His arms are too long, his hands clearly made for things other than building, which is why we’re here this weekend, to build a shed to store whatever it is that churches want out of the way.
            Finn says something under his breath that makes Luke laugh, but Gary ignores them. “What’s inside?” he repeats.
            Luke takes a step forward, hand outstretched, and Gary snaps at him, “Don’t touch the box.”
             “That’s what Kyle’s mom said,” Finn laughs, looking right at me. I feel my face redden and clench my fists at my side.
            “How are we supposed to know if we can’t get close?” asks Drew.
            Gary takes a breath. “That’s the point,” he says. Gary was the star of the school play two years ago. My mom made me go because my sister was in it. We sat in the back and I watched Gary dance across the stage like he’d grown up on it. When everyone’s parents met the actors in the lobby after the performance, flowers in hand, Gary stood alone. Mom asked me what his story was, but I didn’t know.
            “You have to have faith,” Gary says, and I look down because I know it doesn’t work, the metaphor, that if he’s trying to demonstrate faith he’d have to tell us what’s in the box but not show us. He’s got it backwards, and it’s only a matter of seconds before this will get even worse for him and I don’t want to watch. But the door opens and Father John comes in. He’s wearing a tool belt and his gut hangs over the top. I’ve never seen him in regular clothes before.
            “Ready, boys?” he asks. “Shed’s not going to build itself.”
            I look to Gary to see if he’s going to finish his sermon anyway, but he’s gone quiet.
            “Gary!” Father John snaps at him, and I flinch even though he’s nowhere near me. “What did I tell you?”
            Gary looks at his feet. His response is too low to hear. The rest of us grab work gloves from the bin near the door and head out to start building.

            Fifteen years from now, Father John will die of a heart attack while golfing.
            Sometime before that, Finn will marry and divorce and marry again.
            Before that, Luke will get kicked out of college for cheating.
            Before that, I will stop going to church because of the incident after Gary’s funeral with a gas can and a bottle of tequila.
            And well before that, tonight, in fact, I will kiss Gary in the newly built shed and I will ask him, while his hands unbuckle my belt, what was actually in the box, and he’ll smile and say, “Something better,” and I’ll believe him.

Emily Rinkema lives and writes in northern Vermont, USA. Her writing has recently appeared in Fictive Dream, Okay Donkey, Ghost Parachute, and Frazzled Lit. You can read her work at https://emilyrinkema.wixsite.com/my-site or follow her on X, BS, or IG (@emilyrinkema).

mike sluchinski

“long lost pens i’ve loved #1 for naked cowboy pens”

yes it’s one of those pens the ones where if you tilt them the clothes come off in the little barrel area of a ballpoint pen or maybe it’s the hilt some pen people will correct me and i’m writing these for all the pens the long lost pens i’ve loved and maybe it’ll be a book one day and you’ll have to read them and wait for them as they get written down but anyway you know those novelty pens and they used to be popular and you know writers like pens and i do too and this one well it’s an odd duck and sure the pen is one of those clickable ones with the little tapper thing at the top who the hell knows what they’re called button or what and this one well it has a silver body and it’s an old white background kind of yellowed or vanilla now because it’s old and i wonder the older ones the ladies the nude pens usually had ladies and they’d be in their lingerie or underwear or nude and some businesses they gave these away or salesmen did selling all kinds of stuff and who doesn’t laugh i mean you go to write something and the clothes come off and wow oh wow and abracadabra and words like that you could write them but who does anymore and so anyway to get to the point this one it’s a guy and a cowboy all with a hat and vest i don’t know if he was a marshal or in law enforcement or what the regular kind the naked cowboy or vest wearing cowboy and you tilt the pen and his clothes come off and there’s still liquid in the pen or whatever they put in it to get the clothes to drop down off the cowboy and you get the picture kind of an odd one but this one i got it in a box of other stuff at auction and it’s usually that way when people pass and they have an estate and that’s what they do get rid of your stuff so be aware that probably ain’t nobody treasuring your stuff and it’s going to wind up at an auction thrown in with a bunch of other stuff like a leather whip and cowboy hat and an old black vest and western pulp fiction books and a small frame with an american five dollar bill in it and a note that says nothing except ‘for modeling services rendered’ and you know it made me wonder who got the better end of the deal and the hat and vest in the box pretty much looked like what came off of the naked cowboy

mike sluchinski is a recent pushcart prize nominee and grateful to be read in mantis, failed haiku, inlandia journal, kaleidotrope, eternal haunted summer, the wave (kelp), the literary review of canada, the coachella review, welter, poemeleon, lit shark, proud to be vol. 13, the ekphrastic review, mmpp (meow meow pow pow), kelp journal, the fib review, syncopation lit. journal, south florida poetry journal (soflopojo), freefall, pulpmag, in parentheses, and more coming!

