I told a story at a dinner party. The story went like this: I was in college and I was walking by the light rail line. A man in a wheelchair was on the track. The train was coming. I walked quickly, grasped the handles of the wheelchair, which were worn and had rubber bands wrapped around them, and pushed him off the track. It wasn’t far, maybe ten feet. The man cursed me the whole way and I listened while the train went by. When the story was done my host scolded me. I should never, she said, touch someone’s wheelchair without permission. She was serving undercooked white fish in cream sauce with red wine. Not even if they would have died? I asked. You don’t know, she said. The train could have stopped. You took away his agency. I didn’t tell the part of the story where I was so lonely at college. No one had touched me in months. Four nights a week I shelved books at the campus library full of students who crowded around tables and cried in the stacks and gave furtive blowjobs in the study rooms. I was so lonely I would leave my hands on the sides of the microfiche machines after turning them off so I could feel some kind of warmth. I was so lonely I turned the books facing out so at least the author’s photos would see me. I was so lonely the rubber bands on the handles of the man’s wheelchair felt like a lover tracing the lines of my palms, so lonely his curses hit my face like kisses.

***

Frances Klein (she/her) is an Alaskan poet and teacher. Klein is the author of the poetry collection Another Life (Riot in Your Throat 2025). She is a founding editor of Flight: A Literary Sampler, and editor at The Weight Journal. Klein’s flash and poetry have appeared in Best Microfictions, The London Magazine, Rattle, The Harvard Advocate and others.

We recently published Isabelle Hughes’ breathtaking “Afterward.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) I love the intimacy of this apocalypse, how personal it feels. How it’s the little things that have changed that really affect the narrator the most. What little things would you miss about the dark?
I’d miss the moon terribly. Recently in New York it’s been uncharacteristically clear at night and I’ve been able to see some of the brighter stars, which are usually blocked by light pollution. It reminds me of how small we are and how infinite the universe is. I’d miss that. But I think I’d miss sleep most of all. The way the moon tells us, “go to bed.” Without that separation of day/night I imagine things would get really bleak, like, corporations would make us work longer hours and there’d be an excess of productivity guilt (something I already suffer from). The dark gives us permission to end. That, to me, is its greatest gift.

2) The story ends with the possibility of a star. With, perhaps, hope. Do you think there is hope? Do you think that, if there is, hope is something that should be held onto?
I struggle with hope sometimes — especially these days — and I’m sure I’m not alone in that. Maybe that’s because hope is too conceptual? Too diffuse? Yet, we have to hold onto it. We have to believe in it. We have to find it in everyday things. Nobody is going to get up on a world stage and give us a reason to keep moving forward. It might sound trite, but I find hope in the unexpected places and on the smallest of scales, like, running into someone on the subway platform or reading a particularly beautiful poem (I’ve been reading a lot of Marie Howe’s work lately). A writing teacher once told me if you want to capture something “big” and universal, you do it with the tiniest, most concrete object, like a baby’s sock. I think that’s true in real life, too. Don’t look for hope at a macro level, you probably won’t find it there. Narrow your focus and let it sneak up on you.

once there was night and then we unlearned it, slowly at first, by drawing the curtains and saying things to comfort ourselves like think of all the bad things that happen in the dark. there was a time when this would have even made you smile and I could see your front teeth inverting because of the light through the curtain’s crack.

—

birds disappeared. plants grew indefinitely. fish migrated the wrong way. the roof replacing industry ballooned. remember the weight of a flashlight in your palm? remember: stars, christmas lights, red-eye flights, growing up, getting down, making art, making out, running away, coming back, returning, learning, moon cycles, mood cycles, the bright spray of gunfire, jazz after bed, coffee after dreams, sleeping like you’re dead, seeing, believing, doing what you’re not supposed to, getting away with it.

—

we used to frequent this bar on ellerby street. we drank so much our edges slimed or else our vision slimed, and I asked what’s the difference if you really think about it? and you really thought about it, but shit-kicked by beer, an answer escaped you.

—

too many times I show up in places I don’t belong like post offices and the bar on ellerby street and the house where I lived as a child that I sometimes look in the windows of to see if anything is still there like the cuckoo clock or the scribble on the wall of my bedroom. nobody understands this, especially not the woman who lives here now or her child who sleeps in the low bed with a mask over his eyes and just before the child lifts his mask and sees me standing there and calls for his mother who sees me standing there I think I notice a mark on the wall which someone painted over but still exists and I might even smile.

