Milk Candy Review

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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

a woman from my neighbourhood posted a long ramble on her socials  about how she hadn’t slept a wink and how devastated she was to hear about what happened to me and about how she went to school with me and got the bus home with me and I thought it was really odd because I think I only spoke to her five times in my life, twice during sixth form  and maybe two or three times since then when I bumped into her in Tesco or at the park while our kids where running about mad or screaming down the chute slide, and any conversations I did have with the woman were superficial and a nod to the children: You have your hands full, how are they settling into the primary four? Oh, Mrs Pike? She’s a nightmare.  Don’t they have far too much homework? Like this woman wasn’t someone I was ever mates with because she’s one of those women that turned forty the day she actually turned thirty and was all about trying to look like she had her shit together and she was on the PTA  at our kid’s school but she got on like she was running the place when all she was doing was organising the BBQ at sports days, so I waited until my sister  was up because I knew she’d see the post or someone would screenshot it and send it to her and we’d roar laughing about what this woman was on, but then when my sister did wake up and read it she just clicked the button on the side of her phone to make the screen go black and then pulled the covers back over her head and didn’t laugh with me at all.

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Justine is an Irish writer. Her stories appear in journals and anthologies such as the Dublin Review, Banshee Press, Moon City Review, Bath Flash, Trash Cat Lit, Inkfish Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, Fish Publishing and Fictive Dream. She’s a Best Small Fictions nominee and her first collection of stories was shortlisted/ highly commended in the Bath Novella-in-flash Award 2025.

We recently published Jeanne Lyet Gassman’s searing “What We Bring to the Shelter.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) I love the different perspectives we get in this story — each paragraph gives us a different character, a different point of view, and a fuller picture of the whole. How do you think these characters will interact with each other? How will their stories change?
In my experience of being evacuated to an emergency shelter, I noticed how quickly people reached out to help one another once they had recovered from the initial shock. I would imagine that the person who brought pillows and a blanket or a sleeping bag might offer their blankets/pillows to someone who was elderly or cold. Others might ask the person about her grandmother’s quilt, to share some stories and memories of her grandmother. The group huddled together reading from their spiritual texts might invite others to join their circle and offer their own prayers. A collection of old photos and scrapbooks could inspire a conversation with a stranger about the stories in the photos. People at our shelter did share the information they gleaned from their tablets and laptops about the ongoing disaster. They shared information about other lodging, the extent of the disaster, where to find food or refill a prescription, etc. It was very helpful. Finally, I think if a family brought games and snacks for their kids, they might offer to share with other children who were frightened and had nothing.

2) Are there characters whose stories are left untold? Whose belongings aren’t detailed here? Sitting quietly in the shelter, thinking of what they have lost?
I thought about this question for a long time, and I think the voices that are missing are the people who already know they have nothing to return to. These are the people who may have been renting property, or people who live in mobile homes or inherited houses–all directly in the path of the disaster. Most of them probably have no insurance. The only belongings they have are what they brought to the shelter. All of their possessions may be packed in their car. As they sit in the shelter, they’re probably worrying about where they will sleep in the months to come. Where will they find clothing? A new job? Unfortunately, not everyone in a disaster has a support system or family to help them out.

We bring only our wallets, purses, cell phones, and chargers because we had no time to grab anything else. We use our phones to text and call relatives so they won’t panic.

We bring our pets on leashes, in carriers and cages, and in our arms, but our shelter requires they go to another shelter, and when they leave, we worry they will be alone and afraid.

We bring our jewelry stuffed in a sock or crammed in the sleeve of our jacket, and we worry someone will find it while we sleep.

We bring pillows and a blanket or a sleeping bag because we have been through this before, and we know the cots are hard and the blankets are thin.

We bring Grandma’s homemade quilt. She died five years ago, but when we wrap ourselves in it, we can still smell her, and we feel safe.

We bring our wig and full makeup kit because the press is outside, and we want to look our best if they ask for an interview.

We bring our weekly pill counter, hoping we will only need our prescriptions for a day or two.

We bring our religious and spiritual texts, and we huddle in the corner, reading them aloud, because we find comfort from the familiar lessons and prophesies.

We bring our file box labeled “important papers,” but we have no idea what is in there and if it will be any use.

We bring the box of old photos stashed on the top shelf of our closet, and as we rummage through them, we’re swept away with memories of birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, holidays, vacations, and better times.

We bring our toothpaste but not our toothbrush because we forgot about it in our rush to get out.

We bring our emergency stash of cash because we’re worried credit cards and ATMs may not function during power outages.

We bring our tablets and laptops and spend most of our time doomscrolling for updates, but accurate information is slow in coming.

We bring drinks, snacks, and games for our children, hoping it will be enough to keep them quiet during the long night ahead.

We bring nothing but the clothes on our backs because we ran with the disaster on our heels. We bring our pieces of the past, our anxiety for the present, and our uncertainty about the future, and we hold them close to our hearts, a talisman attached, because when we leave we don’t know if we have a home to go to.

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Jeanne Lyet Gassman’s first novel, BLOOD OF A STONE (Tuscany Press), received an Independent Publishers Book Award in 2015. Additional honors for Jeanne include grants and fellowships from The New Mexico Writers’ Foundation, Ragdale, and the Arizona Commission for the Arts. Jeanne’s work has appeared in or is forthcoming in American Writers’ Review: Buyer’s Remorse (San Fedele Press), The Sunlight Press, and West Trade Review, among many others.