How you shouldn’t sneak out flashlight-less, since it’s easy to get lost near the mausoleum and that one girl twisted an ankle tripping down the riverbank. How the gravestones of town settlers bite chunks from our black crayons though we lay our alibi tracing paper flat. How the popular girls didn’t invite us to their pool party, and how we’ll get them back when they inevitably tiptoe into our weekly gatherings. How the groundskeeper’s forgotten this oldest quadrant of the cemetery where we circle up, so the new girl whines about deer ticks, invents rabid skunks skittering around the knee-high grasses, imagines shadows in our smuggled camping lantern. How we roll the dice to see who pairs first.

How one girl’s stepmom won’t quit pinching her “muffin top” or serving her half portions. How the creep outside the Gas-N-Go followed a girl to her car, and the auto-lock on her shitty hand-me-down Honda wouldn’t work. How another’s father uses his belt. How another’s parents are checking her college dropout brother into a “retreat,” and how stupid do her parents think she is when she knows mosquito bites from the marks that dot her brother’s arms.

How us original four found the scratched DVD in the thrift store dollar bin. How lucky it was that the rehab-destined brother hadn’t sold his Xbox for drugs yet because no one has a DVD player. How bang-able Brad Pitt once was. How smoking Helena Bonham Carter used to be. How maybe it’s a generational thing, but cult classic our asses. What did nineties-era white men have to be so mad about? How good it felt that first time when the credits were rolling, our pillows exploding sweat-smelling feathers all over the basement, and we continued with fists. We were Jacqueline’s scream-shredded throats. We were Jacqueline’s bilious rage.

How acrylic nails disqualify until filed down to stubs. How everything below the neck is fair game, but faces are for open-handed slaps only. How if you have braces, you’re allowed to wear a mouth guard stolen from the football storage shed. How all combat must occur in the ring of leaning headstones, cleared of twigs and rocks. How we stash cell phones under the mausoleum’s withered topiary. How the originals can invite a fresh face, but newbies can’t bring another until the dice turns up their number.

How the cemetery became a refuge one month after our classmate’s death. How the police called it accidental. How her quarterback ex came to school with scratches on his cheeks the day after her drowning. How his father is the sheriff. How we kneel at her headstone at the end of each gathering. How her name was Casey McCutcheon. Her name was Casey McCutcheon. Her name was Casey McCutcheon.

How the late summer raindrops perfectly numb the bruises. How we’ll ward off the Gas-n-Go stalker with bear spray hooked on our keychains. How we’ll horde getaway cash in a place our fathers will never look. How we’ll go for the eyes, the balls, the throat, the knees. How any parting gifts from gatherings in the coming cold weather can more easily hide under sweaters. How we’ll tell teachers we tripped, we fell, we were looking at TikTok.

How it’ll be impossible to find a mutual night when school picks up, between homework and band camp and cheer meets and musical rehearsals and basketball practice. How we’ll add more meet-ups, more nights, so every girl gets a turn. How we’ll stay even if the groundskeeper squeals. How we’re practicing now for when we’ll be on our own in just a few years. How this bitch of a world won’t pull her punches.  

***

Lauren Kardos (she/her) writes from Washington, DC, but she’s still breaking up with her hometown in Western Pennsylvania. The Molotov Cocktail, hex, Cold Signal, Bending Genres, Lost Balloon, Best Microfiction 2022, and The Lumiere Review are just a few of the fine publications that feature her stories and poems. You can find more of her work at www.laurenkardos.co.

Boy wakes up in paragraph five, no backstory, no introduction. He would like to know who He is, some action that reveals character and age. It would be helpful to have a name, to know whether He likes football, or has learned to ride a bike. He taps the writer on the shoulder, but the writer shrugs Him off and continues roving his fingers over the keyboard.

Boy searches through sentences for Mother and finds Her back on page one. There She is dressing and climbing into a car. Page two, She is undressing and climbing into a bed. He sees climbing on every page and learns Her stockings are diamond-patterned, sheer and black. Her heels are tall, shiny, and toppling. Her hair is long and wavy. He wades through paragraphs and
pages. Sentences unspool about Men, Martinis, and Sex with no mention of Childcare. It occurs to Boy that He is not the protagonist of the story.

Boy tries again to catch the writer’s attention, whispering in his ear that He would like a puppy. He’d even take a little sister. But the writer is ignoring all calls from the story. An empty glass sits next to him on the desk.

By page twenty, Boy should be back in the storyline. Mother should be making Him breakfast, at least a bowl of cereal. But there are no mentions of Him. He wanders through the pages, searching the sentences. Mother puts her hair up and takes it down. Mother undresses and climbs. Boy wonders where the story is going.

