By Alice Baburek

The darkened sky seeped into the wintry mix of drifting snow and ice. Dripping icicles hung heavily from the grove of blistered pine trees.

Ester Warren blinked several times to remove the fallen snowflakes that gently settled on her closed eyes. A damp chill sank into her spine. The frosty air permeated her burning lungs. 

Where was she? And how did she get to this forsaken place? Alone in the silence of emptiness and long forgotten. Far away from the world she once knew. A world filled with the promise of love and happiness. A world filled with family and friends. 

Ester’s eyes grew heavy. She fought to keep them open. Various visions swirled inside her mind. Why could she not move? Was she injured? Where was the pain? All she felt was the deep, deep cold. It numbed her still body. 

The howling wind intensified. Ester tried to focus. It was as if her memories were jumbled like a jigsaw puzzle. Slivers of images slid together to form a picture. Random clues pushed aside the unknown. And then suddenly they came flooding back. 

An evening drive. A flat tire. Waiting in the frigid weather for help. A stranger seemed nice enough. Or so she had thought at the time. He offered her a ride. It was freezing, and the snow kept falling. Help was just down the road. Could he be trusted? Did she have a choice? With no cell phone service, her options were limited. 

And so, Ester decided to accept the man’s offer. He seemed friendly until he asked questions, she was not comfortable answering. Inside the car, the conversation had waned to silence. The road turned slick, and the snow continued to blanket the fields. 

Ester’s stomach twisted as they passed the open convenience store. She bit her lower lip. The stranger was focused on driving the weathered road. But when they left behind the gas station in the rear-view mirror, she knew it was not by mistake. The act was intentional. He turned and gave her a wink. Shivers ran down her spine. 

The vehicle accelerated. His laugh was deafening. Ester quickly pulled on the handle, only to find that the door was manually locked. And the unlock button could only be released from the driver’s side door. Her heart pounded. An overwhelming feeling of dread spread throughout her trembling body. Tears blurred her eyes.

What did this man want? She just needed a ride. She knew he would give her a ride, but not to where she needed to go. There was no way to escape.

Please don’t hurt me!  Her plea went unheard. The attack was swift. She remembered the pain that seared through her face and then nothing but darkness. 

And now she was alone amidst the forest of evergreen trees. Her shallow, warm breath melted the never-ending snowflakes. She still could not move. No one would hear her cries for help. 

A single tear slowly made its way down Ester’s swollen face. She knew she would never leave this place. A silent prayer for forgiveness escaped her iced lips. 

Suddenly, the snow began to slow, and the wintry clouds began to dissipate. Shards of twinkling stars peeked through the frozen branches. A gentle whisper soothes her grieving spirit. 

It was then Ester let go of her fears—and all that she once knew—and all that she would never know, surrendering to the peace and tranquility calling from heaven above. 

                                                                      *   *   *

Alice Baburek is an avid reader, determined writer and animal lover. She lives with her wife and four canine companions. Retired, she challenges herself to become an unforgettable emerging voice.

By Yimi Lu

“It’s boiling,” Peter whispers across the table, his voice almost covered by the steam between us. The hotpot is a Yuanyang pot, half spicy and half bone broth, and it is always the spicy side that boils first. “You can start dipping your meat.” He nods and lowers his first slice of beef. Once, before we got married, he would smile and wait for the broth side to bubble. We liked to dip our first slices together, holding them up in the air to touch like a toast. That little ceremony is long gone. Now he has already eaten two slices before I start with mine. 

We finish the first slices, then drop in daikon cubes, corn, and tofu. “Do you want any in the spicy soup?” I ask. Peter shakes his head. He is too lazy to explain, or maybe he knows I already know, that vegetables cooked in chili oil lose their taste. The mild broth is now crowded, vegetables bumping into each other like commuters on a train, and I stir them with my chopsticks.

“Do you know Rebecca is going to marry soon?” Peter asks suddenly. “Oh, I saw her Instagram story.” He doesn’t finish. We both know her, yet neither of us has much more to say. Talking about her is only to fill the silence between us.

