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.

My daughter wants a pet Tyrannosaurus rex. Nothing else will do. So I go to the kitchen and take
out the cleaver, the good one, the one that you would always use to chop through pork ribs and
chicken bones when I was sick and wanted soup. I hack your antique coffee table to pieces.
These will be good bones, I think. Scratched and worn from years of use. Soon, they are
assembled into a skeleton, the splinters into teeth. Next, the skin. I take out your sweaters from
the back of the closet and shake off the dust before sewing them together. They still smell like
you, jasmine perfume and coconut lotion. I drape the blue and white quilt over the bones, closing
my eyes while I caress the seams. My daughter is still not satisfied. “What about the feathers?”
she asks. For that, I rummage through my bedside table drawer until I find the plastic bag filled
with your hair. I glue the gray bristles on, one by one. My daughter draws near, hugging the
dinosaur, but it doesn’t hug her back. She starts to cry, and I know it’s because there is something
missing. Something lost in the extinction. Remembering my promise to you, I tear the whole
thing down. Start again.

***

Elena Zhang is a Chinese American writer and mother living in Chicago. Her work can be found in HAD, The Citron Review, Ghost Parachute, Your Impossible Voice, and Lost Balloon, among other publications. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee and was selected for Best Microfiction 2024.

We recently published Melanie Maggard’s glorious “Moonshine.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) I love the personification of the moon here — there’s something so lunar about how you describe her! What made you choose the moon for this piece (or what made the moon choose you)?
Since I started writing a few years ago, I’ve become infatuated with the moon and find that she comes out in much of my writing. And I can’t help but think of the moon as a “she/her.” I’m not sure if this is because I personally identify with her or because of the tradition of relating the female cycle to the moon’s phases. There’s something very deep and sensual about this connection to the main reason we look to the sky at night. I’m guilty of deep diving into research on the moon, sometimes for hours (the best type of procrastination), and incorporating those little nuggets of wisdom into my pieces. With this piece in particular, I loved the idea of the moon being avoided or overlooked, much like how we feel when we don’t receive attention or love from others. The story idea came from a prompt where we were to imagine an everyday action being performed by something or someone extraordinary. 

2) The ending is so stunning and powerful! The idea of a darkness eclipsing the moon rather than the moon causing the darkness is such an intriguing (and beautiful!) idea! Do you think the man who has taken the moon into his house will ever let her know where he keeps his sugar?
I’d like to think that she takes the sugar and leaves, before it is too late and she burns out. I relate this ending to feelings of longing, discontent, and being unfulfilled. For me, it represents what we are willing to do in order to feel love, even if that means we may dim our light in order to get it. Maybe she’ll finally put her own needs above those of everyone else. Or maybe this man will just give her what she needs but there is more that she really wants. All of this gives me an idea of another story.

The moon is going door to door and asking for a cup of sugar. Nobody gives her any. Most won’t even answer the door. They peer through peepholes, slits in blinds, around edges of curtains. They whisper to each other in the darkness. They wish her away. They’re offended by her light, a bright blue-white luminescence, like glowworms on cave walls in New Zealand, or so she hears. She palms a cool tin measuring cup in her hand, the only remaining part of a set her grandmother gave her, the others lost when she moved from one phase of her life to the next. She looks up at the stars and takes a deep breath. She doesn’t have much time left.

Some people are out walking when they see her, head down, curled into herself as she hugs the cup to her chest. When she sees them, she straightens, brightens like a firefly suddenly turned on. Their dogs howl as they pull at leashes. She pauses, waiting for them to cross to the other side of the road before continuing. Over their shoulders, they watch her light wane as the distance between them grows, until she’s half who she was before.

At the last house on the street, a man opens the door immediately after she knocks. When the moon offers her empty cup, he removes a flask from his pocket and pours her a shot of clear liquor, asks if she wants to “get tipsy” with him. A smile settles into the relenting scars on her face as she says, I’m always a bit tipsy. They laugh as she enters the house, leaving a dusting of rocks at the doorstep. With her mouth and throat burning, before the darkness eclipses her, she asks again, where he keeps his sugar.

***

Melanie Maggard is a flash and poetic prose writer who loves dribbles and drabbles. She has published in Cotton Xenomorph, Ghost Parachute, X-R-A-Y Magazine, Peatsmoke Journal, The Dribble Drabble Review, Five Minute Lit, and others. She can be found online at www.melaniemaggard.com and @WriterMMaggard.

This man is fine, not like the man on the moor. The man in his van on the moor.

This man you can give him your pound coin and get your cone with the flake, and he’ll hand you one pence change; no fuss, no kiss on the mouth.

Mum’s here, so you can lick your cone and you can love it. This man won’t say why don’t you lick this.

Your mum takes a coin from her purse for you to hand the man, and she says can’t you be nice and smile for once, but you don’t tell her what the man on the moor did with his big face and big hands and big laugh you can’t get out of your head.

You don’t say that now when you skip school and buy a cone with a flake it tastes so much like fear you want to spit it off your tongue and drop it and run to a place, a fake place, where your mum stands with her arms wide and says what’s all this, pet, come on, let it all out.

***

Kik Lodge is a short fiction writer from Devon, England, but she lives in Lyon, France, with a menagerie of kids, cats and a rabbit.Her work can be found in some lovely journals, as well as in the Best Microfiction 2024 Anthology. Her debut flash collection Scream If You Want To is out now with Alien Buddha Press. @kiklodge.bsky.social