By Amelia Díaz Ettinger

Inspired by Gabriel García Marquez, Un Señor Muy Viejo Con Alas Enormes

Maybe it was true, the land had turned angry against the rabbits that were eating all the carrots on the planet. Maybe that was why, on the least important day of the week, on a long line of unimportant days, while the rabbits ate the carrot, the thin part of the root, where all the taste collected, wasting the green tops and most of the fleshy part, the soil began to liquify. 

During those days, before the earth decided to get rid of the annoying rabbits, there were a few, and by some accounts, only one, but most were certain there were at least three coyotes in those parts. Squalid creatures with ribs so prominent the wind played songs in them as if they were harps. They were the last of the predators left.  

The coyotes, with their languid countenance, lacked the energy to lick their own dirty coats, let alone try to chase and kill the abundant rabbits. Rabbits who had grown so accustomed to the lethargy of the coyotes that they laughed at them, mocking them in shrill, loud calls. Their taunts were akin to a child screaming, “Come and get me.” The coyotes never did, and not by deafness, but they seemed incapable of knowing where to turn or what to do. Their numbers dwindled, and the music from their rib cages grew louder and louder.

This all took place until the Earth’s soil thought She had had enough. Turning herself into a liquid mud that smelled of rotting meat, the rabbits began to dwindle too. What have we done? Their nervous eyes began to question as they turned into large, bulging orbits in their head as they looked frantically around themselves and found no comfort. There was no place to stand as they scampered on top of their once-abundant carrots. Their soft bodies were trapped, drowned in the excrement like soil. They screeched agonizing screams for help, swearing they could do better as they held on to their precious carrots. They convulsed and scampered on top of each other, making a hideous spectacle with their twisted, decomposing bodies, without avail.

When the earth realized that She had gotten rid of those uncaring rabbits, She began to grow strong again—little by little, She regained her sensual texture and aroma of fertility. The carrots again grew plenty. The green tops hid and twisted among the bones of the abundant rabbit carcasses that lay strewn in the open fields for many centuries to come. They stayed there in the landscape as gruesome mummified reminders of the time when the land grew sad on an unimportant day in a line of unimportant days

The balance She was hoping to regain finally came. And the coyotes grew fat and danced and howled under the light of the full moon and avoided the fossilized corpses of an enemy they no longer remembered.

*   *.  *

Amelia Díaz Ettinger is a Latinx BIPOC poet and writer. Amelia’s poetry and short stories have been published in anthologies, literary magazines, and periodicals. She has an MS in Biology and MFA in creative writing. Her literary work is a marriage of science and her experience as an immigrant. Presently, she resides in Eastern Oregon.

By David Lanvert

You still walk faster than I do.

But you run faster. 

I know, it’s always been that way.

You should take it easy.

Don’t worry, I’ll slow down if I get winded. 

I mean you don’t have to push yourself. 

I’m okay.  We used to do more than this.

I know.

All those marathons.  But we could never run together. 

You’re right, we’re too competitive.

But we’re okay now – side by side. 

Yes, because we’re not really running. 

It will come back.

Of course.

But the conversation’s nice. 

                                                            *     *     *

David Lanvert writes literary flash and short fiction. His work has appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine, Fiction on the Web, and Stanchion Zine, and his story “Come Wednesday” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Nevada.

By Jinjia Grace Hu

Every morning when I open my door, a pigeon waits on my doorstep. It might have been mundane—New York has more pigeons than straight men, according to my friend—if it hadn’t been the same pigeon every day, following me around with the obedience of a Victorian butler. The emerald plumes on his chest bounce with each step as he trails me. He doesn’t chirp or coo, asking for no food or attention; he simply follows. 

During the fifteen-minute walk from my place to the subway station, I know that whenever I turn around, I’ll see him teetering behind me, patiently shifting his weight from one leg to the other. His head is always kept low, as though surveying the ground before trusting it with his toes. In those moments, the early sun bakes my half-awake face, and I’m filled with the reassurance of this small consistency in an ever-changing world. 