The spicy side is boiling again. The broth is calm as a lake. Peter drops more meat, as if the half-sentence had never been spoken. I look at the broth instead and ask if he wants to add meatballs. He hesitates, then says he’ll add soup first. I remind him not too much. “Sure, sure,” he mutters, his eyes fixed on the pot.

I watch him pour filtered water into the spicy broth. Is it too much? I wonder, but I hold back. He stops on his own. The broth settles for a while, then he drops the meatballs in. They sink into the red, and I think it might be too crowded, but I let it be. The silence falls between us, replacing the sound of the boiling pot. So I ask, “Did Rebecca start a wedding registry?”

“Ugh, I don’t know.” He scrolls his phone, frowning at the vanished post. I want to tell him not to worry, but I also don’t know what counts as worry between us anymore. Whatever we used to share, worry is no longer one of them.

“Ah, it’s boiling again.” The spicy side suddenly bubbles so hard that it spills over into the broth. Peter stands quickly and tries to scoop it out with a spoon. But it is too late. The broth turns red. I put my chopsticks down. I cannot eat anymore.

*   *   *

Yimi Lu writes about people who don’t say what they mean, in the cadence of Chinese accent. Born in Shanghai, she now pretends to settle in Northern California. She builds code by day and disassembles herself by night to see what remains. Find her at https://www.yimiwriting.com/

By B. P. Gallagher

This, Kelly thinks, will decide it. 

By the end of the day she will know whether this relationship is worth saving. Whether all the hard work to date—and it has been work—was laying the foundation of a deeper, more enduring connection or a monumental waste of time. The fizzling out of a once-promising flame or their rise-from-the-ashes moment. A scenic hike along the stone staircase of Watkins Glen seems a poetic setting in which to make this decision.  

Mike is at best dimly aware of the stakes. He has looked forward to this hike for weeks and considers it just another weekend outing in a more-or-less stable relationship. And what a gorgeous locale for it. 

The afternoon is warm but overcast and the glen less crowded than usual. They pay the fee at the entrance to an aged park ranger in dark grey and park in the lot at the top of the glen. From there they will descend nearly 400 feet down 188 stone steps, then turn around and march right back up again. Kelly will take pictures by the dozens and this will be but another visually stunning memory in her camera roll. The scenery lends itself to nature photography and perhaps, unbeknownst to him, a rekindling.   

Water tumbles down the gorge in a series of burbling waterfalls and pools in bowls carved from the stone by eons of continuous flow. The cliffs that form the walls of the gorge overhang the path in places, their stony faces frowning down at hikers whose feet scatter the pulverized shale piled at their base. A Jacob’s Ladder of steps etched into the wall on one side traces the trough down its length. Each flight descends through an epoch of geological history recorded in grayscale strata interspersed with bands of ferrous red. The steps are broken up by narrow stone landings where hikers pause to rest and take pictures. Clay-colored water puddles in divots in the landings and the air is misty with the spray of waterfalls and the whole place smells of damp earth.

Kelly’s doubts have grown over the past few weeks. Mike’s a good guy, no doubt, and they get along well enough aside from occasional political spats more reflective of gradients in their shared beliefs than contrasting views. And yes, this past year has been one of the happiest and most comfortable of her life. But therein lies the problem: a sense of complacency gathering towards stagnation. He’s a great guy, sure, but are they right for one another? Is this going anywhere? 

Why, she thinks, can’t you ever just let yourself be happy? 

Kelly is taking far fewer photos than expected, Mike notes. She seems distracted, impatient even, so he makes sure not to linger too long over the placards affixed to alcoves in the canyon walls, however fascinating. Some of the placards detail the flora and fauna that populate the park throughout the year; others recount its geological history.

“A Tale of Collision & Erosion,” one reads. The blurb that follows describes the slow seismic violence and gradual degradation by which this natural beauty came to be. How tectonic plate movement buckled the earth’s crust and forced together two masses of formless stone enjoined and later encased beneath a sheet of ice miles thick. How in thawing, this ice sheet and its glacial remnant exposed rifts in foundations comfortably conjoined by that juncture for eons and more, rifts engorged with its retreat and the melt that followed as the Earth warmed and water suspended inanimate for an epoch awoke, first in a trickle, to a stream to an irresistible and implacable flow gushing forth through the eons and which gushes there still. 

