Ma shrugs, it’s how he was – intrusive, shaming . To me, the stippled mucosa telescoping into view is like veined marble, unknowable beauty....

ALT: a cartoon of snoopy reading a book while woodstock looks on

“If this was the Middle Ages, I'd be shunned.” “Shunned because you had meniscus surgery?” She forgets how funny he was when he got high.  She stops at the light and turns her head. His left leg, swaddled in a cocoon of cotton padding secured with an Ace bandage, stretches across the back seat.  “Without modern medicine I’d be a dead man limping, cast off to the outskirts, forced to rely on the charity of the few benevolent souls who took pity on me.” He scratches under the dressing with the business end of an ice scraper. “Who knows what would happen with the kids? You'd be forced to sell your body so we could eat.” “We’d definitely starve.” She hits the blinker, decides not to needle him this time about how they’d get along fine without his pin money. “How much Percocet did they give you?”  “Enough to make me feel goooood.” He titters, a high-pitched giggle she hasn’t heard in years, maybe since when the kids were in training pants. “Listen.” He pushes himself up on his elbows. “You’d have men crawling over each other to get with you. I’d be first in line. I’m sherioush.” “I know you are, honey.” She’s banished him to the guest room for less. But she smiles, all teeth, in the rearview mirror. “That’s really sweet.”  The light changes. She turns off the blinker, hits the gas. “Why didn’t you turn?”  “The kids won’t be home for another hour. Let’s take a drive.”  Her eyes catch his in the rearview mirror. His face erupts with the lopsided grin of a five-year-old; he waves as if noticing her for the first time.  “Lie back and relax, goofball. And tell me all about our life as medieval outcasts.”     --- Jim Parisi is a freshly unemployed editor who lives in Washington, D.C., with his long-suffering wife and their sweet but highly reactive boxer-pitbull mix. He has published personal essays about music for ihavethatonvinyl.com.  

Zara swam in her backyard pool wearing mermaid flippers her mother made. Her mother tossed rings, and Zara obediently retrieved them. Her brother threw a fork, and Zara plucked it mid-air and used it as a comb. Her father lobbed a Barbie that fluttered before it thunked in the pool and Zara skimmed her from the surface and held her under her arm. Her dance instructor threw a pearly pink tutu that Zara had once worn seven days in a row, and she performed a grand jeté, the tutu and Zara both landing without a sound. On and on it went, Zara swishing through laps for days, years, so long her fingers wrinkled, her arms tired. She begged for a pool noodle, a life jacket, a float board. Instead, a professor who questioned everything Zara knew about physics thrust in her thesis. A micromanaging boss she’d grown to hate pitched a doll Zara had mistakenly loved rocking to sleep, striking the side of her head with a reverberating ring. A man she wouldn’t marry shoved in Barbie’s dream house and paper dolls that melted in her hands, the ink staining her fingers. Zara stacked each item, using the pages of her thesis like plaster to hold everything together. She tore the tutu in half, lacing the fabric through each ring before tossing it over the pile and heaving on the line until it went taut. She unzipped her mermaid flippers and climbed, hooking a toe into the dream house’s kitchen window, bashing the fork into the water-logged doll to hoist her up until she reached the top and planted the tines of the fork into the heap, the metal glinting silver from the sun, her reflection in it like some kind of treasure she had just discovered.   --- Kelly Pedro is a Portuguese Canadian writer from Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. She is the winner of the 2024 CRAFT Literary Flash Prose Prize and shortlisted for Room’s 2022 Fiction Prize. Her fiction has been published in CRAFT, PRISM international, The New Quarterly, Cleaver, Archetype, Flash Frog, New Flash Fiction Review, Fictive Dream, Ghost Parachute, and Moon City Review. She is a 2024 SmokeLong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow. She lives on the Haldimand Tract within the traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishinaabeg, and Haudenosaunee peoples—land that was promised to the Six Nations of the Grand River. Find her at kellypedro.ca.

We pass my favourite octopus, Paul and I, on the way to my office at the Aquarium. Paul doesn’t kiss me. I want to pause, watch the octopus parkour across its tank – shrinking into the smallest corner, then exploding across the glass in a tangle of limbs – but something marble in Paul stops me. In their tank, the deadly box jellyfish are in their fertile medusa phase. They float, amniotic. When Paul says ‘I don’t think I can do this anymore, I’m sorry,’ I don’t understand him. ‘The jellyfish?’ I ask, watching the translucent veils of protein pulse through the water. And then I understand, that with these few words he is ending our decade together, my thirties. I press my palm hard against the glass of the tank and it goes all the way through until it too is palely-pink and lucent. My body shimmers with anger. I can’t feel the water, and, cupping one of the jellyfish in my hand, I feel no pain either. My staff look the other way. Paul watches - confused as I pull the jellyfish from the tank, nervous as I pull the long and trailing tendrils from the water, as they become one with my curling hair, until I am a gorgon with flailing tentacles of venom. He says ‘I can explain,’ but before the words are finished, he makes the mistake of looking me in the eye and starts to petrify, feet solidified to the ground, legs held in place, arms out, mouth frozen in a stony scream. No-one takes any notice. I leave him there – visitors to the Aquarium flowing around his statue like water – and I pulse towards the exit, my own medusa phase almost at an empty end.   --- Fiona McKay is the author of the Novella-in-Flash The Top Road, AdHoc Fiction (2023), the Flash Fiction collection Drawn and Quartered, Alien Buddha Press (2023), and The Lives of the Dead, a Novella-in-Flash, is forthcoming from AdHoc Fiction (2025). She was a SmokeLong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow in 2023. Her Flash Fiction is in Bath Flash, Gone Lawn, New Flash Fiction Review, Pithead Chapel, The Forge, Variant Lit, Ghost Parachute, trampset, Bending Genres, Fractured Lit, Peatsmoke and others. Her work is included in Best Small Fictions 2024. She lives in Dublin, Ireland. She is on X (formerly Twitter) @fionaemckayryan and Bluesky @fionamckay.bsky.social.

