By Arvilla Fee

Jess hated elevators. Hated waiting for the doors to open. Hated the people standing inside like upright stalks of corn, leaves touching. Hated the rise and fall as it reached each floor. But most of all she hated the way people shifted their feet and stared at the panel of buttons as if it might suddenly feature a Broadway musical.

Today, of all days, was not a good day for elevators. Jess was already three minutes late for her meeting with one of her brides-to-be, Felicia. This aptly-named bridezilla would have flames shooting from her mouth. She pressed the up button and glanced around the beautiful black and white tiled lobby of the building that housed her modest Once Upon a Dream wedding planning office. 

Hearing the familiar ding, Jess turned back around and faced the door, standing aside to allow people to disembark. Once everyone stepped out, she entered, pressed five, and took a deep breath to calm her nerves. The doors started to slide shut, but a man’s thick hand stopped them, forcing them to separate. Jess blinked as he entered the elevator.

“Good day, ma’am” he said, running a hand through his wavy dark hair.

Jess nodded her hello and hit the “close door” button. 

“No floor for me, please,” the man said.

Jess glanced at him. “Excuse me?”

The man threw his head back and laughed uproariously. 

Jess stared, wondering if he was deranged. He didn’t appear to be, dressed as he was in a tailored gray suit, shiny Italian loafers and an expensive looking watch on his wrist. Of course, deranged people could often appear quite normal. She shook her head, realizing he was watching her watch him. 

“Actually five is fine,” he said, his mouth quirking up in a sideways grin.

Jess muttered a few choice words in her head as the elevator began its assent. She noticed, while pretending to watch the panel, the man was still watching her.

“So,” he said, after a brief pause. “How did I get the good fortune to ride to the fifth floor with such a beautiful woman?”

“I don’t think—” Jess started then stopped. “Sir, I don’t know you,” she finished lamely.

He raised his perfectly sculpted brows. “Well, let’s change that, shall we?”

Jess edged closer to the door, as number four lit up. One more floor.

The man lifted his hands in mock surrender. “I meant, let’s introduce ourselves. I’m Carson Monroe.”

Jess suppressed a gasp. If this was who she thought he was then— 

The ding sounded for floor five, and they both exited simultaneously, the man’s arm not-so-subtly brushing hers as he used his other arm to hold open the parted doors. “After you, gorgeous,” he said.

She nearly stomped down the hallway with him close at her heels. As she stepped inside her cozy, teal blue foyer with its yellow accent chairs, Jess’s fears were confirmed. Bridezilla’s fuming face broke into a wide smile upon seeing the man behind her.

“Darling!” she cooed as she threw her arms around Carson Monroe.

It was all Jess could do to keep her composure and not flee to her inner sanctum which lay just beyond her assistant’s desk. Carson Monroe! Of course!  Hadn’t she heard for weeks now: “Carson doesn’t like linen napkins. Carson prefers Cala lilies instead of roses. Carson needs a competent violinist not some hack off the streets. Carson—Carson—Carson!” She’d never met the groom-to-be, but the image she’d formed of him in her head was pretty spot on. 

Carson put one arm around Felicia, pulled her to his chest, then winked at Jess over Felicia’s head.  “Let’s start planning, shall we?”

*   *   *

Arvilla Fee lives in Dayton, Ohio and teaches English for Clark State College. She has published poetry, photography, and short stories in numerous presses, including North of Oxford, Rat’s Ass Review, Mudlark, and many others. Her poetry books, The Human Side and This is Life, are available on Amazon. Her third book, Mosaic: A Million Little Pieces was published December 2024. Arvilla loves writing, photography and traveling and never leaves home without a snack and water (just in case of an apocalypse). Arvilla’s favorite quote in the whole word is: “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” ~ Henry David Thoreau. To learn more, visit her website: https://soulpoetry7.com/

By Haley M. Forté

In the beginning, she begged for silence amongst the chaos of the end.

When the world stopped, time began to move quickly. Charlie hadn’t considered that once humanity could no longer keep the wheel turning, that Earth would continue to spin, just on its own accord for the first time in centuries. In reality, the spokes were slowed by the progress of humanity, and once the numbers began to trickle down like rain water off a roof, true momentum had been restored.

