By Lynn Kozlowski

On rare nights when nearing sleep, I still foolishly recall an old episode, again testing its power over me. Decades ago, in our early months together, when you were wanting me, you also still desired this captivating, noncommittal older man. You secretly sought his bed while we were planning our lives together. You two are fresh from sex, and I feel angry, humiliated, and pathetic over your love and lust for him. These nights the calm I need to sleep burns away.

You begged me to forgive your finished affair. I did, but, as you expected, I still cannot forget.

*   *   *

Lynn Kozlowski has published in The Citron Review, Molecule, The Zodiac Review, 50-Word Stories, Every Day Fiction, The Dribble Drabble Review, Bright Flash Literary Review, Friday Flash Fiction, The Quarterly, The Malahat Review, and failbetter.com. He has a volume of short pieces, Historical Markers (Ravenna Press). He is based in New York State, USA, but spends a great deal of time in Ontario, Canada.

By Oliver Cubillos 

Today starts just as it always does, except when it doesn’t: a woman is taking me home, so I’m told, and as she starts my engine for the very first time I chirp with glee—there are some errands we must run, she tells me when we’re on the road together at last, including but not limited to: an oil change, a fresh coat of paint, a scrub to my windshield, and a new set of tires; and when that’s all done, my new owner tells me I have a new name, that she’ll call me Shirley, and together we spend that afternoon roaming gray peaks and valleys and hills, listening to the squeak and whine of worn rubber on gravel, and it’s here where I honk and beep to my heart’s desire; when we stop for gas for the very first time, I watch the sky roll over my back; when we return to the street, I sing contently with oil slick on my lungs—I’ve come to discover there’s great excitement to be found on the open road, and for the first time I see such lovely sights (vistas and meadows and turnpikes); the woman has a set routine, she tells me, and together we’ll go from home to work to home to store to work to home; there are rules to follow and of course I abide by them (I’m obedient and resilient, factory-made)—she treats me well, for when I stumble and scrape my bumper on the curb, she coos from the driver’s seat and reminds me that I can feel no pain (I’m only made of metal and steel), and I know she loves me because it’s then she recites: we’ll sweep all that away, that rust and grime and, come tomorrow, you’ll be clean and good as new—and it’s only when I come to rest at last in that dusty garage, and the woman taps my hood one final time before she goes inside for sleep, that I blink away cobwebs and dust, and suddenly there’s a great hollow husk in the dark shell of my body, and I wonder: if only I, myself, could take control of the wheel…like a guttural punch, I remember I’m only an automobile; though I have a name and a voice, I have no heart, and when, tonight, slumber eventually finds me, no dreams will ever come. 

*   *   *

Oliver Cubillos is a writer and filmmaker from Southern California. He recently graduated from Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts with a BFA in Media Arts Production and a minor in literature. 

By Barry Yedvobnick

There were no sonograms in 1952. As the auditorium lights dim, I open my eyes and glance toward the stage. Mothers learned about complications like the smack across their newborn’s bottom. It’s framed by burgundy curtains. During your first minute, my obstetrician and nurse placed you on a table. The acoustic shell is maple, your favorite hardwood for sound projection. They examined your right hand, and I heard the words—developmental defect. Walking on stage, you pause beside the piano. Frantic, they tried to calm me. Spotlights rise and one hundred applaud. What’s wrong with her? Missing a pinky and ring finger? You touch right hand to heart and bow. Alone, as your dad waited elsewhere, I screamed his name. Dad takes my hand like he has for thirty years, interlocking our fingers, and you sit. Oh my God, can you fix her? Your eight fingers produce the exquisite refrain of Canon in D by Pachelbel. They brought Dad in, and I couldn’t speak, so I pointed. I study your hand and recall your struggles to master the modified techniques. He turned to the group surrounding you and demanded to know what was happening. You stand and bow.

