The Little Prince is tired of sunsets. He’d rather watch the sunrise instead, because he never appreciated the dawn or beginnings when he was young, but now he’s old, and endings frighten him, although this isn’t a story about endings. The Little Prince is now old enough to be a Little King, and sunsets bore him, he’s seen enough.

But this isn’t a story about sunsets. It’s about a little boy who has grown up and sees hats like grown ups do, a story about roses, and joy and color red, about the warmth that rose once brought to his planet, inside him, the smell of spring and hope and happiness. It isn’t about that worm that looked like a leaf and made him throw away the rose, because the rose needed him, demanded his attention, his care, his time. The rose wanted too much of him and he couldn’t cope with such a burden.

This isn’t a story about his aging parents. It isn’t a tragedy that unfolds before his very eyes and he stands there, hands tied, the chorus that fills the silences in ancient plays, but nobody pays attention to the chorus, the plot is elsewhere, and everyone expects a happy end. He sings and sings to warn the audience, because he sees clearly now that he’s a Little King, because reality hit him and things aren’t as simple as he once thought, only nobody hears, and he’s dead tired, he gives up, he looks the other way, then he forgets time, the time they’ve wasted, the time he’s wasted. He misses the old times, back when the world was someone else’s business, oh, how he’d rather see swallowed elephants instead of plain hats.

But this isn’t a story about hats. Although trouble started after he saw them. This is a story about a fox who felt lucky she’d met the Little Prince, because after he was gone, she had the color of rye that would always remind her of him. It wouldn’t be just another color, it’d mean something to her forever. Now that the Little Prince has become a Little King, now that he’s grown up, everything reminds him of something he couldn’t keep, and nostalgia physically hurts, now that he feels like an unwilling vampire, old enough to miss too much, roses, people, places, seasons, worlds gone, and he now believes in the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, and he envies the Little Prince he once was, the clarity of the empty slate that was his mind.

But this isn’t a sad story. The Little Prince sees the hats, but he can paint them, color them, and make believe they’re hope. He can’t even be certain if he can blame the hats or if he saw them after all loss, but one thing he’s sure of is he doesn’t enjoy sunsets like he used to, the older he gets the more they bore him, and he runs away from sadness, he moves and moves and moves to catch the sunrise, because he isn’t defined by what he’s been robbed of, by the love he couldn’t keep, by that time he couldn’t take care of the rose or his parents. This is a story about the good times they had together, that keep his heart warm and his mind haunted. This isn’t about him at all, it’s about all the happiness he once held in his hands, about all the sunrises he’s witnessed, but now everything reminds him of something gone.

***

Mileva Anastasiadou is a neurologist, from Athens, Greece and the author of “Christmas People” and “We Fade With Time” by Alien Buddha Press. A Pushcart, Best of the Net, Best Microfiction and Best Small Fictions nominated writer, her work has been selected for the Best Mirofiction anthology 2024 and Wigleaf Top 50 and can be found in many journals, such as the Chestnut Review, Necessay Fiction, Passages North,and others.

We recently published Mandira Pattnaik’s brilliant “How to Lift Your Bottom.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) This story is told in reverse, revealing itself (and the narrator) in layers. When you conceived this story, did you always picture it being told in this way, or did you consider a more chronological sequence of events at any point?
I remember being tired, bored and hopeless on the day I wrote this piece. It was not the kind of mood I am usually in. Everyone has one of those days from time to time. I’m usually very diligent, and take pride in my adherence to my simple life and routine, nearly marvelling if a day goes without a hint of action or thrill. I am that kind of person–easily domesticated, so to say, haha! So that was the zone I was writing from: happy but tired, content but missing something. One does, as a thinking human, try to resolve this state of mind; ask oneself–what exactly is causing me to be this tired, and this hopeless? That is definitely a reverse engineering kind of process. So yes, the piece was in reverse from the very beginning–I never considered a chronological, linear sequence.

