I chiseled at the idea to see if it would budge, but that made it only balloon more between us. Black letters inside jumbled and spun in a ball, like they were caught in a dryer. They entranced me. Yo...

“I’ll leave you,” you say as you head out the door. You say this every morning. It is happening as you say it. You always wait for my reply, so I say, “I love you too,” and the door shuts behind you w...

Lancing for Free. Thoughts on life as a freelancer.

Short fiction If Only by writer Cole Beauchamp. Published in Temple in a City literary journal.

"On Hanging a Framed Poster Entitled 'Galaxies Today' " by Jenny Wong. Twin Bird Review, issue 3.1 / Summer 2025.

We never walk alone at night. Never. Only stupid girls ignore that rule and we know what happens to them. If we need reminding, all we need to do is watch Dateline and listen to Keith Morrison, watch breaking news in any state any city any day. We never forget the girls’ faces. Their Bambi eyes, their yearbook grins, hair shiny as rearview mirrors. We click deadbolts, check them twice. We lock our bedroom doors at night—a lock inside of locks. We never take cocktails from strange men. We travel in packs, never leave a girl alone, never drink more than two martinis. We remember the girl who went missing last month, the ghosts of her eyes, her Chiclet smile stapled to a Starbucks bulletin board. A girl who broke the rules. It won’t be us, we say. We never walk to our cars without our keys in hand, nails flashing Kick Ass Red, metal splayed through our fingers like weapons. We are cortisol-flushed, animal eyes alert. We are ready. We never forget the rules. Until our keys are hung, our pajamas on. Until we’ve turned locks upon locks upon locks. We never see them coming. Until their whiskey breath runs hot down our necks. Until their arms slip around us, familiar as locks. Until we remember Keith Morrison, his baritone warning, it’s always the friend, the boyfriend, the husband, it’s always someone you know.   --- Kelli Short Borges writes from her home in Phoenix, Arizona. Her fiction has appeared in Peatsmoke, Moon City Review, Lost Balloon, and elsewhere. Recently, Kelli's work was chosen for the Wigleaf Top 50 longlist and the 2024 and 2025 editions of Best Microfiction. She’s currently working on her first novel.

Wind whips down the slip-road that leads from the Lydiate Ash roundabout onto the M5. Her mouth is dry, though she has just sipped from a water bottle. She huddles inside the raincoat, shuffles her boots on the gravel, re-arranges her face into a half-smile half-scowl that she hopes will give her the impression of being friendly and tough. She does not feel tough. Only her boots are tough, with their thick soles, the black leather cracked like dried mud.  She sticks out her right arm, her thumb. A banana lorry pulls up almost immediately. It’s a long step up into the cab - her first time inside a truck.  ‘Where are you going?’ The driver seems trustworthy but like her face both may be a lie.  ‘Bristol.’ She’s hitched before but never alone. Once, with a friend, a man said if he could kiss one of them he’d take them further. She said no, yet the friend seemed to think she’d acquiesced. She hadn’t. An argument followed. They got out of the car. The driver offers her a banana. She expects a crude joke. None arrives. She doesn’t need to hitch - her mother gave her the money for the coach fare - so why is she doing this? All she knows is that she loves being out here on the road, the recklessness of it. The fact that there’s a boyfriend at the end of the motorway is, for now, of little importance. What she wants is to be up here in the cab, watching the white lines disappearing into the distance, the autumn leaves a blur of rusts, ochres and greens. She wants to be in this cab forever, as the tyres rumble down the asphalt and the diesel fumes belch out into the crystalline air.   --- Bronwen Griffiths writes flash fiction and longer form fiction. Her work has been published in the UK, USA and New Zealand. She won the Mslexia Flash Fiction competition in 2024. 'Hitching Down the M5' was first published in the Worcester Flash Fiction Anthology in 2020.      

Even Evan, who wore a beret and a black polo neck like we were hanging out in a 1950s New York basement. Evan, whose poetry was written by bats. I asked him once if he’d prefer to read up-side-down, ‘it might feel more authentic.’ He looked at me as though I should find myself exhausting, like quitting hosting poetry nights to focus on my actual job was the best option for me. ‘Bats process more sensory data than we ever could,’ he said. The first bat poem Evan read was about grief. In it, devastation bounced off every surface creating echoey images of impenetrable cave walls. The audience, mostly poets clutching the pieces they planned to read, was moved to tears.   As far as I’m aware, bats don’t find themselves wishing they could talk to their not-long-dead father about their troubled marriage. They don’t drop from the sky because the thought ‘I must give dad a call’ popped into their head, because for a moment they forgot he won’t be there to answer. But Evan said, ‘If we want to understand our lack of understanding, we have to embrace non-human creativity.’  Evan started sharing his access to bats with other people, had Spoken Word Nights changed to Chiroptera Slams. He swapped bar snacks for swarms of midges and introduced segregated seating, because female bats tend to keep themselves separate unless they’re ready to mate.   I couldn’t stomach the readings. I went outside, sat and watched insects bother street lights, wrote about a community who survived on a diet of nothing but moths. They had all the protein they needed, but fur from the moth’s bodies built up on their tongues, until it was impossible for them to get their words out.    --- Anika Carpenter lives and works in Brighton, UK. Her stories have been published by Fictive Dream, Gone Lawn, Goosebury Pie, 100 Word Story and others, and have been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and the Bath Flash Fiction Award. You can find her via her website www.anikacarpenter.com

