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Flash Fiction, Monica Dickson

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Friday

In the future, Marie will reinvent herself. But first she will disappear to have the baby. Then she will reappear to sit her exams, the baby safely delivered by her mother to a nice family that Marie will never meet, in a city she will never visit. She will get a place at Uni to study law, then she will use her natural talent for winning an argument to train as a barrister. She will drink too much. She will smoke too much. She will quit smoking. She will join a gym. One day she will write to Robert, the baby’s father, and she will tell him how well she is doing and how she hopes they did the right thing for all of them, and he will treasure the letter, but he will not write back. Marie will think about the child, and how and who they are, but she will only allow herself to do this for an allotted half-hour, every Friday, after work and before dinner.

In the future, Robert will sell insurance. But first he will party his way through an extended adolescence that lasts long into his third decade. He will drink and do drugs with a commitment bordering on a qualification. He will stop drinking and doing drugs when one of his friends has a stroke. He will barrel through a string of co-dependent relationships – with women who will cook and clean and care for him, until his tearful, late-night self-examinations become too difficult a form of mothering. When he finds himself alone, he will read and re-read the letter from Marie. He will keep the letter in a hanging file marked Miscellaneous and he will think about the child – now an adult – and how and who they are, and he will think about having a drink, but he won’t.

In the future, Theresa will watch as Marie’s star rises. She will congratulate herself on making the right decision. She will tell her friends how happy her daughter is, how she drinks cocktails with high-flying clients, how she stays in the best hotels. She will sometimes think about the baby’s tiny foot in Marie’s hand, just a child herself; the argument Marie couldn’t win. One day, Theresa will write to the adoption agency and she will ask them to pass on another letter, from her, to the child – who will always be a child in her mind – but Theresa will be told, kindly and efficiently, that it is not allowed under the terms of the non-contact agreement they made all those years ago. 

In the future, when Theresa dies, Marie will clear her house. She will break this task down into manageable timescales: Monday to Thursday, for half an hour, after work and before dinner. One day, Marie will find a sealed envelope, addressed, in her mother’s handwriting, to a person she doesn’t know. She will think about opening it, but she won’t. She will take the letter home, she will file it under Health – general, she will pour herself a large glass of wine and she will look forward to Friday.

Monica Dickson writes flash fiction and (longer) short stories. Her work has been published in Anti-Heroin Chic, jmww, Splonk, X-R-A-Y and elsewhere online, as well as in various print journals and anthologies. Her story ‘Receipts’ was selected for the inaugural Best British and Irish Flash Fiction award (BIFFY50). She won the 2019 Northern Short Story Festival Flash Fiction Slam and is a graduate of the Northern Short Story Festival Academy. More at writingandthelike.wordpress.com and @mondickson.bsky.social

Three poems, Joshua Walker

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If It Still Hurts, It Means You’re Awake

That’s the rule. The rest is metaphor.

Your heart- a pit viper curled in a shoe.

Your breath- a coin flipped into a dry well.

Your name – an echo

that winces when it’s called.

If it still hurts, maybe you outlived the ritual.

Maybe the smoke didn’t take.

Maybe your ribs learned

to sing without permission.

Once, your doctor asked if you heard voices.

You said: only when they need something.

He smiled like that meant “no.”

If it still hurts,

it might be the prayer decomposing.

It might be God peeling your name

off his tongue like a scab.

It might be

you,

again,

asking to be known

and bleeding when you’re not.


You Were Born With Your Hands Full:

A splinter of moon,

a dead wasp,

your grandfather’s last breath.

You’ve never known how to be empty.

Even now

you carry pills,

lost buttons,

a girl’s hair from a bus seat in 2011

you never got to return.

Grief taught you balance.

Joy taught you guilt.

Your shoulders forgot

how to drop.

Once you told someone

you couldn’t cry anymore.

They said:

Then let the salt come through your palms.

You dig holes in the dirt

just to watch them stay open.

You believe in silence.

But not the kind

that forgives.


The Mouth Remembers Before the Mind

The salt of her skin,

the word you swallowed

so hard it grew teeth.

Your tongue is a reliquary.

There are prayers lodged

in your molars.

One cracks every time

you lie about being okay.

Sometimes you dream

of bees nested in your throat,

buzzing secrets your body

never agreed to keep.

You speak in thorns now.

You call it healing.

You call it poetry.

You call it

not dying.

Your mother’s voice

was the first ghost

to take up space in you.

You were seven.

You still are.

You wake with a taste

you can’t place

a little iron,

a little mercy,

a little god.

