There’s Something a Little Wrong with Jean

by Kathy Fish

 

Lara has festooned her home inside and out with red, white, and blue. The friends gather first outside, on the green lawn, but the wind whips up, the umbrellas have to be cranked down, and they rush indoors hugging the bowls of food.

Kyle’s already inside setting up the bar. He brought his own equipment in what looked like a briefcase. They’re still waiting for Jean, who’s always late. The friends think there’s something a little wrong with Jean. They think they might have to confront her about it today.

This concoction is known as a Hugo Spritz, Kyle declares, handing Lara a tall glass containing mint leaves, lemon slices, and booze. He hands one to Lance, who’d just as soon have a beer.

Lance wants to know exactly what’s going on out there. He believes this is no ordinary storm.

It’s just some sort of atmospheric disturbance, Lara assures him. She notices Lance’s face, typically rosy, is turning gray.

Maybe she had other plans, Kyle suggests.

What could possibly be more important than us? Lance asks.

Lara remarks she saw Jean at the pharmacy last week. No time to chat, of course!

She’s not like us, Kyle offers, tearing the mint leaves from their stems.

Ben sighs. Maybe we’re not like her.

Jean finally does arrive, wearing a frazzled smile and disorganized hair, a scarf wrapped three times around her neck. Kyle has a drink all ready for her. She moves to the window and watches the branches of the boxelder massage the side of Lara’s house. She downs her spritz, then swirls the ice cubes around in her glass.

They’re all pointedly ignoring Jean as they consider what to say. The room smells like pennies.

The gray, which first appeared on Lance’s face, is seeping further into the house, draping the furniture, coating the walls, the decorations. Only Lara notices. She runs around closing all the windows, but it touches everything, like patient fingers. Exhausted, Lara sits on her bed for a while regarding her slim, gray hands. In the other room, someone puts on music, but it abruptly cuts out.

When she rejoins the group, Lara sees Ben sitting cross-legged on the floor with Markus, the cat. Ben’s rubbing a dryer sheet over the Markus’s fur, and over his own face and forearms.

There’s a certain way things feel, Ben says. It has to do with the barometric pressure. I feel my gases expanding.

A burst of thunder rattles the windowpanes, making them jump. Markus scrambles out of Ben’s arms and hides under the sofa. Jean leaps right out of her skin. (Later, they will say it sounded like a zipper unzipping.) She stands before them, muscles and organs and veins, exposed and pulsating, and demands another cocktail.

Lance picks up her spritz glass, which had rolled across the floor.

Kyle steadies himself. Here’s the thing, Jean. We’re all a little worried about you. Ben and Lance nod.

That’s an understatement, Lara says. Look at her! She moves closer to Jean, resisting the urge to touch the only non-gray thing in the house.

There’s nothing wrong with me. What are you staring at? I’ve never felt so alive!

The electrical activity of Jean’s cortex twinkles like lights on a Christmas tree. Her green eyes glisten.

Lance wonders aloud if the next thunderclap might turn Jean right side out. Anything’s possible, right? But no one’s listening.

Hail machine guns the roof, unnerving them all. Except Jean, who has an abundance of nerves that flicker over her body like fireflies. That spit and crackle like sparklers.

 

Widely published and anthologized, Kathy Fish’s stories may be found in Ploughshares, Five Points, Best American Nonrequired Reading, the Norton Reader, and Norton’s Flash Fiction America. She has been honored with a Copper Nickel Editor’s Prize and multiple appearances in both the Wigleaf Top 50 and the Best Small Fictions series. The author of five short fiction collections, Fish teaches a variety of writing workshops online. She also publishes a bestselling craft newsletter on Substack: The Art of Flash Fiction. Her writing has been generously supported by fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation and the Kerouac Project.

 

See what happens when you click below.

Three Fictions

by Girija Tropp

 

THE MATTER OF BABY

Moses puts the baby down when the car comes past the trees flanking the first curl of a long drive into the property. It putzes onto the gentle grass slope. The sun is a bit bright so he places the diagonal corner of the cotton blanket over the baby’s face. Then he worries about breathing problems so he pushes the fold back. He is going to ask Hibiscus, his lost sister, to give the baby her special name.

He waits on the banks of the dam till she parks the old Volvo. The day has started now, he tells the baby. He ponders on the way that Hibiscus’ legs cycle under a calf-length green skirt and how the brown thongs lift through the grass. “You have good circulation like me,” he says, giving her a kiss on the right cheek. She smells of wood gum.

“Why do you say that?” She is looking at the baby.

“Like me, you don’t wear much on your feet even though the weather is turning cool.” He bends down to pick up the blanket parcel. “Meet the baby.”

“Who does it belong to?”

“My…” He pauses. “Wife of yesteryear.”

“So how come you’ve got—is it a him or a her?” Hibiscus strokes the baby’s nose and the eyes open wider.

“What happened is that my mother was watching TV.”

“Oh?”

“She was trying to make the baby quiet and was getting very tired. Mother is old and has been sick recently. So she told me to take a walk so the baby can stop crying. I have been feeding her milk from a bottle. I have no good ideas about how to feed youngsters.”

Hibiscus puts her satchel down and her hands out for the baby but it turns its face away. “Oho, Moses, you are his favourite person. Tell me, when did our mother give this baby to you?”