*   *   *

Barry Yedvobnick’s fiction is forthcoming at Literally Stories and appeared recently in The Phare, Sky Island Journal, Neither Fish Nor Foul, 10 by 10 Flash Fiction, Wordrunner eChapbooks, and elsewhere. His nonfiction writing received a 2025 Georgia Press Association Award. A retired scientist, he narrates stories for AntipodeanSF radio shows. http://www.chillsubs.com/profile/barryyedvobnick

By Ken Poyner

It is difficult to explain to a child why the loose spiders he catches in the corners of his room should not be mixed in with the spiders purchased for next week’s spider loaf. To him, a spider is a spider. His senses have yet to learn fine distinction. Eight legs are eight legs. Every web is gossamer. He delights in the morsel, imagines adding it to the family larder. He is too young to judge gradients of capture. Make a game of it. Tell him his spider is special, not for spider loaf, but tastier if he eats it alone, raw.

                                                                        *   *   *

The latest of Ken’s twelve collections of poetry and flash fiction is “Science Is Not Enough,” speculative poetry.  He lives in the lower right-hand corner of Virginia and is married to a world champion female power lifter. He spent 33 years herding computers. See him in “Analog”, “Asimov’s,” “Café Irreal,” “Blue Unicorn” and another hundred or so places.  www.kpoyner.com.  

 

 

By Mike Lee

At eight o’clock in the morning, the first summer thunderstorm arrived, pelting the corrugated metal awning covering the aging porch. The porch, painted light blue and flaking, exposed the oak planks.

The screen door opened with a screech of rusting springs, and a young man stepped out, his feet in black Doc Maarten’s boots creaking on the aging oak planks.

Not tall, or small; fat or thin, just nondescriptly normal, a man who could pass into and away from a crowd barely noticed, and when otherwise, quickly forgotten; a nondescript man/boy in transition from youth to adulthood without notice. 

While jogging to his car, he pulled his black motorcycle jacket over his head toward the car parked on the curb next to the crushed gravel driveway. 

It was a dark blue 1983 Mercedes station wagon that Dad bought at a bankruptcy sale in the aftermath of the 2007 financial crisis. The station wagon was missing the chrome on the driver’s side, and the upholstery had stains, but the Mercedes ran well, although they had to drive to Asheville for repairs. 

He was a kid then. A young family owned the house, and the belongings were being auctioned off by their creditors. They had kids, a dog, a cat, and a nondescript brick house with five bedrooms and two stories. Dad remarked that the house was as shoddy as the garbage mortgages the parents took out to pay for it. Cheap rewards get you nothin,’ he said, and the other bidders near him nodded.

Fuckin’ good farmland gone for this shit, one of the men remarked, after spitting out a small stream of tobacco juice.

The only item on auction that interested Dad was the station wagon. He slid his fingers over the roof, gentle as feathers.

Fuckin-a, I didn’t realize they built these.

Dad motioned to the auctioneer, an older, rotund man wearing a gray Stetson. 

I want 200. Stetson man nodded and made a gesture. Dad walked over to him, pulled out a pair of Franklins, got the papers signed, and received the keys.

Years later, his father admitted that he had obtained the Mercedes for so little on a no-bid basis because the auctioneer owed him money from a card game.

As they drove away, they passed the family. Two girls. One boy. The mother was blond. The father’s light brown hair was thinning.

When he was in fifth grade, the boy learned the meaning of the word stoic and realized that was who they were on that day.

As the rain subsided, he wondered what eventually happened to that family. Did they start over? Break up? Or pass through the years as apparitions of their former lives, haunting the brief years they spent outwardly wealthy, though unknowingly, overwhelming, leveraged.

When he arrived in Weaverville, he stopped at a café to get an Americano and write in his notebook. 

The counterperson was a black-haired Goth with a narrow face and nose, with gray eyes, and was distracted while attempting to take his order. They kept glancing out the window at the Mercedes station wagon.

He knew why. He has been coming by the café every Sunday for a month. They never say anything, exchange only the rote language of the service person and the customer.

There is no other acknowledgment. Eyes never meet.

After getting his Americano, he found a red upholstered booth with a painting of flamingos on a velvet backdrop, set against a lakeshore. This booth was always the same one because Sunday mornings are always slow at the café.

He hung up his leather motorcycle jacket and sat.