When I step out of the subway after work, usually late afternoon, he’s waiting outside the station. Does he ever leave? I never know, yet I hope he does. I hope he has pigeon friends to play with, to talk about the day, to tell about us. As the lingering sunlight softly tickles the back of our necks, he chaperones me just as he does in the morning: same street, reverse direction. Only this time, rather than trailing me, he waddles in front of me, head still low, as if he’s leading me home. He stops right in front of my doorstep as we arrive, and I know I’ll see him again the next morning. 

Only later do I notice how low he keeps his head, his red beak nearly grazing the pavement—tracing the dark contour on the ground. He isn’t escorting me. He’s in love with my shadow. 

*   *   *

Jinjia Grace Hu was born in Nanjing, China, and lives in New York with her cat, Almond. She is an MFA candidate in creative writing at Columbia University. Her stories appear or are forthcoming in The Bloomin’ Onion, The First Line, and elsewhere.

 By David Larsen

Lucy McBride grimaced as she studied the picture on her bedroom wall. The sweeping landscape of the plains of western Nebraska, a gift from her aunt and uncle in Grand Island, had been swapped out without her knowledge, replaced with a pen and ink sketch of Tom’s former girlfriend, Susan, naked as a jailbird, leering seductively at the artist and the world. What in the world can Tom be thinking? she wondered.

Tom Bracewell had moved in three days earlier, lock, stock and barrel, including the disturbing piece of art. Lucy was far from a prude, yet this seemed to push anything goes beyond its limits. The nicely-framed piece—the nude—was well done, or so she supposed. What did she know about art? She was a first-grade teacher. She knew crayoned stick figures and finger-painted swirls and smudges. To have a naked woman wantonly glancing over her bare shoulder at her, and, of course Tom, from the wall of her bedroom seemed to be asking for more open-mindedness than she was prepared to offer. And not just any naked woman, but a slender-hipped woman Tom had slept with up until six months ago, a woman he might retain feelings for.

“Couldn’t we hang it someplace else?” asked the divorced thirty-two year old. “Not in the bedroom.”

“But where?” Tom laughed. “You don’t want it in the living room for my poker buddies to ogle when they come over, do you?”

“Your poker buddies?”

“Yeah,” said Tom, “I’ve told you about that. I get together with some of the guys from work every Tuesday…for cards.” He grinned. “I hadn’t mentioned it but I was hoping that you’d be willing to fix something for us to nibble on. Something simple. It doesn’t have to be much. We rotate the game, so we’ll only be here every fourth or fifth week. The wives and girlfriends of the other fellas throw something together, chili, nachos, pizza, whatever. It can be anything that would be easy for you to prepare, something that goes well with beer. It doesn’t have to be fancy. The guys aren’t fussy. This Tuesday will be my turn to host.”

“Where will you sit,” asked Lucy. “I don’t have a card table.”

“I assumed we’d play at the dining room table,” said Tom. “There are only six of us, sometimes seven. We’ll use a folding chair or two if need be.”

“That mahogany table belonged to my grandmother. It’s an antique.” Lucy bit at her lip. She wanted to cry. “I’m not sure I want a bunch of men playing cards around it…gorging themselves on God knows what and guzzling beer.”

“We’ll use coasters…and ashtrays.”

“Ashtrays?” 

“A couple of the guys smoke. Most of us just like to chomp on a cheap cigar. Jinx Morgan smokes that godawful pipe of his but he’s the only one who’ll stink up the place.”

Lucy sighed. A pipe? In my dining room? “The rest of you don’t smoke the cigars?”

“We do…and we don’t. We light ‘em, of course. But nobody inhales a cigar. We just like to have a stogie in our mouths for effect. You know how it is…with men.”

Lucy didn’t know. Her father, a Baptist, never smoked…or played poker for that matter. Nor, for heaven’s sake, drank beer. Her ex, in spite of all of his faults, didn’t smoke or gamble. Although, Ronald did have a thing for other women. Damn him.

