By Juleigh Howard-Hobson

Before the burial, she lit a candle, praying that his ghost would show up. That this wasn’t the end. Haunt me. Whispered to the room. Haunt me. Whispered to the candle. Haunt me. Whispered to somebody who wasn’t there. Haunt me. Nothing. After a while, she blew the candle out. 

                                                              *   *   *

Juleigh Howard-Hobson’s work can be found in Amazing Stories, The Deadlands, Under Her Skin (Black Spot), Vastarien: Women’s Horror (Grimscribe) and other venues. An active member of the HWA and the SFPA, she lives in the Pacific Northwest, in a suitably haunted 140 year old house by the sea.

Creative non-fiction by Zan Miller

It begins with popping the pimples on my breasts. 

Three of them in a line from one boob to the other, like some imitation of a constellation. My breasts are softer than they used to be, sag further the more I travel into my 30’s. The mirror shows a droop, creating an underside my small, perky chest never had before. Time didn’t take my body; I sacrificed it to my two children and gained a wobbly, stretch-marked tummy to boot. 

The shower spits hot, but not for long. I work fast because our hot water tank sucks, shampooing my mullet, exfoliating my pale skin. I don’t bother shaving, gave up on that a year back when we stopped affording razors. The water chills before I can rinse my conditioner. 

I grab my towel from over the heater vent, preheating it the only way I can because we don’t own a washer or dryer. Outside the half-covered window, ice swaths the ground like Swiss cheese, holes melted in the white. I think of covering it, remembering the trauma of the tom peeping on me when I was 11, but the sunlight is nice and the only way someone could see me was to come really close to my trailer and like, why would someone be that close anyway?

I rinse my conditioner first, in the sink, enduring the ice cold against my sensitive scalp. 

After, I wash my face with leftover anti-aging face wash that isn’t mine. I embrace aging, grateful for the thought lines on my forehead because how many hours of deep thought must have formed those? I would rather think than have a flat forehead. Like laugh lines! Who can hate a line joy itself carved into my skin, a reminder of all the past times I smiled and laughed and lived? 

The face wash smells like seaweed and mold, but it says “natural” and wasn’t expired so I continue scrubbing my face. Dead skin pills under the scrub pad, small white balls of evidence to how little I scrub my face. I rinse my face in icier water than before because I’ve used enough to reach that deep pipe water in the subfreezing Arkansas ground, which I know is better for my skin, but I’ve already been so refreshed by rinsing my thick-ass hair for 10 minutes in my stained bathroom sink so I’m lamenting my shitty water tank and lack of hot water. 

Face clean, I apply lotion, a highlight spray, and let it dry.

Next, I work on my hair. Styled in a short mullet, it curls just at the base of my back, not quite to my shoulders. The top fop brushes my eyebrows, but I prefer it pushed back. I shave both side of my head from temple to just behind my ear, giving the mullet an effortless shape. My mom HATES it, calls it the epitome of “white trash,” but she doesn’t understand that’s what I’m going for. 

I leave the hair mess for later and step into my bedroom—the master of the three-bedroom trailer. Built last century, not well-kept or cared for, but it was stable and cheap enough for my small family to afford. The quirks and trifles are tolerable, even though we only have three burners for our four-burner stove and the thermostat is temperamental and there’s mold and mildew in places we can’t reach, and we don’t talk about the utility room (or enter it much). We share the place with many different creatures, daddy long legs and Chinese beetles, ants, the occasional mouse. A small dog named Holly Dolly. Two kids under 10. The usual bugs and creepy crawlies. 

I pick out complicated lingerie with its multiple straps and soft cups. Seriously, there’s like 15 straps and four hooks. Where does my head go—oh, right there. I get it on, somehow, and snap the last snap. Leaning forward like Natasha Lyonne getting a new bra in Slums of Beverly Hills, I try to position my floppy boobs in the unshaped cups, a battle of squish and softness. Satisfied enough, I slip on the matching bottoms, the whole get-up red and black and doing nothing for my cool-toned alabaster meat suit, but it’s sexy enough and my other lingerie is still packed somewhere. 

