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Flash fiction by Alison Wassell 

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A Safe Space

Sometimes life gets too much for Michael Marsden, so when he points at the space under the classroom sink and asks if he can get into it, Miss Cathcart sees no reason to say no. It seems a reasonable request, something her chronically anxious cat might do to avoid an unexpected visitor, or the vacuum cleaner, or the application of his flea treatment. 

“If that’s where you feel you need to be, it’s fine by me,” she says, so he squeezes in. Michael’s a big boy for his age, and only just fits, but he seems happy enough, curled up in the foetal position, so she leaves him to it while she talks about floating and sinking. 

She has taught this lesson so many times she could do it in her sleep. The children gather around her. A selection of objects surrounds a half-full fish tank of water on the table. Which objects will plummet to the bottom of the tank? Which ones will stay on the surface? Why do some things float while others sink? Is it to do with what they’re made of, how big they are, or how heavy?

The children love it, mainly because there’s a strong possibility that someone will get wet. Miss Cathcart draws out all the correct language from them; prediction, hypothesis, volume, density, particles. These words aren’t in the infant curriculum, but she knows the children enjoy bamboozling their parents with them. Michael remains tucked in his hideaway, but she can tell he’s listening. From time to time he sticks out his head, craning his neck to see, but she’s careful not to catch his eye, confident that he will emerge when he’s ready.

As Lucas Watson is predicting that a pebble will float, and the rest of the class is telling him he’s wrong in no uncertain terms, The Head walks in unannounced, as has become her habit. Miss Cathcart feels her heart sinking like a stone, but she forces her face into its brightest smile and, in her best teacher voice, reminds the children to put their hands up when they want to speak. 

But The Head has no interest in the lesson. Not now she’s noticed Michael Marsden. The Head has no truck with children being where they need to be. As far as she is concerned, Michael Marsden needs to be cross-legged on the carpet with his classmates, and anything else is downright disobedience.  Like an unsympathetic midwife she yanks him from his safe space. He cowers on the carpet, his hands over his ears, and rocks backwards and forwards. The Head draws Miss Cathcart aside. 

“We’ll discuss this later,” she says, before clip-clopping away on her too-high heels.

“Are you in trouble, Miss?” someone asks.

“I always seem to be in trouble, lately,” Miss Cathcart says. 

Maybe it’s to do with what she’s made of. Maybe someone stronger would float above it all with a featherlight heart. But these days Miss Cathcart feels kitten weak. At the end of the school day, when the children have been waved off, she opens her cupboard door and crawls into the space at the bottom where she’s recently installed a comfortable cushion. Pulling the door closed, she curls up and cries for herself, for Michael Marsden, and for all the other children she hasn’t been able to save.

Alison Wassell is a writer of flash and micro fiction from Merseyside, UK. Her work has been published by Fictive Dream, Does It Have Pockets, South Florida Poetry Journal, The Bridport Prize and elsewhere.

Micro fiction by Pam Avoledo

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The World’s Largest Rubber Band Ball

Laura fishes rubber bands out of  drawers and steals them from counters of the stores. She likes the faded ones best, likes how they stretch. She wraps them  for hours and hours in her backyard. The rubber band ball grows past the fence.  She pushes and pulls the rubber band against her skin, waiting for the snap and adds another strand. 

The rubber band ball is at least a ton, she estimates. She rolls it on her trailer into town at the mayor’s request. The mayor promises she can visit it whenever she wants. She smiles with the mayor  in a photo for the newspaper and stands with it at the city fair, helping children choose their favorite color and reach as high as they can. She pushes and pulls the rubber band against her skin, waiting for the snap and adds another strand. 

The giant rubber band ball, with its rainbow stripes, sits on its metal pedestal right off the highway. There’s a parade every year on the last weekend of July. People dress as jars, spoon holders and tripods. A plaque boasts the world record. The high school band marches on the main street, playing a song dedicated to it as Laura stands by her creation, opening the festival. She pushes and pulls the rubber band against her skin, waiting for the snap and adds another strand. 

Pam Avoledo’s work can be found at pamavoledo.com. 

Flash fiction by Oliver Reimers

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The Inevitable Truth of the California Dream

You’re seven years old at a campsite when you try to pick the golden poppy.

“Don’t do that,” your mother says before your fingers close around the stem. “You can’t do that in California.”

For the past week, all you’ve been able to do is watch a video of a piano teacher play “Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho” from Piano Adventures 3A. She messes up at the thirty second mark but does not edit it out. She does not do a retake. It is a fifty-three second piece. Her right hand falters after the error. How humiliating to make a mistake on a song from Piano Adventures 3A.