“I don’t get it,” said Lucy. “You sit around with a lit cigar in your mouths? What’s the point, if you don’t smoke the thing?”

Tom grinned. “It’s just the way guys are.” He shrugged. “That husband of yours didn’t like to hang out with a group of his friends?” He tilted his head then smiled.

Lucy’s lower lip trembled. For some reason, she felt defensive when it came to her ex, even if he was a jerk. “Ronald preferred the company of women,” said Lucy.

“Unfortunately.”

“Don’t we all?” said Tom.

Lucy winced. Just the thought of her boyfriend chasing after women like her ex made the room spin. Now what? she thought. Cigars? Poker? What else?

“Do you lose much money?” she asked. Tom’s job at Smart Fashions didn’t pay all that much. How could he possibly afford to gamble—on his commissions, paltry as they seemed to be?

“Not really,” said Tom. “We just like to get together and tell stories. Locker room talk as the president called it.”

My dining room isn’t a locker room, she wanted to tell him, but she held back. She desperately wanted everything to work out with Tom.

Tom looked at his cellphone, frowned then scraped his keys across her dresser, another antique. “Can we hold off on supper for another hour or two?” he asked. “I’ve got to run over to Susan’s house and pick up Rowdy.”

“Rowdy?”

“I’ve told you about Rowdy. My dog. You’re gonna love him.”

“You’re bringing your dog here, to my apartment?” She paused. “You never said anything about your dog.”

“Where else would he go?” Tom blinked. “He’s no trouble.”

“What kind of dog is he?”

“He’s a mutt, part hound, part terrier.” Tom shook his head. “If one of us walks him, and cleans up after him, he’ll be happy. He doesn’t shed…not much.”

“I have a cat you know. What about Cheeks?”

Tom nodded. “If Rowdy bothers Cheeks, just give him a whack on the nose. He’ll learn.”

“I don’t want to hit your dog.”

Tom laughed. “He’s used to it.”

With Tom gone Lucy went into the bathroom. Tom’s wet towels and washcloths, strewn across the tiled floor, smelled mildewy. She collected them, gagged then tossed them into the hamper.

When he gets back, she thought, he’ll be more than surprised to find his clothes, his golfclubs and his precious girlfriend’s picture on the front porch. Then I’ll call Ronald. We can work things out, I hope. He always said we could. He called just this morning.

*   *   *

David Larsen is a writer who lives in West Texas, two miles from the border with Mexico. His stories have been published in numerous literary journals and magazines including Cholla Needles, The Heartland Review, Change Seven, Literary Heist, Aethlon, Pattern Recognition, Coneflower Café, The Raven Review, Voices, Smoky Blue Literary Arts Magazine, Mobius, The Griffel Literary Magazine, Bright Flash Literary, Floyd County Moonshine, The Mantelpiece, Oakwood, Nude Bruce Review, Canyon Voices, County Lines: A Literary Journal, The Word’s Faire, Rundelania, Red Dirt Forum and October Hill Magazine.

      

     

A Memoir by Johanna Elattar

The television in our living room showed a unicorn that summer—a pearlescent creature with a single, spiraling horn—destined for Madison Square Garden. I was eleven, and unlike the adults around me, I still believed in the possibility of a miracle. I didn’t know about surgical grafts or the grim theater of animal acts. I only knew that I wanted to see it.

My father’s youngest brother was staying with us then, the youngest of my grandmother’s five sons. When I asked him to take me, he answered without thinking. He was lost in his own thoughts.

“Yeah, okay. I’ll get the tickets,” he said.

A week passed. The circus was moving closer, the ads getting louder. “Did you get them?” I asked.

“They’re in the mail,” he told me, his voice flat and practiced. “Any day now.”