“Yesterday. In the evening.”

“There will be some very worried persons looking for this baby.”

Moses hangs his head. “I suppose I should have rung but I didn’t have the right coins. When you have a baby, you can’t just stop doing things for it and start doing something else. Last night I thought of ringing after the baby fell asleep but you can’t ring people at home after ten.”

“I think you will have to take the baby back.”

“Okay.” He sits down on the grass.

“I mean now.”

“But we haven’t had a picnic yet.”

Hibiscus shakes her head. “We might be God-saved but we are in the real world. The police are probably out looking for you.”

“I don’t want to go into hospital and I don’t want drugs.”

“Stay calm.” Hibiscus chews her lips. “What’s the number of our mother?” She dials and puts the thing to her ear and her head to the side. “Hello there, this is Hibiscus and I am ringing for Moses to tell you that the baby is with us, and is well and safe.

“Easy there Mother, relax and take a deep breath or the other way around. No, he wasn’t trying to steal anything. And I’m not an imposter!” She has to move the mobile from her ear again and back. “You asked him to walk the baby and he took… Mrs Mother, now please settle down or I will hang up.” She drops her hand so that the mobile is pressed to her thigh and their mother, ElsieMaw, is talking to a lime green skirt.

 

 

HOW TO BE A FISHERMAN

Hibiscus takes the baby so he can organize a good piece of stick and tie a string to it, and then add a bit of meat on the end of the string. He has convinced her of the deliciousness of a yabby meal. He casts the string into the water and is so focused on his yabbying that he does not speak, and she has to repeat the question. “So whose place is this?”

“This is my old friend Dean’s house. He has also got problems like I have, you know what I mean by the reality problem. I told him that drugs are not necessary but he is into his medication.”

“I can see that you have a purpose to calling me here.”

“Can you do something for my friend Dean?”

The baby begins to whimper, and they feed him from the milk bottle. Moses repeats his question about Dean. “Well,” Hibiscus says and she seems to be having trouble knowing how to answer. “It’s like this—there is the right time, the right place and even the right person in addition to a person’s readiness for saving. I might not be the right person. I have no instruction to come here and save a Dean. However, the fact that you’ve asked me to save a Dean at this place and in this time might count as instruction. That is, if you have received instruction to ask me. However you have not been passed into the inner circle so I doubt it. Nevertheless, I will do my best.”

“Dean is not awake yet but we will start cooking the yabbies, and wake him up in time to eat.”

“Just yabbies?”

“There should be something else in the cupboards. Maybe some noodles.”

Hibiscus shades her eyes. “Is that a vegie patch I see over there?”

“I believe it is. There is a fence around, and it has beds with wooden planks, and I see green plants all of a similar nature in rows.”

“I think you have described the essential composition of a vegetable garden.”

“What a miracle! Have I told you how such marvels are constantly occurring to me since I met up with you?”

“Yes you have, as a matter of fact, but you wait till you are an Ascended Master, the fruits of the earth shall wait in line for your touch.”

Moses reels in the sixth yabbie and drops him in the yellow bucket and ties on more meat scraps. “I want the whole world to find miracles,” he says fervently and casts the line. A yabbie bites almost immediately.

“We, the God-saved, can get a little over-enthusiastic.” Hibiscus says.

They throw back the younger yabbies into the opaque water and fill the bucket with fat scrumptious-looking older yabbies. Moses thinks how amazing it is to find so many yabbies hiding in such a shallow dam.

“It’s because of the coming spring,” Hibiscus says. “And we have some very warm days that are conducive to the wellbeing of yabbies in dams.” She grins, and brings out a banana which she offers first to Moses. He takes a bite and then she takes a bite, and then he takes a bite and then she takes a bite, and in this manner they finish the banana. When the pail looks to be three quarters full of yabbies, Hibiscus says how these creatures could feel crowded, and they tip half their catch back into the water. As they walk towards the house, Moses expresses his feelings with some movements that he calls gladden-the-heart. “I have always dreamt of being a fisherman.”

FRUITS OF THE EARTH

In the kitchen, Moses puts a big pot of water on to boil, and starts cleaning and shelling yabbies. “Normally,” he calls out into the lounge area, “these would have to be fed on milk till they are cleaned out but we are hungry. We are to expect a little grittiness.”

“T’s’okay,” Dean calls out above the guitar notes, and says something about East meeting West.

Moses lifts the yabbies in time with the music rocking his brain. His chin bobs forward and back as he works. Peeled shells are chucked into the compost bin. Another saucepan of water goes on to cook while he hunts for some noodles. He finds tomatoes and onions. He chops these up into another pan of oil, and adds some herbs from pots on the window sills that need watering, a matter immediately rectified.

“We need vegies,” he calls out.

“Soon,” Hibiscus says in a drowsy voice. “Do you mind if I wait a little? I’ll even help with the veg.”

Moses sniffs the air. There is a mushroomy smell adding to the smokey warmth of burning logs.

“Want a drag mate?” Dean is asking over the sounds of the east.

