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.

 

517 words

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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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/.

 

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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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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.

 

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CNF: Morning Stars

by Chris Clemens

 

I have things to worry about, but first I must unload the dishwasher, making sure that the plates don’t clink too much. I can’t wake everyone up to clatter downstairs into these quiet hazy sunbeams, to shatter my tenuous peace with their unavoidable messy living. Hopes and dreams begin and end with breakfast. And so the coffee mugs are gently placed into the cupboard, slowly enough that I can consider the printed rocket ship and angry morning bear, the summer sun shimmering through the window, the garden already under siege, heat waves rising against the noise wall like an unchecked tide on the horizon, yet still far away on the other side of that wall so calm down already or I’ll shatter another mug on the floor. Cutlery jingles, each utensil placed into a plastic-moulded sense of order, comforting and restorative until the last spoon is neither large nor small, but something in-between. In a dream I might open the back door and throw this irregular spoon outside into the sweltering garden, as if to say: see? Look what you made us do. This categorically difficult spoon is your problem now, because we have worse things to worry about. In my dream I might scream something like this, irrationally, disturbing the neighbours. In reality I would dig the weird spoon out of the wilting tomato plants and tenderly return it to the dishwasher, terrified of what the raccoons might be capable of, equipped with such a tool. In reality I would never scream at all. Screaming might wake everyone up.

 

Chris Clemens teaches and writes in Toronto, where he has defeated 8.5 raccoons (with help from his wonderful family). Nominated for Best Small Fictions and Best of the Net, his stories and poems appear in Best Microfiction 2026, The Literary Review of Canada, Baffling Magazine, Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction, and elsewhere. Find more at linktr.ee/clemenstation.

 

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My Hiding Son on the Fourth of the July

by Chris Pellizzari

 

He’s hiding from lost house keys, from curls fallen from homemade haircuts swirling on orange carpet, from unplugged wires seeking their place in the galaxy. He’s hiding from the baseball he can’t wrap his fingers around, dropped and forgotten near the refrigerator in favor of a cherry popsicle. He’s hiding from baby sister’s bottle nipple pointing towards the fuse box that connects clean teeth to itchy fingers and from the steak knives his mother left out on the kitchen table, telling me to stay away. He’s hiding from promises I could not keep thanks to my diabetes, anxiety, insomnia, and cowardice. He’s hiding from the puppy that scratched his hand last week in mutual excitement and from the fireworks outside his window and the windless night carrying sulfur into today.

What is that humming sound coming from the kitchen sink, my boy’s hiding place? Come out, show yourself my son. There is a July cricket in the garage who wants to meet you. His voice is the truce between the earlier explosions of the fireworks and the quiet. Come my son, listen to the cricket, who keeps perfect time, like your heart when the fear is gone.

I hope, for both our sakes, the next decade is not too loud. I hope, for both our sakes, that time is kept perfectly.

 

Chris Pellizzari is a writer from Willowbrook, Illinois. His work has appeared in The Citron Review, Lake Effect, and Hobart. He is a member of The Society of Midland Authors.

 

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Saint

by Leath Tonino

 

They burned her alive, pretty standard, and soon after a cloth-and-stick effigy was constructed, carried to the town square, and committed to the flames of a new fire. Burned her dead this time? The ashes were spat upon, pissed upon, scooped up and thrown down, and additional bodily fluids were gleefully discharged. Then someone had an idea: Mix the ashes with hay and clay, build a sculpture, cut its head off! The crowd did this repeatedly, five executions, six executions, seven executions, and stopped only when the point was convincingly argued that too much recycling had diluted the essence. This prompted a lengthy debate about the meaning of the word “essence.” Questions led to more questions, and more questions, and more questions, and the anger fizzled, the energy drained away. A sleepy boy mutilated a rabbit. An old stooped man tidied the town square up in preparation for the Sunday morning market. All of the above occurred many years before she was canonized, obviously. The surprise, I suppose, is that everything started over again in response to her canonization, i.e. nothing really changed, nothing except this: The boy with the rabbit was now the man lugging the bucket, the old stooped man almost sort of dancing, under the full moon, late on Saturday night, across the ancient cobblestones, the moony cobblestones, with his disgusting mop.