That was the start of the ritual. Every afternoon, I’d leave the apartment and head for the lobby. The Brooklyn heat was a physical weight, smelling of hot asphalt and the briny ghost of the harbor. I’d stand before the bank of dented metal mailboxes, my small key slick with sweat.

The sound of the key in the lock was a hopeful click. The sound of the box swinging open was a hollow clack.

Clack. Utility bills for my mother. Clack. A circular for the supermarket. Clack. Empty.

In those first weeks, the key felt different in my hand — lighter, charged with what might be waiting on the other side. I’d take the stairs fast, my heart already moving ahead of my feet. Every afternoon was a small beginning, a door that hadn’t been opened yet.

By July, the “any day now” had become a mantra. I’d ask him on Mondays, then Wednesdays, then only on Fridays. He never changed his story. He never looked guilty. He just kept promising the arrival of an envelope that didn’t exist.

By August, something shifted. The key didn’t feel like possibility anymore. It was just metal. I knew the box was empty before I even turned it. I could feel the vacuum of it through my palm. Yet I didn’t stop. I didn’t confront him. I didn’t ask why the mail was taking six weeks to travel from Midtown to our hallway. I just kept the ritual alive, a silent, daily pilgrimage to a metal box.

I kept the ember of expectation burning because I refused to be like the people who surrounded me—the ones who had allowed the world to break their wonder until they were as hollow as that mailbox. I went down every day because I chose to believe in the unicorn, even after I stopped believing in my uncle.

One evening I was alone in the living room when the commercial came on. The same music, the same pearlescent horn — but the words had changed. Last week in New York City. I sat with that for a moment. The circus was gone. The window had closed while I was still checking the mail. I got up, went downstairs, and turned the key anyway.

Clack.

I didn’t tell anyone what I’d seen. There was no one to tell.

The day before school started, I went down one last time. I couldn’t have explained why. The ritual had become its own reason by then — separate from tickets, separate from unicorns, separate from anything he had or hadn’t done. I just went. Because I was the one who went.

I stood before the metal box. There was nothing left of the feeling that used to carry me down those stairs — no flutter, no forward lean, no small voice saying maybe. Just the key in my hand and the knowledge of what I was about to find. But I turned it anyway.

Clack.

Nothing but a supermarket circular. No tickets. No miracle.

I stood there holding the circular, the paper soft from the heat. The unicorn on the television, the goat with the bone-graft horn, and the man who had promised me tickets — they were the same thing. A performance of something that wasn’t real.

I locked the box and walked back up the stairs. I passed him without a word. He didn’t look up, and for the first time, I didn’t need him to.

                                                                  *   *   *

Johanna Elattar is a professional writer and Pushcart Prize nominee whose investigative reporting on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) is featured in the Oxford University Press textbook Race and Racisms (4th Edition) and Unheard Voices Magazine. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Santa Fe Literary Review, and Yellow Arrow Publishing. She was a finalist for the Diana Woods Memorial Award at Lunch Ticket (Antioch University), where she was shortlisted by Michelle Tea.

after A House with Bottle Trees, Simpson County, photography by Eudora Welty (USA) 1941

It was their third night in the new house, and Walter still couldn’t sleep. His wife was restless, too, tossing and turning and constantly sitting up to fiddle with the fan.

Born and raised in California, the heat was not new to them. But there was a restlessness here somehow, a nervous undercurrent thrumming from the floorboards. The house needed work, which they would get to, once they were finished unpacking. In time they would get used to the new place and feel at home.

Walter shuffled to the fridge and poured a tumbler of lemonade, standing in his undershirt and nothing else in darkness. The humid air was thick with perfume; mimosa, magnolia, myrtle. The moon was high. He leaned over the sink, close to the screen, and saw it glinting off the rainbow of glass bottles on the tree in the neighbour’s yard, light dancing through them like fireflies.

Celia. A peculiar, spindly old woman. Now he remembered: “No one sleeps in that house,” she’d warned cryptically when they’d made small talk before moving in. “Bet you got the place cheap. The old maids didn’t last a year. Carried out together with their eyes frozen open. Who knows what they seen.”