The sickness spread quickly, the fever washing over the world like a red tide in spring and summer. Hospitals became overrun, cemeteries expanded the best they could, and like leaves in winter, humankind began to die. In the absence of man, nature regained Her footing. Flora flourished, skies cleared, and the sea returned to its unbounded glory. Marine life, thought to be long lost, returned to the shallows, breached the waves, and amongst the dwindling land of man, the ocean regained its sovereignty.

She hadn’t been alone at the start. There had been Elijah, her loving husband, then Carter and Shea, colleagues, and trusted friends. Traveling together, they had fought back against the sickness in the only ways they knew how. Shea and Carter were both doctors of the old world, Charlie a botanist, and Elijah, a marine biologist, one who specialized in the ways of whales. Elijah’s love for the creatures had been a reason Charlie had fallen in love with him. His passion had been infectious and the others shared her sentiments. They shared knowledge as they wandered, healing wounds, eating safe plants, and attempting to understand the emerging world through the eyes of their fellow scientists.

There had been violence in their path, others who were unconcerned with learning to adapt, and only wished to take and destroy that of which they didn’t understand. Bloodshed had become inevitable in the harrowing landscape similar to the wars of the past and in a sense, humanity hadn’t changed at all in the new world. There just no longer was an excuse not to fall into their intemperate nature. Cultures died, democracies crumbled, and amongst it all, survivors wandered, slowly becoming far and few between.

However, like everything else, nothing in the new world lasted forever. One by one Charlie’s family had fallen to the world. Their lights snuffed out just as the grid had blinked out alongside them, damning her days to darkness. She had lost everyone, each death causing the pressure to increase upon her shoulders as she carried their lives with her like barnacles on the scarred skin of a humpback, each one more painful than the previous. Shea had died last, an infection neither of them could have prevented after a tumble through a stained-glass window, and after two weeks of fever and pallid skin, Charlie was alone, lost without her pod.

They had never avoided it, the truth of every day. Elijah had been the reasonable one. “There will come a day when the fever catches up to us,” he had said. “We can’t outrun it forever.”

He had been right.

Charlie knew it was inevitable and yet, the day she crafted her contingency plan in secret, her heart had never felt heavier. She knew which plants to use, which ones to cause her heart to stop after another slowed her breathing. A touch of spring water here, and a vibrant red berry there, and her final act of self-preservation dripped into a glass vial. The same vial that lay in her pocket as she stood at the base of the mountain.

No tears pricked her eyes as she began her climb. Elijah had always wanted to bring her here, to the place where he loved to watch the whales. The wilds were vast in size, but she had never felt smaller than in the time she spent climbing over fallen trees and tangled roots. The silence of the world followed her as she hiked. Shadows moved alongside her in the dark of the forest. It was unknown whether the lingering shapes were animals or ghosts of her past waiting and watching her final ascent. Memories of the past moved through her as the cliff came into view.

She imagined she could hear them.

“Only the males sing,” Charlie whispered, approaching the sea-spray-filled edge. “Only the males sing, but they all know the songs.” Visions of humpbacks littered her mind, their flukes breaking through rough surf in the Puget Sound from May to October. She thought of those times as she collapsed against a lone boulder overlooking the water. She also thought of the rising numbers on the television, the ever-present sounds of sirens, and the way Elijah’s voice had sounded as he lay dying under the cover of a rusted awning three years prior.

Clouds rolled over ahead, dark gray in color, as a chill spread through the misty air. Everyone talked about how the world would end, but nobody ever asked what would happen to those who remained after. Nobody ever thought of what came after. Carter had at first, but he had died before anyone had ever considered themself in the post of anything.

“When did it become after?” Charlie whispered to herself as she dug for the vial in her coat. A single breath left her as she lifted the vial to her mouth and pulled the stopper with her teeth. Keeping her eyes on the sea, she poured the maple-colored elixir down her throat, her earlier hesitation nonexistent. The vial almost felt heavier in her hand as she lowered it from her lips, watching as the last drop of liquid dripped down the side like setting amber. At first, she felt nothing, and on that cliffside, even the crashing of the waves was swallowed by the silence that wrapped around her, suffocating, and demanding as she became Atlas anew.