 

Leath Tonino is the author of two essay collections: The Animal One Thousand Miles Long and The West Will Swallow You. A freelance writer, his prose and poetry appear in Orion, The Sun, New England Review, Outside, The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and many other magazines, journals, and anthologies.

 

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The Economy of the Blade

by Avril Shakira Villar

 

In 2023, the Philippine government allocated approximately 0.34 percent of GDP to the arts and culture. It is the official numerical expression of a nation’s belief about what counts as productive, what deserves to be resourced, what kind of human activity merits the sustained attention of a state that has other priorities. What this number means, in practice, is that the Filipino artist learns very early and very permanently that compression is not an aesthetic choice. You finish the woodcut because you cannot afford the oil paint. You write the short story because the novel requires a room of one’s own and the room belongs to six other people and three of them work night shifts and need to sleep.

What it does not reliably produce is the middle range, the sustained work, the five-year novel, the decade-long film project, the body of work that requires institutional support and a career structure and the basic guarantee that if you spend the next three years making the thing you need to make, you will still be able to eat at the end of it. This is what we have not built. Not the individual talent, which is everywhere, which has always been everywhere, which boards planes at NAIA Terminal 3 and lands in Toronto or London or Singapore and wins prizes there and is claimed then as a Filipino artist by the same country that could not find a way to keep them.

The psychic cost of making art inside a structure that does not support it is not documented in cultural policy papers because cultural policy papers are written by people who have jobs and therefore do not feel it. It is documented in the dropout rate and in the number of writers who stopped writing after thirty because the writing was not feeding their children. In the number of musicians who play weddings and corporate events and are excellent at it and hate it with a precision that only people who know what they could have done instead are capable of hating anything. It is tragedy in the administrative sense, the tragedy of neglect so structural it becomes invisible, so normalized it becomes character, becomes the Filipino capacity for resilience, becomes something we are praised for internationally by people who do not understand that what they are praising is our ability to survive conditions that should not exist.

The Filipino artist knows all of this from the inside, in the body, without needing it explained. The knowledge is in the hands that finish the woodcut at two in the morning before the shift begins. It is in the short story that is short not because short is the right length but because short is the length that fits in the life. It is in the film that runs twelve minutes and screens in Rotterdam and wins the prize and the director flies home economy class and goes back to shooting commercials on Monday. From the outside, you can see the shape of what was prevented. The novel that would have been written with five more years and a living wage. The career that would have unfolded if the career had been possible. It is the political question underneath the aesthetic one: not how do we celebrate the art that survives, but why must so much of it not survive at all.

 

Avril Shakira Villar is a writer and youth leader from the Philippines. She is the author of I Live Because I Almost Died and an alumna of WriteGirl LA. She is one of the finalists in the English Poetry category of the 2025 Maningning Miclat Art Foundation competition. Her poems appear in Adi Magazine, Evanescent Magazine, Arcana Poetry Press, Voice and Verse Poetry Magazine, Renard Press, and other literary magazines.

 

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His Face

by Roberta Allen

 

This time she will know exactly how he looks. With fingertips, she traces the outline of his face in profile. But lightly snoring, lips apart, he is not anyone she knows awake when his expressions change so rapidly. There is no one way of seeing him except now when he looks nothing like himself.

 

A Tennessee Williams Fellow in Fiction and a Yaddo Fellow, Roberta Allen is the author of nine books, including four story collections, THE TRAVELING WOMAN, CERTAIN PEOPLE, THE DAUGHTER, THE PRINCESS OF HERSELF; a novel, THE DREAMING GIRL, and the writing guide FAST FICTION. Over three-hundred stories have appeared in magazines such as Conjunctions, Guernica, The Bennington Review, Epoch and The Brooklyn Rail. Also a conceptual artist, most of her works on paper are held by The Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Her writing papers are held by the Fales Archive of NYU. robertaallen.com

 

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Autumn Hummingbird

by Kenneth Probo

 

I’m a hummingbird when the last lobelia has withered, the red faded, each stalk a dead brown, the feeder taken indoors.

 

Kenneth Pobo (he/him) has a new book out called Raylene And Skip (Wolfson Press). His work has appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, Nimrod, Mudfish, Amsterdam Review, and elsewhere. He’s retired and enjoys the garden.