—

they scrub words from the dictionary — some that make sense (like night and bird) and some that don’t (like width and feature).

—

on our wedding day which is redundant so I’ll just say on our wedding guests arrive in black. they call to ask if we mean black tie to which we say no black, and some say what do you mean by that? which is not really a question. we don’t ask questions anymore because it’s pointless to wonder when the world is all forward motion and they’re changing our calendars from daily to weekly and we know they’ll change it from weekly to monthly. I wear black on our wedding too and so side by side we are like less piano keys and more like a merging. I stare at the overexposed photograph of us, bright except for our figures which are more important than our faces and there is no one else in the picture just like now.

—

we knew we were in trouble when the quality of music changed because before it reminded us of before. they built listening cafes where the light couldn’t get in to help us remember music but it shifted like fuzz on a cassette. imagine removing the bridge from Radiohead’s Karma Police or from Safe European Home by The Clash. whole segments flew away like the birds and with them the reason we’d loved the songs.

everything we could we did in the artificial dark. dinner parties, birthday parties, picnics, we tried to swim in the dark but it was unsafe. we couldn’t get enough dark. I remember eating bony fish in a black room with friends and we forgot, until the end, about one of the guests who we loved dearly but who only spoke when spoken to. we’re so sorry we said really! and she looked at us with her pupils no wider than needle points and said that was the greatest thing that has ever happened to me.

—

we got better at drawing the curtains. we rejected windows and their views.. we made new songs. we think often of birds. all the art incorporates birds: parrots, parakeets, woodpeckers, cardinals, and we invented new birds that we don’t have names for but who we delight in when we see their brightly-colored wings in the foreground of a picture. we tell our children about stars. sometimes in certain lights there is a plane or a reflection and we think is it a bird? but our children see it too, this tiny blot in the sky as iridescent as a gemstone and we wonder. we wonder.

***

Isabelle Hughes is an MFA candidate at Sarah Lawrence College. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in X-R-A-Y Lit, Blood+Honey, Cherry Tree Literary Journal, and Eunoia Review. She lives in New York City but will always call North Carolina home.

We recently published Timothy C Goodwin’s haunting “You Found a Ghost.”

Here, we ask him two questions about his story:

1) This kind of haunting — it’s so heartbreaking. It could happen to anyone. And the narrator’s voice is so wise and kind, guiding the reader through the proper steps to deal with this visitation. Is this gentleness, in part, because they can see themself becoming the ghost in this situation?
When I was a little kid I used to bemoan the fact that my mom put about 6.7 bazillion cat stickers on our Plymouth Voyager. It was so. Un. cool. “It helps me find the car in a parking lot,” my mom said. Cut to me, in college, walking to my car at the University of New Orleans, telling a friend, “It’ll be the Ford Mustang with all the band stickers on it, so I…can…find the car…in…” That was my first (of many) times I’ve realized I am slowly, quickly, unwittingly, wittingly, happily and unhappily turning into my parents. The amount of sympathy I have gained for them grows with every parallel I find myself in.

2) The things we inherit, good or bad, are displayed so powerfully here. Is it because of this connection that the narrator is able to show such compassion to their mother?
Yes: the older I get, the more I feel like my friends and I start to pick up on the things our parents have, emotionally, physically, even financially. I have a friend what recently zoomed with me and joked, “I’m not too happy that every time we get online together, all I see is your dad and mine.” I think I’ve finally come around to realizing my parents are just slightly more screwed-up versions of me. Or slightly less screwed up versions? I think that would depend on who you ask. But people who are still just trying to figure it out. Like me.

Be gentle. Ask where this ghost needs to be. Wants to be. Tell them you’re gonna take them there, wherever they say they’re going—Lydia’s for weekly bridge, “the lake,” their wife—because it won’t be long before they’re off again, slipping between dimensions to inadvertently interrupt someone else’s sleep/basement flooding investigation/attic reorganization. They might even (try to) take your arm, and they might even ask who you are. Tell them. They could use a kind voice: ghosts are the souls that slip off the shovel loads that Nature keeps feeding into the fire at the Center Of All Things, and now float aimlessly, a broken equation, eternally surprised, eternally confused, suddenly finding themselves here—wherever that is—without remembering how they got here, or why, with only the last, distant echo of where they think they should be. Like you: standing in the mudroom, realizing you just walked the dog but don’t remember a thing about it, how your absent-mindedness used to be funny, how you treated it like a kind of party trick, but it’s hereditary, what your mother has, showing up surprised at the foot of your bed or confused in the neighbor’s yard, still looking for dad, still thinking she hasn’t gone to the grocery store, as you gently take her arm, trying to give her a moment’s peace before she’s gone again.