“No thanks.” Moses bends over his yabbies and talks to them as he works and wishes them happiness in his tummy. After a while his hunger reaches an ecstatic intensity. Hare Ram, Hare Krishna, Dean chants. Gopalajaya, jaya, jaya. Shell after shell is dropped into the bucket, and a glass bowl fills with yabbie meat, and noodles get dropped into boiling water, and he pepper-and-salts the cooking tomato-onion mix. There is a moaning sound that catches his attention. Moses stops for a minute. Hibiscus? The music has changed without him being aware. No longer is it live music. Instead, there is a CD playing softly. There is another soft slippery sound, and cloths rubbing against other cloths.

Radha, Radha, Radha, Radha, Radha. Moses sings with the CD.

It is time to get the vegies so he turns the flame down and tiptoes out. A side glance towards the fireplace confirms the fact that Dean is lying on top of Hibiscus. Under the navy blue woollen robe, Dean’s backside is making a prayer to love. Hibiscus has her hands outflung and her face is hidden by hair, but she is making a noise like more, more, more.

Suddenly, she yells, harder, harder, harder and her heels drum on the robe. Moses realizes he has stopped and redirects himself to the front door. God bless you, my children, he says to the air. Some distance from the house, with the vegie garden getting closer, he flings the pail into the air and catches it again, letting out a great whoopee. There is every chance that Dean is going to be saved. With the knife, he cuts a bunch of silverbeet, and picks some beans from a kind of small homemade greenhouse. He would like to get more fruits of the earth but has to consider the timing of the meal.

 

Girija Tropp is the winner of the Boston Review Prize and the Josephine Ulrick Literature Award. Her work has appeared in Agni, Denver Quarterly, Mississippi Review, Fiction International, Chimurenga, and Best Australian Stories. She has completed two novels, working on a third, and lives and works in Australia.

 

See what happens when you click below.

Flurry

by Lydia Gwyn

 

I dig holes for snowdrop bulbs. A song of psalms, over and over. Turning and turning. I plant so many bulbs that when spring arrives, the hill will become a snowbank. By that time, I’ll be a different version of myself. Patient and pauseful. One who listens more. One who notices. My daughter’s ponytail curling on itself, her pretty, open face. The sachet rooms of orange light in my house. My husband playing guitar until the cords go slant in my brain. The sound of my son on the phone with a friend, pacing as he talks, like his father. I place each bulb in its hole, a flurry of them, and remember other fall days years ago, when I was in college and visiting my parents’ home for Thanksgiving break. Football cheer on the TV, and the smell of onions, buttered potatoes, the boiling, baking air. My mother assembling pumpkin pies, pricking the bottom crust with a fork. I was always in-love with some boy or other. Waiting for their calls. How I wish those lovers had loved more. Snowdrops have such small blooms. I picture how these on the hill will bud and open, dangling like strange opioids or like the tips of someone’s fingers dipping sugar from a bowl.

 

Lydia Gwyn is the author of the flash fiction collections: You’ll Never Find Another (2021, Matter Press) and Tiny Doors (2018, Another New Calligraphy). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in DMQ Review, The Best Microfictions 2024, Appalachian Places, Elm Leaves Journal, Fractured Lit, F(r)iction, The Florida Review, and others. A selection of pieces from her new collection “Emptiness, Standing Still” is available in Issue 22 of Ravenna Press’s Triples Series. She lives with her family in East Tennessee, where she works as an academic librarian.

 

See what happens when you click below.

The City of Depression

by Avital Gad-Cykman

 

Glimmers crawl like larvae in dirty puddles left by hours of drizzling rain. Slippery stones tilt each step, teasing the body’s balance, the near-symmetry of legs, threatening to twist an ankle. A line of adjoining houses stands like a stalled train, their surfaces peeling, throwing angled shadows across a ghostly uneven street. Steady drizzle blurs the eyes, but from this hollow in the landscape it is impossible to glimpse the hilltops at sunrise anyway. Chilly darkness clenches like a fist around passersby.

This month, a man in his fifties strangled by blood clots, has lost his ability to speak. His mouth twists and his eyes roll as he surveys the ruins of his brain, searching for a way out. To reach others, he needs one word-that’s all. The right word, to pull him back from a loneliness stretching forever without it.

We walk through the city of depression and no one speaks. Our feet hurt, our heads are bursting, our hands reach out without finding anything solid to grasp, something to hold. We pass each other without looking. Then a whistle. Someone sings something old, a children’s song.

The man turns his head. He listens. The song is about a garden. And a boy. A memory spirals open.
And there it is.

A flower.

 

Avital Gad-Cykman is the author of the story collections Light Reflection Over Blues (Ravenna Press) and Life In, Life Out (Matter Press). She is the winner of Margaret Atwood Studies Magazine Prize and The Hawthorne Citation Short Story Contest, twice a finalist for the Iowa Fiction Award and a six-time nominee for the Pushcart. Her stories appear in Spectrum, The Dr. Eckleburg Review, Iron Horse Review, Prairie Schooner, Ambit, McSweeney’s Quarterly and Michigan Quarterly, twice in Best Short Fictions, W.W. Norton’s Flash Fiction International anthology and Best Microfiction 2025. She lives in Brazil.

 

See what happens when you click below.