The rain had begun, heavy and frigid, and Charlie could not tell where the saltiness on her tongue originated. Whether it blew in from the sea below or finally dripped from her soaked lashes as tears returned to her. Everything was still and silent. Everything was over, and she was done.

Smiling slowly, she lifted her face to the sky, letting Mother Nature wash her once more of her sins as warmth began to spread in her chest and down her limbs as they grew heavier with each passing second. Seabirds flew above as their calls breached the glass cage that she had built around herself. Charlie let herself be swept up in their songs as ice fought with fire, both life and death grappling for a handhold on her soul. It was a battle, but she had no more fight left in her, not after Shea, Carter, or Elijah. Not after Seattle or Olympia, or any other city that had fallen, taking blood and breath along with it. Tokens of her dead friends clinked together in the torn pockets of her rucksack, aching to be reunited with their owners. Though, Charlie knew the truth, knew what had become of them and what she vowed she would never allow for herself. The world had taken too much, and free will was as rare as another warm body willing to take her out of the cold.

Her fingers became numb as the poison settled in her bloodstream, its fire burning through the frozen wasteland that cracked in her chest. Seven hundred and thirty-three days were enough. “Let us sing the songs of whales searching for the lost,” she whispered, her eyes locked onto the horizon. More tears flowed down her cheeks as the stone at her back dug in harder, adding pain to fire and ice.

She welcomed all three.

Death was winning in Her fight against Her sister as Charlie’s breaths grew shallow and labored, the poison reaching her heart quicker than she had anticipated. She could hear them, their voices, as they called out to her in an attempt to get her attention. They were muddled against the rain as they slowly morphed into a single call, one filled with anxiety and relief.

“Thank God!” the voice called, sounding close for someone so far away. “I saw the tracks from a few miles back and thought you would be gone by the time I hiked up here.” The voice moved closer. Turning her head, a figure moved into Charlie’s field of vision, blurry then clear, as a man approached her, a smile on his face as he gazed at the woman. “I really thought I was the only one left,” he said, exhaling as he stepped closer, only to pause as he took in what rested in her limp palm.

Seven hundred and thirty-three days, and she was no longer alone. Looking up at his face as it shifted from relief to sorrow, she allowed herself one last smile. He was human, and by God, he was beautiful.

                                                                      *   *   *

Haley M. Forté loves cats and hates hot weather. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and has been drafting stories since the age of fifteen. Her work can be found on her website and in Something Or Other Publishing’s Winter 2022 anthology. When she’s not writing, she is playing apocalyptic video games, drinking tea, and learning all she can about the universe. 

A Memoir by Orleans Saltos

Tucked inside a red brick theater in the downtown Arts District is a windowless rectangular room—not the main stage, but a modern multi-use space for classes, lectures, or small plays. Beneath a high black ceiling, long-hanging lighting hovers over 60 sleek plastic chairs arranged around a low stage in a half-circle. The stair-stepped floor ensures clear views from every row. Today, the theater lights are off, replaced by soft, even office lighting. Students trickle in, carrying backpacks, notebooks, purses, or nothing at all.

Someone mentions this theater class has been meeting for decades—twenty or thirty years—and another adds they’ve been attending for ten. This is my first time here, a transient presence in a permanent space. I settle into a back-row seat, surprised by how comfortably the molded chair cradles my butt. The perfectly calibrated lights make reading and note-taking effortless. I am not sure when I reached the age to appreciate a well-lit room to sketch in.

The view in front of me is a landscape of gray bobbed hairdos and shiny bald heads. Although the temperature is mild, 65 degrees outside, almost everyone is wearing neutral-tone sweaters brightened a little by the reds and purples of scarves, purses, or caps. One student has purple stripes added to her white hair.

“How’s Laura? Oh, good.” I hear someone say.

“We need to get together to try out that new restaurant.”

“I’m thinking of not renewing my Shotgun Theater membership. I hate all the plays there.”