The writer appears to have nodded off. On page twenty-five, Martinis grab hold of the narrative. Mother mixes and climbs and mixes again.

The writer lifts his head and returns his fingers to the keyboard. He backspaces over Mother and types in Woman. Then he scrolls back through the pages, cutting all references to Boy. Boy cries out, tries to hold on, but He is too undeveloped. The writer deletes Him altogether in paragraph five. Boy, like so many children, remains forever unwritten.

***

Shira Musicant writes short fiction and creative nonfiction. Her current stories can be found in journals such as Fourth Genre, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Bending Genres, among others. Recently retired from her practice as a somatic psychotherapist, Shira lives in Southern California with her husband, a black cat, and five chickens. She writes early in the morning, chickens still roosting, cat on lap. shiramusicant.com

Stale beer and cigarettes. Chick-fil-a grease on my brown polyester uniform. Parking
deck lights and shadows. His blue pinto with the yellow hood. His eyes the same blue as his
Gyro Wrap uniform. The steering wheel against my back. His soft thighs, warm. The squeak of
his white leather jacket. His long, sun-bleached hair with black roots. The way he quotes
Outlando de Amour. The blue metal bench in the mall where he explains that I’m too skinny, too
young. The prick of sedative and the cold metal instrument followed by the overwhelming need
to faint. Followed by the overwhelming need to cry. The way his mother moves in their kitchen
that same afternoon. Like any old thing had happened.

***

Mamie Pound has stories in Smokelong Quarterly, James Dickey Review, Image Journal, Gooseberry Pie, Ghost Parachute, and Bath Flash Fiction Anthology 2024, among others. Her work was long listed for the Craft Fiction Award. Her chapbook was a finalist in Fractured Lit’s Chapbook Prize 2024. One of her stories was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is awarded a residency at the Kerouac House artist-in-residence beginning November 2025.

I want to write a story about a house sinking into a swamp, but I’m always writing a story about a house sinking into a swamp. Sometimes I’m unclear about the metaphor. Am I the house, slowly being devoured by my anxieties? By the volatile environment? By my poor choices of real estate investments? Or am I the swamp, ever hungry, slowly swallowing the young couple that couldn’t afford a pricier first home, because, let’s be honest, most people would kill for the mold-thick two bedroom that sits on the swamp’s border. They don’t care about the water in the basement, the way low-tide-reek creeps in once a day, the beards of moss draping their window casements. They don’t even care about the thing living out there in the depths, the one that calls shrilly every night in a near human voice. It sounds a little like his grandmother. It sounds a little like her first boyfriend. It sounds a little like me when I can’t sleep and need someone to talk to about my own dread, not realizing it will slowly become their dread, that it will become the thing that frays their tether to reality, sanity slipping until they drown one another, or set the house on fire, or re-list the property on Zillow at a loss. I’ll push them away like any good swamp should. People aren’t meant to live so close to fetid water. The phosphorus should be a hint, that creature living at its center an even greater indicator. I’ve tried to write so many stories where the couple stays, where they overcome their fears, or kill the monster, or fix up the property and double their money like they do on the Home and Gardens Channel. But that voice that is almost their grandmother/ex-boyfriend/me is always there, always whispering, never letting anyone rest. I’m always anxious that the house will be subsumed, that the swamp obscures something worse than I originally thought, that I’m actually there, nestled amongst the reeds, screaming and screaming.

Maybe someday I’ll stop writing about a house on the border of a swamp.

Maybe someday I’ll understand and emerge from the reeds.

***

Corey Farrenkopf lives on Cape Cod and works as a librarian. His work has been published in Electric Literature, Strange Horizons, Nightmare, The Deadlands, SmokeLong Quarterly, Bourbon Penn, and elsewhere. His debut novel, Living in Cemeteries, was released from JournalStone in April of 2024. His eco-horror collection, Haunted Ecologies, will be published by them in February of 2025. He is the Fiction Editor for The Cape Cod Poetry Review. To learn more, follow him on twitter @CoreyFarrenkopf or on the web at CoreyFarrenkopf.com

The children are getting out of bed, they are putting on shorts and T-shirts. They are scarfing down their mother’s love, bowls clinking, they are meeting in the valley, the hills, the burnt out lot
where the supermarket used to be. They are waving to their friends, they are waiting for the kid with the ball to arrive. They are constructing a goal on each side, made of sticks and string. Their teams are decided by strength or by smarts or who the kid with the ball likes best and the game stretches like the shadows of the summer day until the children are running in the golden light. Not all of them. A curly haired boy or a girl with braids or a kid with a closely shaved head is kicking the ball toward the goal made of sticks and string. The ball is going to make it and the light falls on his curls, her braids, the curve of the neck where it meets the skull, and their mouths are open with laughter, with joy, and the children are running from the sky. The bomber so low the flag on the belly is visible. The stripes or circles or stars as clear as the children’s own panicked breaths.