Even though you can’t bring yourself to clip your nails or wash your face, you are in the car with Saraya, hurdling seventy miles per hour up I-80 towards Reno. She is made up pretty with black eyeliner that looks like kohl, and you think you would like to have your brain stirred up and removed through your nose. “There’s a comedian tonight,” Saraya says. “He finally broke out of New York.”

Between California and Reno, there is nothing but hills and the dimmest evergreens you’ve ever seen. A pulped skunk sticks to the side of the road. A woman parks her car to scrape it off.

“I’ve always wanted to be a comedian,” Saraya says, “but I’m not funny.” Even her attempts at self-deprecation are pathetic.

This trip was supposed to cheer you up, but it is taking everything not to throw yourself out of the car and join the skunk.

It would have taken less than a minute to rerecord the video.

The car stutters. A rock skitters behind it onto the empty road. “That wasn’t an animal, was it?” Saraya says. A quarter mile ahead, a lone sign welcomes you to Nevada. The car jumps. There’s a hiss. Saraya jerks the wheel. You hope she will swerve left and leave the two of you steaming in a ditch, but she swerves right, and you skid across the dirt and weeds until the brakes kick in and you bang into the dashboard.

You get out of the car.

Neither of you are hurt. Saraya kneels by the popped tire and prods it for a nail.

Maybe it was the seventh time she’d restarted the video. Maybe it had taken hours. Maybe she’d watched her finger move astray, knowing it was fate, and accepted that no matter what she did, her pinky was always destined to strike that B.

On each side of the border sign, there is a golden poppy. Saraya curses behind you. You walk to the first poppy reach down, then remember. You step past the sign. Welcome to Nevada.

Beneath your fingers, the stem snaps so easily.

Oliver Reimers (he/him) is a writer from Sacramento, California. His work has been featured in Prime Number Magazine, One Teen Story, Gold Man Review, and Main Squeeze Literary Magazine. His portfolio of short stories received a national honorable mention from the 2024 Scholastic Arts and Writing Awards.

Poetry by CS Crowe

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The Story of the Rainbow

And on the 3040815th day, 

God saw that things were not going so great;

A man in south Florida loaded a pistol,

And took the bus to a gay night club. 

It was happening in every city and street.

He caressed the cloud and gathered 

Raindrops and sunlight into His palms

He wove them like river reeds into a vast bow

And set it in the sky each day after the rain 



That all might look upon His bow of rain 

And know that He loved all His children equally

In His omniscience, He did not ask Himself

How His love could ever be in question—

But it was a cloudy day, and He realized

He’d put the rainbow down in the wrong year.

Noah stepped onto the shore and wept.

Well, God told Himself, It’s only a few thousand years off.
I’m sure they won’t even notice the difference. 

CS Crowe is three crows in a trench coat that gained sentience after eating a magic bean. He spends his days writing stories on a stolen laptop and trading human teeth for peanuts. A poet and storyteller from the Southeastern United States, he believes stories and poems are about the journey, not the destination, and he loves those stories that wander in the wilderness for forty years before finding their way to the promised land.

Micro fiction by Federica Silvi 

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Hanging, still hanging, gone

The metallic grey Nissan covered in ads for the Juliet & Romeo Matchmaking Agency has held the same spot in the Safestore parking lot for months, and the frayed rope stuck to the neighbour’s windowsill still has a lanky Santa puppet holding on by one hand. I couldn’t blame you for thinking everything looked right in its place in December, but it’s almost spring now, and I can’t be the only one seeing the lingering signs of decay.

You once told a room full of people that I always notice the things no one else does; you said it like you held the key to the best thing about me they couldn’t know. Now, you shoot me worried looks from the side of your eye, and I see who I’ve become to you: a lost cause, a stubborn child, hurling dull-edged words at a wall of silence. 

Within a week of us moving in, the old lady with the gaudy Christmas display knew how long we’d been together and what our dogs were called. I couldn’t help being scared of finding out what else she’d learnt about us. Every time I crossed the street to avoid walking past her door, I wondered if she was behind the curtains, looking straight at me not looking back. That was before you started calling me paranoid; before someone planted the For Sale sign in her yard; before I could think of only one reason she would leave one of her marionettes behind.

These days, I get the feeling that the next time I’ll remember to check in on Santa I’ll be on my own. I wonder how I will find him. Hatless, hair and beard waving in the wind. Capsized and drenched in rain. Tangled in his ladder turned noose. Hanging, still hanging, gone.