James Keith Smith

Nearsighted / Farsighted

The optometrist’s eyesight is failing. Driving at night, headlights blur, street signs go unread. The optometrist’s wife sits beside him, her face is an indistinguishable smudge. He reaches over for her cheek, misses.

The optometrist wears a white coat, black slacks. He’s highly regarded—4.3 stars—if you can trust reviews. There are outliers, of course. Pompous, says one. Impatient.

“Reciting Yeats by heart may not get you many dates,” he tells one patient, “but it might help get you into Harvard.”

A little tuft of air in the eyeball.

“This one, or that one,” he says flicking the lenses. “A little bit better here?” he says. “Or there?”
“The first one,” the patient says. “No, the second.”

“It’s not a trick question,” the optometrist says.

Sometimes the optometrist wonders if his wife is writing the reviews. Inattentive. Disorganized.
His frame selection is poor and out of style, says one.

If only I could see clearly, he thinks. Then I might know.
What if the optometrist’s wife no longer loves him?

A prescription changes, he thinks.

At home, the optometrist’s dog is always chewing: the rug, sofa leg, shoes. He’s discovered a hole in the fence. The dog runs away. Comes back covered in mud.

The dog comes in, the dog goes out. The dog can never make up its mind. In, or out.

“A, or B?” he asks a patient. “So, B is better than A?”

The dog eats one bowl of food each morning, one at night. He always sleeps in the crate beside the red sofa. The children’s grades slip, athletic seasons end. During summer, they seem to be around all the time, losing the remote, arguing. And his wife—one week she insists on Italian, the next it’s Indian. Manicotti one day, curry the next. She talks and talks to her sister on the phone—never stopping to breathe—and the moment she hangs up, hardly a word.

Double vision, floaters, a new sensitivity to light. He’s referred to an ophthalmologist who only sees patients at 3pm, on the first Tuesday of the months ending in the letter ‘R.’

A new review insists the optometrist has let himself go.

Nevertheless, the review is for 3.5 stars.

But most of the reviews are getting worse. Disheveled, distracted. When you talk to him, he has a blank stare.

“You have an astigmatism,” he tells one patient.

“Yes, I know,” the patient says.

“You know everything, I suppose,” he says.

The optometrist no longer associates with the Elks Club. He’s been kicked off the board of a prominent private school for missing three meetings.

I heard him weeping in a back room, one reviewer claims.

The optometrist awakes at night. The comforter is on the ground, the dog out of its crate, pawing at the mattress. He pats for his wife in the dark.

James Keith Smith’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Split Lip Magazine, Moon City Review, Sierra Nevada Review, Pithead Chapel, and others. He grew up in Michigan and now lives in Tacoma, WA. Find more of his work at jameskeithsmith.com

Chelsea Stickle

Photo by Maureen Porto Studios

We All Know What’s Happening Here

            The courthouse flag is flying half-mast and neither of us knows why. There are so many mass shootings now that we can’t count the dead, though we try. “Our democracy is dead for sure,” I say.
            Gary answers, “Courthouses don’t care about that.” We might’ve chuckled before, but the old jokes have hardened in our chests and weigh us down more every day. Stones on stones on tombstones where political humor used to reside.
            By the courthouse, we see the bank building was converted into a pop-up shop from an artist collective. They opened the vault at the short end of the L, and my inner kid can’t wait so we beeline to what feels like a movie set. We climb up a step stool to cross the scalloped threshold, and it’s just a room with an interesting history. I thought it would feel magical like an adult treehouse, and it doesn’t. Like so many fucking things, the idea of it is better than the reality. But I’m not about to leave at the first disappointment.
            I’m admiring a Shop Local tote when we hear the first shots. There’s so much whimsy in this place that I can’t be sure some rabbit-shaped balloon animals haven’t popped somewhere. That is, until the screaming starts. We glace at each other but don’t need to. We all know what’s happening here.
            The gay couple that had been examining the witty postcards closest to the entrance move first. They kick the stool propping the round door open. A basketful of humorous greeting cards litters the floor. Gary helps two parents carrying small children clear the entrance. “Wait!” someone nearby screeches. A couple of teens hurdle inside and land in a pile panting, clutching their shoulders, before the gay couple and I lean our weight against the vault door until close. The parents pat down their children for bullet holes, and Gary checks the teens. When he sees they’re bullet-free, he joins me against the door.
            We wonder if the shooter cased the joint first. If he knows we’re back here. If there’s more than one shooter. If he or they can find or force a way in. If the camera in the corner will give us away. One woman tries her cell but the signal can’t escape. We have to wait for help. We’re spared most of the screams outside, but we know we just got lucky. Siloed in here is safer than out there, but the vault feels like a forever tomb we willingly climbed into. The idea of it and the reality of it are so goddamn bleak that I have to focus on my breathing to halt the panic attack creeping up on me. Gary eyes me. He knows this happens but hasn’t seen it before. I am encased in ice. Toes and fingers stiff in my boots and gloves. Gary squeezes my hands. I wish we knew Morse Code so we could safely, privately talk. He’s the only man I’ve ever loved. I waited thirty-five years for a love like this. One that makes me giggle and regularly. He’s genuinely kind. He doesn’t deserve to die because I wanted life to feel more like a movie. I mouth, “I love you” and he mouths it back. I pick up my phone to type him an apology, a thank you, goodbye. My lock screen reads ICE and my mother’s phone number. In case of emergency. In case this happens. I wanted to be identifiable. I want to be identifiable. I hope I’m identifiable.