Walter shuddered recalling it. No wonder he’d been wide awake for days. According to their realtor, the Jones’ sisters had passed of ripe old age, and that made sense, one each of them being on either side of ninety years. 

The yards on the block had lush, colourful gardens and an eclectic assortment of whimsical oddments and doodads, wrought-iron chickens and seashells and chubby angels. And most of them had the requisite tree strung with cobalt blue bottles, some adding green and purple and red. It was a popular decoration among southerners. Some old timers still believed the bottle trees enticed the restless spirits into the glass and kept them from entering their houses.

Celia had the biggest tree, with hundreds of dusty old liquor glass, flagons, and jugs rigged up with twine. He and Beth both liked the folksy vibe of it all. Since they’d moved in, they’d mostly seen Celia rocking on her wraparound porch with iced tea and the Scriptures in hand.  Her house was, fittingly, painted haint blue, the same pale colour as a sleepy sky. “This tricks ‘em into passing through and flying away,” Celia had said. “Otherwise they keep at you until they tire you to death. Only the word of God and the old ways can save you.”

By the second week, Beth had set everything up nicely inside and Walter had cleaned out the Jones’ leftovers from the garage and yard. He had taken a mountain of empty boxes to the recycling depot in town. They both had dark circles around their eyes. Walter was growing concerned: he would be starting the new job come Monday and needed to be sharp to learn the ropes. Beth was jumpy, unnerved by the rattlings of the old house. They both heard strange noises, staccato yelping from the edges of the woods behind the yard. Walter was sure these were sounds from the feral dingoes that ran the swamps.

One early morning when he went out to retrieve his newspaper, he saw Celia sweeping glass shards into a dustpan under her tree and he went over to ask if he could help. She shook her head. “Many bottles broke during the night,” she explained grimly. “Sometimes that happens. When the evil is strong enough, the glass bursts open because it cannot contain them.” 

She busied herself tying new ones to the lower branches. Walter helped to steady her as she reached awkwardly to tether her twine to higher spots. He suggested gently that perhaps the rain overnight had loosened some of the vessels and broken them. Her black walnut eyes darted sharply about. “The stubborn don’t believe,” she said finally, and returned to her task. “And they endanger their neighbours, too, inviting these spirits.” 

After a moment intent on tying a knot, she turned to Walter. “How are you sleeping, child?” And then, “Don’t you hear them at night, growling from the swamps?”

Walter felt uneasy. But he didn’t believe in ghosts. “What would the spirits want of me?” he asked. “Did something happen in the house?”

Celia snorted. “It’s not a ‘me’ thing,” she said. “It’s not personal. The elders know that the air is filled with all manner of ancient darkness. Did you know that more ten percent of the men enslaved here died within a year of getting off those ships?” She waved her skinny brown fingers to the north. “Just a mile from here were the rice fields. More than half of the children died working those wetlands. Malaria. And worse. They’re still rattling away, hoping to be heard. We forget, but they remember.”

Walter walked the old woman to her front porch, where she resumed her favourite perch in her rocking chair. “The haints chase us, begging us to listen, to our exhaustion,” she said. “They want to find a home, but our homes are not their homes. My advice? Listen to them. But don’t let them in.” And she snapped at the rolled up paper under his arm, so he gave it to her, and turned back to his own yard.

There were just a few of Beth’s empty wine bottles in the blue bin in the garage. But it was a start. He would head into town later and look for others. He found an old clothesline and cut it into pieces. 

Walter was just finishing with what they had when Beth came into the front yard and asked him what he was doing. 

“It looks nice, don’t you think?” he asked. He stepped back to admire the way the green glass bottles glowed in the rising sun. 

