Month: June 2026

My Allergies Stayed

by Chao Wang

 

My cat died, but my allergies stayed. I woke in the dark, my face wet with snot and tears, just as it had been on the day she was put down. That day, I held her and sobbed uncontrollably, like an old father who had lost his only child. I cried twice more, once as I walked out of the hospital, and again when I got into the car. When I got home and looked in the mirror, I realized I had aged considerably.

Suddenly I felt like a character in one of those bleak prestige dramas about hard country lives. The camera begins with a wide shot: a dilapidated little courtyard, the sun going down. Then a close-up: me alone in the doorway, squatting, smoking a pipe. The old man from next door comes over and says to me, “The child is gone?” A montage. I nod. He says, “What are you going to do now?” I take a drag, sigh, and say, “What can I do? The days still have to be lived.”

Then one night, I tried to convince myself that I was living inside a video game. I requested to load an earlier save, at least one from before 2021. Back then, the cat was still alive, I was still young, and the clouds in the sky were still half-lit, half-shadowed. This went on for half the night. The response I received was 403 Forbidden.

Later on, I called the funeral home. The standard urn from the hospital was ugly enough that I asked to change the color. I also asked them not to inscribe her name on it. After all, a name is only a code. She was not Meatball, or Ms. Purrfect, or anything like that. She was a small, warm puff of fur. Now that little puff is gone, and there is a cat-shaped hole in my chest. As time passes, maybe it will heal a little. But not completely. There will still be a tiny cat-shaped hole. Which, if you think about it, is almost cute.

On an early winter morning, I might walk alone down the street. A cold wind would sweep in, piercing my chest and leaving behind a cat-shaped chill. I would place my fingers over the opening, using my body as an instrument, and play a sad song. The melody would mingle with the snowflakes, drifting and swaying through the air. Where it touched the eaves, it would turn into icicles; where it touched the branches, it would become rime. Then it would fall to the ground in a flurry, carried away by the wind.

So, this is the end. My cat is gone for good, leaving behind an urn (which is still ugly, looking like a stone block), a paw print, a tuft of fur, several hairballs, vomit stains on the carpet, a hole in my chest, and some immune cells in my blood. Those cells are attacking my system, as if they think I am part of the cat. I suppose that’s what death is like. It is neither gentle nor peaceful. It is violent and ugly. After it has raged through, the traces it leaves behind take a long, long time to fade.

 

Chao Wang is a writer living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Born and raised in Beijing, he writes fiction in English and Chinese.

 

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The Carnival of the Witch

by Kel Rocha

 

The sparrows will take her hair.

They’ll pull the dark straw off her head for their nests, and once they figure the hair thin and strong, they’ll tighten each of its ends between the branches. They’ll pull fingernails loose from her flesh and use them to pluck those strings. They’ll sing.

Over the hipbones, a spider will weave her web, and the botflies attracted to her flesh will make of that surface a bongo.

After those flies and maggots, frogs will pounce on her ribcage. They’ll fashion each opposite bone into the key of a xylophone for the strikes of their tongues to draw notes out of.

Unclothed of flesh, her toes will end in spires. Mice shall pluck them for their sires, to crown the heads of their lances. They’ll hop onto their salamanders and joust.

From her teeth, faeries will carve out ivory teacups for the tea they’ll brew as the temperature rises beneath her. Once it rises, lord, it’ll be too late once it rises.

She will leach into the earth. Her bits and bobs and ends will disperse for roots to suckle. Mycelium will share the news of her. Take her to lands far away. She will walk in every direction. She will rise and sink. Of her, we’ll never be rid.

Hear the dance of the fireflies, the feast of the butterflies. They call out her name, known to the earth, everlasting. Seal her, cover her. Do it quickly.

Do not let her spread.

 

Kel Rocha is an autistic artist and writer based in São Paulo, Brazil. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Communication, and her passion for cozy fairy-tales and surrealist horror often blends in her writing, paintings, and sculptures. Over the past three years, she has shared her handmade woolly mice with an audience of over 100,000 Instagram followers at @kelfelts, inspired by the books that shaped her childhood.