Covered as I prefer to be, I next drip a jasmine scented body oil across my skin. My hands smooth over my lined stomach even floppier than my breasts, the skin almost folded over my hip dips. It’s the only part of my body that really bothers me, but only hygienically because it sweats. 

My body has crafted a narrative, a backstory, several lives, footprints, ripples, an effect on the world. It lets me clean my baby-dog’s accident when she gets too excited. It functions well enough for me to play in the snow with my kids and still make hot chocolate after. It groans and protests like a bratty teenager, my lower back and hip and nerve pain burning my whole body, the Sacroiliitis from some mysterious source I’ve just lived with for eight years. Sometimes I can’t do things because, while other bodies adjust if you just keep trying, my body responds kinda like a broken Jumping Jack Nutcracker whose legs go up to his ears but pop out of their little sockets. 

Sitting in a chair heated by a round blanket colored like a tortilla shell, I drip extra oil on my feet. Footcare always held a certain holiness to me, like Jesus might be proud or something, which is why I didn’t do it often. I hold the same belief of deities as I did of the government: of course they exist, better they aren’t aware of me. Or, if they’re aware, then at least not perceiving me, ya know?

I don’t want anyone more powerful than me to pick me for anything. Power strips autonomy, another solid reason to avoid it. Women give up their bodies and voice for breadcrumbs of power; let me scream into the void with my body nobody wants.

White socks cover my over-oiled feet as I slip on the Victorian-style shirt with fluffy sleeves and collar. It sinks over me, some of the lingerie’s straps peeking from the deep neck and I could almost forgive Shein’s garbage. I pull on a pleather skort that’s black and short and more garage from Shein. I know the impact of fast fashion, but I’m also aware of my lack of options. 

The last thing I do before I message my husband is apply Carmex to my lips. And that’s just step-one of my seduction technique!  

*   *   *

Zan Miller (she/they) lives in Jonesboro, AR with her partner of 11 years, two fully formed humans she birthed herself, and Holly Dolly, her puppy raised by cats who thinks she’s a wrecking ball. She is a nonbinary, disabled writer with 22 years of practice and believes it’s high time she turns all that practice into something practical. She’s been published in Ignatian and Waffle Fried Literary Magazines.

By Betty Stanton

I 

Her mouth smells of liquor and wind. She wears strength like a jacket—borrowed, too big in the shoulders—the rain echoing on concrete like prophecy.

Inside, coffee is bitter as blood on bitten tongues, iron-strong. He says she walks funny. She says nothing. Cigarettes clenched between fingers that won’t still, she folds herself into the hollow of his voice. 

He is whispering about God again. She doesn’t celebrate holidays, just bodies—crossed ankles, eyes that don’t blink. She wants to be wrapped in arms, not questions.

Outside, the wind is wet. She can’t taste the bitterness unless she swallows it.

She swallows it.

Her mouth becomes a cathedral of smoke.

II

Soaked, she sits with elbows pressed to her knees like prayer. Neon buzzes above her, spitting violet onto the sidewalk. 

In the dark, something is trying to die.

A homeless boy pushes a baby carriage past. He says nothing. She nods anyway. The cold presses against her lips like a question she tries not to answer.

He is whispering about God again. Once, she thought she would be something loud. A prophet. A hunter. A myth with teeth. Now she watches the light walk across windows, listens to the beat between someone else’s words. 

She knows when people are afraid. She can feel it in the way they flinch when the wind kicks.

III

Inside again with one boot heel clicking and the other scuffed to silence, her reflection in the glass looks like a distant cousin – the blurred charcoal eyes, the iron-hard set of her lips. 

He says something about biochemistry. She laughs quietly – the sound of something tipping over inside her ribs. Inside her pocket she fingers a matchbook with fingers that won’t still but does not light anything.  It’s just the gesture now, the ritual. Like prayer. Like swallowing your own name.

He is whispering about God again.

Outside, the rain has stopped. The streets steam and forget her. 