All this is the chitchat of smiling, wrinkled faces.

Everyone seems to know each other in that kind of friendly way only decades can produce. They speak of each other’s losses and deaths, children’s and grandchildren’s names. I glance around expectantly, hoping for a nod or a smile. I am not invisible as I feel the occasional glance, but their eyes skim over me as their conversations float around me. I’m not part of their shared history. Although I have been accustomed to being an outsider all my life, the weight of being an interloper sits surprisingly heavy in my chest. I wonder if I’ll ever be woven into this tapestry of gray heads and familiar laughter.

When the instructor takes the stage, the woman next to me immediately begins to knit with gnarled fingers. As old hands deftly knit and purl, knit and purl, a scarf or sleeve appears. I open my notebook and sketch the faces in the crowd with all their folds, jowls, and hook noses. The woman beside me peeks at my work as I glance at hers.

The instructor introduces the guest lecturer, an actor named Julie. Julie is in her late 40s, still pretty, with fluffy bleached hair falling in professionally cut layers around her face. A turquoise knit top cuts to her breasts in a V, emphasizing a long and graceful neck. She sits self-assured and asks the audience with a voice that projects clearly, especially in this acoustically sound room, “Any questions? I’m told this is a crowd very knowledgeable of Thespian pursuits!”

A woman raises her arm. “Tell us a little about yourself?” she asks with a rough graveling voice.

“Is it harder to find roles as you age?” Someone else yells out.

“Betsy, you must wait for your turn. You’re Number Two,” the instructor admonishes.

Pointing an index finger to the audience, the instructor assigns numbers to questions. “I see you, Bob, you’re Number Three. And then Martha, Number Four, Kris…” She counts down to them with familiarity, forming the numbers with her fingers.

I raise my hand, but the instructor doesn’t know my name. “OK, and you there, Number Six.” She doesn’t form a six with the fingers for me. “Everyone, please stand when it is your turn and speak loudly.”

“Well, I was mostly a Shakespearean actor, but now I do more contemporary theater. I like playing someone real.” Julie says. “And, yes, roles are getting harder to find, but it is the life experiences that inform characters. That makes it all more enjoyable when I get my jobs.”

Someone releases an emphysemic cough. The woman beside me has finished half a sleeve and changed to a circular wire-type needle. My eyes drop to my hands, looking to see if they mirror hers. The veins are more prominent than I remember, and the skin is starting to look loose, like a soft warning of time passing too quickly. Not yet, I think. Not yet. I think of famous movie stars and how film could capture their beauty as if that would make them immortal. Yet in real life, no amount of botox, fillers, or facelifts stop the march of time.

“If a play endures, there is a paradox at the core.”

“Theater is art, and art is redemption. It’s alchemic into something beautiful.”

I listen as my ballpoint pen scratches and scribbles onto a moleskin notebook. Pale yellow unlined pages fill with different faces, forming scowls or smiles. I draw a man with eyebrows that angrily push together when someone’s cell phone rings. I draw the hands trying to find the button that shuts off the smartphone’s tone. I draw many glasses and scarves covering necks. Each sketch I do is an attempt to anchor myself to this moment, that person, this place.

The hour is up before Julie gets to my question. The instructor never looks my way, and Number 6 remains unasked.

Instead, Julie ends with a joke. “You want to know what my new play is about? Oh, it’s about an hour and forty minutes.” The room only chuckles slightly. Tough crowd.

“See you next Monday,” the instructor says. “We’ll be discussing The Children playing at The Aurora. Be sure to use your discount!”

Stuck behind a woman with a walker, it takes me a long time to descend the stadium seating and get to the exit. The woman with the walker, one of the eldest of the class, is painfully thin. Her bones look like they would shatter with a single misstep, so I’m patient. Her head comes up to the height of my chin.

Outside, the cool marine wind brushes against my face, a crisp reminder of the world beyond the theater’s warm bubble. Straightening my spine, I pull my sweater tighter and walk toward BART. The faint chatter of the others lingers behind me:

 “You should go to MY doctor.” 

Their voices fade, but their community feels as solid as the brick walls I’m leaving behind.