 Lorette C. Luzajic

Lorette C. Luzajic is a writer, editor, publisher, educator, and visual artist in Toronto, Canada. Her work has been widely published, nominated, taught in workshops, and translated into Spanish, Urdu, and Arabic. Two of her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions and another is forthcoming in Best Microfiction. She is the founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review and The Mackinaw.

By M.D. Smith IV

Near the ragged edge of town, where streetlights thin out and the woods swallow the last sighs of civilization, a dirt road claws its way up the backside of a mountain and simply stops. It ends at a wound in the earth—a limestone cave mined in the 1920s, abandoned when the Stock Market crashed and hope drained out of the country like blood from an opened vein.

The cave’s mouth gapes thirty feet high, like a jaw frozen mid-scream. Just inside, three tunnels split off in different directions, carved by men who once believed rock could be persuaded to surrender its treasure. Nature reclaimed the place over decades, vines threading through broken fencing, trees crowding close as if trying to seal the scar shut. Only locals remember the narrow trail that snakes from the road to the opening.

Teenagers remembered it best.

In the early years, it was beer and bonfires. Later, smoke and pills and whispered dares. Police rarely bothered with a patch of woods just beyond the city limits. Three Caves became a secret passed down like contraband.

Then, in 2002, a teenage couple vanished.

Some said they eloped. Friends said they wouldn’t have left without a word. A year later, a man and his young son camped inside. They never came back. The sheriff found scattered gear—an overturned lantern, a sleeping bag torn open—but no bodies. Officially, drifters or criminals passing through got the blame.

Unofficially, the whispers began.

Monster.

The county fenced the entrance with chain-link and barbed wire, posted NO TRESPASSING signs that flapped in the wind like nervous warnings. But by 2025, the fence had been neatly cut where bushes hid the gap. Teenagers returned, because youth is deaf to caution.

Not all of them returned home.

Those who did spoke of strange dreams, foggy gaps in memory, the sense of being watched by something that breathed without lungs.

Three Caves became The Three Caves Monster.

But who believes in monsters?

Certainly not Clint Marson and Bill Stevens. And definitely not Bill’s younger brother, Jimmy, who tagged along wherever the older boys went. Add in girlfriends Sue and Jenny—whose mothers conveniently thought they were sleeping at each other’s houses—and you had the ingredients for a reckless night.

The sun was still bleeding orange across the sky when the five entered the cave with backpacks and flashlights. Their laughter bounced off stone walls and came back thinner, as if the cave swallowed the joy and returned only its echo.

They rounded a bend in the largest tunnel, where the ceiling dipped low and the air grew colder. A ring of old fire stones marked the perfect campsite. Clint and Bill built a fire with starter logs from a store that lit easily, burned a long time, and soon flames licked upward like hungry tongues. Hot dogs sizzled, marshmallows burned black, which only the boys ate while the girls insisted theirs be a light tan color. They popped open beer cans. Lit the home-wrapped weed.

Smoke coiled toward the ceiling and disappeared into the cracks like spirits escaping.

During a lull, Jimmy stiffened.

“What was that?”

The others groaned.

“It was like something moving,” Jimmy insisted. “Big like a possum or raccoon.”

“They’re more scared of us,” Clint scoffed, tapping the large Case knife strapped to his belt. “And if they’re not, I’ll fix that.”

But the cave felt different now. The air heavier. Listening.

Sue stood, arms wrapped around herself. “I don’t like this. I want to go.”

Jenny looked at her and nodded quickly. “We’ve done enough.”

“There’s only one car,” Clint said sharply. “Besides, you want to explain why we’re home early?”

Reluctantly, they stayed and spread blankets. Kissing replaced conversation. Jimmy read his ghost paperback, though his eyes kept drifting toward the dark edges of the firelight.

The fire dwindled to embers.

A scream shattered the silence.

Jimmy’s flashlight beam jerked wildly. “There,” the light beam wiggled as he was trying to keep it illuminated. “That thing, bigger than a basketball, covered in hair.” 

Everyone snapped upright and looked just in time to see something dark gray and furry scurry around a corner. Everyone flashed on their lights and shone them around the cave walls.