Chelsea Stickle is the author of the flash fiction chapbooks Everything’s Changing (Thirty West Publishing, 2023), and Breaking Points (Black Lawrence Press, 2021). Her stories appear in Passages North, Fractured Lit, Identity Theory, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and others. Her micros have been selected for Best Microfiction 2021 and 2025, the Wigleaf Top 50 in 2022 and the Wigleaf Longlist in 2023. She lives in Annapolis, MD, with her black rabbit George and a forest of houseplants. Learn more at chelseastickle.com.

Jennifer Thomas

Assisted Living: Becca Revises the First Draft

Jennifer Thomas began writing fiction after a long career as a science writer. She lives in Salem, Massachusetts, but grew up in Miami, Florida, and is still not used to winter after 50 years up north. Her stories have been published in 365tomorrows, Flash Fiction Magazine (contest honorable mention), Bewildering Stories, Women on Writing (second place contest winner), 101 Words, Windward Review, Persimmon Tree, and Does It Have Pockets?, among others. You can find some of her work at www.jenniferthomas.net.

Tina S. Zhu

Aisle 9

The last time I saw Chrysanthemum Sun in the flesh was in Aisle 9, the frozen food aisle. She was buying frozen vegetables. We shivered together, summer shirts too thin for the power of big box department store air conditioning. She didn’t say hi. When we were kids, Chrysanthemum was always the first to say hi. She was the kind of person who you couldn’t help but hate at first because she was so friendly, but then you realized the friendliness was genuine and hated her even more. Our moms compared us all the time. She, the athletic, pretty, straight-A girl destined for big things. Me, inadequate in every respect. At the store, she took a bag of carrots out of the freezer and two bags of green beans. I went for the Ore-Ida tater tots. Her daughter was with her, in a princess tiara. Chrysanthemum had become a Lululemon yoga mom who spent a fortune on Korean beauty products. I had recently become single and was working a dead-end job. I made sure to make eye contact with her and smile when I opened the freezer door again for frozen chicken nuggets. She turned to talk to her daughter, choosing to ignore me.
A few months later, when the MISSING signs went up and everyone was talking about the local mother of two who had seemingly vanished in broad daylight, my mother called me. Chrysanthemum’s mother made a scene at the Chinese church the other day, was sobbing so loudly everyone else turned away. See? I wanted to say, watching the MISSING sign with the corners ripped off on the telephone pole outside my apartment as the rain started up again. See? She’s not better than me, at least I didn’t disappear. After the rain let up, I went outside. Chrysanthemum’s paper face was soaked through, the black ink of MISSING running down her tranquil expression like tar-stained tear tracks. I ripped off a phone number. I wanted to rip out her photo too, because she was too good to be seen in public without her ten-step skincare routine. I couldn’t bring myself to leave a hole in the sheet. The world deserved to know Chrysanthemum Sun. She stared into the street, the sad angel of Aisle 9 protecting us from harm, until the letters were unreadable and her face only a rainbow smudge.

Tina S. Zhu is an Assistant Fiction Editor at Split Lip Magazine who also co-edits WYRMHOLE, the terminally online speculative fiction newsletter. Places her work has appeared include Lightspeed, The Cincinnati Review, Best Small Fictions, and The Crawling Moon: Queer Tales of Inescapable Dread (Neon Hemlock Press, 2024), a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award. Her work has received support from Lambda Literary and the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, and you can find her at tinaszhu.com.