About two-thirds of the way down the gorge the trail splits, one path continuing on down the staircase to the bottom and the other leading up to the ridge line. Lover’s Lane, reads the sign marking the ridge line path. That way promises the best views.  

Taking Kelly’s hand, Mike draws her up the path. Past the drop-off to their right the cool clear water chuckles down the stony trough on its eternal pilgrimage. Where the ridge line trail ends a boulder sits prominently beside the overlook. Sunlight slants silver and glaring through gaps in the cloud cover and the gorge stretches out below them in shades of slate and glacial blue-grey water. They take a seat beside it and absorb the scenery in quiet. 

Mike drapes his arm around her shoulders and leans over and kisses the crown of her head. Her dark blonde hair smells of her floral shampoo and a slight tang of sweat and he breathes in her scent and smiles. “Thanks for taking another hike with me,” he murmurs.

“It’s beautiful,” she says. After a moment she looks up into his eyes and kisses him on the lips and leans her full weight against him. A pacifying warmth fuzzes her mind, drives her doubts far afield. It takes her a moment to place it. She feels safe. 

Something has shifted in the posture of this afternoon, but Mike can’t be sure what. Still he has the vague sense that he has done something right and wants to capitalize on it. Picking up a chunk of pointed stone he uses it to etch their names into the boulder, going over the letters again and again to embed them in the stone. He sits back on his haunches and admires his handiwork. Good, but unfinished. Inspired, he takes up the stone again and adds artfully, 4EVA.

“What do you think?”

“I think if college doesn’t work out you might have a future in headstones.”

“Yeah,” he says with a broad smile. “Me too.”  

“Want to take a selfie?” Kelly asks.

“Sure. Then we better hit the trails. My calves are already starting to ache.”

“There’s a shuttle at the bottom if you can’t hack it,” she says with a sly smile.

“I didn’t say that.”

They stroll off holding hands.

Park Ranger Ed Forsett walks the trails at the end of each day with his cordless grinder and his spike stick. The cordless grinder is for chewing gum and graffiti scratched into the stone surfaces of the park. The spike stick is for trash. He makes liberal use of both on a daily basis. Park visitors are prolific in their leavings. 

Thanks to years of this routine, Ranger Ed’s calves are iron. At sixty-two he is proud of his iron calves. In a world of constant change, he prides himself also on his efforts to keep the park pristine. Even as the water erodes away the gorge by degrees imperceptible within a human lifespan he will work to preserve its natural beauty against more brazen alterations.   

Because these tangible signs of human life are more persistent than we think. Who knew? They’re still turning up footprints from prehistoric humans who strolled the mud flats of New Mexico tens of thousands of years ago. Rewriting our species’ history around it, some say. He himself once went and took an RV tour of the western national parks and saw the Puebloan cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde and the Oregon Trail wagon ruts in a single trip. There was graffiti there too, hundreds of years old. And all that before the invention of plastic. 

He spends some time on the rim trails disassembling obtrusive cairns. People love to stack stones, which is fine, as long as they don’t interrupt the trail or scenery. He walks Lover’s Lane last, with the setting sun bruising the western horizon through silver filigreed breaks in the clouds. The boulder at the end of Lover’s Lane is defaced with a new protestation against impermanence: MIKE + KELLY 4EVA.

Not particularly original, thinks Ranger Ed, getting out his cordless grinder. He feels no more compunction over scouring away this leaving than any other. 

*   *   *\

B. P. Gallagher is a social/personality psychologist and Assistant Professor of Psychology and Culture at Nazareth University. His fiction has been published in Flash Fiction Magazine, The Avalon Literary Review, and elsewhere.

By Chaz Osburn

“I work with a bunch of robots.”

“Another bad day at the office dear?” asked Annette, handing Bob his customary after-work martini. “I thought you’d be happier now that they promoted you.”

“Well, the HR department left out one detail during the interview process,” Bob said to his spouse as he watched their three-year-old son, Jacob, move his crayon feverishly across a sheet of paper.

“What’s that, dear?” Annette asked.

“Of the fourteen team members who report to me not one of them—not a one—is what you’d call innovative. When I present them with a challenge, they either just cite the manual or tell me what their former boss would do. What ever happened to critical thinking? Where are the latest ideas? They’re just a bunch of robots, I tell you.”