*   *   *

Betty Stanton (she/her) is a Pushcart-nominated writer who lives and works in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in various journals and collections and has been included in various anthologies. She received her MFA from The University of Texas – El Paso and holds a doctorate in Educational Leadership. She is currently on the editorial board of Ivo Review. @fadingbetty.bsky.social

By Madlynn Haber

They keep calling me Regina, but I’m pretty sure that’s not my name. It’s a terrible thing when you can’t remember your own name. I don’t want to admit it, so I answer to it when the ladies in charge of me call me Regina. Some call me Reggie. One calls me Gina. The big woman from the islands just calls me Ma. I know I’m not her mother. I did have children. Two boys who are now men. One of them manages my money. He tells me I have enough to keep paying for this place, but apparently not enough to go home, or even out to lunch. I’d like to just go home.

Someone else is living in my house. They tell me that person’s name is Sherry. She lives there with her boyfriend Fred. I don’t know who these people are. My granddaughter comes to visit and asks me if there is anything in my house I would like to have. One time she brings me my wedding album. There are people in some of the photos that I no longer recognize. I guess my granddaughter is friends with that Sherry person, or maybe she is Sherry. Names are the hardest thing for me to recall.

The other son, the younger one, is in charge of my treatment here. They started out treating me for bruises I got when I fell down in the living room. I was on the floor for four days when the older son found me and started yelling at me for being so careless. He asked me why I didn’t call for help when I fell. There was a phone in my housecoat pocket. I said, “Who would I call?” 

So, they put me in a hospital to recover from the fall and that was the end of it. They never let me go home again. I went from the hospital to this place. The boys blame it on the doctors. The doctors say the people who care for me here, the ladies, think I need to stay. The ladies say it’s my sons who want me here. Nobody cares that I want to go home.

When the younger son takes me to the doctor, they call me Mrs. Walters or maybe Mrs. Waters. I had a husband once. I remember how he smelled like smoke and pine needles. I lost him somewhere. He disappeared, and then he died. I went to his funeral. I can remember the large photo of him on display next to his coffin. I remember our wedding. Someone brought our wedding album here for me to look at. 

I can’t figure out how to find my way home, convince someone to take me there or get whoever is in charge of this place to let me go. I just try to make the best of it. I watch the sun come up in the morning through the big window on the other side of the room and I watch the darkness come in at dusk. In my dreams, I know who I am and where I am. As soon as I wake up, I forget who I am, and I just pretend to be Regina.

*    *    *

Madlynn Haber is the author of Seasons of Sorrow and Joy (Metaphysical Fox Press, 2025). She lives in a cohousing community in Northampton, Massachusetts. Her work has been published in Poetica Magazine, Buddhist Poetry Review, Eunoia Review, Months To Years, Orenaug Mountain Poetry Journal, and many other journals. Online at http://www.madlynnwrites.com

By Tracy Royce

The snub-nosed revolver reclined amid the camisoles, bashful at the back of the drawer. Satin swathed its pink pearl grip. How it yearned to be held again, its cylinder caressed, each vacant chamber filled. Then the officers arrived with their rough hands. And the coarse embrace of the evidence bag. 

                                                                   *   *   *

Tracy Royce’s words appear in Bending Genres, Blink-Ink, Does It Have Pockets?, The Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and elsewhere. She lives in Southern California, where she enjoys hiking, playing board games, and obsessing over Richard Widmark movies. You can find her on Bluesky. 

By Soramimi Hanarejima

These days, the story fairy is always so very busy, flying all over the city to visit everyone who needs new stories to make sense of their lives and the world, and in this day and age, that’s a lot of people. So when I see her in the park and finally get to ask if I can apprentice with her, I’m surprised that she grants my request—and even more surprised that she then launches right into the basics of casting stories, voice chipper as she avidly explains how her wand automatically detects what sort of stories a person needs, then synthesizes meaningful narratives that fit the bill—all in a matter of seconds. The upshot of which is that much of her time is spent getting into people’s homes at night when there isn’t an open window or mail slot or cat door she can go through. Because stories, she tells me, have to be cast when people are asleep since the sleeping mind puts up little resistance to stories while an alert mind can tear apart even a story it desperately needs with reflexive skepticism.