***

Sage Tyrtle’s work is available in New Delta Review, The Offing, Lunch Ticket, and Apex among others. Words featured on NPR, CBC, and PBS, and taught in schools. Read more at www.tyrtle.com.

We recently published Beth Sherman’s brilliant “Natural.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) I love the interaction between the taxidermist and the boyfriend when the mother first appears. So much weight in these lines: ” The taxidermist thought she’d probably break up with him. She always dumped men before they did it first.” What, other than the obvious, makes the taxidermist think the boyfriend would be planning to break up with her?
“Natural” is part of a longer novella-in-flash about a fractured family and the fraught relationship this character has with her mother, who left when the narrator was young, and her father, who died young. At this point in the novella the father is gone, too, and the narrator seeks fleeting comfort in a series of unsuitable men. It’s always a bit dangerous to psychologize your characters, but in this case I think she’s trying to avoid getting hurt and losing anyone else. So she makes sure she’s always the one who ends the relationship. Her psyche is so fragile that she can’t imagine anyone would want to stick around!

2) Of course, the real relationship in this story is the fractured one between mother and daughter. Do you think the taxidermist has gotten (at least in some form) what she wanted from her mother now? Or has that ship long sailed?
This piece is part of a series of fabulist stories that the narrator in my NIF is writing to try and make sense of her life. As the “taxidermist,” I do believe she gets something from the interaction with her mother here. For one thing, she’s at least partially in control of her mother’s whereabouts (until the end, that is), and she’s able to care for her mother’s body — even if it’s weirdly after death. Interestingly enough, the mother is not actually dead while this is being written, but it feels that way to the “taxidermist.” Their relationship is strained to the breaking point because of the mother’s failings and the “taxidermist’s” unwillingness to understand or forgive. Although I haven’t finished the NIF yet, I’m hoping there can be some sort of reconciliation between them.

The taxidermist began stuffing her mother on a blindingly sunny morning in South Florida when the temperature was pushing triple digits. She knew it was all about looking natural. Erasing the sags and droopiness her mother had fretted over. The taxidermist had been choosy about her palette  – selecting flesh tones that harmonized with LED lighting. Careful to avoid the sallow complexion her mother would have hated. It was similar to sculpting. After a while, her fingers became part of the clay so it was easy to forget where she left off and her mother began.     

The taxidermist was sleeping with someone named Jason. When he walked into her apartment and saw her newest creation, he let out a yelp.  

“I didn’t know you had a mother,” he said.

Not surprising. They mostly talked about which movies he’d seen and which vacation spots he’d visited.

“What the hell?” he said. “She’s not a white-tail deer.”

The taxidermist thought she’d probably break up with him. She always dumped men before they did it first.  

The taxidermist and her mother had never been close. Her mother disappeared when she was twelve, relocating to California in an unsuccessful attempt to . . . what? Recreate a youth that never existed? Shed the constraints of motherhood with its endless dirty dishes and laundry, its relentless messy feelings? The taxidermist tried to ask but never got a straight answer. By the time her mother returned 15 years later, she wasn’t a kid and couldn’t hide her scars with Band-aids.

The taxidermist liked to position her mother near the kitchen table while she made dinner, describing how her day had gone. She knew her mother couldn’t move, yet sometimes when she came home from work a hand would be higher than it was before or the chin would tilt at a different angle.

The taxidermist made a list of how she and her mother were alike:

1. They both were stubborn.
2. They liked the color green.
3. They were persistent.
4. Regretful.
5. Rarely satisfied.
6. Quick to anger, slow to forgive.

The taxidermist brushed her mother’s hair to gently remove dust. Cleaned her mother’s eyes with a Q-tip dipped in Windex. When her mother’s nose began to crack, she dabbed on petroleum jelly. Kept the blinds drawn so the harsh Florida sun wouldn’t cause any damage. Caring for her mother softened the hollow place in her heart.  

The taxidermist talked to her mother all the time. Sometimes she thought she heard someone talking back. She studied her mother’s mouth – the teeth she’d crafted, the pink velvet tongue – and words tickled the air. No. Help. Escape. Gone. It was like watching a ventriloquist, the way she couldn’t be sure how sounds were produced, where exactly they came from. 

The taxidermist lay in bed at night and tried to forget how things used to be. How when her mother ran away, the taxidermist wrote her a letter each day describing what had happened in school. Tests she’d taken, boys she’d liked. Hundreds of letters tied with green ribbon, buried in a box in her closet because no one knew where to send them. Now, in the half-dark, she saw her mother had left the kitchen and was standing in the bedroom.