Joshua Walker is a poet and storyteller, also known as The Last Bard. His work explores memory, identity, and the fragile beauty of survival amid hardship. Drawing on personal experience with mental illness and a deep love for myth and lyricism, Joshua crafts poems that are raw, intimate, and unflinchingly honest. He shares his voice widely on social media and continues to build a community of readers and fellow seekers.

Bluesky@bigjosh84 Insta/threads@bigjosh84thelastbard

Flash fiction, Vijayalakshmi Sridhar

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I heard you became a father again

A son this third time. Here. Take a laddoo. It is from your favourite shop. Jalaram’s. Motichoor. Not the Besan laddoo that you upturned a plateful during our third year Diwali celebration, leaving floury bits all around, like a bomb explosion. That day my heart sank at your disrespect.        

There she is – your second wife. Here. Feed her a laddoo. She needs to be lauded. For producing a heir. For helping you shed your skin as my husband, the cover for all the love shared for thirteen years. You said I must learn from her, by drinking her urine, borrowing and sleeping on her pillow to absorb lessons on how to be a ‘good’ wife. 

Where is your mother – the evil goddess who held your dubious honour aloft? Has she ever played any role other than being a yes-woman, refusing to see my side? You’d say I planted the bone of contention in the first place. In your eyes, she is infallible and tolerated all my mistakes too. You owe her for today. Celebrate with a laddoo.

Why am I at your son’s naming ceremony with a box of laddoo? Why laddoo? Because by its shape it represents the universe. The fried flour pearls are the human lives; the sugar syrup is the love that is supposed to give the binding. Fried cashews and raisins are the good and bad tidings and the cloves- those spicy bits are the real deal. They are the tests for love. 

Fine, don’t buy all this. Don’t fret about guilt and conscience, duty or the failure of it or the energy exchange that has happened all these years in the give and take between you and me, just come forward. Take a laddoo. 

Come on, take one; Make a move. 

Vijayalakshmi Sridhar is a writer of features and fiction in Chennai, a coastal city in South India.  

Two poems, Peter Cashorali

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The Lover

If you’re a hallucination that’s okay. If you’re the relationship with my mother when I was two that’s fine. If you’re the product of my having been born in 1954 and living since then in a temperate zone of the planet, sure. An aspect of capitalist consumer culture? Okay! Maybe you are just a trick of the light, made of the afternoon light and Thai food. Don’t you get it? I don’t need you to “really exist.” Just be with me.

Real

You’re faking it, and suddenly you’re not. You’re fooling yourself, and the real thing assembles out of your foolishness and is here. Surely there are wrong ways to go but on every path here it is, the where, the what, the who you seek, and despair of finding, and always knew was fake, that dug the cellar of your grief, that was how your family made its fortune, that your father gambled away when he was young, and the fortune roamed the world, searching for you on every road in back country so no road was the wrong one, that one morning at daybreak steps up to you, clasps your cold hands in its own and says, “Oh my God. You really do exist.”

Peter Cashorali is a neurodivergent queer psychotherapist

Fiction, Travis Flatt

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Say: “There’s a Dragon, Camel Boy!”

“Watch out, King Arthur, there is, there is…” my son, Jay, says. He stands teetering on stage in his little burlap robe, his Merlin costume, swinging his arms and shuffling his feet. He looks to the side of the stage where his kindergarten teacher, Miss Katie, sits smiling in an honest-to-God director’s chair. She mouths something, but my son only furrows his brow, looks out at us parents, and scrunches his face. His mouth and chin are obscured by the cotton ball beard his mom, my Ex, made for him. His eyes are huge and I worry that underneath his lips are quivering. 

At home, during my weeks with him, he and I practiced his lines. He’s only got three of them. He’s supposed to warn Rylee Faulk, who plays King Arthur, that there’s a dragon protecting the sword in the stone. Not part of the legend, but they’re only six. 

The parents titter in the silence.

Rylee Faulk, in her cardboard armor and Burger King crown shouts. “Say: ‘There’s a dragon,’ Camel Boy!” 

Gasps from the parents. Miss Katie hops up from her director’s chair. My Ex, seated at the far end of my row, stands and makes a choked outraged sound alarmingly close to a death rattle. 

Rylee’s mom, in the third row, stands and says, “Oh my God. I’m so sorry darling.” (Whether “darling” refers to my son or my Ex, I’m unsure.)

At the beginning of the school year, Miss Katie texted all parents to warn/admonish that students were mocking my boy’s cleft lip. His scar divides the flesh between his nose and upper lip, which puffs out below either nostril. This engendered “Camel Boy.” A plastic surgeon in Nashville said he’ll fix it once he’s older.  