Waiting for the train, I flip through the pages of my notebook filled with faces whose names I don’t know. The faces stare back as if withholding their stories until I’ve earned the right to hear them.

*    *    *

Orleans Saltos is a Latine writer and illustrator born in New Orleans to Ecuadorian immigrants and raised in rural southeast Louisiana. She has contributed to award-winning books, educational materials, and magazines as a professional children’s book illustrator. She is an active Society of Children’s Books Writers and Illustrators member, serving as regional social media manager. Under the pen name Orleans Saltos, her fiction and creative nonfiction appear in The WriteLaunch, New Feathers Anthology, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, and Blue Earth Review. 

By Kristin Barickman

I dreamt of her two weeks after her death. She took the seat across from me and expressed irritation over the way our table wobbled. I folded a stack of cardboard-brown napkins into a thick square and wedged it under the table’s leg to keep it still. Then I broke the news.

She was surprised to learn she was dead. She didn’t yell at me or cry. But predictably, she couldn’t accept my diagnosis without a splash of skepticism. She asked how she could possibly be sitting there, at that little café table with me, if she were dead.

I studied the familiar lines of her face, that specific arrangement of features I had dedicated to memory before any other; shapes I knew were mirrored back at her as she looked at me. 

“Mom,” I said. “This part of you stayed because this part of you is me.”

*    *    *

Kristin Barickman is a recovering corporate attorney turned writer. She lives in central Illinois with her husband and three young children.

By Tess Godhardt

She hated him. For the last fifteen years, Lucy had avoided any ounce of emotional anguish brought on by her lovers by immediately detaching herself. It was as easy as flipping off a light switch. The moment Lucy sensed she may be hurt, she pulled away. She would set her sights on new conquests and convince herself she never cared about the man she was still tied to. Lucy had become an expert at the defense mechanism, and had reached the level where she had cheated on every single one of her significant others with no remorse. Her rationale? The men had simply not been right for her.

Travis was different. Sporadic therapy sessions, mostly attended by Lucy to deceive those closest to her, persuaded Lucy she was the committing kind. Thus, when Travis got down on one knee, she accepted with little hesitation. A year later, Lucy was feeling less than sure. Travis had just finished detailing his past sexual trysts to her with no prompting. Her heart ached with the thought of him finding another attractive. Her mind flooded with images of modelesque woman with large, perky tits bouncing on him. The thoughts gnawed at her insides like a vulture picking, dissecting, and devouring the guts of its meal. 

A few days later, Lucy lay outside in the Florida sun. Splayed out on the concrete slab in her backyard, she had been sipping on mimosas all morning as a sleepy Saturday brunch playlist echoed in the background. Travis was working inside and periodically checking in on her. Each time he ventured outside, the newfound hate bubbled within Lucy’s stomach and exploded into her throat. He had made her love him. He had forced her into this impossible situation where she either had to learn to face her emotions or get out. Lucy stared up at the light blue sky in a tipsy state, watching the local hawks circle. 

You could hurt him back. This was Lucy’s default. She wanted nothing more than to slip right back into the bad habit. It would be as easy and as comfortable as putting on an old pair of sweatpants. She would no longer be in unfamiliar territory. She would once again have control. But although Lucy’s time with a psychiatrist had been mostly for show, the notion that she needed to be vulnerable and feel her emotions had stuck. Lucy hated that of all the lessons thrown at her, this was the one she felt obliged to follow. 

What is the point of relationships? What is the point of opening yourself up and feeling this pain? Feeling at the mercy of someone else? I could have just kept fucking around and never been hurt. Of course, Lucy’s single days appeared a wonderous shade of ruby. What Lucy’s recollection conveniently excluded were those days her phone was silent, and the nights filled with men who used her for her body.

And yet, her past life had been comfortable to Lucy because it was chosen. She began to wonder how many more unexpected, unwelcome periods of suffering she would have to endure in her next thirty years with Travis. She thought of the wrinkly, arthritic couples celebrated at weddings for wearing their, presumably, years of misery with a badge of honor. 

What a sham. Why force two people to be together forever despite the pain they COULD cause each other in the future that they cannot even imagine at the time they marry? 