When the bomb rolled out of Rennie’s mouth and smashed down onto the dinner table, there was just time enough for you to marvel at how something as tiny and weightless as a single word could land with such impact, but then the shockwave blasted you into the exosphere, where you hung by ice-numbed fingertips on the dark curve of space, gaping at the devastated table below; the splintered wine glasses, the slap of burgundy on white linen, crystal shards winking from the spinach salad, and the gravy-spattered guests, who avoided looking at where you were or where you had been because Ellen had put so much effort into the Chicken Marsala and Rennie didn’t mean it like that, of course, and because as long as they didn’t look toward your chair or see you fighting to breathe at the edge of space, dinner would not be ruined, nothing would have happened, so they continued to eat with their heat-twisted silverware, picking at mushrooms from between the cracks in their plates, crooning in such soothing honey-sweet tones that you found yourself descending back to the table, eating alongside them, wondering whether there really had been a bomb and whether you really had gone to space, and you were almost convinced that you’d imagined it all except that with every bite, glass crunched between your teeth, and your tongue was absolutely lacerated. --- Barbara Diggs’s flash fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Wigleaf, SmokeLong Quarterly, Fractured Lit, Emerge Literary Journal, and Your Impossible Voice and Best Microfictions 2025. She has also won Highly Commend awards with Bath Flash Fiction and The Bridport Prize. She lives in Paris, France. Bluesky: bdiggswrites.bsky.social.

When the bomb rolled out of Rennie’s mouth and smashed down onto the dinner table, there was just time enough for you to marvel at how something as tiny and weightless as a single word could land with such impact, but then the shockwave blasted you into the exosphere, where you hung by ice-numbed fingertips on the dark curve of space, gaping at the devastated table below; the splintered wine glasses, the slap of burgundy on white linen, crystal shards winking from the spinach salad, and the gravy-spattered guests, who avoided looking at where you were or where you had been because Ellen had put so much effort into the Chicken Marsala and Rennie didn’t mean it like that, of course, and because as long as they didn’t look toward your chair or see you fighting to breathe at the edge of space, dinner would not be ruined, nothing would have happened, so they continued to eat with their heat-twisted silverware, picking at mushrooms from between the cracks in their plates, crooning in such soothing honey-sweet tones that you found yourself descending back to the table, eating alongside them, wondering whether there really had been a bomb and whether you really had gone to space, and you were almost convinced that you’d imagined it all except that with every bite, glass crunched between your teeth, and your tongue was absolutely lacerated. --- Barbara Diggs’s flash fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Wigleaf, SmokeLong Quarterly, Fractured Lit, Emerge Literary Journal, and Your Impossible Voice and Best Microfictions 2025. She has also won Highly Commend awards with Bath Flash Fiction and The Bridport Prize. She lives in Paris, France. Bluesky: bdiggswrites.bsky.social.

* Be dead to the moment as you go outside, noticing nothing, not the pulsating rainbow of garden greens, malachite apples, pistachio shadows, moist mossy crevices. * Breathe through your mouth so the sickening whiff of sweet-rotten windfalls doesn’t catch in your throat.  * Find an optimum spot where the fruit is low hanging, and don’t focus on the foul sappy mounds beneath your wellies or the monsters that lurk in their rotten insides. * Never imagine mouthparts, or mandibular sharpness, or side-to-side shearing or abdominal pincers. * Think in facts because facts dispel fear. Earwig, name derived from old English wicga, which means beetle, and ēare, which means, well… ear which entomologists suggest refers to the appearance of hindwings which when unfolded resemble a human ear. Absolutely nothing to do with crawling into human ears then, to feast on the sweet-rotten pap of windfallen brains. * Pick three hard-green fruits and if a breath of wind rustles the leaves above your head, do not imagine bristly bodies landing in your leaf-litter hair. * Tear back inside to the clean not-green kitchen and stare at the TV which you left on for its bluescreen light. Stare into that light, at the bright orange face on the rolling news. * Watch the tangerine man spit poison from his tight little mouth and feel a deeper fear immerge. Find yourself instinctively filling your head with an army of facts, but the power of information only makes matters worse, this isn’t irrational fear of something that can do you no harm, but reasonable fear based on adult understanding. * See the tiny hairs on your naked forearms itch themselves upright in logical loathing, in sentient terror. * Feel the earwig fear recede into the background for the first time in over forty years.    --- Jan Kaneen writes flash and short stories and her new collection of both, Hostile Environments is available to pre-order here, from at Northodox Press.