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Micro fiction, Litsa Dremousis

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Oedipus Sings Smooth Jazz


Patrick’s mom pushes me aside, squeals, and rushes the stage when he starts singing  “It Might Be You.”


He hears her screaming and blows her a kiss. 


I wave. 


He blows his mom a second kiss. 


Maybe he doesn’t see me standing right there. Or, worse, he does see me and deliberately directs two kisses to his mom instead of his girlfriend. 


I’m now doubly grateful for the non-creepy relationship my dad and I share. 


I’m craving pizza and decide to leave.


As I approach the exit, I hear “I dedicate this next one to Mom!”


Yeah, we’re done.

Litsa Dremousis (she/her) is the author of Altitude Sickness (Future Tense Books). Seattle Metropolitan Magazine named it one of the all-time “20 Books Every Seattleite Must Read”. The Believer, Bright Flash Fiction Review, Esquire, Filter, Flare Lit Mag, Flash Fiction Magazine, McSweeney’s, Monkeybicycle, MSN, NPR, NYMag, NYT, Paper, Paste, PEN Center USA, P&W, PW, The Rumpus, Salon, Short Beasts, Slate, WaPo, et al.

Micro fiction, Rachel Abbey McCafferty

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The summer the sky burned, our town got a new pool and only opened it three times 


We held our breath above and below, heat battling smoke, our lungs stretched, the sun permanently imprinted on our eyelids. We were all new proportions and unmet potential. We were the promise of a future. We held our dreams close. We did our best to live in the moment. We did not know enough to worry about what if.

We saved our spare change for fast food and bruised fruit and cheap wine.

We saved our spare breath for each other’s lips.

Rachel Abbey McCafferty has been writing since she first learned that was a thing people could do. Her work has appeared in journals like HAD, Maudlin House and formercactus.

Micro, Lance Mazmanian

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Scottish Book Trust

After jumping off the ship in the Atlantic, it was quickly discovered that the sunset we saw from the deck, reflected in the ocean water, was no more than a giant blanket woven from fine cotton and tin. With occasional plastic bananas. How did we sail from Port Aberdeen, then?

Word/visual author Lance Mazmanian: once Random House distributed with Harlan Ellison, got a coffee as payment. Mazmanian published 2025 in London Writers’ Salon, Fiction On the Web UK, WILDsound Festival (TIFF), more. Leonard Cohen (RIP) wanted himself and Mazmanian to create a poetry chapbook together. Til the Scrapbook File imploded. 

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

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.