That’s literally what divorce is for, Lucy. The mimosas mixed with the sunshine beating down on her all morning had clouded her rationale. Divorce seemed extreme for her current situation. But changing her number, taking off in her Bronco, and moving cross-country . . . now that seemed doable and enticing. 

It would be perfect. I could start all over, forget I even ever had a whore of a husband. Lucy fantasized driving her Bronco through the deserts in Arizona, windows down, music-blaring, Travis devastated at home trying to figure out where she went. Her downtrodden spirits were slowly rising. 

“You okay, babe?” Travis was peering out of the kitchen door. 

Blegh. Without turning her head, Lucy threw up her arm and gave him a wobbly thumbs up. He replied with a proclamation of love and returned inside. Lucy continued to stare at the hawks above-head, wishing she could either join them or feel their talons rip her apart.

                                                                       *   *   *

Tess Godhardt is an attorney who has always harbored a love for creative writing.  When she is not working, she can be found on the basketball court attempting to relive her collegiate glory days or outside throwing the ball for one of her five dogs.  She lives with her husband in Cedar Creek, Texas.

By Kelli Gibson

There is something oddly comforting about a motel. The lobby always greets you with watered-down coffee and the faint scent of cheap perfume mixed with secondhand smoke. Vending machines showcase expired Hostess cakes like a time capsule of childhood. And the useless hum of the old air conditioner fills the silence in a way that feels like home.

The real comfort, though, comes from the people. Everyone here has a story. It isn’t like the Marriott, where you go for vacations or business trips. A motel is for when you have nowhere else to go. For runaways with dark-ringed eyes and truckers who need warmth after too many lonely miles. 

No one ever says much. They nod when passing in the hallway, or at the ice machine. That is all. Because in the quiet, there is an understanding: at a motel, no one needs to explain why they are there.  

*   *   *

Kelli is a writer who has recently rekindled her love for storytelling. She holds a B.A. in Psychology from Bowling Green State University and is currently pursuing a Creative Writing Certificate at the University of Toronto. Kelli lives in Ontario with her husband and their dog, Toto, who has abnormally long legs for a Maltipoo. 

A Memoir by Karla Jynn

At age 16, I met a boy. I stayed committed to him for 37 years, within a conservative Christian faith in a tiny religious enclave. I followed “The Lord’s” rules, had four kids, never drank or used illegal substances, and loved my well-to-do life of work, church services, and extended family. In 2008 at age 54, I got divorced, from both my husband and my religion. I signed up for OkCupid and went on dates with 52 different men over the next several years. One of them was Sam.

The first time I met him, I’d used my underdeveloped navigation skills–my ex had done all the mapping and most of the driving–to make my way from my newly-acquired home in Northwest Philadelphia to The Last Drop Coffee House in Center City. After circling the teeming neighborhood of historic shops and ornately-corniced office buildings, I found a spot and proudly parallel-parked—in only two tries. The Last Drop’s mismatched furniture, graffitied red walls, and layered notes and posters made me feel like an aspiring hipster.

Sam was waiting near a table in the back. I found his shy smile, faded plaid shirt, and long scruffy hair–so different than the buttoned-up, clean-shaven men in my previous life–oddly appealing.  

After an awkward hug, Sam and I sat down without even bothering to get coffee. His quick shoulder shrugs and breathy little laughs relieved my own nervousness. I asked him how he liked to spend his time.

“I’m an online DJ. I do space rock, punk, drone, experimental—stuff like that,” he said. 

I had no clue how those words applied to music. 

During our conversation, I found out Sam was 46, had never married, and didn’t have kids. He asked me about mine.

“My oldest son is a full-time musician with his own band,” I said. 

“What’s his name?”

“Ryan Jynn.”

Sam grinned like a kid and said, “I know him!”

I was surprised, since my son wrote folk and soul music, but thought maybe Sam had been to one of his gigs. 

Our date was short, since I had to drive to South Philly to meet Ryan near his house for dinner. Sam and I had a warm hug, and agreed to get together again later in the evening. 