“Hey, over there,” Clint shouted. “In the corner, another one trying to get into that crease.”

Flashlights stabbed the darkness. In a corner, one creature crouched in a crevice. It was the size of a basketball, covered in coarse gray hair. Sharp ears twitched. Tiny black eyes reflected the light with oily malice. Thin, batlike membranes clung to its sides. Webbed feet scraped stone.

It hissed, revealing a mouth crowded with needle teeth.

Clint moved without thinking. Steel flashed. He drove the knife into its shoulder. The creature shrieked—a sound so piercing it felt like glass slicing the air, and the echo ricocheted through the tunnels, multiplying into a chorus of pain.

The creature lunged and clamped onto Clint’s calf.

His scream joined the echo.

He stabbed again and again until the thing fell limp.

Blood soaked his shredded pant leg. Bill grabbed the first-aid kit, applied antibiotic, and wrapped the wound with shaking hands while the girls sobbed openly. The cave smelled metallic now, like blood and damp stone.

“We need to get the hell outta here,” Jimmy said, voice breaking.

No one argued.

The girls yanked up their shoulder bags with purses inside, and the guys got only necessities they could grab in a hurry. Two of the flashlights were growing dim, flickering like dying stars.

They rounded the first bend.

Three more creatures stood ahead, side by side, blocking the path.

Both girls screamed and hid their mouths with their hands.

The air felt electrified, like the moment before lightning strikes.

“Should we just rush ‘em, kick the crap out of them, and keep going?” Jimmy suggested.

“Yeah. Rush them,” Clint muttered through clenched teeth. “On three. Okay, one…”

But before he could count, a roar erupted from the depths—a roar so massive it seemed to vibrate the marrow in their bones.

From the tunnel behind the three little creatures, the darkness bulged.

What emerged was not a creature, but a nightmare made of flesh—a heaving mass of gray fur the size of a small truck. Its head scraped the ceiling. Wings—vast and leathery—unfurled like storm clouds. Its eyes burned with an animal intelligence sharpened by grief.

The mother.

She surged forward, jaws wide enough to swallow a body whole. The ground trembled under her weight. Smaller creatures darted around her feet like satellites orbiting a dying star.

A cacophony of screams filled the air. The flashlights went out.

The cave swallowed the screams, one chomp at a time. Then nothing but the sound of crunching bones. 

Blood ran in pools on the cave floor.

Days later, search parties gathered at the entrance but went no farther than the cut fence. The memory of past disappearances hung over them like a curse. No one volunteered to step inside. The cave still stands at the edge of town.

And sometimes, when the wind is right, a sound drifts from its mouth, a low, rumbling growl, like a mother mourning in the dark.

*   *   *

M.D. Smith of Huntsville, Alabama, writer of over 350 flash stories, has published digitally in Frontier Times, Flash Fiction Magazine, Bewilderingstories.com, and many more. Retired from running a television station, he lives with his wife of 64 years and three cats. https://mdsmithiv.com/

`By David Henson

Hurrying down a rush-choked sidewalk, the marriage is shocked by a smooth-skinned, dark-haired version of itself crossing the street. The marriage calls out, but the urban din gulps its voice. As the marriage jaywalks closer, a bike messenger runs it down. Cartoon stars orbiting its head, the marriage struggles to its feet just as its young version boards the number 42. The marriage waves its arms and shouts Come back as the bus lurches ahead. Its eyebrows and chin as far apart as they can get, the marriage brushes itself off and limps back to the throng. A few minutes later, the young marriage jogs back to the stop. Its hand shielding its eyes, it peers at the swarm of pedestrians, and, skipping out of the way of a bicycle, spots and approaches its wrinkled, gray-haired version sitting on a bench, rubbing its shoulder. When it sees its younger self, the older marriage smiles I have so much to tell you, it says. The young marriage frowns, turns, and walks away. 