At that, Jacob looked up from his coloring and asked, “Daddy, can I go to your work?”

“Sure,” Bob replied. “How about tomorrow?”

Jacob had heard his father speak about his job many times and, although Jacob was not exactly sure what an assistant manager of operations did, he was certain that it was important.

The next morning Jacob accompanied his father on the train to the office tower in the city and rode the elevator to the fourteenth floor where his dad worked. 

The boy found plenty of things to keep him occupied. First, the receptionist stopped by to ask if Jacob wanted to help her make copies on the copy machine. He quickly discovered the machine had buttons. Jacob loved to press buttons. 

Later, the accounting director stopped by and took Jacob to the big meeting room, gave him a fistful of colored markers, and let him draw anything he wanted on the whiteboard. Jacob chose to express his artistic talent by creating a large blue shark that was about to swallow a small red sailboat. The director of business development was so impressed he gave Jacob his business card and asked him to call when he graduated from college in about twenty years.

In the afternoon, the company president himself took the boy to the break room and bought him two large candy bars from the vending machine. This surprised Jacob’s father greatly as the president had a reputation as a cheapskate.

On the train ride home, Jacob began to cry. 

“What’s wrong?” Jacob’s father asked. “Didn’t you have fun today?”

“Yes, but I didn’t get to see any of the robots you work with!” the boy blurted out.

                                                                *   *   *

The author of two novels, At the Wolf’s Door and Incident at Jonesborough, Chaz Osburn has a background in the newspaper and magazine business and in PR. His short stories have been published in several print and online publications including Amazing Stories, Sci-Fi Shorts, Alternative Liberties, Every Day Fiction and Altered Reality. He lives in Traverse City, MI.

By KM Baysal

What a foolish way to die, she thinks, as she views her crumpled body from a distance. She knew better than to hike alone with only a few hours before sunset, but her broken heart convinced her there was healing to be found among the trees. What were they arguing about? It seems so long ago, so inconsequential.

She has something that she needs to do, but the words are just out of reach. 

It’s a simple, sweet moment that keeps her here—the first time they kissed after he walked her to back to her dorm on a crisp, fall night. The warm, tentative touch of his lips against hers. Her heart beating so fast she was surprised to find herself still breathing when he pulled away. 

Another, older, memory of reading Goodnight, Moon to her baby sister helps solidify her grasp. The wiggly weight of the toddler in her lap, the milky scent wafting off her as she kissed the gossamer-soft top of her head.

It’s curious that her leg doesn’t hurt resting at such a weird angle. She can’t feel the scrapes and bruises from the rocks that she is sure she crashed against as she fell. The panic that shot through her when she lost her footing is gone, replaced by a peaceful knowing that she can’t recall experiencing before.

She feels her mother now, braiding her wet hair on a hot summer day. She sits between her mother’s long, sweaty legs, head aching from the tugging of the comb through all the knots, the smell of chlorine from the pool tickling her nose and burning her eyes. 

She knows she’s losing her grip on the world, the invisible tether that held her to her body has been cut like the umbilical cord so long ago. 

There was so much to be thankful for. She sees it all now. Tiny happy moments accumulated to form a life. She wasted so much time focused on disappointments she missed all the beauty. 

The memories come faster and faster on a never-ending loop. A whisper beyond her sight tells her it’s time to let it all go. She reaches for herself, but her hands remain empty, grabbing nothing but air and ether.

*   *   *

KM Baysal lives, works, and writes in NYC. Her work has appeared in Does it Have Pockets, Folklore Review, and Inkfish Magazine. Her work was nominated for Best Small Fictions 2025. She can often be found haunting the New York Public Library or cozy coffee shops, tapping away on her keyboard. She is currently working on a fantasy novel. Follow her on Instagram @kmbaysal.

A Memoir by Elizabeth Rose

My brain is like the egg they used to show on VHS in elementary school. Shell cracked against cast iron. The yolk splaying in the pan. “This is your brain on drugs,” the man says. It sizzles. This is supposed to be a bad thing, we can tell. From the tone of his voice. No room for doubt. 