One of the Fingers

by Kim Chinquee

 

I center myself on the moto, balancing my core. Out here in the open air, on the road, wearing long pants, my ref jacket, whistle, timer, helmet. My driver is from England, not far from where I used to live when I was in the Air Force.

Cyclists use their legs, helping them go forward. It’s my job to make sure they’re not drafting, nor breaking any rules. Also: ensure safety. Today, I’m Head Official.

When I see athletes grouping on the bike course, I tell my driver to slow, follow, and the athletes tend to self-correct, moving single file outside of the draft zone. I’m an athlete myself.

We ride up and down the course: twenty-six miles of vineyards, farms, and hills. Along Lake Cayuga; it’s one of the Fingers. I give my driver orders, and we stop here and there to chat. He’s a retired physicist who came to the US by way of Cornell. I’m a professor myself. He also is an athlete.

It’s a thrill, on the back of his motorcycle, speeding, slowing, speeding, feeling the air, seeing the athletes on the bike, knowing what that’s like. The burn of the muscles. The breath. The hard climbs, sailing through the downs.

We wave to police directing traffic.

Part of this course shares a Half Ironman route I’ve done more than once and will do again next month.

As I start the two-hour drive back home, I listen to a novel on audio, and I imagine myself on the moto, imagine myself on the bike, pushing on the ups, speeding through the downs, the clean breeze on my face, and oh, the beauty of the landscape, and the lake! Again, an uphill and a down one! Faster, faster—wee!

Turning left, I see lights behind me, the police. I’m still wearing my official gear. My hat and shirt and jacket and my whistle.

I pull over, unroll my window, and a cop steps up and asks me for my license.

I say, “Was I speeding?”

“It goes from 55 to 40 down to 30.”

“Oh,” I say, handing my ID.

He says, “It’s not a race.”

 

Kim Chinquee’s eleventh book is Octopus Arms. She’s Senior Editor of New World Writing Quarterly, Prose Editor of Midwest Review, and Associate Professor of Journalism at SUNY-Buffalo State. She’s a competitive triathlete, a Certified USA Triathlon and World Triathlon Official, and lives with her three dogs in Western New York.

 

See what happens when you click below.

Apophasis

by Michael Okafor

 

Today, I am not going to write a single word about it. I will take a walk in the clear-cut repose of the park. I will listen to Fela. I will watch the hectoring winter-white pigeons peck at an army of red ants. I will lasso my mind around a single thought. Perhaps I will write a poem that outruns meaning. It is useless to try to explain anything. I stopped writing about it because I stopped writing about it. It is apparent what it is. I am not afraid. My great-grandmother was afraid when they took her eldest brother. I will not even mention who they are or what they did. I don’t want to write about anything terrible. I will tell you what I would love to write about: Sclater’s guenons; those slaves who died by the dull stab of the Atlantic; the perseverance of ants. It is not easy to preserve a species marked for extinction. But we have to do what we have to do, don’t we? I might as well be the one to write what happened on those ships. You weren’t there, remember? I am the only one who knows. It is my single responsibility. I can’t remember when it became that way. I guess it’s just like running; you never remember the first thing that made you sprint—you just know you have to keep running until the air in your lungs starts fluttering against your ribcage like some frightened bird in a cage. Every person is running from something. My ancestors ran from white men for years. This wasn’t some sport; I checked—they didn’t make it to the Olympics. I’m not even making this up. I have gathered my empirical data from my dreams. I am a scientist like that. My aim is to convince you that history is an approximation of lies. I know the ocean still plots my death. I know how heredity works.

 

Michael Okafor is an Igbo writer and medical radiographer from Nigeria. His work, which explores the human condition, has been shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize (2025) and was first runner-up for both the Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize (2025) and the SprinNG Annual Poetry Contest (2023). A 2023 SprinNG Writing Fellow and member of the Nwokike Literary Club, his poetry is featured or forthcoming in Prism International, Chestnut Review, The Shore, and Broken Antler Magazine, among others. He’s on X (@okaformichael_) and Instagram (@okaformichael0808).

 

See what happens when you click below.

CNF: Living Beneath

by Richard Hurst

 

I grew up in Levittown, Pennsylvania, under rows of Norway maples that made a ceiling out of summer. I thought that was how neighborhoods worked. Shade laid in gentle curves, sidewalks lifting where roots insisted, leaves thick enough to quiet whatever tried to grow beneath them.

I did not know I was living inside something planted all at once. Sometimes I slipped past the rows into small woods the builders had missed. The air cooled. The light split. Tulip poplars rose straight into the sky.

Red oaks held the ground in a way I could feel without understanding. Beech stood pale and smooth, like a room that asked for silence. Sweet birch carried the faint scent of wintergreen.

These places felt older than anything I knew how to name. Back in my neighborhood, the maples spread wide and shallow, covering everything. I lived beneath them without knowing what they had replaced.

Even then, something remained. A single poplar behind a fence. A beech at the edge of a schoolyard. A red oak holding its ground. I noticed them without knowing why.

Now I understand what remained.

 

Richard Hurst is a writer who recently retired from a patrol position with the Minneapolis Park Police and now works seasonally as a ranger in New Mexico’s Gila country. His work explores public space, memory, landscape, and the fragile structures that hold people together. His writing has appeared in the Minnesota Reformer, MinnPost and Núvol, with forthcoming work in Smoky Blue Literary & Arts Magazine, Star 82 Review and Thin Places Journal.