Ma shrugs, it’s how he was – intrusive, shaming. To me, the stippled mucosa telescoping into view is like veined marble, unknowable beauty. Zita says the faecoliths trapped in a diverticulum means he has to carry us little shits with him forever wherever he’s gone. Zain says bam! as the cauliflower polyp in his transverse colon appears. His little brain, Ma says sputtering with laughter. I watch the deep, pink mystery unfold like a glistening. I read the silken folds for clues. It finishes at his ileocaecal valve - an elephant’s trunk reaching out, looking for something to hold on to.  --- Sumitra is a Malaysian-Indian-Australian coconut who writes to make sense of her experiences. She’ll be the one in the kitchen making chai (where’s your cardamom?). Bluesky: @pleomorphic2 & sumitrasingam.squarespace.com

I’m in the back seat of a Holden Monaro parked up the road from my place kissing a boy whose name I don’t remember when they say on the car radio John Lennon’s been shot. I tell him I have to go, and I run home. Mum and Dad have already heard on the news. Only in America, Mum says. They’re passing round a joint and drinking red wine at four o’clock in the afternoon, listening to Sergeant Pepper on the stereo. Dad gets up to change the record, takes Imagine from the place on the shelf, it’s positioned alphabetically between Help and Let It Be. He carefully removes the vinyl from the sleeve, holds it up to the light to check for scratches, then lays it on the turntable and removes the dust with a blue velvet cleaner. The record spins and we sit on the floor round the coffee table to listen. When we get to the second track, Crippled Inside, Dad says John wrote it about Paul McCartney after The Beatles broke up. Dad says the Beatles fell out over a woman from New York, they hated her in England, it should never have happened, if they hadn’t chased Yoko away, Paul and John would still be writing the greatest songs in the world, John and Yoko would be living in England with their friends and John wouldn’t have been shot outside his own apartment in front of the love of his life. Your mum takes a drag on the dooby, she says, yes. Because that’s what it’s like in America, they elect cowboys for President and everyone walks round packing heat like they think they could be the next leader of the free world, like they think they could be motherfucking John Wayne.   --- Gillian O'Shaughnessy is a reader and writer from Walyalup, Fremantle in Western Australia. She has work in X-R-A-Y, Splonk, Night Parrot Press, Jellyfish Review and Literary Namjooning, among others. She's a submissions editor for SmokeLong Quarterly.

The twins next door have to go to evening school now that they’ve turned into crickets. On warm evenings, they leap from blade to branch, their frenzied shrieks replacing silence — quiet kids transformed into chatterboxes. No one knows how it happened; just that one day their mother told them “speak when I’m talking to you, dammit,” and the next day they were snacking on her lululemons. She’s not a bad mother, she insists, as she shows us the fetid pile of rotten vegetables, decayed leaves, and dead insects she’s assembled for dinner. She screws up her nose when she shows us, like this is all new to her, but we can tell she finds the twins only marginally more disgusting than before. “Would their daddy have walked out if they were a pair of angels?” Mom once asked when she thought we were away. “You know some kids are trouble from the moment you set eyes on them.” Away from prying eyes, we keep a diary of the twins’ daily doings: doze the morning away; early supper before heading to school; homework before play; and then prompt to bed at dawn. Rinse, repeat, for a few weeks… we’ve only recently discovered crickets don’t get to live very long, but it seems like fun while it lasts. It is late when we get home, dinner time except there is none to be had because Mom and Dad are quarrelling again. We shove stale Oreos into our mouth while we wait for the twins to beat their wings on our bedroom window and ask us out for a game of tag. When they arrive, we press our noses against the glass. If only we could fly out! We could if our parents wish us into moths. Or butterflies. Something pretty. Something happy.   --- Varsha Venkatesh writes from Bangalore, India. She’s been previously featured in Exposition Review, Moss Puppy Magazine, Five Minute Lit, among others. She can be found on BlueSky at @VarshaWrites86.bsky.social.

So first he says, I had to stay late at work. But then he says, okay I wasn’t at work, but I had to go out with a client after work. Then he says, not a client you know, a client from a couple of years ago that we’re hoping to get back. Who cares whether it was a client? Why are you always asking so many questions? If you didn’t ask so many questions, I wouldn’t have to make things up. And besides, if I go out after work it’s on you. Don’t blame me. I don’t need the third degree every night when I get home from work. So I missed dinner. Jeez, I’m the one breaking my back to put food on the table and don’t you forget it. You’re lucky to have dinner. Don’t bother to warm up the leftovers. I ate out. I wasn’t planning to warm up the leftovers, I told him.   --- Jacqueline Doyle's flash fiction chapbook The Missing Girl is available from Black Lawrence Press. See more at her website: www.jacquelinedoyle.com.

ALT: a cartoon of homer simpson in an orange raft