My son raises his wizard staff, a large piece of brown construction paper rolled into a cylinder, shoulder high, then levels it at Rylee to hurl like a spear and says, “Die, Pants!” 

(There was another incident where Rylee had an accident, wet her pants on the playground, followed by a similar email to the parents.)

Unphazed, Rylee readies her sword, also construction paper, only more elaborate in, well, construction.  

Jay throws. Rylee effortlessly bats the spear aside with a twirling parry. Some parents actually cheer. 

Saying, “No, no, no—children, this is not how we [something inaudible],” Miss Katie charges into the fray but skids to a halt. Rylee and Jay cross and grasp each other in a bear hug, giggling, squealing. 

My son, I know, has an enormous crush on Rylee. She’s all he talks about. My Ex, in our “updates on Jay” chats during drop off exchanges—which are generally the two highlights of my month (the chats are)—insists our kid is too young for a crush. But I had crushes at his age.

At the smattering of applause, Rylee and Jay bow. Miss Katie steps forward and insists they finish the show. 

Two of Jay’s friends push on a wooden backdrop, a mural of a green dragon coiled around a gold hilted sword. The quality of the painting far outstrips the costumes, the props, and the other backdrops, which were made/painted by the kids. The dragon was the work of Miss Katie. Our printer paper handbills, mock programs with bios for each little actor and stagehand, concludes with a page-long bio of Miss Katie, who apparently earned a technical theater MFA at UT Knoxville. 

The final scene is supposed to be Rylee alone, though Jay remains onstage holding her hand. Rylee, after proclaiming “Have at thee” whacks the dragon painting, then—although she already has a sword—kneels in front of what one assumes is Excalibur. 

A blackout, the show’s only light cue, and lights up on Rylee and Jay appearing to contemplate a first kiss. Again, Miss Katie rushes in, this time making it, and grabs their hands. She raises them, which earns an enthusiastic, if confused, second applause.

In the elementary school’s lobby—White Plains is K-6th—we parents mill about congratulating one another and one another’s children. I find my Ex and say “What the fuck was that?” a little too loud. 

“Right?” she says. 

“The sword thing was cool,” I say. “The kid’s got a future in that.” (I don’t know what “that” is, but this is how most of our conversations go.) 

“I guess,” says my Ex. “Nice dragon.” 

Rylee’s mom shoulders through the small, needlessly congested crowd and apologizes for the “Camel Boy” thing. 

Jay rushes between the three of us and announces that he and Rylee are “betrothed”—his words—then demands someone take them out for ice cream to celebrate. Rylee’s mom and Jay wander off to join the crowd-within-crowd praising Rylee. 

Tonight is supposed to be my Ex’s handoff of Jay to me. It’s now the two of us alone. “Ice cream?” I say.

My Ex stands frowning, looks back and forth from me and Jay, says, sharp and sarcastic, mocking,“Are you asking me out?” But looks instantly, deeply embarrassed. We both flush. We both teeter on the tile of the lobby. We sway, swinging our arms, and shuffling our feet. Look off into the wings.   

Travis Flatt (he/him) is an epileptic teacher living in Cookeville, Tennessee. His stories appear in Fractured, Variant Lit, Prime Number, Gone Lawn, and other places. He enjoys theater, dogs, and theatrical dogs, often with his wife and son. @WriterLeeFlatt (Twitter/X) @travisflatt.bsky.social Travis Flatt, Author (Facebook)

Micro, Colin James

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Pork butt salad

Thought about stealing Amazon packages off doorsteps  to generate some extra income, but all of my generous neighborshave cameras with speakers, sometimes having long conversations with me from across the street. A bit nerve wracking what with all the questions they ask. Amazing what one normalizes. I haven’t reconsidered attending the Abominable Absurdism Reunion, still pretty firm on that. Then there are the watchdog animals behind electric fences that run at me aggressively and suddenly stop. Pretty sure their vocal chords have been removed cause when I stop for a little chat they just groan. The stabled horses are doing much better. The arses that sit atop them call to me imaginatively in various degrees of missionary undress. I have a beat-up but clean van that might pass for an emergency vehicle, inclusive or exclusive at a moments notice. Uniforms I don’t aspire to but then again, if they could help get me in why not? I’m game.

Colin James has a couple of chapbooks of poetry published. Dreams Of The Really Annoying from Writing Knights Press and A Thoroughness Not Deprived of Absurdity from Piski’s Porch Press and a book of poems, Resisting Probability, from Sagging Meniscus Press. He lives in Massachusetts.