 

See what happens when you click below.

Plain Jane’s Calamity

by Barbara Diehl

 

Jane sees herself as anything but plain. Jane is no child in a primary reader who looks and sees and runs with a brother named Dick and a dog named Spot. Jane is no Jane Eyre, no pitiable governess, no almost-missionary’s wife. Jane is no Tarzan’s Jane, a Baltimorean bumbling her way through an African jungle. No, not our Jane. Our Jane sees herself a Calamity Jane, tobacco spitter, a beer guzzler, sharpshooter, fearless rider Jane, star of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show.

But look. See Jane in her gingham dress and bobby socks watch Dick play fetch with Spot. See Jane push funny little baby Puff in the carriage while Dick struts in Father’s fedora. But see Jane cower before the savage, unrepressed Bertha in the attic. But see Jane run from Thornfield Hall across windswept moors clutching her carpetbag of belongings. But see Jane need Tarzan to rescue her from lions and apes and kidnappers, time and time again.

See Jane ride the subway with her dog spray canister tucked into her cross-body bag. See Jane take coffee orders, take minutes of the meeting on a legal pad, take whatever anyone dishes out, take it with a grain of salt, take it on the chin, take it like a good sport. See Jane dream of a horse named Rochester, a lover named Hickok, of being addressed, with respect, as tribal chieftess, and sometimes Lady Greystoke.

See Jane dream of bursting through saloon doors with a Winchester rifle. Dream of a Stetson with an eagle feather. Of spurs. Of being spurred, an unbroken horse in a wild west show. Dream of herself in Father’s fedora, leaving little baby Puff with Dick so she can rip herself right out of that reader. Be Bertha shredding the bridal veil, burning the manor down. Plain Jane is only a bookmark. Plain Jane is not the story. See Jane know she will be any Jane but plain.

 

Barbara Westwood Diehl is senior editor of The Baltimore Review. Her fiction and poems appear in a variety of journals, including Fractured Lit, South Florida Poetry Journal, Poetry South, Painted Bride Quarterly, Five South, Allium, Split Rock Review, Blink-Ink, Midway, Free State Review, Ghost Parachute, Pithead Chapel, Raleigh Review, New World Writing Quarterly, Tiny Molecules, Sky Island Journal, Gargoyle, and Cleaver. She is the winner of the 2025 L+S Press Mid-Atlantic Chapbook Series Contest.

 

See what happens when you click below.

CNF: My Mother Hates the Movie FARGO

by Courtney LeBlanc

 

Thinks it portrays the state she loves more than her daughter as small. Backwards. A frozen tundra. Plus, she argues they got the accent wrong but every time I talked to my father, Oooh Courtney, how ya doin’? rolled out of his mouth and I can confirm: Frances McDormand nailed the accent. And that scene where Steve Buscemi buries the money in the snow-filled ditch and he looks one way and it’s just a blanket of white stretched as far as he can see and then he looks in the other direction and it’s the same—yeah, that was my childhood. And my childhood was great, my playground: our entire farm, wide open for miles, but I always felt caged in so I left as soon as I could. Now I hate winter, can’t stand the cold, have only returned for one Christmas in twenty-six years. I recently rewatched the movie, it still holds up. My relationship with my mother is complicated, frozen for years, my father’s death thawed it a bit. I don’t talk to her much but I call her the credits rolled. I wanted my father’s voice in my ears, those long Os, the way he laughed at the woodchipper scene. I try not to cry when she picks up.

 

Courtney LeBlanc is the author of the four full-length collections, most recently Her Dark Everything and Her Whole Bright Life (winner of the Jack McCarthy Book Prize). She is the Arlington County Poet Laureate Emerita and the founder and editor-in-chief of Riot in Your Throat, an independent poetry press. She’s also the founder of the Poetry Coven, a monthly generative workshop. She loves nail polish, tattoos, and a soy latte each morning. Find her online at www.courtneyleblanc.com.

 

See what happens when you click below.

We’ll Have Plans

by Suzanne C Martinez

 

Let’s make a vow that fifteen years from now, we will not be those people who only talk about aches and pains, doctors’ visits, or upcoming operations, or about people we knew who have passed on, bless their hearts. Let’s not criticize other people’s questionable clothing choices, their saggy neck wrinkles, or the crepey skin on their arms. We won’t suck our teeth mentioning the ones who’ve had ‘work done’ or dental implants. We won’t discuss anyone’s children’s divorces and job losses, or our grandchildren’s many accomplishments.

Instead, let’s get together and talk about the books we’re reading, the trips we’re planning, and the Broadway shows we have tickets for. Let’s go to the gym and swim, do yoga, and lift weights. Let’s finish writing our novels, start another one, and create new paintings in a series. Let’s go out for dinner at nice restaurants weekly, see the latest art shows, and attend book launches. Let’s live each day as if it were endless, and we have plenty of time.

But if we should die, let’s be ghosts. Let’s haunt the playground after the kids have gone and swing as high as the stars. Let’s make transparent rabbit ears behind everyone’s head on school picture day. And dance in the moonlight on roofs and parapets like fireflies. Best of all, we’ll go down into basements and up into attics, where they always say never to go.