I am sitting across from an officer who is speaking to me about important paperwork. He makes copies. I smile. He seems nice, and I want him to like me, to not realize I am fried egg in my mind. Not because of drugs. I am, unfortunately, definitely not high. Just exhausted and lost, a little confused about the finality of the decisions I’ve made. Is it too late to take them back? Is it too late for the plane to turn around, cross the ocean again? My brain is yellow, a single cell rolling around a rough pan while the whites start to burn and stick to the edges. Two days on planes and sleep not since Tuesday last that I can remember. There are much harder ways to do this, much more dangerous and courageous that require more faith and resilience but the truth is when tired I am terribly weak. I am soft insides of egg, my outside one collision from cracking. Life is pan, hot, scalding, unbuttered. I cook quickly. Beg to be scrambled or flipped, to reallocate the heat somehow.

I am going to see my boyfriend soon. I don’t tell the officer that because he is more likely to like me if I seem single-ish. I feel single-ish. Fried-egg brain doesn’t remember how my partner hugs me. It has been a very long time of time zones making our todays and tomorrows different. Will we kiss when we see each other again? I wince. Are we worse than strangers?

I think I miss him? What I really miss is what this officer is doing for me: being nice to me, helping me, not making me do something alone while my brain sizzles on the life-pan. Imagining me as someone I am not. Someone full of potential and enthusiasm. I was when I made the decision. But the me here, confused and tired, in desperate need of a change of clothes, she is signing paperwork agreeing to miss the birth of her niece, to miss PopPop, who said he’ll miss me, and I could tell he meant it, from the tone of his voice, his speckled hand on my wrist when we last spoke. This woman agrees to watch friendships unspool like snagged sweaters, crop tops by Christmas. She agrees to be out of sight and off their minds. She has emptied her bank account and left her lease and abandoned her job and shed most belongings and none of that matters except that there is no turning around now, is there? And forward is terrifying. Forward is crack-me-open. Forward, unknown, but please be better than his America, forward is what I just signed up for, under the influence of something more potent than jet lag or drugs. 

Intuition, the little nagging voice deep in my belly, whispering up the pipes into my throat until I speak it myself. It would be worse if I stayed, it says. It would be a bad thing, I can tell. From the tone in my voice. 

*   *   *

Elizabeth Rose (she/her) is a writer from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her academic work has been published by Duke University, Georgetown University, and The Herald-Sun. She won the F. Scott Fitzgerald Short Story competition while serving as a Lannan Fellow for creative writing at Georgetown. Her creative nonfiction appears in In Short. Find her on Instagram: @elizabethrosewrites.

By Leah Mueller

My owner decided to take me for a long spin down Route 66 a month and a half after her husband died from cancer. She’d crouched at the poor guy’s bedside for days, playing John Prine and Alice Coltrane tunes while mopping his forehead. He lay unresponsive, wasting away into the rollaway hospital bed.

Personally, I thought it was too soon for her to embark on such an ambitious adventure. She has always been impulsive, launching herself forward when she should be taking time to pause and reflect. Or grieve, for Chrissakes. Since I’m a Camry, I never complain. A turn of the key and I roar to life, every goddamn time. It’s my job to do as I am told. 

Of course, she had to do the trip backwards. LA to Chicago instead of the other way around. Part of it was because she lives in Arizona. She wanted to get started immediately. Also, as a lifelong contrarian, she liked to do the opposite of what she was told. 

I was afraid she’d get lost. Signage on 66 sucks. The road winds like spaghetti. I watched without comment as she labored up a mountain towards Oatman, Arizona. Lots of folks skip that part of the route. It’s treacherous as hell, with blind curves and steep drops that would terrify an Indy 500 driver.

She gripped my steering wheel and stared straight ahead without blinking. Obviously, it wasn’t time for me to protest. Non-cooperation on my part would lead to her demise. A pair of close-together deaths would just be too tragic. The time to kick up a fuss would’ve been at home, in the driveway. Too late now.

Two hours later, she reached the summit. Oatman was deserted, as it always was after 2 p.m. The only store had shuttered for the day. A cluster of wild donkeys stood in the gutter, braying. Every sidewalk was littered with crumpled piles of donkey feces. The shit looked like it had been there a long time and would remain for quite a while longer. 