He began writing. Sometimes, he observed the counterperson, their arms crossed, staring through the window at the blue Mercedes station wagon parked at the curb.

                                                                   *    *    *

Mike Lee is a writer, photographer, and editor at a trade union in New York City. His work appears in or is forthcoming in Waffle Fried, Lowlife Lit, Wallstrait, Panoplyzine, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Bristol Noir, BULL, Drunk Monkeys, and many others. He also has a story collection, The Northern Line. 

By GJ Welsh

Back in 2025, one person was born every three seconds.

By 2030, it was one every 3 days.

In 2035, he was the only one born. It was the first time The Guinness Book of World Records had an entry for the Youngest Person Alive next to the oldest. The picture of him as a baby was placed next to an old Japanese lady, who was the first to live to 150 years old. There was no print edition that year; the cost of printing it outweighed the sales price.

The following year, no babies were born, nor the next, nor any year following.

Adam was not only the only child in his class, but he was also the only child in his school. The previous kid had moved to a school where he didn’t have to play catch with himself.

He had a teacher to himself, a physical education teacher, even a janitor followed him around making sure it was clean around him. And that he still had a job.

When he reached the age of fourteen, his parents sat him down, not to explain the facts of life to him, but to break the news that he would be the last one left.

On his 120th birthday, he buried his father in the backyard next to his mom. He had no way of knowing what he had passed away from. The last doctor died 10 years ago.

Adam was in perfect health; he figured he still had a good 10 years left. So he decided to start a hobby.

Every day, he tried something new to see if it would stick. He painted, he sculpted, he gardened. He baked, he tried to play guitar, and then he decided it was no use; he had no one to play guitar for.

The next day, he set off after placing a flower on each of his parents’ graves.

He walked for a whole day before he found signs of life. An old garbage tip that hadn’t been added to in close to 20 years by the looks of it. Deep in the detritus, he found an old comic book and read it to a squirrel who did not seem interested in a story read by the last man alive. He found a woman’s pink knitted hat. He put it on.

Suddenly, Adam felt like dancing. “Shall we?” He flung out one arm and glided over the trash of humanity; he imagined the woman who owned the hat. Her name was Brooke, like the river; her laughter filled his mind. She twirled as he raised his arm. Oh, how her hair glittered in the reflected light of the broken glass that shredded his bare feet. 

They danced until the sun set. Then they walked hand in hand toward an old farmhouse. She told him stories about her grandmother. They were funny stories, about how she used to throw Brooke into the air when she was little and of the cakes she baked every birthday, with sugar icing the color of her favorite hat. He had never known such joy.

Brooke made him grin, even though he no longer had teeth to show off; it felt good to stretch his gums. It had been years since he had last even thought of smiling.

That night, he made a fire from an old couch in the farmhouse and he and Brooke held each other as the flames consumed their bodies.

*   *   *

GJ Welsh is a copywriter with a manuscript and a bunch of awards for his writing from the Clio Awards, Cannes Lions, Loerie Awards and more. He is from South Africa, but currently lives in Karachi, Pakistan. His work straddles the fine line between mythology and reality.

By Tim Conley

I used to date this girl who had to have a nap every afternoon. Thirty minutes every day behind a closed door: that was the rule and there were no exceptions. She allowed a little teasing about it, to the extent that she smiled about it, but the rule held firm. The first time she stayed at my place for the weekend, maybe a month or so after we started seeing one another, she surprised me by insisting on a room to herself for the nap, door closed. Not to be disturbed under any circumstances, I said with my ominous announcer voice, and she smiled, because she always smiled at my voices, and said: that’s exactly right. We once took a trip together to Cuba and she exiled me from the hotel room for half an hour every afternoon, during which time I either read a book by the pool or at the bar or went for a walk. 

There’s something odd, when you think about it, in how, as we grow accustomed to another person, we begin to question what we accepted so readily, or even so eagerly, when we first became attracted to them. It’s as though we’re maintaining some mysterious balance to a shifting ratio between degrees of familiarity and degrees of strangeness. Amid the heat and rum and time unmeasured except by that strict routine of naps the thought of this ratio introduced itself and lingered. When we came back from Cuba, I returned to my questions about the naps. Would it be so terrible to miss one, now and then? Maybe I could try joining her for the nap one afternoon? She smiled and shook her head.