 

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CNF: Snow Globe of Returning

by Alexandria Peary

 

My mother from Pforzheim joins a Facebook group about the Pforzheim dialect and is told that she’s not echt Deutsch, not a real Pforzheimer anymore, is corrected, feels insulted and hurt. And so, she says Gell, Alla hopp, Dess find ich glasse, sag dess nochemol! Baggewaddsch.   *   My mother, born in the gateway city to the Black Forest, at the security gate at the Frankfurt airport, tells the Customs officer it’s her first time on German ground since 1964. It’s 2023. Inside the plexiglass booth, the guard in his twenties, unsmiling, “Then you should have never left your country.”    *    My mother, daughter, and I search Pforzheim for a restaurant serving bratwurst. For a slice of Black Forest cake with cream, for a real pretzel.   *   It was brave of me.   *   It was brave of my fifteen-year-old daughter to join us.   *   It was brave of my mother to return to the place that hurt her as a girl, though her body hurt so badly she couldn’t walk two city blocks by trip’s end, looking at buildings that didn’t fall from the sky that night in 1945.    *    It was hard on my mother to stay in an Airbnb with cockroaches dropping from the ceiling and a window falling out of a wall, cabinets sticky, and a freezer of stale food. I bought her a tote bag covered in dialect, Gell, Alla hopp, Dess find ich glasse, sag dess nochemol! as an apology. In the souvenir shop selling tote bags, a shelf of snow globes but not snow globes of the city’s destruction on February 23, 1945.   *

Somewhere I know there’s a snow globe with my grandmother picking up rubble for a bowl of soup. I keep looking for her.  *   My mother who cleaned house every day throughout my childhood––lemon Pledge, Windex, shag carpet, bathroom sinks––owns a robot vacuum that steers around the legs of furniture.   *   My mother, seventy-nine, bikes twice a day with her boyfriend in Tennessee, who is seventeen years younger, gell. Seventeen was her age when she left for the United States, so he was born the year she emigrated. *   She texts updates of her virtual tours on her Strava bike through Prague, the Alps, and places in her homeland she’ll probably never see. She speedwalks on virtual sidewalks in Panama City Beach, Florida (where she has been) but also Mittenberg, Germany; Florianópolis, Brazil; Vansbro, Sweden; Gemünden to Hammelburg; and Innsbruck. (I have a yellowed photo of her Wehrmacht father stationed in Innsbruck at the start of that war.)  * * * *  Somewhere there’s a snow globe with my grandfather in a tattered uniform in a door to a cellar, what is he doing?, so I keep looking for him.

*

Now at night I am preparing for my solo visit to Pforzheim, so I am reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a library book, and on the television, watch a series about Hitler narrated by William Shirer, long dead, his voice generated by A.I.

 

Alexandria Peary served as 2019-2024 New Hampshire Poet Laureate and was a 2024-2025 Fulbright Scholar in Germany. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in the New England Review, Southern Humanities Review, Brick, Arts & Letters, and elsewhere. Her books include Battle of Silicon Valley at Daybreak (poetry) and Prolific Moment: Theory and Practice of Mindfulness for Writing (prose).

 

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In the Chair

by Grace Keir

 

I fear the dentist because I do not like anything in my mouth that I cannot hold onto myself. A fork, a toothbrush, a sandwich, a cigarette — these are okay. For me, the fear is not about the sharp steel instruments, the mechanical whirring, the blood, or the pain. These discomforts are acceptable to me, given the situation of the dentist’s chair. I am a logical person. But I do not like my hands in my lap with my mouth open and all sorts of things going in and out of it. So I found a dentist, a kind and compliant man of sixty or so, who lets me hold onto his thick, hairy wrist while he scrapes at my gums and inspects my molars.

I found a psychologist, too. He tells me that my particular fear of the dentist is indicative of a suppressed childhood memory. He doesn’t say molestation, but I can tell he is thinking it. He says my dentist enables this suppression by allowing our routine to continue. He says just because I am holding the wrist does not mean I control the hand. So I fire the psychologist. There is no part of him I can hold onto while he goes into my head.

 

Grace Keir is a writer from New York based in Columbia, SC. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Fiction at the University of South Carolina, where she also serves as Fiction Editor for Cola Literary Review. Her work has appeared in Gordon Square Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, and elsewhere.

 

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Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.

Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.

Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.

Submissions

Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again September 15, 2025. Submit here.

Upcoming

06/29 • Chao Wang
07/06 • Adrian Potter
07/13 • Lissa Staples
07/20 • Emily Kingery
07/27 • Eipsita Kumari
08/03 • Ryan McGeeney
08/10 • Suzanne Martinez
08/17 • Courtney LeBlanc
08/24 • Barbara Diehl
08/31 • Richard Hurst
09/07 • Michael Okafor
09/14 • TBD
09/21 • TBD
09/28 • TBD