***

Timothy C Goodwin has work included in Gooseberry Pie, Metastellar, Complete Sentence, HAD, Flash Frog, Best Small Fictions 2025, and elsewhere. (@)timothycgoodwin(.com)

We recently published Joy Yin’s brilliant “my mother & I.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) One of my favorite lines (from so many beauties!!) is “if I turn my head, it is only because the painter allows it.” In the universe where the narrator finds themself and their mother, what do you think the painter does allow?
I think the point here is that the painter wants them to be intensely aware of each other’s pain. Both the mother and the child might want to look away, but cannot because they are not in control of their own bodies. The painter allows them to bear witness to each other’s blood and arrows, but doesn’t allow them to interact, to stop the suffering. In other words, the painter allows them to feel and to see, but not to alter the story the painting is trying to tell.

2) I love how the idea of being deer (and not in a “soft, storybook way”) and the idea of pain and things not being meant to change are so intertwined here. Is there any possibility of change for the narrator and their mother in the universe where they are not deer?
The piece is partly about generational trauma, though it is up for interpretation. The similarity of their injuries and the line “we enter the world already hurt” imply that these wounds are passed down from mother to child. Even in a universe where they are not deer (and not trapped in a Frida Kahlo painting), their relationship would remain mostly unchanged. There may be more of a possibility for movement, but it would still be difficult to escape that cycle.

& we are in another universe & we are both deer, not in the soft, storybook way but in a way that feels wrong, like our nerves have been bundled too close together & we are only antlers on top of heads on top of legs. in this universe, we are painted by frida kahlo, which means we have been pierced by arrows & the blood has stained the canvas too soon. there is no moment before the wound. we enter the world already hurt. the pain is intentional, the arrows placed strategically along our sides to convey some kind of tortured beauty. she stands beside me in the frame, close enough that our injuries almost touch, close enough that it’s hard to tell whose blood is whose. i wonder how she looks so composed.

if i turn my head, it is only because the painter allows it. if she looks away, it is because she already knows how this will end. the forest behind us is symbolic, which is to say it cannot intervene. the blood keeps darkening. later, they will say it’s beautiful how closely we are held. i wonder if they can smell the fear in our eyes.

we are too aware of our legs. we are too aware of our lives. we are too aware that nothing here is meant to change.

***

Joy Yin is a writer and poet with three different hometowns. She is the founder and EIC of Lacuna Vox, a youth literary magazine. She loves boba and hopes her words can inspire you to create something new. 

Since you said we were done. Since you walked out with the dog and the French press and the blender. Since you left my text on read and didn’t reply. Since you moved in with a friend who sounded suspiciously like your old girlfriend when I caved and called  you to pick up your Amazon packages. Since you caught me spying on you outside her apartment to confirm. Since you blocked me on Instagram. Since I shredded the rest of your mail. Since you texted me to admit you were staying at your old girlfriend’s place but swore you never cheated on me. Since the sky was the same as it was yesterday, but it seemed different, heavier, ready to drop some great weight. Since I got lonely and swiped right on someone who looked like you. Since you saw me at a bar with your doppelganger. Since I had a few too many Moscow Mules. Since you shook your head as if to judge. Since you wouldn’t stop staring at me over your overpriced Pinot. Since your ex who you said is not your girlfriend got visibly pissed at you for paying attention to me. Since that made me laugh and that made you angry. Since it felt good to make you feel bad but not as good as when I could make you feel happy. Since you left with her, arguing. Since I left alone. Since I took a sketchy Uber home. Since you showed up knocking on my door at two AM. Since I was still up, drunk-watching Squid Games on Netflix. Since it took all my nerve not to let you in. 

***

Donna Vorreyer is the author of Unrivered  2025), To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. She hosts the reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey and is a co-founder/editor of the new journal Asterales: A Journal of Arts & Letters.