When I arrived at Ryan’s he said, “Hey, I was coming back from Save-A-Lot and Sam passed me riding his bike home. He told me he just met you!” Then he laughed, shaking his head, and said, “He’s my weed dealer!”

I cracked up, and appreciated Sam for keeping their connection a secret. He had no way of knowing how open my son was with me, and in any case a dealer would never reveal his customers. I couldn’t wait to close the loop with Sam.

“I’m seeing him later tonight,” I said to Ryan. “He’ll get a kick out of you telling me.”

Ryan’s eyes widened as he leaned forward and said, “You may NOT tell Sam I told you! You’re never supposed to name your source!”

Later, I navigated the streets to Sam’s place, amazed at my unexpected adventure. He lived in a row house inherited from his grandma, on 15^th Street near Mifflin, an area I’d never seen before. His home had patches of shredded carpet, lamps with crumbling shades, and a 1920’s kitchen whose one-piece enameled cast-iron sink stood on tapering white legs.

That evening, I didn’t let on to Sam what I knew. But by the third date, Ryan had finally given me permission to tell, and Sam and I had a good laugh about it.  

Dating Sam widened my view; I’d never hung around with someone who took life so easy. He had an engineering degree, but had dropped out of the conventional world early on, and made just enough money tutoring university students. Mostly he rode his bike all over the city, smoked weed, and produced his late-night music show.

I hadn’t watched TV since childhood, but Sam introduced me to South Park and The Vampire Diaries. He also took me to Ultimo, a coffeeshop one block away, with refrigerated glass walls packed with individual beers from all over the globe. And throughout the 18 months we dated, he was fine with me dating other men as well. 

Sam had a rusty extra bike I rode when we went to pick up Chinese takeout at his house. And he came to my neighborhood for dinner sometimes, riding his bike up Broad Street and along Kelly Drive, then winding over steep, rocky trails through the Wissahickon Woods. I’d fix salad and tortilla chips, and we’d hang in my back courtyard, his weed smoke swirling in the darkness.

At about 10:30, he’d strap a wide band with a miner’s light around his forehead, and ride the 14 miles back along rutted trails, the Schuylkill path, and down crowded streets to South Philly. 

At Christmas time, I told Sam about a New Year’s Eve party my ex and I attended early in our marriage. A lawyer colleague of his invited us to their apartment with his wife and a few friends. We sat in a circle in the living room, talking about office cubicles, snow removal, and their dietary restrictions. After a couple hours, I pulled out the mending I’d brought, knowing I’d last longer if my hands were busy. Still, we left well before midnight. Sam thought it was hilarious. 

When a snowy December 31^st came, Sam had a plan. He and I bumped and slid on bikes through the icy city streets from his house up to the waterfront. We arrived before midnight and joined a huge crowd of revelers to watch fireworks bursting over the Delaware River. At the exact right moment, he leaned in and kissed me. 

At 1 a.m., driving home alone, I couldn’t help smiling at my newfound role: a cool mom traveling far afield from that insular little religious town.

*   *   *

Karla Jynn is a 71-year-old emerging writer who left an insular religious community to discover an expansive world outside its confines. Formerly a self-taught mixed-media artist, she currently provides therapeutic support for clients and friends, and is a National Core Volunteer for Movement Voter Project.

By Carolyn R. Russell

Our cubicles are arranged in a circular rather than grid rat maze because she says it’ll work best to foster what she calls a community of empowered individual contributors sharing our expertise with each other in our particular spheres of influence, and we don’t know what she’s talking about because we’re all hourly wagers who have no spheres, just non-viable undergraduate degrees and decent computer skills and bills to pay. Most likely it’s just her excuse to make us come into the office rather than work remotely, because who would she have to play with then? She likes to randomly occupy an empty cube some days, possibly to show how egalitarian her sensibilities are, or maybe because she wants to eavesdrop on our personal lives. Which we never discuss anywhere but the hallway restroom because she has her own executive type ensuite and has never to anyone’s knowledge used anything but. Today she’s installed herself behind the partition to my left, which nobody in their right mind would call a wall, but it’s like she imagines it’s reinforced cement or something, and we can all hear her yelling at someone named Melissa who works on the floor above us in finance. Don’t you dare cry, she booms in this frozen tundra tone. Then she goes on and on about floating decimal points and Santos in the cube to the right of me starts laughing contagiously and I can’t help myself, I start laughing too. Suddenly she’s standing beside me and for some reason I stand too, and she looks me up and down and says, Did you buy those shoes on purpose? and leaves. It’s 9:45 a.m.