Federica Silvi is an Italian writer and translator based in London. She has published flash fiction and creative nonfiction on Dear Damsels, Funny Pearls, Memoir Mixtapes, Visual Verse, and more. Her first published literary translation piece appeared on Asymptote in 2025. Find her on Bluesky as @edgwareviabank.

Poetry by Al Russell

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Arrival of the Mail Truck

Well it’s good to know

Whatever has come (or has not come)

Is here now

Al Russell (they) is a NC-based pansexual nonbinary tankie educator parent dog lover who reads too many books, watches too many movies, and smokes too many cigs. Previous poetry collections include Children of the Anxious City and Lookinglasshouse, both available from Vegetarian Alcoholic Press.

Resurgence (4)

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Flash fiction by Sudha Balagopal 

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Desert Squall

In the split second before the rainstorm unleashes, I see your neon-yellow, oblong vehicle. You’ve arrived early. 

            I click my tongue, release seat belt. Water drips over my arm, plop-plop-plop―the moonroof needs sealing. I’ve never thought to fix the problem since this is Phoenix, with 300 days of sunshine a year. Today, a rare desert squall pounds and my compact sedan shudder-judders, reminds me you and I met in a tube-like elevator that rattle-shook in the seconds before it halted, suspending us between floors five and six. 

            I squint through the downpour. Becky’s office is dark―the wedding planner isn’t in. We’re here to hand our separate guest lists so she can organize the seating chart for our daughter’s reception. You open your car door and I hiss, “What on earth?” 

            Much later in our failed marriage, I understood you turn into a Bollywood hero when you’re trying to score. In that stalled elevator, you reassured me first before taking charge. You banged on the metal door, then called for help, first from your phone then mine―cell phones were relatively new then―and when you couldn’t find a signal, you hit the emergency button on the panel, again and again. After marriage, you tossed all desire to impress me. 

            You run on the wet concrete, an out-of-shape man in his fifties, a triangular box held over your head, computer bag slung over your shoulder. Shirt soaked, hair dripping wet, you open my passenger-side door, slip in. 

            “No point waiting in separate cars,” you say. “Did you have time for lunch? I got you pizza.” 

            I stare at the odd-shaped box, likely the doggy-bag from a meal you shared with your girlfriend. 

            When the elevator jolted to a stop, I wobble-crashed against your strong, muscular frame. In that moment, I couldn’t identify what petrified me more: being alone with a stranger in the enclosed space, the sense of suffocation, or the cloying darkness. We disentangled quickly, but once you’d contacted building maintenance, you reached for my hand, held it in your warm palm, speaking comforting words in a husky, intimate voice. My stupid heart’s runaway emotions betrayed me, swelling and filling my ribcage as we dangled between floors five and six, until rescue arrived. For years after, your dinner-party conversation started: “When I met my future wife, I was so stunned, not just my pulse, but the elevator stopped too.” 

            Odors of aftershave and dank, wet clothes overwhelm my car. I notice the bald spot on your crown and that you’re wearing a pink shirt. Your girlfriend’s younger than I am by a decade; she likely picked that shade. I open the pizza box. The slice is a tight fit; melted cheese has slid off the pie, glued itself to the cardboard. “Pizza should come in a square box,” I say, fling the box with its unappetizing contents on the back seat. 

            You hold a hand up to my car’s ceiling, capture dripping water. “Why don’t you get this repaired? I’ll call my auto shop.” There it is, that long-discarded exhibition of attention, of caring, that once captivated me. You grab my box of Kleenex from the floorboard, wipe dashboard, gear shaft, console. 

            You unzip your computer bag, fish out a document. “My list isn’t long,” you say, adding, “How can I help with the wedding? ”

             I play with the car’s turn-signal lever: up-down-up-down, peer at the wedding planner’s still-dark office, shrug. “Ask Becky.” 

            “Why won’t you eat the pizza?” you press. Ache-filled images pop into my head: a laden dinner table, a kitchen clock that displays 10:00 p.m, me curled up on the couch, rectangles of cut-up lasagna in Tupperware containers, rows of stacked dinner leftovers in my freezer. 

            Today, you’re urging me to eat soggy, cold, cheese-denuded pizza in my leaky car.

            “By the way, my mother’s coming a week before the wedding.” Deft as a fencer, you slide in the information.

            I massage the circle of the steering wheel with my fingers. 

            “She’s the bride’s grandmother,” you say.

             I grip the steering wheel tight. The mother-son strife is not my concern anymore, nor the fact that nothing about you pleases the lady: not your job, not your home, not your appearance. 