*    *    *

David Henson and his wife reside in Illinois. His work has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, and has appeared in various publications including Bright Flash Literary Review, Best Microfictions 2025, Ghost Parachute, Moonpark Review, Maudlin House, and Literally Stories,  His website is http://writings217.wordpress.com. His X handle is @annalou8.

By Jeff Harvey

Perry stole an issue of People Magazine, the one with Tony Orlando on the cover, and placed it in an old fruitcake tin, hidden under his bed along with his diary, pictures of Joe Namath cut from a magazine, and a copy of Fear of Flying. When he returned from summer band camp, his mom had displayed all his secret box items on their kitchen table and said What would Reverend Price say if he knew what you had under your bed. She threw everything in the fireplace and burned his secrets.

During a career planning class in his senior year, Perry decided he wanted to be an actor or a game show host, something in entertainment. He played clarinet, and had performed the role of Conrad Birdie in band camp’s production of Bye Bye Birdie. He loved Warren Beatty, The Hollywood Squares, and had watched every episode of All in the Family. His mom found his folder and suggested that he consider a respectable career like running a car wash or taxidermy.

At his wedding which his mom had organized including choosing his bride, the sixteen-year-old daughter of their Pentecostal minister, Perry squirmed while she made her speech and said Perry is so special, and I’ve always told him I’d be proud of him regardless of the path he took in life. His mom died a few years later in a car crash and Perry fell into a pattern of alcohol abuse, popping pills, and buying porn tapes but was afraid to watch them. After three DUIs, a judge sentenced him to six months in rehab or in jail. His wife told him it’s rehab or she was leaving him. His counselor said It’s time to face the truth and be honest about who you are.

When Perry returned home, he discovered his wife had moved to Omaha with a truck driver to work at a slaughterhouse. Their home was in foreclosure. Memphis Discount Auto had closed, and Perry no longer had a job.

He sold his few possessions at a flea market including his collection of TV Guide magazines. Across from his booth, Perry spotted a tattered copy of People Magazine, the one with Tony Orlando on the cover, and bought it.

That evening he boarded a Greyhound headed west. Perry sat on the last row and opened a burgundy diary. He wrote his first entry: Mom’s abuse started after she found Dad skinny dipping with our insurance agent in Lake Berryton. I never saw again Dad after that weekend.

While waiting to transfer buses in El Paso, Perry ate a catfish taco and pulled out the copy of People Magazine and reread the article about how Tony Orlando fought prejudice, broke through the pack, and became a star. The Los Angeles bus rolled into the station and Perry sat on the front seat for the final leg of his trip.

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Jeff Harvey lives in Madrid and edits Gooseberry Pie Lit. His work recently appeared or is forthcoming in MoonPark Review, Ghost Parachute, trampset, Moon City Review, Your Impossible Voice and other litmags.

 

 

By Mark Rosenblum

The stranger exhaled his last drag and rose from the sagging bed. He pulled on jeans, dragged a sun-bleached polo over a pale chest and left the motel room. She was alone now. The only sound at 3 a.m. was the hum of the ice machine in the hallway. The periodic thump of cubes colliding in their cage of frost. A brief impact, a fracture, and then shards into vapor. 

In the room, moonlight cut through bent, dusty blinds. On the nightstand sat her purse. She rummaged past the stranger’s crumpled bills until her hand found the knife. The blade caught the light. She pressed its tip to the inside of her arm, drawing another scarlet line across pale skin–a map of routes leading nowhere. 

Strangers touch her without caring and look at her without seeing. Only the knife leaves a mark. And with that mark, she exists–for a moment.

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Mark Rosenblum is a New York native who now lives in Southern California where he misses the taste of real pizza and good deli food. He attempts not to drive his wife crazy, but tends to fail miserably. His eclectic ramblings of fiction and poetry appear in Gemini Magazine, Gold Man Review, Monkeybicycle, Penduline, Vine Leaves, the Raleigh Review, and other journals in print and online.