Well, my use of the past tense is probably not that much different from the ominous announcer voice: a coming change is implied. It happened on a weekend when she was staying at my place, a Saturday afternoon just over a year into our relationship. The door to my bedroom was closed and there was something I suddenly felt I needed from that room – I have since forgotten what it might have been, but of course at the time it seemed important, or at any rate important enough to justify the intrusion. Quietly it could be done, I convinced myself, because no noise had ever disturbed that sacrosanct nap: not a thunderstorm, not a car accident just outside the building, not the time I dropped a glass bowl in the kitchen.

I turned the knob with the gentlest determination. Before the door was open, my mind flashed a wild array of possible scenes, but nothing like the one that I discovered. I was not in my bedroom but in a bustling lobby of some kind, more spacious than my entire apartment. A tremendous chandelier hung between two intertwining staircases, up and down which people in extravagant dress –sequins, bow ties, turbans, feathered boas, top hats– were making their way. Lush carpeting added a decadent warmth to the general dazzle. People were lining up at desks, sitting and chatting on couches, revolving through doors.

Stupefaction lured me forward a few steps but before I noticed that the doorway through which I had come was no longer behind me I had begun to observe more and more bewildering details: that seated old woman with the weasel perched on her shoulder was singing a duet with the animal; the vexed man with such enormous feet that he could not fit them into the elevator; those uniformed hussars were laughing at how impossibly entangled their beards had become. 

The rest is too much to tell in full and it would make no sense, given in any detail. Rather than tell of the dancing skeleton chamber and the hurricane of diamonds and the tiny concierge who is himself the master key, I will stick to the broadest outline of my life since my arrival at the hotel on the glacial cliff, though simply saying as much as that will make the point that there is little to say that will be coherent. 

Not long after my arrival, I was received as an employee at the hotel, where I have served ever since. No job title could capture the range of duties I have performed and no exact duration for the long, long time I have been performing them can be given. The place itself, if it can be called a place, has always been as changeable as the guests who come and go. I have mixed martinis for viziers and shoveled the shed skin of dragons into furnaces. I have detected, at certain moments, certain resemblances to the hotel where we stayed in Cuba, but these are doubtful and fleeting. Once in a while I encounter a guest or staff member who reminds me of some friend of hers, or of her imperious mother, whom I had only previously seen in photos. Most of the time, if it can be called a time, I accept the unknown as I find it from day to day, and I suppose that I have become more and more gladly accepting of it. The terms familiar and strange have no serious meaning here. No ratio troubles me in my work.

Do I miss her? I don’t know how to answer that. It’s true that I have never seen her here and long ago gave up trying to find her napping in one of the thousands of suites, yet I have come to appreciate that she is everywhere. 

*   *   *

Tim Conley’s most recent fiction collection is Some Day We Will Look Back on This and Laugh. He lives in St. Catharines, Ontario, in Canada. 

 

By Thomas O’Connell

We are a family where a child went missing. No matter what achievements we may accomplish – art show awards, track and field ribbons – there will always be people who, when seeing us in the supermarket or at the public skate at the local rink, first think of the absence. Perhaps we do too.

We are a family where a child went missing, disappeared years ago. Ran away? Wandered off? Abducted by aliens or a serial killer? I wish I could tell you, I wish that sort of omniscience was something that I could offer you, but I cannot and so you will have to be content with the unknowing. Welcome to our world.

Today is moving day for mother. She is finally leaving the family house. When father died, she pleaded to stay for another cycle of holidays. It was the house that they would never move from, though couldn’t really afford to keep up, and so they missed the real estate spike a few years ago that would’ve rewarded them handsomely. In time, it became a burden to us children, one more child around to pitch in sure would have helped. But they were not there to contribute or persuade or field phone calls at one in the morning about squirrels in the walls. If they had still been around, mother and father likely would have moved years ago. But they had to remain in the house just in case the child came home and they insisted on keeping their landline (since the number was the one that the child knew) even when we convinced them to get a cell phone. The children kept paying for both phones.