 

Suzanne C Martinez’s fiction has appeared in North American Review, Wigleaf, Vestal Review, The Citron Review, and The Broadkill Review, among others, and was nominated for Pushcart Prizes (2019, 2020, 2026), The Best of the Net (2020, 2024), and Best Short Fictions (2022). She lives in Brooklyn.

 

See what happens when you click below.

Dorothy

by Ryan McGeeney

 

When I was ten years old, I asked my grandmother what my name was.

She leaned forward, put her hands on the knees of her polyester slacks, and peered into my eyes, her bottle-bottom-thick lenses between us.

“Omarosa Pizza Pan,” she said.

Our mouths were flat lines, a silence hardening between us.

“Millenia Trashcan Biscuit Basket,” she said.

My lip quivered. An eyebrow raised.

“Arsenio Fargleswap,” she said. I gave my head a single, curt shake.

I cleared my throat.

“Deprock Kegglebate,” I said.

Her septuagenarian face. A withered, immovable rock.

“No, no,” she said. “Don’t believe that’s right.”

“Maxamillian Farkletwerp,” I said, just a hint of a question mark.

“Mmmmmm, no,” she said. She straightened her back, stretching her hips forward a bit.

Gazing at the horizon above my head, she took in the full lay of the Kansas land before bringing her foggy gaze back down to me. Like the Hubble telescope hammered into the Rock of Gibraltar, that face.

“Ah,” she said, lowering her face back into mine. “Now I remember.”

“Go on,” I said.

“Lazarus,” she said. “Lazarus Gorthmorkin the Fourth.”

Pause.

“Forkin.”

And I lost it. The woman had done it again — chipped away at my bearing until I stood no chance of keeping a straight face.

This was a ritual between us, and we found ways to execute it all throughout our summer days, when I spent large swaths of time at her house, as my parents did whatever it is they did in the intervening years between their wedding and their divorce. Helping my grandmother bake cookies, I would pass her a scoop of kooglebarter fappleschnitz, after being directed to pull out the Skaarsgarten mufflestomp from the drawer of baking pans. It’s a wonder we never poisoned anyone.

The game, such as it was, had grown out of my first conscious memory. I was five years old, and had simply “come to” in my body while standing a few feet away from her, looking into those foggy, rheumatic gazers of hers. And when I’d asked her my name on that day, I’d honestly had no idea.

And so she told me. Even as a small child, I was skeptical about many things, but the name had the ring of truth. Going forward, no one disagreed with it. Had she been a woman of greater guile, she really could’ve gone with anything. Missed opportunity for both of us, I suppose.

And that was Dorothy. The first woman I remember. A child of the Great Depression, rye from morning into night, but forthright enough not to leave you completely unmoored in your more vulnerable hours.

Skepticism notwithstanding, I wasn’t especially insightful as a child, and ardently self-absorbed as an adolescent, so I never really discovered that much about her in life. “Discovered.” As if I’d have had to interrogate her. All I really would’ve had to do, more than likely, was ask. But I never did.

For shame.

Whatever became of Dorothy? Why, she died, of course. Some 20 years after letting me in on the forgotten secret of my own name, she’d faded rapidly in her final years, succumbing to Alzheimer’s or dementia or some other disease of forgetting and dysfunction.

I traveled home for her funeral, but regretted not having been available to her when she, perhaps, might have needed someone she could trust to simply remind her of her own name.

“Gorgonzola Moonraft,” perhaps.

 

Ryan McGeeney is a writer and carpenter living in central Arkansas. His work has also appeared in The Bleeding Margin. His forthcoming novella, “The Merciful Thing,” will be available from Ruadán Books in 2027. His woodworking can be seen at https://www.instagram.com/the.occasional.woodworker/.

 

See what happens when you click below.

What He Does in Each Life

by Eipsita .k

 

In the first life he makes coffee before anyone else is awake. He knows the exact weight of the grounds, how far to fill the carafe. He does not need to measure anymore. He stands at the window while it runs and watches the neighbor’s dog move across the yard, which it does every morning at the same time, which he has come to count on. He is a man who counts on small things.

In the second life he arrives early, which is a form of respect he extends to everything he does. He parks where he planned to park. He checks what needs checking. He is unhurried. Hurrying introduces errors and he has never had much patience for error.

In the first life his daughter comes down in her socks and he pours her cereal without being asked because he knows what she wants in the morning. She talks to him. He listens to the parts she needs him to listen to and makes the right sounds and asks the one question she wants asked. He is good at this. He has always been good at this.

In the second life he does not need to be told anything twice. He understands the sequence and he follows the sequence and he is fully present inside each step the way a person is present when they have chosen to be somewhere and have no reservations about the choice.

In the first life he drives his wife to her appointment and waits. He brings a book he doesn’t read. He watches the room. He is practiced at waiting. He has always been the kind of man other people describe as calm, which is accurate, though they mean it as a simpler thing than it is.

In the second life he finishes. He is careful and thorough the way he is careful and thorough about everything and when it is done it is done and he does not revisit it. He drives home through streets he knows well.