2) As the story unfolds, we see the narrator has options for her choices throughout the day. And yet — does she really? Or is she only offered the illusion of choice?
Um–I honestly did not consider this! This reminds me of thought experiments. Thought experiments can blur the lines between philosophy and critical thinking by forcing us to confront seemingly paradoxical scenarios, challenging what are our multiple options and, out of those, what was the choice one made? Ultimately this may lead to deeper philosophical inquiry. Does she have options? In going deeper into this, I think she’s only offered an illusion of options. She merely sticks to her basket, of what cards she has been dealt, without really feeling sorry about her situation, or repenting her choices. In any case, an abundance of options would make it more difficult to choose, particularly when the end-outcome cannot be substantially different.

Swear. 

Before that, roll over. Cover your bottom. Juggle your weight on all fours. Climb out of the creaky bed. Be irritated, or sad, or drained, or hungry—or all of these.

Before that, close your eyes. Those eyes, he fell for them, said they were pretty, he needn’t see them now. You don’t think yours are pretty. Or his are. Pretty is a word for damsels. In distress. Eyes aren’t pretty. They are, at best, calm, or solemn, or gentle. This time, you’ve decided to be gentle. He is above, you’re sprawled below.

Before that, eyes open, your breaths heavy, jaws clenched, coupled until we part, you count. Count what? Something countless. Like minutes? Breaths? Laps in a pool? Waves hitting the shore? He reminds you of a shark in an aquarium. Sharks have brilliant night vision and hunt only at night. Backs of their eyeballs have a reflective layer of tissue called a tapetum, which helps them to see in low light. But only the docile ones can be tamed in an aquarium.

Before that, scrape the bottom of the urn that has the remaining boiled rice your in-laws saved for you. Eat clumsily because you haven’t all day, with bits sticking on the sides of your mouth and bits on the floor. Observe seven large black ants queuing up towards the rice grain near your toe. He has been fed well by his mother—fish head curry and pulse soup, a smattering of crisp thinly-sliced pointed gourd. He must be sleepy. You must eat the leftovers, too meagre to support your growing body, and then clean the dishes.

Before that, wonder if the bullying you were subjected to at the Amazon store where you work, and in which your supervisor flew off the handle, was brought about by bowel. They say bowel movements affect moods.

Before that, as the barrage of insults continued, be patient. Patience like the bottom of the sea, where, at the lowest levels, waves don’t exist, and the seabed is a sanatorium of marine beings long lost. Remember lost things: your childhood, your youth. Remember that in the depths, even a murmur is a shout.

Before that, early the previous morning, pre-dawn, before the sparrows are yet to begin bickering perched on the clotheslines stretched between two bamboo poles, read your life like a closed book because you have reached the end. Hear his snores. Watch him sleep like a lumber dog, because he’s not going early to work as you do. Read the room for mutual stakes—what’s in this bargain for you? Smell the moisture hanging about—a concoction of sweaty work-clothes, fermented beer stored under the bed and a bottomless garbage pit at the back of the house. Clasp knuckles together, lift your arms above your head, notice the stiffened peaks showing up from underneath your tee. Stare into the full-size wall mirror, and feel tired thinking why your face looks so dull even though the mini plums you had last night didn’t cause you indigestion and why the garden outside looks so full of life like it has turned round from the bottom of a discolored deep wintery sleep.

***

Mandira Pattnaik is the author of “Glass/Fire” (2024, Querencia Press). She serves as Contributing Editor, Vestal Review and Columnist, trampset. Her body of work can be found at mandirapattnaik.com