Moving the furniture out to the rental truck, the very last thing – the very last – that is moved is the black rotary telephone, unplugging it from the wall at the bottom of the stairs in the living room. I sit on the bottom stair and pick up the receiver, listening one last time. No voice speaks to me. I can barely remember the voice and it must have changed by now anyway. No dial tone either, just space – the unknowing.

*     *     *

A librarian living in eastern Massachusetts, Thomas O’Connell’s poetry and short fiction has appeared in Bending Genres, Paragraph Planet, Hobart, and The Los Angeles Review. He is a former poet laureate of Beacon, NY, who has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, as well as having a miniature story appear in Best Microfiction 2024.

By Bethany Bruno

He used to make her omelets on Sundays. Mushrooms, green peppers, cheese grated thin. He called it his specialty. He poured coffee into her cup before his own and kissed her forehead through the steam. She used to think that meant love. The whisk against the bowl, the scrape of the spatula, the sound of him humming while she sat barefoot in the kitchen. Love had a sound back then.

Now the whisk means she is late.

He comes home at six. Always six. She has fifteen minutes to get the roast on the table before the sound of his key turns the air small.

She slices the meat and remembers a line she once read on the back of a church bulletin: Anyone you give the power to feed you can starve you too. She did not understand it then. She does now.

The baby is nine months old. The house shines. Her English degree sleeps in a box under the bed between birth certificates and old wedding cards. He told her she did not need it. “Your job is here,” he said. “Raising our family.” She agreed because belief was easier than wanting more.

When the roast comes out dry, he looks at her across the table. His fork scrapes the plate.

“You’ve been home all day,” he says. “You couldn’t keep it from drying out?”

She swallows what rises in her throat. The taste burns.

After dinner, she washes dishes until her hands wrinkle pale. Through the window, she sees their reflection. Him in the chair, her behind the glass. She dries her hands and turns off the light. The reflection disappears.

In the mornings, she packs his lunch. Turkey on wheat. An apple. A note folded into quarters small enough to vanish if he ever stopped wanting them. The kitchen smells of coffee. He eats standing up. He leaves crumbs. Always crumbs.

By noon, she scrolls through job listings. “Five years experience required.” “Proficiency preferred.” Her cursor hovers over Apply Now. She imagines pressing it, imagines her name entering some bright system where no one knows it belongs to him.

When the baby naps, the house goes still. She sits in the quiet and imagines the taste of salt. The ocean she has not seen in years. Sushi with too much wasabi. A drink poured by her own hand. She imagines someone asking, What do you want? and meaning it.

In the mirror above the sink, she barely recognizes her own face. The lines around her mouth do not belong to laughter.

At night, he reaches for her. She stays still, her body quiet and distant. His breath slows. She listens to the space between them and wonders how long she has mistaken silence for peace.

On the refrigerator, a grocery list curls at the corner. On the back, she once scribbled the line again.

Anyone you give the power to feed you can starve you too.

She reads it now like scripture.

She thinks of every meal she has served. The hundreds of plates she set before him, her hands trembling from exhaustion or apology. Her grandmother used to say, A woman’s love will feed a man until she forgets to eat. She wonders if hunger runs in the family.

The next morning, she sets the table. Plates, napkins, coffee. She makes his sandwich, but this time she takes a bite. Just one. Just to see what it feels like to taste something first.

When he enters, she smiles. “I tried the turkey,” she says. “It’s good.”

He frowns. “You’re eating my lunch?”

She shrugs. “I was hungry.”

He stares at her as if hunger were defiance. He leaves without kissing her cheek. The door closes behind him. The sound lands inside her chest like a small, clean break.

She waits for the car to disappear down the road. Then she locks the door from the inside.

The kettle screams. She pours herself a cup and drinks it slow. The heat spreads through her chest. The taste is sharp and real.