In the first life he washes his hands at the kitchen sink, which he does after cooking, after coming in from outside, after anything. His daughter is telling him something that happened at school, something involving a girl in her class and a misunderstanding that has since been resolved. He listens. He dries his hands on the dish towel. He turns around. He is completely here. He has always been completely here. This is one of the things his wife says about him, that he is present, that she has always been able to count on that.

In both lives he sleeps well.

 

Eipsita .k is a writer fascinated by the quiet rhythms of daily life and the unseen depth within standard routines. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in various spaces. She currently resides in Bengaluru, India, where she makes coffee and counts on small things.

 

See what happens when you click below.

Deadbeats

by Emily Kingery

 

I met him at Jungle Bungle and we really hit it off. He was walking around with a kid-sized Croc in his hand, holding it up like an empty leash, like mister have you seen my dog, so I was like, oh no, and we did the fuck-my-luck laugh. Eventually, he went back to the claw machine, where the other Croc was stranded. He kicked it aside, then got eye-level with the coin slot and jangled it, fast, like he was feeling up the babysitter, and would you believe two quarters came out? No way, I said, and he grinned and jerked his head, like hey kid wanna meet the band, so okay, I joined him. Not to toot my own horn, but I played the claw machine at the I-80 rest stop and won a Minion stuffie for my daughter. I got to the hospital when she was born and everything– the nurse gave me this tight little smile, but it made me proud, showing up with a gift. So I was telling him this story, dad to dad, while he fumbled with his cargo pockets. He made a face like he was unhooking a bra, like where’s the Velcro, and for a second I thought he wasn’t listening. But then he reached into his pockets and pulled out BuzzBallz, one left and one right. Two magic rabbits. Voila! he chuckled, and we clinked the balls. To kids! I boomed, like it was a speech at my daughter’s wedding, though she was not in Jungle Bungle but somewhere else in Iowa, probably. We chugged our BuzzBallz. I looked around for a trash can, and when I came back to the claw machine, he was gone. Can you believe it? He left his empty ball on the floor with the Crocs. Not littering, exactly– he placed it there, like a still-life arrangement. It looked pretty good, honestly, so I took a picture on my phone and hit send. I watched her typing bubble appear and vanish, appear and vanish, then stop.

 

EMILY KINGERY is the author of Invasives (Finishing Line Press, 2023). Her work appears widely in journals and has been selected for multiple honors and awards. She teaches creative writing and literature at St. Ambrose University and is an emeritus member of the Board of Directors at the Midwest Writing Center, a non-profit supporting writers in the Quad Cities community (mwcqc.org). You can find her at emilykingery.com.

 

See what happens when you click below.

CNF: Wychwood Park

by Lissa Staples

 

It’s 3 p.m. on August 31st and I’m walking through Wychwood Park in Toronto. I never expected to need solitude the way I do now. Rain is falling with intent and autumn leaves corkscrew around my feet as if sentient. I’ve always loved rain. How the pavement cups it into puddles. Put enough of it together and you have the lake with the blue rowboat, my cousins and I oaring across the bay to Moore’s General Store with quarters in our pockets, salivating for bars of sweet caramel. We float over water black as eternity.

I never thought loss would feel like drowning.

I remember quiet evenings in the cabin, my parents’ faces in candlelight and the sounds of summer through the open windows: the clank of the rowboat against the dock, the silvery songs of loons and the splash of trout tails. I have always been surprised by the sound of my own name: my mother calling me from the cabin, her voice like a disembodied creature of the lake.

The first time I saw my mother’s name on her gravestone, it looked so small and unimportant among the other memorials.  I never expected her to be subterranean just as I didn’t expect a wheelchair to put my father below the visual horizon – a social disaster and a lonely place to be. When he asked me rub his slumped shoulders, his voice was breathy.

I didn’t know my name was beautiful when whispered.

A bell shrills and I step into the grass as a cyclist passes. He’s not wearing a hat and I wonder if he likes rain too. A swath of flame-tipped leaves follows him down the hill like a celebration. On my eleventh birthday, I singed my eyebrows blowing out the candles. My mother dashed me in the face with a glass of water, laughing in relief. When she said my name, it sounded joyful.

The rain courses toward the pond. The swans have already flown because they are sensible creatures. Was that a flash of lightning? I’ve always loved the edgy tension of thunderstorms. I stop to zip my coat and lift the collar. All over the pavement are the fleshy question marks of worms flip-flopping charmlessly in the flood. I never thought I liked worms but they are the most defenseless of all things on wet asphalt and yet they can be deconstructed without necessarily dying.

I never imagined a worm would make me hopeful.

The wind twirls my hair into a complicated tangle. The umbrella is exhausted. I let go just to see what happens and it sails away to the unknown like a liberated soul. I like the feeling of being vulnerable in this weather. Anything could happen. I could slip on one of these worms or change course to the pub on Bathurst. If I stand here long enough, I might molt, shed my losses and grow thicker skin.

I didn’t expect so many options as I observe my sixtieth birthday in a rainy park in Toronto where no one says my name or disturbs my solitude.

 

Lissa Staples is a retired classical singer and emerging writer. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she won Synkroniciti’s short story contest with “The Month of Drowning.” Her work has appeared in Corvus Review, Heartwood Review and The Stickman Review among others. She lives in Golden, CO.