Not a person in sight. A sudden wind gust rustled through the dry sagebrush, making a high-pitched, whistling sound. Then the street became eerily quiet, like an empty stage waiting for the curtain to go up.

My owner cut the engine so she could examine the scene more closely. She wandered across the street and peered into one of the shop windows. This gave me a bit of time to allow my engine to cool down. I felt glad for the rest. In a few minutes, we would need to get moving again. 

 My owner squinted at the sky. Her face wore its usual stoic expression; eyes shrouded behind her sunglasses. She was a tough one, for sure. We were two of a kind.

It was all an act, performed for nobody’s benefit. In an hour, I would shepherd her to a cheap motel. I’d rest in the parking lot while she lay alone on a hard mattress, staring at the wall. There, in the darkness, she’d let the tears come at last. 

*   *   *

Leah Mueller’s work is published or forthcoming in Rattle, Writers Resist, Beach Chair Press, NonBinary Review, Brilliant Flash Fiction, New Flash Fiction Review, Does It Have Pockets, Outlook Springs, Your Impossible Voice, etc. She has received several nominations for Pushcart and Best of the Net. One of her short stories appears in the 2022 edition of Best Small Fictions. Her fourteenth book, “A Pretty Good Disaster” was published by Alien Buddha Press in 2025.

By SM Reine

I’m a time traveler now, though I didn’t used to be. I knew the way the world was in the moment where I stood. I could tell you which buildings stood at which corners—they had always been there—and when I looked outside the window of a car, I saw cars that looked like mine. Everything was right. 

But it was hard to stay there, in that moment, with time dilated out so that I lived moment-by-moment and second-by-second. 

If you close your eyes, you can feel the beating rhythm of the world.

If you close your eyes too long, you are carried on the pulsing heart-rhythm of sunrise, sunset, getting up too late, reading terrifying news, watching the sun fall, sleeping restlessly, having nightmares about abduction, waking up when the sun hits your eyes, doing nothing for hours, feeling afraid of other humans, falling asleep too late, sweating in your bed, until you wake up again, and sleep, and wake, and—

Time constricts.

You travel.

For me, I was carried on the slipstream for months, for years, from a hazy Before Time to where we are now.

The cars weren’t what I expected anymore. They came from the future. Round lines yielded to hostile geometry. The future-headlights burned my eyes. If I looked inside, the dials and buttons became touch screens, which was never what I had expected. 

(They didn’t used to tell me the future would look like that.) (They never warned me everything would happen by subscription.)

Where once there were fields stood buildings: ranch land turned into a warehouse, a park turned into storage units, an empty stretch of highway flanked by the seventeenth tire store and another identical coffee shop. Rurality grown into endless suburban sprawl, all the exact same shade of desert-tan under smoke-orange skies.

Everywhere I used to walk became private property with fences and signs, and I couldn’t walk anymore, so I tried to go back.

I thought school would still be the same—that it would make sense. It was still classrooms in a building and you learn things. But I brought text books from the past (I was supposed to download that) and I wrote things by hand (like a caveman) and my teachers were on websites (submit through the portal) and, most confusingly, I was surrounded by children.

The children are robots. Their research questions are answered in a few summarized lines by networks they access through permanently attached devices. Their worth is determined by statistics. Grades, yes, but also likes, views, comments, subscribes. 

They look the same, smile the same—they don’t have house parties; they don’t have houses. I’m not sure who was taking care of them while I was in the slipstream. I didn’t help them. Did anyone help them?

I thought, “I’ll get used to this.”

The slipstream will let me go. I can stop. I can make this my time.

I wasn’t always like this, either.

But now that I travel, I can’t stop hearing the rhythm of the world, or stop seeing the spinning colors—with the pulse of night and light, seasons rolling into seasons, years becoming decades—and I’m still rooted in some distant place that no longer exists—with a modernity that will always confuse by comparison—and what was once old has been forgotten; what once was new has become old.

I’m a time traveler now, and that’s what I’ll always be.

*   *   *

NYT bestselling author SM Reine writes fantasy from the soggier corner of Nevada, supervised by a dog with more legs than brain cells.