She sits at the table where sunlight falls in narrow bands. She opens her laptop. The screen wakes. Her fingers hover above the keyboard. Then she moves them. Name. Address. Resume. The cursor blinks like a pulse.

Apply Now.

Click.

The sound is soft, but something shifts. The house feels different. The kettle cools on the stove. The wall clock ticks in steady rhythm. Outside, wind moves through the trees, dry leaves skating along the glass.

She does not know what comes next. What he will say. How she will pay the bills. She only knows she is breathing easier than she did yesterday.

In the afternoon, she steps into the backyard. The air smells of soap and damp cotton. She pins the laundry to the line and watches it sway. The fabric catches the light. For a moment, she closes her eyes and lets the sun touch her face.

She imagines another kitchen years from now. A chipped mug. A small table. Her child older, her own laughter softer but still hers. Dinner without fear.

Back inside, she empties the sink. The counters are clean. The roast can burn tonight.

Let him starve.

She eats the rest of the sandwich she started that morning. The bread is soft. The turkey tastes rich. She chews slowly until she feels full.

                                                            *        *       *

Bethany Bruno is a Floridian author and amateur historian. She holds a BA in English from Flagler College and an MA from the University of North Florida. Her work has appeared in more than a hundred literary journals and magazines, including The Sun, McSweeney’s, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, Brevity, and The Huffington Post. A Best of the Net nominee, she won 2025 flash fiction contests from Inscape Journal and Blue Earth Review. She is the winner of the 2026 Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest. Learn more at www.bethanybrunowriter.com.

By Huina Zheng

Silence began to cry again. Ling pulled the quilt over her head, but it slipped in anyway, sighing, murmuring, sobbing between the layers of cotton until fatigue dragged her into another world. In that place where the border between visible and invisible blurred, silence became another kind of sound: the breathing of shoe soles, the singing of mosquitoes in dreams, the gasping of walls. They floated around her body, brushed her skin, slipped into her veins.

The Chinese New Year’s Eve dinner began. Father, mother, three siblings, grandmother, and the seven from the uncle’s family next door crowded the living room.

Two large tables. The baby cousin’s cries. The aunt’s humming. A tangle of voices. Ling stirred her bowl of white rice, her teeth working mechanically. She wore a sweater of Chinese red, once her sister’s. The sounds of chewing and swallowing filled her ears, louder than any conversation. Grandmother farted, startlingly loud amid the noise. Her seven-year-old brother said, “The smelly ones don’t make a sound; the noisy ones don’t smell.” Mother’s face darkened; she was about to scold him, but since it was Chinese New Year’s Eve, she only glared. Ling ate faster, emptied her bowl, picked up the last few grains. Everyone turned to look at her. Mother’s eyes, sharp as blades, warned: Don’t make me hit you. Ling forced a smile, but a grain of rice clung to her lip. They didn’t understand why she wouldn’t eat meat. Grandmother placed a chicken wing in her bowl. Just as she lifted it, the air quivered, then silence screamed. She set the wing down and stood. As she turned to leave, the chatter followed her like needles against her back. When she closed the door, she had already turned into a hedgehog.

The TV sketch from the Spring Festival Gala crawled through the crack beneath the door. The lamp gathered her in its arms, stroking her gently. Ling turned the pages of a book, her eyes chasing the words until they filled her sight. She wanted them to leap into her ears, but they took her hair for swings, her arms for slides, her thighs for trampolines. They laughed, bright and wild. She didn’t understand their joy. Silence grinned and began to expand. Its arms propped up the ceiling; its body swelled like a balloon, covering every wall. The words trembled. She opened her mouth, and they rushed in, thrashing, biting, until she began to murmur. The sounds crawled up from her heart, through her throat, between her teeth, and rolled across the room. 

Like wind singing through a dense forest.

  *     *     *

Huina Zheng holds an M.A. with Distinction in English Studies and works as a college essay coach. Her stories have appeared in Baltimore Review, Variant Literature, Midway Journal, and other journals. She has received four Best of the Net nominations and three Pushcart Prize nominations. She resides in Guangzhou, China with her family.