I take off my clothes for him. Imagine what he will tell his brother. The one I dated. Am I pretty? My body asks. I am 19. I suck in my stomach, slip into the water. A hot tub at a hotel on the edge of the sea. Santa Cruz. Waves slam against the shore. Moon ablaze overhead. I take off my
clothes for him. Later, we will tear through the hotel hallways in nothing but towels. I will eat a
rib from a tray outside someone’s door. I will hurl myself into a juniper bush, claiming it can
hold me. I will sink all the way down to the hard dirt earth. I take off my clothes for him. He
doesn’t look at my body at all. Just my face. He stares at me, and everything about him makes
me want to curl inside myself. My ex-boyfriend’s brother. My ex-boyfriend’s twin. On a Friday
night in Santa Cruz. I am 19. I take off my clothes for him. My problem is: I know I want him.
Not want but want. I take off my clothes for him. But I don’t really want to. I want to watch him
take off his clothes. I want to curl inside myself. Or maybe I want to run. Leave him here while I
climb back over the hotel wall. Dig my toes into sand. Feel the salt waves lick my shins. I don’t
run. I slip into the water. Santa Cruz. 19. Waves slam against the shore. I take off my clothes for
him. Am I pretty? Later we will tear through the hotel hallways. Later, I will eat a rib from a tray.
Later, the juniper bush. Later still, we will sleep together. Not sleep, but sleep. I will not sleep the
whole night. Staring at the ceiling. Thinking of my body and what it’s capable of. My ex-
boyfriend’s brother. My ex-boyfriend’s twin. Moon ablaze overhead. I take off my clothes for
him. Maybe I want to run. Dig toes into sand, feel salt waves lick shins. I take off my clothes for
him. Santa Cruz. 19. My body asks. I will not sleep. I take off my clothes for him. I take off my
clothes for him. I take off my clothes for him.

***

Allison Field Bell is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Utah, and she has an MFA in Creative Writing from New Mexico State University. She is the author of the poetry collection, ALL THAT BLUE, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. She is also the author of two chapbooks, WITHOUT WOMAN OR BODY (Poetry, Finishing Line Press) and EDGE OF THE SEA (Creative Nonfiction, CutBank Books). Allison’s prose appears in Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, SmokeLong Quarterly, DIAGRAM, The Gettysburg Review, The Adroit Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Smartish Pace, Passages North, THRUSH Poetry Journal, RHINO Poetry, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. Find her at allisonfieldbell.com

Her last year of high school, the thought of someone wanting Gabrielle made the image of her own body, naked and golden, rise up inside her mind’s eye. Her handful-sized breasts, the slope of her thighs—once shameful, now a pride—and then between her thighs, waiting darkly, her soft, thrumming prize. 

Everyone wanted her. She was famous at the high school, her name looped across the bathroom stalls. She generously gave forth in bedrooms and on sofas, once in a tent, once under the bleachers, another time in the light booth of the high school theater while rehearsal was going on. That’s when people said she crossed a line. That’s enough, Gabrielle, they said. People have work to do. People have to sit there. What about “Our Town?” they whined. We don’t want to think about you naked, they said. Or even partially disrobed. We don’t want to think about your fingers on the lightboard, your hair lashed over the guardrail. We don’t want to smell the smells, we don’t want to hear you sigh. 

From that point on, school was off limits. It was decided. That part of her life was done. Other students went on about whatever it was they went on about, lockers and exams and letter grades that went home to parents who would congratulate or else ground them, and all the while Gabrielle felt herself walking out into the depths of an ocean. An ocean of her own accord. Somewhere deep and fascinating and beyond. An ocean filled with phosphorescent eels and glittering, winking schools of fish and also the mysteries of the dark, the misshapen globes of the deep dangling their own tiny lights before their eyes. Gabrielle smoked imported cigarettes and wore silk robes, even when she was alone. The golden body dangled somewhere just behind her eyebrows. The golden body spun like a helix in her mind. 

***

Melissa Benton Barker’s fiction appears in Longleaf Review, Citron Review, Best Small Fictions, and other publications. She has edited fiction at Lunch Ticket and CRAFT. Melissa’s debut flash fiction chapbook, Beauty Queen, is available at Bottlecap Press. She lives in Ohio with her family. 

In Alice’s stories the mother always dies. Or is dead already. Or is absent in a way that suggests, to the perceptive reader, that she is likely dead. There are mother figures, maybe a step-mother or a grandmother or an aunt or a motherly neighbor, but no actual live mothers by the end of her stories.

In one story, the mother, an old woman, dies in a plane crash, and the tragedy is that when the list of victims is published, they misspell the old woman’s name and her daughter, who is estranged, reads the names while waiting for a haircut and abstractly mourns all the losses before asking her stylist for bangs like that French actress in the movie about the war.