After accompanying the story fairy for a week, I’ve gotten a decent grasp on becoming invisible, shrinking, going down chimneys with a controlled descent and waving the wand with the right motions so its magic reaches different parts of the mind. Then I’m on my own with the fairy’s spare wand until she can get me a new one from the wand shop, which is only open on Tuesdays. In addition to the wand, I also carry a scroll that lists people who need stories along with their locations. Conveniently, it too has automatic features, like opening right to the name of the person I’m closest to and checking off the name once the wand has worked its magic.

Soon, I know firsthand just how busy the story fairy is. No matter how many people I visit each night, the list seems endless. So I try an experiment: casting stories on people who are spaced out, daydreaming or on autopilot. After each casting, I consult the scroll, and most of the time, the name it opens to is checked off! Encouraged by these results, I continue the experiment throughout the afternoon.

When I float over a backyard and find a kid lying on the grass staring up at the sky—Bozarc Milimar, according to the scroll—it seems natural to wrap up the experiment by storycasting on this young cloudspotter. Then, the moment I finish waving the wand over him, I’m suddenly whisked away into the woods beyond the yard. There, I find myself face to face with a tiny woman in a white silk gown, looking miffed as she hovers before me. Another fairy?

“I know I should do this while they’re asleep, but there are so many people who need stories,” I blurt.

“They need ideas too,” she says sternly. “That’s what I’m here for.”

“Oh, you’re the muse,” I realize.

“That’s right. And the ideas I grant people won’t stick if their minds are preoccupied by stories.”

“Well, does everyone on this list need ideas?”

I hand her the scroll.

“These are OK,” she says, pointing at various names. 

I get out my highlighter and mark up the list accordingly. 

“How about I focus on these people during the day and work on the rest at night?” I suggest.

“Nice idea, and it didn’t come from me!”

“Maybe just being around you is magic.”

“That’s also a nice idea. If only it were true.”

“I feel like it’s at least a little bit true.”

“That’s sweet. The story fairy is lucky to have you.”

“Thanks, that means a lot to me.”

“Well, I’ll see you around.”

“Not if I stick to these names,” I say, holding up the scroll. 

“You’ll get through those in no time. We’ll have to meet again so I can pick out more names. We can also coordinate schedules so you can cast stories here while I’m on the other side of the river.”

“I love that idea!”

“What can I say. That’s my job.”

And with that, she flits away, leaving me looking forward to our next meeting.

*   *   *

Soramimi Hanarejima is the author of the neuropunk story collection Literary Devices For Coping. Soramimi’s recent work can be found in Pulp Literature, Harpur Palate, Black Warrior Review, and The Cincinnati Review.

By Kate Maxlow

She counts the darkness in you, glass by glass. She scrawls it on invisible calendars and draws crimson circles around the day she can finally ask you: Are you okay?

She knows you are going to fail, so she measures your week in days of glass. Day one, day two. Nothing. Nothing. Day one, day two, day three—time to intervene!

The number of “nothing” days mean exactly that—you get no points for their emptiness. Their weight equals zero, and you cannot divide by zero. You once read that ancient civilizations used “zero” to represent the void—the absence of value. Before that, ancient bookkeepers simply left a blank spot where Something politely excused itself from existence. One day, some clever soul drew a circle around the nothingness. A circle, a cycle, like life and death, birth and rebirth.

What she doesn’t know is that each glass dances through your veins like light. The hexagonal glasses and glinting rainbow prisms pour liquid light to drown the whispers: Your parents never talk about you to their church friends. She wishes you still wore makeup. This democracy smells like wilted flowers. Your body is a size too small for your soul.

The whispers shriek like banshees at a bottomless mimosa brunch.

Like the brunch where you met, where you stared at her until the liquid light replaced enough fear in your blood and you could finally speak. Where you laughed and blushed and said you were a writer who builds sky castles made of glass, esoterica, and moonbeams. She asked what you’d written and you sent her a link, which she read while you casually counted the total number of forks on the table (fourteen), and when she finished reading, she looked at you and that was that.

Now she just looks away as you fill another glass.

There’s nothing she can do. The same fire in you that rages at injustice burns anyone who tries to help. The oxygen from her words only feeds the flames as they dance higher and higher and scream, “Do you dare me to see how high I can reach?” She watches as you grasp at the sun, your waxy limbs dripping onto the scorched earth below, and all she can ask is, “Are you okay?”