Poetry, Todd Matson

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Author/Artist Todd Matson is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in North Carolina, United States.  His poetry has been published Feminine Collective, San Antonio Review, The Brussels Review, and featured in Poetry for Mental Health.  He has also written lyrics for songs recorded by several contemporary Christian music artists, including Brent Lamb, Connie Scott and The Gaither Vocal Band.

Flash fiction, Denise Bayes

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Goddess

Before she came, there was only darkness. Unremitting night surrounded, moonless. Their limbs shrank, conserving energy within their bodies like bulbs sheltering in winter soil.

And then she dropped into their midst. One of them caught sight of her in the woods, a bright sphere of light, illuminating the world. They stared at her from the grey shadows. They watched the warmth of her smile that radiated light into dank corners of the forest. Her fingers stretched wide, leaking flashes of brightness into their world. 
They turned to each other, shaking their heads in puzzlement.

Could they trust her lightness?
A few of the braver ones began to move towards her. As they tiptoed closer, their bodies shivered as brightness began to pulse through their limbs. An unfamiliar energy photosynthesised their veins. As their pinprick pupils began to adjust to the glare, they shrugged off the frowns of the dark years. Etiolated limbs began to stretch and lengthen in her powerful rays.
Then she began to speak and her maple-syrup sweet voice reached them. She spoke of love and happiness, filling the woods with the beauty of words. Soon the reluctant ones drew closer, taking slow steps towards the new world, she had revealed. There was joy in their faces. They formed songs with their new vocabulary and smiled in her presence, shrugged off the old world.
One morning, she was gone.

The people halted, fearful of the past returning as they gazed into the void she had left. They waited in silence for the darkness to return.
But as they turned towards each other, they saw light throbbing through each of them.

Denise Bayes has been published in NZ Micro Madness, Free Flash Fiction, Oxford Flash,100 Word Story, Ellipsis Zine, Firewords ,Roi Fainéant press and the recent NFFD Anthology. Originally from Sunderland, Denise lives in Barcelona, Spain where she lives with her husband and a lively cavalier puppy called Rory. Bluesky @deniseb.bsky.social

Poetry, Peter Gutierrez

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Afterparty

There were tides inside, lap-rolling and full of swimmings with and

Against the waves, lagoons of shifting plastic, and seabirds fighting

With the shore birds fighting with the waterfowl, intarsial contrails

Of diving, flying over, falling into. Nearly every morning she awakens

Only partly, the slosh of dreams and the chilled saltiness of reality

Staggering her back into jumbled half-action.

The clear light and the unclear, and how the two of them liked to switch

Between the two.

The clear undercuts the unclear, which is fun in a jungle

Sort of way—you never knew what phenomena you’d encounter in the fog.

Focus on breath in, hate out.

Breath in, hate out.

Janus felt the negative leave his core, or

At least decided that’s how he’d describe it

Later.

Breath in, hate out.

Or should that be breathe? He hated those online

folks who didn’t grasp the difference. (Spells & spellings.)

In any case: in through the twins, observing thoughts

As they froth and ferment. Then: out through the lips,

Fumigating the caverns of contempt in the digestive knowledge

Management system.

Distantly, a jet plane quiet-thundering through the clouds;

On the next block, a Sonata slides by, its tread smooth and humming.

He could sit here and listen to the dawn-sounds, the sound-

Makers afar and invisible, and be happified for the rest of his

Life, he mused.

His wife, Eleanor, enjoyed a different pathway into the light:

Influenced by an influencer, she went out each dawning before

Anything else. Barely dressed, barefoot or flip-flopping along, 

Ellie followed the notion of forcing undesired action into being,

Doing that which she didn’t want to do to skill her mind into

Facing the unknown; specifically, the rest of the unraveling day.

As a strategy, this swelled and broke like an egg. Those summer

Mornings in Maryland, inches past daybreak, and she could feel 

The hint of heat, the tingly precursors of rain, the immediate world

Still coated in night’s silences. This emergent love of the pale,

Creeping minutes in a pale and creeping hour derailed the project

(As happens sometimes). Later, a post she drafted explained it,  

How what she’d avoided became what she desired, and undid all

The wisdom of the shift. Yet also brought the amor fati peace that

Newsreel chatter, sparkly cocktails, party favors, and elbow-brushings

Had failed to.    

Her husband, whose name is likely Janus, was, is, and will be

Ever unaware of the sutured joinings of her Buddha nature. 

Peter Gutierrez is a poet and writer with work in Bruiser, Exist Otherwise, Not One of Us, and Lxminxl; his books include the story collection From Bad to Worse and the novella The Trees Melt Like Candles. You can find him online @suddenlyquiet.