            “Umm. . .” your hesitation makes my breath shrivel. “I didn’t tell her we’re divorced.” 

            A howling gust of wind hits the car. You place your hand on mine, like you did in the elevator. Your large palm is warm, like it was then. You lean close, like you did then. I can feel your breath fanning my ear, like I did then. By the time the elevator doors opened, I’d succumbed. 

            I extricate my hand from under yours.

            “Didn’t or couldn’t?” I bang my fists on the steering wheel. 

            “How can she stay with us in the apartment?” you ask. Us: you and your girlfriend. “Can my mother stay with you, please? Let’s avoid unpleasantness.”

            After that rush of words, you place your hand on my cheek. 

            I’m about to shout, “Unpleasantness for whom?” when I see Becky walking up to her office.

            I brush your hand away. The rain has ceased as suddenly as it arrived. When the elevator doors opened, I offered you my phone number. Now, I step out. I’ll give Becky my guest list and leave. At the office entrance, I turn. You continue to sit in my car, wiping down fogged windows with Kleenex.

Sudha Balagopal’s work appears in Adroit Journal, Fictive Dream and Does It Have Pockets among other journals. In 2024, her novella-in-flash, Nose Ornaments, runner up in the Bath contest, was published by Ad Hoc Fiction, UK. She has had stories included in Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions. She is Series Editor, Wigleaf Top 50.

Flash fiction By Emma Phillips

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Run

Run, run, as fast as you can. Everyone is out to get you; they tried to bake the perfect boy, but you couldn’t fill that outline. You’re air, like cotton candy. They sprinkled you with sugar, tried to keep you sweet, never understood why you couldn’t keep your feet still. Gingerbread Ma and Gingerbread Pa chased you in and out of rooms, called the experts in to redefine your boundaries.

Run, run, as fast as you can. Count your raisin buttons when they file for divorce. It seems a biscuit baby didn’t do the job. Your Ma carries emptiness like others carry laundry. Your Pa is a cliché with wandering eyes. He’s the reason they fixed yours to only look ahead. Your Ma told your Pa not to ice your ears. She didn’t want you to notice the wolf-snap of his words when he asked her “Is he mine?”

Run, run, as fast as you can. Keep your brittle head up. Just as long as you keep moving, they can’t dunk your limbs into their tea and fish you out like a baptism. Your Ma was a slither of lightning once too. Knocked your Pa flat with her milk-white legs.

Run, run, as fast as you can. They piped you a smile to never fade. Flash it at the fox and dash for its tail. You are the sum of your parts. Make your music. Sing your songs. Other gingerbread boys fit the cookie cutter better. But you have a secret weapon. Beneath that oven-tanned skin, beats a doughy heart. Run, run as fast as you can. Theirs is a game you can never win. Freedom is movement; go, go, go. Shift that gingerbread ass.

Emma Phillips lives by the M5 in Devon, which often lures her off in search of adventures. Her work has been placed in the Bath Flash Award, Free Flash Fiction Competition and Best Microfiction 2022. She loves crisps.

Flash fiction by Huina Zheng

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Fresh eggs

During a deep clean, a photo slipped out of an album. We were in school uniforms, shoulder to shoulder, smiling. Three years of high school, inseparable. We promised to be best friends forever. It’s been more than ten years since we last spoke. I turned more pages. Faces once familiar now felt distant. I don’t know how I lost them. Or how we lost each other. Distance? Work? Or just change? My best friend from college. I barely see her once a year. The mom I used to meet when our kids were in preschool stopped messaging after they went to different schools. We used to share picture books, plan weekend parks. Making friends is hard. Keeping them is even harder. Sometimes I pick up my phone, scroll through contacts and don’t know who to ask, “Does this dress look good on me?” The emptiness is hard to name. This morning after drop-off I parked my scooter downstairs. In the lobby the cleaning lady in her blue uniform was mopping. I asked her to wait a minute. Ran upstairs and brought down a stack of boxes. She collects recyclables to sell. I used to think friendship was built on shared interests. When I handed her the boxes she reached into her cart and held out a small paper carton. “Fresh eggs from my hens back home. For you and your child.” We looked at each other and smiled. No more words were needed.

Huina Zheng holds an M.A. with Distinction in English Studies and works as a college essay coach.  Her stories have been published in Baltimore Review, Variant Literature, Midway Journal, and other reputed publications. Her work has been nominated thrice for both the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. She resides in Guangzhou, China with her family.