 

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Taxonomy

by Nicholas Claro

 

I’d gone to look out the window to look at anything that wasn’t Miranda, who I didn’t feel like looking at. Not after she said what she said. She said, “This doesn’t have to be ugly.” And after a minute said that what she’d said was something she had been meaning to say for a while.

Then I saw it out there, lying motionless in the backyard.

I thought it was a dog. But dogs don’t sleep like that, I thought.

Especially not when it’s raining.

My next thought was, Poor dog.

I must have said this out loud.

Miranda joined me at the window. A hand went to her mouth.

“What do we do?” she said through her fingers.

“What kind of question is that,” I said.

She followed me to the door. I stepped into boots and put on a jacket.

I found the shovel on the floor in the garage, below a hammer with a splintered handle that hung from a pegboard next to a saw with rounded teeth and a pair of rusted pliers.

It wasn’t a dog.

It was a large raccoon. Raccoons grew large in this neighborhood. There was a soybean plant nearby. The air always smelled like burnt popcorn. It drove them to frenzy. The raccoons were in the habit of breaking into the silos and eating their fill.

The blade slipped easily into the wet soil. It wasn’t long before I had the thing buried.

Back inside, I filled a kettle with water and set it on the stove.

While it heated, Miranda walked in.

It was really coming down now. Rain thumped against the windows.

“Was it wearing a collar?” she said, her voice breaking a little.

Now it breaks?

I shook my head. “There wasn’t any collar.”

“That means it was a stray,” she said. “Doesn’t it?”

“Would that make you feel better?”

She thought for a moment, her eyes watering over. She sniffed.

“No, actually,” she said. “I don’t think that it would.”

“It was some kind of mutt,” I said. “It looked like a really sweet dog—”

“Stop it.”

“—maybe with a little Border Collie or Australian Shepherd mixed in. You know, something I didn’t notice at first. But became more obvious the closer I looked.”

 

Nicholas Claro holds an MFA in Fiction from Wichita State University. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appears or is forthcoming in Louisiana Literature, Necessary Fiction, XRAY, Write or Die Magazine, and others. He is the author of the story collections This Is Where You Are (Roadside Press, ’25) and Sedgwick County (Roadside Press, ’26). He lives in Wichita, Kansas.

 

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My Left Thumb

by Michael Mirolla

 

It starts as a gentle weakness in my left thumb. Like a slight pinching that won’t allow me to use the full strength possible when matched to my right thumb. That prevents the thumb muscle from achieving its full potential. Nothing serious, mind you. Nothing visible when placing the two thumbs side by side. Nothing that I need to bring up to my family doctor on our rare Zoom meetings. (Not wanting to waste her time with trivialities when I know I an fortunate to even have a family doctor despite her office being several hundred kilometres away and thus awkward for face-to-face.) It does worry me, however, that nothing I do by way of exercise improves the strength of that thumb. And is it getting worse? Hard to tell. For some reason, my mind goes to the thought of the opposable thumb theory of human intelligence and ingenuity. And how now, when twisting off the top of a vacuum-sealed jam or olive jar, I can no longer make full use of one of my opposables – and need to switch to my right hand. Is this going to lead to a loss of a percentage of that intelligence or ingenuity? Well, I guess that would have had to depend on measuring the difference between pre- and post-left-thumb-weakness intelligence and ingenuity levels. I had never thought of doing that before my left thumb showed this weakness. Would have shown incredible foresight if I had done so. In any case and not crying over spilled milk (not that I would ever cry over milk as I don’t drink it), I am able to simulate that pinching and loss of strength by holding the base of my diminished thumb between right thumb and index and squeezing. Being somewhat still intelligent, I check to see what can cause thumb pain: trigger thumb, thumb arthritis, DeQuervain’s tendonitis, carpal tunnel syndrome, skier’s thumb. None of these pains describe the weakness and pinching in my left thumb. Next, I check the muscles included in the thumb: abductor pollicis brevis, flexor pollicis brevis, opponens pollicis, adductor pollicis. This is all Greek to me. Perhaps my intelligence is already starting on that downward slippery slope. Tom Thumb, while interesting as the first fairy tale printed in English, doesn’t help all that much – especially the part where a cow swallows him and is then expunged via a cow pat! But I digress. Is that another symptom of diminishing intelligence? I fear it might be. Well, look on the bright side. Unlike many others, I can trace this lessening to a specific cause. Hopefully, I can hold onto that as I fade away.