But you know you’re fine: last night at the Mexican place, when the waiter asked if you wanted a third glass, you laughed like a responsible adult who makes good choices. 

“Oh, definitely not! Early day tomorrow!”

She does not applaud your restraint. She does not comment at all. She is playing tic-tac-toe on the paper tablecloth with your daughter—the woodland nymph you sculpted together from the moonbeams in better days. Your daughter’s laugh as she wins is a silver charm, a promise that you keep making to yourself. This beautiful girl has existed for nine years and loves how the light dances off the prism glasses you drink from in the evenings. You wonder if one day, she’ll build a tower from those glasses, chasing the light that will turn her to ash. You close your eyes against the image—her body burnt, broken into a thousand shards.

You tell the server you need another glass after all.

Later that night, you build another castle in the sky. Unlike the ones before, woven from linear storylines and future hopes, these castles shine like light and metaphors bent in a thousand aimless angles, infinitely directionless. Where the neat and tidy castles crumbled under the heaviness of the dark, these new castles will surely stand forever.

*   *   *

Kate Maxlow is a recovering school district administrator and former nonfiction writer who now explores the truths only fiction can reveal, often interrogating the systems we’ve been taught not to question. Her stories appear or are forthcoming in Maudlin House, BULL, and elsewhere. She lives in Virginia with her family. She can be found on Blue Sky @katemaxlow.bsky.social or at https://katemaxlow.my.canva.site/kate-maxlow.

By Jacqueline Hyatt

Bugs like grains of brown rice shimmy up braids and bangs to the scalp and drain blood. Hailey’s hair is home to generations of mothers and fathers and babies. School nurse Candice prescribed a special shampoo. Scrub scrub scrub bubbles of poison into the louses’ houses. Squeeze those eyes shut for shower gel and genocide.

*   *   *

Jacqueline Hyatt is an undergraduate at Arizona State University. A member of the Creative Writing Concentration, she writes about the complexities of human relationships, growth, and the consequences of apathy. Her work has been published in Applause and Canyon Voices.

By Angela Joynes

Mum had insisted the mall was a good place to shop for a snazzy dress and hat for Ginny’s wedding. “I’ll need…as a grandmother…”

“Of the bride,” I finished her thought which I often did lately. “But, Mum, I don’t see any nice ladies shops.” The place was polluted by vape shops and Forever 21.

“I know it’s here somewhere.” She sounded peeved. “You know the one.”

Actually I didn’t, but indulging was another skill I was mastering.

Mum furrowed her forehead. “It’ll be beside the place…the cinnamon sugary place.”

“Cinnabon? Look, it’s over there but no dress shop.”

Mum’s new dentures impaled her thin lower lip. Then she brightened. “I know, it’s by the citron place.”

What citron, citronella? An outdoors woodsman outlet?

“Sour,” Mum spit.

“You mean lemons?” Just like Mum to recall a French word from high school but not which dress shop. “The lemonade stand?” The rather excellent enterprise of freshly squeezed lemons, icy, crisp, wafting lemon oil wasn’t here, not for ages.

After two more excruciating laps of the entire maze, upstairs and down, every wobbly step onto or off the squeaking escalator potentially my mother’s last, we finally stopped, thank God, in the T-junction center. Under those unflattering fluorescents Mum looked elderly, utterly exhausted. Disguising my obsessive thought that we could’ve already ordered dresses and accessories for the whole wedding party online by now, I said, “Let’s go.”

“No! We keep hunting. I know that boutique is nearby. I’ll know it when I smell it.”

I sighed. The neurologist had explained the incongruities of memory loss, how Mum might clearly recall long past people and events, that scents would trigger strong memories much longer than touch, longer than my face or my voice, longer than the reserves in my tank.

*      *     *

Angela Joynes (she/her) is a disabled Canadian writer who holds a BA, MD, and Certificate in Creative Writing. Words in The Ilanot Review, The West Trestle Review, National Flash Fiction Day Anthologies, Flash Flood, Fictive Dream, Susurrus Literary Journal, Trash Cat Lit and others. X@angela_joynes @angelajoynes.bsky.social