 

See what happens when you click below.

CNF: Locally Sourced Sadness

by Adrian Potter

1.

I once cried in a liquor store because they sold out of the brand of bourbon I craved. It was just days after my mother passed. There I stood, in an aisle filled with limitless booze options, cheeks stained with tears, openly wondering about mercy, whether the universe had decided I didn’t deserve what I wanted most.

2.

I have spent money I didn’t have on things I didn’t want, just to feel alive. Just to possess something new when everything felt like old hat. After all, shame is easier to clutch onto than hope. Lottery tickets, avocado toast sprinkled with feta, detox supplements. As-seen-on-TV gimmicks, earbuds, bubble tea. Locally sourced sadness, handcrafted in small batches. A quiet kind of tragedy, to squander cash on synthetic satisfaction. But some nights, even a sliver of satisfaction feels like heaven.

3.

I understand the urge to say you can’t do anything right. I have muttered it to myself more times than I can count.

4.

My identity has become a bunch of mismatched stories that don’t seem to fit together, but they always have. They always will.

5.

These days, I am finished trying to wash away my wrongdoings. Even baptism leaves something behind. Some things are meant to stay with us, so we remember how far we’ve come.

6.

It was never about the bourbon. Sometimes it feels easier to grieve over what’s temporarily missing rather than admit everything I’ve permanently lost.

7.

It feels like a thankless form of faith, to keep preaching optimism to the listless congregation that populates our world. But I do. I have. And I will. Not because I’m right, but because I still believe in the gospel of trying, failing, and trying again. Amen.

 

Adrian S. Potter humbly lives in Minnesota on the traditional, ancestral, and contemporary lands of the Dakota people. When he’s not silently judging your beer selection and record collection, he’s writing poetry and prose. His work has appeared in over 300 literary journals, magazines, and websites. Potter has authored four collections of poetry/prose/hybrid work, including “The Blues Handbook” (Thirty West Publishing) and “And the Monster Swallows You Whole” (Stillhouse Press). Visit him online at http://adrianspotter.com/.

 

See what happens when you click below.

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.

 

See what happens when you click below.

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.

 

See what happens when you click below.

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).

 

See what happens when you click below.

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.

 

See what happens when you click below.

CNF: A Life I Can Inhabit

by Clayton Eccard

 

I grew up in houses my father built the way some men build prayers—by hand with a faith that could be squared and made to last. We moved often. Each house arrived as an attempt at permanence. He believed stability could be earned the way a man earns calluses: through repetition, through doing it right.

His hammer echoed through whatever neighborhood we were trying to become, a steady insistence: here. It took me years to understand what that rhythm was teaching me. Home was something you built, occupied, and sometimes left. Movement did not feel like loss. It felt like progress.

When I returned home as a young man, nothing was wrong with the house. The rooms were finished. The kitchen smelled familiar. My parents welcomed me without hesitation. Yet I moved through it like a guest. I left my bag zipped in the corner. I shortened stories before they reached their endings. No one built walls around me. I built them myself, room by room, until I could pass through the house without revealing what I was still learning to name.

New York felt like distance enough to become whole. For years I lived as I had grown up—temporary. Roommates, sublets, apartment shares. Spaces that worked until they didn’t. An apartment near the World Trade Center was the first place that felt chosen. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked directly into the South Tower. At night, the office lights glowed. That glow carved shadows from everything we owned. We never hung curtains. Too beautiful to block, the glow did not feel temporary.

Then smoke replaced sky. The glow vanished. The room felt smaller without it. What we owned remained there for months. The lease dissolved into paperwork. The relationship fractured under pressures neither of us had rehearsed. I moved again. I began to understand how quickly a structure could vanish.

The years that followed were a series of iterations—different apartments, different versions of myself. I stopped mistaking square footage for security. Home was no longer attached to someone else’s future or a skyline I believed would hold.

Meanwhile, my father kept building—homes, rental properties and a retirement imagined in mortgage-free rooms. He achieved what he wanted, but even that foundation cracked. Alzheimer’s came for him and there was only one house left—a structure he never knew he no longer owned. Then, as I held one of his hands, he turned toward me and said my mother’s name. He told her she would be fine without him. He said that their son had always managed alone. I stayed quiet.

I inherited my father’s hands but not his faith in walls. He measured twice. I measure again. Each of us believed that if the work was honest enough, something would hold. When he framed a room, he did not ask whether it would last forever. He asked if it was level. He drove the nail clean. He moved to the next beam.

I am standing in a similar moment now—between addresses, between versions of myself that once felt incompatible and now feel less divided. I can remain.

 

Clayton H Eccard is a New York–based writer exploring intimacy, perception, and the quiet structures that shape human connection. His work has appeared inOUT Magazine and Lavender Rising, with work forthcoming inWelter, Beyond Queer Words, and the Southeast Review.

 

See what happens when you click below.

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

10/12 • Kathy Fish
10/19 • Katherine Garrison
10/26 • Beverly Jackson
11/02 • Robert Scotellaro
11/09 • T.L. Sherwood
11/16 • Susan Buchler
11/23 • Chelsea Stickle
11/30 • TBD
12/07 • TBD
12/14 • TBD
12/21 • TBD
12/28 • TBD