 

Michael Mirolla has had the fortune of publishing more than two dozen novels, plays, film scripts and short story and poetry collections. These include award winners such as a novella, The Last News Vendor, winner of the 2020 Hamilton Literary Award, and three Bressani Prize winners: the novel Berlin; the poetry collection The House on 14th Avenue; and the short story collection Lessons in Relationship Dyads. Michael is also a veteran writer-in-residence, including: a three-month residency at the Historic Joy Kogawa House in Vancouver (fall 2019); Olot, Catalonia (September 2023); Barcelona (Can Serrat residency, July 2024); Regina Public Library Writer-in-Residence (Sept. 2024-June 2025); Virtual writer-in-residence (Saskatchewan Writers Guild, September-October 2025). A symposium on Michael’s writing was held on May 25, 2023. Born in Italy and raised in Montreal, Michael makes his home on a 30-acre farm (along with five dogs, a cat and sundry humans) outside the town of Gananoque in the Thousand Islands area of Ontario.

 

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CNF

by Terena Elizabeth Bell

 

Zoomers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, June 2024

 

In the room young women come and go, TikToking Michelangelo.

 

Terena Elizabeth Bell is a fiction writer. Her debut short story collection,Tell Me What You See (Whiskey Tit, 2022), was named one of the “best books of the century” by New York Society Library. Her writing has appeared in more than 100 publications. A Kentucky native, she lives in New York. Get one story delivered to your inbox every month by subscribing here: patreon.com/terenaelizabethbell.

 

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Interview Erasure

by Wayne Lee

 

 

Writer, editor and teacher Wayne Lee (wayneleepoet.com) lives in Santa Fe, NM. Lee’s poems have appeared in Tupelo Press, Slipstream, The New Guard, Writer’s Digest and other journals and anthologies. He was awarded the 2012 Fischer Prize and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and four Best of the Net Awards. His collection The Underside of Light was a finalist for the 2014 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award; his collection Dining on Salt: Four Seasons of Septets was published by Cornerstone Press in April 2025; and his collection The Beautiful Foolishness is forthcoming from Casa Urraca Press in 2026. Lee is the host of the online Tuesday Poetry Practice community.

 

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First Woman

by Sarah Daly

 

The existential angst of not being able to find a job was squashing her brain. Like flattening it to a pancake. Her brain would become so flat that there would be no room for the 12,000-word research paper about beetle worms’ spots. There would be no room for the two-hour lecture about the habits of glowworms in volcanoes. There would be no room for the three-year experiment comparing the variegations of gnats’ wings. Her brain would become so flat that there would be big gaps in her head. Her head would sound hollow when she slumped over her desk and impatient students knocked on it. Helium from the gnats’ nests would creep into her ears and fill those hollow spaces. Her head would get so light that her feet would lift off the ground. She would begin to float over her crazy city and look down on everyone. She would float over lakes and rivers and streams and cities and mountains and oceans, lots and lots of oceans. She would get so sick of water that she would dream she was a cactus. She would float higher and higher until the clouds were cushioning her and wrapping themselves around her like ermine robes. She would wave at passengers on airplanes who fainted when they saw her. She would knock birds off their courses, who plummeted to untimely deaths. She would float until the air was purplish and speckled with stars. She would float until she passed the satellites and saw nothing but swathes of light on a blueish background. She would float until her feet touched a white, dusty surface and she landed. Then the helium would leak from her head and her brain would expand back and she would live a very happy existence on the moon.

 

Sarah Daly is an American writer whose fiction, poetry, and drama have appeared in fifty-five literary journals including New Feathers, Moss Puppy Magazine, Shot Glass Journal, and The Avalon Literary Review, and Autumn Sky Daily. You can find her work at https://sarahdalywrites.wordpress.com/

 

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About Time

by Robert McBrearty

 

He was meditating in his favorite rocking chair in the cabin when his wife said, rather urgently, You might want to hurry with that, the enemy is about to attack.