The taxidermist plucked one of the letters from the box and began reading aloud.

Dear Mom,

It’s raining out. I had pizza for lunch. Soon April will be over. Do you miss me? I put a little of the perfume you left behind on my neck so I can remember what you smell like.

xo

The taxidermist watched her mother’s eyes gleam silver. Moonlight spilled onto the wood floor, like spoiled milk. She felt it would be a good time for her mother to apologize and imagined accepting the apology. Not right away, of course, but within a reasonable amount of time. After her mother explained she wished to God she’d never left. After the apology hug. After they traveled to Disney World, where they would spin in teacups until they got dizzy. Instead, her mother extended both arms, palms raised, fingers splayed, not to embrace her only daughter – to wave goodbye.

***

Beth Sherman’s writing has been published in more than 100 literary magazines, including Flash Frog, Gone Lawn, Tiny Molecules, 100 Word Story, Fictive Dream, and Bending Genres. Her work is featured in Best Microfiction 2024 and she’s the winner of the Smokelong Quarterly 2024 Workshop prize. A multiple Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net nominee, she can be reached on X, Bluesky or Instagram @bsherm36. 

The safe word is that there is no safe word. The safe word is that you are not safe with this man and never have been. Even though you wanted to believe him. Wanted to believe you were different, special. Even though you heard him joke about his second wife going back to work at the cosmetics counter at Nordstrom because she was left high and dry. Prenup, baby! How at least she’d get a discount on wrinkle cream, and he laughed, and you laughed too, because you were younger. Prettier. You wouldn’t make her mistakes. Getting old. Getting fat. When he told you about locking her in the home gym, not letting her out until the Peloton showed 12 miles. About morning weigh-ins, and if she hadn’t lost she didn’t get to eat that day. Cry, cry, he mocked her, but he would never mock you. You’re not like her, or like his first wife, the one who died. Shot herself in the head and tried to frame him for it. Because he left her and she stalked him, so he had to take out a restraining order on her. Because she was a crazy bitch. Something was wrong with that story but you didn’t think too hard about what it was because you needed someone. Someone strong. Someone who would save you. Sad, he said, the first time you took him home. Sad, you having to live in a shithole like this. And he set you up in that parkside apartment, location, baby, location, and you wouldn’t have been able to afford it but he took care of that for you, and you wouldn’t have been able to move in anyway because the no pets policy but then your cat died, so sudden, so sad, and he held your hand, took you to the best vet, the very top vet, he said, and the vet said it was a congenital heart defect and you told yourself don’t obsess, don’t second guess, don’t look up poisonous plants, don’t think about the white lilies he gave you, what’s done is done, don’t be suspicious, don’t be a crazy bitch, he’d never do anything really wrong, he’d never hurt you, and when he ties your wrists to the headboard it’s just a kink, just a joke, and you can take a joke, can’t you? When he flushes your pills down the toilet because you don’t need that shit anymore. When he slams your head against the wall. When he puts his hands around your neck and dares you to say a word it’s just a joke, and you’re in on the joke. Aren’t you? When you want to speak but there’s no air, no voice to speak, and what was that word you wanted to say? You can get through this. You can take it. You will tamp yourself down and wait, holding your strength inside. You are a cold fuse, waiting to ignite.

***

KATHRYN KULPA is the author of A MAP OF LOST PLACES (Gold Line Press) and FOR EVERY TOWER, A PRINCESS (Porkbelly Press). Find her stories in Best Small Fictions, Boudin, Flash Frog, HAD, and Paragraph Planet. She is a 2025 writer-in-residence at Linden Place in Bristol, Rhode Island.

We recently published Mileva Anastasiadou’s glorious “Sunset Fatigue.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) I love that The Little Prince (now old enough to be a Little King!) is the protagonist if our story! What made you select the character for this piece?
I wanted to write a story about how loss accumulates as we grow older and turns into grief and guilt and bitterness. Then came the Little Prince in mind, it’s the only book I’ve read in three languages and it has always meant much to me, and I thought that the Little Prince has it easy because he never gets old, old enough to realize how much love costs, so let’s see what happens if he grows up too and starts losing all that he loves, will he become an adult who sees hats too?

2) And I love that this isn’t a story about things like sunsets and hats and parents. That it’s about the things we’ve lost – I mean, the things the Little Prince has lost, the things he misses. Do you think that he could articulate what he misses the most? Do you think it would be fair to ask him to?
I think that what the Little Prince misses the most as he grows old is the innocence, the certainty that he would never end up like all those grown-ups that see hats instead of swallowed elephants, he misses the love he couldn’t keep and all those things he took for granted but are now gone, the times when the world didn’t seem overwhelming and he was enough.

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.