In another, the mother, who is young and beautiful, dies of brain cancer, and the death is quick, painless mostly, and the family, all four kids and the father and the extended family and the neighbors, gather around her in the hospital and one at a time they name a thing they hope is in heaven, only the youngest daughter, who is just eight years old, can’t help but list two things she hopes are waiting for her mom: olives and meerkats.

Alice has a soft spot for the story about the taxi driver, the one where a daughter is on her way to the airport and the taxi driver asks where she’s going and she decides to lie and say she is going to visit her mother, even though her mother is dead, and then the driver says his mother is dead too, and the narrator says she’s sorry for his loss and they sing a song together as the snow falls outside.

The mothers in Alice’s stories die in many ways. There are the sudden deaths–the plane crash, two car crashes, a wrong-place-wrong-time murder, an escalator accident, a choking death. There are the illness related deaths–four types of cancer, a heart attack, an undiagnosed syndrome following an insect bite in the islands off South Carolina, kidney failure, dementia. There are the assumed deaths, absences that have gone on so long that the family or the lover or the parents or the spouse or the daughter can no longer cling to hope, can no longer hear the sound of her voice or imagine the way she looks when she’s sleeping or when she steps through the front door carrying too many grocery bags for one trip.

And then there’s the story where there’s just no mother at all. No death, no loss, no estrangement, no grief, no searching, no longing, no anger, no questions, no memories. Just a general absence so inconspicuous that even Alice sometimes forgets what the story is really about.

***

Emily Rinkema lives and writes in northern Vermont, USA. Her writing has most recently appeared in X-R-A-Y, Variant Lit, Flash Frog, and Mudroom Magazine, and she has stories in the Best American Nonrequired Reading, Bath Flash, and Oxford Flash anthologies. She won the 2024 Cambridge Prize and the 2024 Lascaux Prize for flash fiction. You can read her work on her website (https://emilyrinkema.wixsite.com/my-site) or follow her on X, BS, or IG (@emilyrinkema)

He lines the Furbies’ computer corpses up on the half wall between the kitchen and living room of his one-bedroom apartment. He starts with two, then it’s three, then four. Each time you go over, there’s another one, and whenever you stay the night, you can hear them, whimpering, slurring their words like they’re drunk, calling out for someone or something.

I think they’re crying, you say. Maybe you should put them back together.

But he doesn’t, and now they’re multiplying. There’s another five, six, seven.

Now they’re on the kitchen counter. Now they’re in the bathroom. Now they’re under the bed.

He moves to a different apartment, says it’s because he needs more space.

Because of the Furbies? you ask.

For lots of reasons, he says.

But when you go over to his new place, expecting to see the dissected Furbies, they aren’t there.

Now there are only bones.

***

Jessica Klimesh (she/her) is a US-based writer and editor whose creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Flash Frog, Gone Lawn, Ghost Parachute, Gooseberry Pie Lit, trampset, and Many Nice Donkeys, among others. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net. Learn more at jessicaklimesh.com.

In the horror movie she calls a life, The Bad Girl gets cast as a camp counselor because she’s hot, she knows she’s hot, and every horror movie needs an antagonist to the virginal Final Girl, at least until the monster shows up. Also, Camp Silver Springs is desperate for counselors, lenient with job experience, and it’s like getting paid to party. So, although she never agreed to it, the newspapers will forever refer to her as The Bad Girl, because no one remembers anyone’s name besides the monster’s in a horror movie, not The Jock’s, not The Nerd’s, not even The Final Girl’s.

One night, drinking warm beer around a fire pit with the other counselors, The Bad Girl listens to The Final Girl once again complain they should follow the rules. Be better role models to the campers. The Bad Girl tells The Final Girl to Fuck off, that she hopes the campers are breaking curfew, telling ghost stories, toilet papering cabins, or sharing sloppy first kisses, because a little trouble is good for the little dorks. Following rules is bullshit, it’s all bullshit, and no matter what, the world’s going to try to kill you anyway, that’s the only thing for certain, so do what the fuck makes you happy with the little time you have.