 

His eyes fluttered open for a moment and he caught a glimpse of the full moon through the window. Of course, he thought, they always attack during the full moon. It was so like her to make a big deal of things. He heard the wind rattling the clapboard cabin. Plenty of time, he said, you can’t rush a meditation. He shut his eyes and focused on his breath, in, out, a wavelike movement of the belly.

 

She gave that certain long-suffering sigh of hers. He heard her storming about, shuttering the windows, barring the door, loading the weapons.

 

Really, she said, couldn’t you help a little for once?

 

This isn’t a good time, he said, without opening his eyes. Let me know when they arrive.

 

Jerk, she muttered.

 

There was a fierce pounding at the door. The door shuddered and creaked at the hinges. The wind rushed in. He stood up, blinking his eyes in bewilderment. My God, he said, what’s going on here?

 

His wife gave him that certain withering look of hers and asked, Is it a good time now?

 

But she was already opening fire.

 

Robert Garner McBrearty’s stories have been anthologized in the Pushcart Prize and widely published in literary journals including Missouri Review, New England Review, North American Review, StoryQuarterly, and previously in The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts. He’s the author of six books of fiction including A Night at the Y, When I can’t Sleep (Matter Press), and The Problem You Have (University of New Mexico Press, 2025). His writing awards include a Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award and fellowships from MacDowell and the Fine Arts Work Center.

 

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Dépaysement

by Mathieu Parsy

 

My coat isn’t warm enough for Toronto’s winter. The consulate man said, “Layers are key,” but he had a beard and the kind of face that doesn’t feel cold. My breath fogs like speech bubbles in a language I don’t read. Every time the subway doors open, the air bites a little harder. This city wants me to flinch.

I live in an open basement with a futon and a microwave that smells like melted plastic. The ceiling is low. I bump my head on edges I keep forgiving. My landlady is an old Greek woman who calls me “France” and warns me not to use the washing machine at night because it frightens the cat. There is no cat. There is no explanation either. I nod and try not to dream of water.

The city is wide and gray and not ugly, just undecided. Glass, concrete, a skyline in mid-thought. I walk west on Queen Street with my hands in my pockets and pretend I’m in transit. Everyone here walks like they’re late for something beautiful. They carry coffee like weapons. I buy one too. It burns my tongue, and I’ve been branded.

I came here for reasons that sounded better in French: Épanouissement. Indépendance. Opportunité. I recited them to my mother to reassure her. Now I say: “I’m just settling in,” and “It’s an adjustment,” while watching the water heater in my room click at odd intervals, like it’s learning Morse code. Sometimes I answer it. “Yes,” I say. “I know. Not yet.”

At the French bakery on College, the woman behind the counter asks where I’m from. I want to say something wry and memorable. Instead I shrug and say, “Marseille,” like I’m offering a confession. She says she’s from Nice, and her mouth twists when she says it, like it used to be something she was proud of.

On Sundays, I call my sister and tell her things I think will travel well across the Atlantic: a guy on the streetcar was beatboxing into a sock, a squirrel stole a whole sandwich, there’s a bar that serves nothing but cereal. I don’t tell her about the silence. How it follows me through daylight like a patient dog. How sometimes I whistle and wait for it to come.

Today I applied for a job folding clothes in a store where all the music sounds like someone exhaling. The manager had hair that looked expensive. She asked if I had Canadian experience. I answered, “I’m working on it.” But I was dying to tell her: I fold my own laundry. I fold into this city like origami—smaller each day. Isn’t that experience?

I’ve started naming pigeons out the window. One of them has a limp. I call him Alain. He comes most mornings and stands at the same crooked angle. I leave him crumbs shaped like letters. Sometimes he eats the ones that spell “okay.”

In the evenings, the upstairs tenant practices the same piano song—slow, with one note slightly off. I pause. It sounds like someone learning to stay.

 

 

Mathieu Parsy is a Canadian writer who grew up on the French Riviera. He now lives in Toronto and works in the travel industry. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as Flash Frog, MoonPark Review, BULL, New World Writing Quarterly, and Bending Genres. Follow him on Instagram at @mathieu_parsy.

 

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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