Fiction by Seán Hill

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Getting The Electric

It’s not something my grandfather ever really talked about. He had said once, a long time ago, “the ESB drove the ghosts from the countryside.” He was talking about the Electricity Supply Board during the electrification of rural Ireland from the 1940s to ’60s. It always seemed pretty clear to me what he meant, but it was only when I half-jokingly mentioned it once again near the end of his convalescence was I met with a sigh, a minute of silence, then him looking me dead in the eyes and telling me the whole thing.

As a young boy, my grandfather, like many young folk, used to do what were called “messages” for some of the older people in his home village of Dunbannig out in the rural west, such getting milk or bread or mail for them, himself not being old enough to be of much use on the farm, and education of any kind was sporadic. It was during his messages in the days after the neighbouring village of Ballyrackert “got the electric” that he heard the first murmurs. Small things, like the farmers on the road who complained of the state of the fields, like an animal had gone mad and kicked the dirt up all over, or something big had got into a chicken coop. Or Mrs. McRae in the shop who went on about the cold in the night, getting odd looks as the stifling summer sun streamed in the door. None of this weighed on my grandfather’s mind at the time, and in fact, he said, he was wholly ignorant of the vast majority of such murmurs. But that was soon to change.

Mr. Walsh, the ESB area organiser, had come back from some prior visit for a decision, and this time most assented. Might take a short while, he said, though “not so long that they’d become unfashionable!” But no one laughed. My grandfather noted, in the time leading up to electricity, boys, including his brothers, were hired to keep watch on pens and barns at night, though they all ended up congregating near houses, and that was mostly because of the calls that seemed to pass through the night air right until the sun came up. He remembered the priest from three towns over arriving one afternoon, saying blessings were in demand in Dunbannig. It didn’t stop people refusing to answer the door for their messages, or his parents from whispering until someone came in the room, or keep his sister Margaret from staring through the window in the evening. People running behind the houses, she’d say. They sometimes caught her eye, and stared back.

It happened one evening when it was just my grandfather, his sister, and their mother by the fire. He was pondering over one of his mother’s borrowed books from Ballyrackert, but his sister had gone to watch out the window, again. She stayed that way for a long time, utterly still, strange for any child to be, eyes fixed on the blue night. In the quiet hearth crackle, her little voice was a shock when she said someone was at the door. Their mother called for Margaret to come over at once and stop playing. There was no argument. Their mother hadn’t taken her eyes from the fire once the whole night, but her head snapped up like a frightened bird when, suddenly, someone tried the door. It was bolted, and my grandfather said maybe it was dad, but his mother only called for both of them to come to her. It wasn’t insistent, it came every half a minute or so, someone pushing on the door a little harder than before. She held their shoulders hard to stop them from turning around.

But my grandfather couldn’t help himself—young boys rarely could when told not to do something. He craned his neck to the window. Something, he said to me most seriously, darted away the second his eyes passed over the smoky pane. The door groaned long and loud. Seconds later a wave of cold swept over his hands and face. In the firelight he saw the door, ajar, with what was very clearly a hand gripping the frame. Margaret was crying. His mother didn’t budge an inch, but she was speaking the Lord’s Prayer and her hands around them were like vices. My grandfather swore then, upon his life, his wife’s memory, his family, and his God, that what that peered through the doorway was not an animal, and was also certainly not a human being.

The next thing they heard were his brothers’ voices coming up the path. But how long they had stayed there, with that thing inching closer, could have been minutes, or hours.

For a week after that, his parents’ large silver crucifix, a family heirloom, hung on the front door. In the daylight, electric work had progressed, and there were new poles and lines all along the roads. Houses had been fit with lightbulbs. The family couldn’t have them on quick enough. Soon, after some minor tests, a time and date had been set the next night for the grand ceremony of putting on the lights. Apparently Ballyrackert had put on quite a party, but what Dunbannig did was probably audible for the next several towns over. My grandfather and his sister were allowed stay up for it, and eventually went to bed under the supervision of an older brother, and a the warm glow of an electric lightbulb.

Did you know, my grandfather said, even now in some countries they’ll make way for certain hills or sites, so as to not disturb them? The Irish government had, it seemed, paid no such heed in its march towards modernity. And Dunbannig was, it turned out, the last place in the entire district to get the electric. He didn’t want to imagine just what had been driven their way in all those years.

Seán Hill is not an award winning author, nor does he have a degree or string of letters after his name. Instead, he’s spent a lifetime cobbling together as disparate a collection of influences as possible. He writes a lot, perhaps too much, publishing new fiction every week on his Substack, Shadows & Sorcery, and experts say it won’t stop any time soon.

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/wizardhill.bsky.social

Substack: shadowsandsorcery.substack.com

Resurgence (5)

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