*   *   *

A Best Microfiction 2024 winner and Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions nominee, Carolyn R. Russell’s short stories, poetry, and creative nonfiction have been featured in numerous publications. She has also authored four books, including a multi-genre flash collection called “Death and Other Survival Strategies” (Vine Leaves Press, 2023). Carolyn lives on and writes from Boston’s North Shore. 

By Mahmoud Elterawy

He had never found solace in this world, for he knew with a gnawing certainty deep within that he was not fashioned for it. The universe, he believed, was engaged in a relentless, cruel jest at his expense. To him, life offered two paths: one right, one wrong. Whether he believed in a god was a matter cloaked in ambiguity, perhaps even to himself. His existence was a relentless march down the wrong path, every fiber of his being straining against the force that compelled him to live a life antithetical to his essence.

He often mused, “He who knows nothing of fear knows nothing of this world.” And he, without a doubt, knew fear intimately. Not because he was a coward—quite the contrary. There were moments when he seemed the bravest of men. Yet fear, in its most primal form, is the fear of death, and he was well-acquainted with it. Panic would seize him often, and he courted death innumerable times. This intimate dance with death rendered him perhaps the most fearful being in the universe, yet he knew death like an old companion. He yearned for it, sought it as one seeks liberation.

His detachment from the mundane grew so profound that he feared the loss of his sanity, feared the descent into psychosis. In time, he embraced psychosis willingly, a rebellion against the hollow veneer of human rationality he so despised. To be truly free, to be authentic in a world steeped in hypocrisy, he realized he had to surrender to madness. In his presence, one felt the unsettling possibility that it was not he who was mad, but we. He wept like a child and fought with the valor of a hero. Some saw him as a tragic figure, a squandered potential. But not I. I believed in him.

*   *   *
Mahmoud Maher Eltrawy, writing under the pseudonym Titoxz, is an Egyptian writer who explores dark, existential themes. His work delves into the human psyche, suffering, and the fragility of existence, driven by his personal experiences and internal struggles. Mahmoud writes in English, believing it provides a more authentic way to express his complex thoughts. Although a graduate in medicine, he finds his true calling in literature, focusing on the darker aspects of the human condition. Residing in Egypt, he continues to practice medicine while dedicating himself to his writing.

 

By D.E. Miller

Like weary butterflies, the yellow cottonwood leaves drifted and wandered in their descent as the breeze swept them from their branches and scattered them into the river and onto the ground where four people had gathered near the riverbank. Two older women embraced a younger woman who stood with her eyes closed, her face tilted toward the brilliant, cool sky, while an older man and a younger man stood with their faces turned downward toward the yellow leaves at their feet.

Then, the younger woman and man walked to the river’s edge. The woman held a tiny paper boat she had fashioned and in which she had affixed a small, pink candle. The younger man turned his back to the wind, struck a match, and lit the candle. Gently, tenderly, the younger woman knelt and placed the paper boat into the water. Then, they all stood at the river’s edge and watched as the little boat wobbled in the slower water near the river bank until the current began to pull it away. The little boat drifted only a few yards in the swifter current before the breeze snuffed its struggling candle.

“That makes sense. It really does, doesn’t it?” said the younger woman.

In silence, they watched as the current caught the little boat and swept it downstream, rocking and twirling in the eddies. And then it was gone. 

“Oh, I hope the river knows where to take it,” said the younger woman.

The younger man said nothing and pulled the younger woman close. She leaned against his shoulder. Together, they gazed downstream as the cottonwood leaves silently drifted away.

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D. E. Miller is a high-mileage, blue-collar writer living in Nebraska. His other works include the poetry and vignette collection, “The Road and Other Liars,” and the science fiction novel,“Until the Rescue Ship Arrives.”