During a game of Never Have I Ever, The Bad Girl finishes off a six-pack of Miller Lite on her own by taking a big gulp when someone says never have I ever: Kissed a girl, smoked a joint, had a threesome, had a black eye, buried a mother, got a tattoo, lived out of a car, ate food out of the trash, got a second tattoo, tried acid, crowd-surfed in a mosh pit, stole a car, broke someone’s nose, been in handcuffs, been in love.

The Final Girl didn’t drink to any of those, but it’s that last one, never having been in love, that makes The Bad Girl soften a bit. The same way she feels about the campers, she now feels about The Final Girl, wanting her to live a little. Wants her to break some rules. Do something stupid. Something she might regret. To make mistakes. Have no regrets because you never know when your time is up.

Millions of stars, and The Bad Girl takes a stroll to the lake with a girl following, a girl being led, a girl chosen, The Final Girl, because she needs this. They both do. Refracted moonlight on lake water, knees digging into the sand, straddling The Final Girl because The Bad Girl doesn’t fuck on her back, she wants the world to see her, young and beautiful, and her last thoughts are a mix of pleasure and philosophy, how life is short, how life must be short even to stars millions of years old, how at the end of their life even stars must wish for just a little more time.

The Bad Girl doesn’t get a chance to scream when the machete wielding monster steps out of the woods, sneaks up on her, and swings for her neck. It is inevitable. Everyone has their role to play. The Bad Girl’s role is to warn viewers to stay away from sex and drugs. And in this movie, this life, her death serves as the inciting incident for The Final Girl to enter her badass monster-killer era, but only after watching all her friends meet gory deaths. Except, the thing no one ever talks about, not the director, not the critics, not the audience, the real reason the monster kills The Bad Girl first, is not because she drinks, or gets high, or likes to fuck. No, it’s because if the monster doesn’t take her out first, she’ll run him over with the camp bus. Stab his eyes out with the sticks they use to roast s’mores. Take his machete and cut his fucking head off. The Bad Girl would save everybody. And what would the newspapers name her then?

***

Mario Aliberto III is an award-nominated writer whose work appears in SmokeLong Quarterly, trampset, The Pinch, and others. His debut chapbook, All the Dead We Have Yet to Bury, is forthcoming from Chestnut Review in early 2025. He lives in Tampa Bay with his wife and daughters, and yet the dog still runs the house. Twitter: @marioaliberto3

My grandson rests his gosling-down head on my chest, gurgles milk from a bottle in the soft gloom of the room. We’ve said our goodnight moons and goodnight rooms, started the white-noise machine so he’ll drift off in sweet, sanguine sleep while halfway across the world a distant cousin nestled in his mother’s lap startles from slumber as the buzz of drones enters the room, smoke shrouds the setting moon, steel rain falls all around. How can we bear that the building, the room, the arms that cradle him are shaking, trembling, threatening to fall? Can you tell me how?

***

Kathryn Silver-Hajo writes, worries about the world, wonders how it will all work out, and writes some more.

We recently published Elena Zhang’s illuminating “Grandmother.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) I love how there are three characters in this story, though we only really see the two. The grandmother is the ghost that haunts this entire piece as the narrator breaks apart (and puts together) things that belonged to her — in memory of a promise, in service of a daughter. What kind of weight do these things hold for the narrator?
I think the grandmother’s belongings definitely haunt the narrator, providing a sense of comfort and memory. But they are also a kind of burden, something the narrator hoards and holds onto too tightly, preventing her from really building something new.

2) Is it really a Tyrannosaurus Rex that the daughter wants? Or, more specifically, is it really a Tyrannosaurus Rex that our narrator is putting together?
The daughter has that kind of childlike desire and insistence for a wish to come true, no matter how possible or impossible it may be. Out of love, the narrator wants to fulfill that wish, feeding into their shared fantasy that dead things can come back to life and look just like how we want them to.