The only way I can trace the call is if you keep him on the line. That way I can pinpoint his location before the bomb detonates. Ask him questions. Maybe start with: why? People love to talk about themselves. I bet he’s no exception. Soon you’ll be chatting about, I don’t know, your respective high schools and favourite noodle places. Just keep him on the line. You can perform basic tasks as long as the phone never leaves your ear. (Conversation will get easier. You’ll become expert at small talk: the appropriate follow-up questions, the subvocal please go on hums and huhs.) Eventually, one arm will feel more muscular from holding the phone; the other limp, always by your side. Sometimes, you’ll be tempted to hang up. Enough is enough, you’ll think. I don’t want this bomb to go off, but I have to live my life! You’ll then see me gesturing at you, making a kind of pinching and pulling motion with my hands: stretch stretch stretch. So you’ll ask him about his childhood, and whether he believes in god. He’ll answer, and ask you in return. It’ll be easy, intimate. You’d miss him if he wasn’t always there. Sometimes you’ll think you could end the call and his voice would still echo in your head – but don’t hang up! Keep him on the line! Lives are at stake! You’ll tell him what you look like; you’re much older than when the conversation began. He’ll say he can already imagine you from the sound of your voice. A voice that’s changing, now. Harder to hear than it used to be, and sometimes you find yourself grasping blindly for the right word. He laughs: me too! You’ve heard all each other’s stories, but there’s pleasure in what’s familiar. (I’ll no longer be in the room, watching and listening. I died years ago. My mission lives on in you.) One night, you’ll be in bed, lying sideways – it’s the only position that doesn’t hurt your hips – and cradling the phone. You’ll say: I love you. He’ll say: I love you too. Then, gently, you’ll ask: Do you want to talk about the bomb? But you’ll realise you can’t hear him breathing anymore. It’d been a constant, like the tides, for so long. You’ll sit up in bed and lower your phone. You ear will feel hot and naked without it. In the distance, a small explosion.

***

Martyn Pedler is a writer in Melbourne, Australia. His flash fiction has appeared in Bending Genres, Have Has Had, Flash Point Sci-Fi, and often in Ahoy Comics. He has a PhD in Creative Writing from Swinburne University, focusing on superhero stories and toxic fandom, and also has a horror/comedy screenplay in post-production. You can see more of his stuff at martynpedler.com. 

 Things are functioning, but just barely. The AC is set to High, yet we sweat. We hear the fridge struggling, compressor kicking on and off. The lights flicker but hold. There’s no point in calling anyone. They charge us just to look at it, then tell us there’s nothing they can do.

            Friends call to talk about their illnesses, their procedures. They call to compare medications. The doctor no longer accepts their insurance, they say. Now there’s only the ER. They wait for hours with the magazines, eyes throbbing, tissue over their mouth.

            A man comes to the door, claims to be a neighbor, knows us by name. His daughter is in the hospital, he says, and he needs money quick, but the bank is closed. We’re doubtful, but we give him the cash in our wallets. The detectives tell us we are not the first.

            Bands of feral cats prowl the street. We hiss at them, hope to scare them off, but they only stop, stare. Who do you think you are? their look says. You should stay in your homes. The street is ours.

            Cars slither by, windows open, stereos thumping. Any delay in the traffic starts the honking.

            The things on our screens remind us we’re unremarkable, uninteresting, unattractive: we are not lounging on the beach, we cannot paint photorealistically, our puppies don’t behave adorably – they chew on our best possessions and drop their runny stools. It feels like a metaphor for something.

            On the TV, the program never changes: a naked woman dead in a creek. Then the hunt. Many appear guilty. Very slowly the monster is revealed. It’s one of us. Or: young people, the currently beautiful, scheme to win something they all agree is valuable. But is it?

            We take walks in the cement neighborhood. Odors of things rotting, vents venting gasses, a cloud of something from a construction site. A man revs an unmuffled car, inky smoke billows from the pipe. We are always dodging scooters. Police gather on corners, looking disgusted. Any inquiry elicits an impatient scowl.

            We want to go away, see something else, break the pattern, but we worry about removing the car from its parking space. One of us, upon our return, will have to stay with the vehicle, circle the block for hours waiting for someone to leave. The thought of it is a deterrent.

            We dream. We dream of leaving, of becoming citizens of elsewhere, of pleasant places we can afford, pure green places, where we can walk to anywhere, where our spirits can enlarge, our perceptions sharpen, where we feel exalted, and when we die, we die very old, or not at all.

***

K. A. Polzin’s stories have appeared in Subtropics, swamp pink, Wigleaf, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere, and have been anthologized in Best Small Fictions 2023 and the Fractured Lit Anthology 3, and chosen for the Wigleaf Top 50. Polzin was a finalist for The Forge Flash Fiction Competition.