A gathering of recent speculative flash & micro fiction, each presenting a tiny-yet-powerful universe. How tiny? About one-thousand words for flash; four-hundred words for micro. The word count…

Fragmented © Heather D Haigh The Script Reader Patricia Schultheis Although the chaos following the election decades before had eased and government systems were once again somewhat reliable, Celes…

The girl built a snowman in the street next to the park.  She never really meant to. She had gone out walking. The snow was sticky so she sc...

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In the last weeks before my mother died, a fox began appearing on our front porch. Always at twilight. Always facing the door. It didn’t scratch or howl. It didn’t pace or flee. It sat there, still, eyes fixed on the brass doorknob as if waiting to be let in. Its coat was too clean, too red. Its presence too deliberate.  But we watched it from the kitchen window, my mother and I. She in her robe, flowers faded from the wash. Me with a hand on her shoulder, though I never knew what comfort felt like to her. “It’s not a real fox,” she said once. “It’s a message. You just don’t know how to read it. Yet.” That night, I dreamed it stepped through the door, walked the house like it remembered the rooms. Its paws made no sound, and its breath fogged the mirror above the sink as it stood on its haunches. When it turned to me, its eyes were unmistakably my mother’s. Not in color or shape, but in a way I can’t describe without sounding ridiculous. You’d just have to have known her. After she passed, the fox stopped coming to the porch. I left a saucer of milk out for a week, then a piece of bread, then nothing. Seasons turned. The ivy swallowed the stoop’s railing. The door swelled in its frame. I tried to move on. While clearing out the attic, I found a sketch she’d drawn, pencil on yellowing paper. A fox was seated neatly in front of a door, and above it, in her handwriting: If I forget how to find you, leave the light on. That night I lit a candle in the hall. And when I woke, there were paw prints along the corridor. Small. Clean. --- Cate McGowan’s the author of four books. Her collection of poems, Sacrificial Steel, is forthcoming from Driftwood Press in 2025. Brill published McGowan’s collection of memoir essays, Writing is Revision, in 2024. Her short story collection, True Places Never Are, won the Moon City Press Short Fiction Award.

Father's tongue falls out of his mouth during Sunday dinner. One moment he is spewing a hail-storm of hateful, hurtful words, next moment, the muscle lands from his mouth onto a half-eaten bun.   Mother crushes the napkin in her fists, quakes in her chair. My fork and knife clang-clatter onto the tiled floor. Father's vast, toothy mouth drops wide open, revealing bits of food stuck in his molars. He lunges after the slimy pink organ with his meaty fingers, scattering the bread and tipping the soup tureen. The quick tongue, moist with a coating of spittle, slip-slithers away from him. Father is particular about taking care of his sinful tongue. He scrapes the three-inch length with a stainless steel, U-shaped tongue cleaner every morning and every night, over and over. He has grated, and grated, and flattened his taste buds. Now, he cannot taste the tomato sauce in a lasagna or the brown sugar mother adds to the apple pie. Today, he screamed at Mother for her muddy soup, for the chalky bread, for the salt-less vegetables. His tongue, that soft body part, hit her harder than a baseball bat. She's learned to tuck the injuries under a soft voice, inside her soundless movements, behind her lowered gaze. Father swings across the table making guttural sounds, gasping, grasping for his tongue which has flipped upside down in the oven-roasted vegetables. Faint blue lines mark the organ, veins maybe. The muscle leaps onto Mother's plate. In two breaths, she places the tines of her fork on Father's tongue, holds her knife poised over the flesh. He waves his arms up and down, up and down, stamps his feet, thud-thud-thud. Mother pins her gaze on him. It's as steady as her fork on his passive tongue.   --- First published in Stanchion Zine, October, 2022.  Sudha Balagopal work appears or is forthcoming in Banshee, Doric Literary and Fictive Dream among other journals. Her novella-in-flash, Nose Ornaments, was published by Ad Hoc Fiction, UK, in 2024. She has had stories included in Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions and the Wigleaf Top50.

Amma told me not to eat almonds whole lest my skin got browner. She blanched them perfectly so that the white oval nut popped easily from its brown skin to be tossed away as she slivered the innards for cooking. Thankfully, she didn’t know I rubbed in tanning oil, whose bottles were as dark as I hoped to become. Didn’t know I soaked in the New England summer sun like my friends, showing skin that was supposed to be covered. Poolside, girls compared tans, and I was told how lucky I was that I didn’t burn. Yet I secretly envied the joy of peeling off sunburned skin and the warmth that emanated from their bright red skin all slathered with aloe. My aunt, visiting from India, wondered why we tried so hard to get dark when they advertised lightening creams there. India, a country I imagined, kept girls so sheltered that their skin blanched ghostly white. Here, I worked hard to forget my roots, though my skin became darker daily, an inheritance skin deep. A child of the Americas whose cultural identity teetered on the balance beam of Marvel Comics and Amar Chitra Katha. Never understanding who people wanted me to be. Never knowing the real me and not sure who I was becoming. Hiding that I was white underneath all my brown only to be continually exposed, bisected, transected, chopped to pieces like that sliver of almond perched precariously atop my Amma’s carrot halwa.   --- Nina Miller is an Indian-American physician, epee fencer, and creative. She loves writing competitions and nursing cups of chai. Wigleaf Top 50 for 2024. She is a contributor for The Pride Roars blog and author for Sci-Fi Shorts. Find her @NinaMD1 or ninamiller.bsky.social. Read more at ninamillerwrites.com.

It’s a rule of thumb not to eat cheesecake like you used to years ago because, nowadays, even if you limit yourself to one slice you’ll be d...

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.

The first unblinking baby is an anomaly. Facial nerve palsy, the doctors speculate, offering lubricating eye drops, soft tape for sleep. Soon all babies are born unblinking, their dark eyes gazing into their mother’s face, faces of doctors, families, neighbors. Our faces. Babies are supposed to be cute. But these wide eyes that never close, like snakes or sharks. We are glass. Our babies see every withered promise, every muddy heart. We scrutinize old pictures of sleeping babies, those half-moons of closed lids, thick dark lashes brushing their orbicularis oculi muscle. We watch old videos of awake babies: splashing and babbling and blinking in the tub; licking plates of mashed squash, orange goo on their blinking lashes; wailing into a kitten stuffie, blinking tears into its fur. We cradle babydolls that kick their chubby legs, that coo and laugh and cry. That blink spontaneously.  They are voiceless, our babies. No whimpers, cries, or giggles, just those huge dark eyes, peering at us. Their rare smiles luminous as a snow moon rising over Denali Peak. Congressional meetings, Supreme Court hearings, Presidential briefings: the babies are lined up in baby rockers, and their stares hold the future, our yesterdays trailing behind like a chain of rusty nails.    --- Claudia Monpere’s flash appears in SmokeLong Quarterly, Split Lip, Craft, and elsewhere. She won the 2024 New Flash Fiction Prize from New Flash Fiction Review, Genre Flash Fiction Prize from Uncharted Magazine, and 2023 Smokelong workshop prize. She has work in Best Small Fictions 2024, forthcoming in Best Microfictions 2025.

Fruit flies live on my window sill but do not flock to my kitchen. I am cautiously happy but cannot understand why they do not come into the kitchen where I have pellets set, as they swarm my neighbors' kitchens. Although I am cautiously happy, I am also flustered because the fruit flies behave as though it is not a kitchen but a sacred temple. What’s even more confusing is that my house is no temple; it is easily messier than my neighbors' houses—especially the one with a cat, a dog, and a baby. Here, there are more cups with shriveled tea bags lying around the counters, more peanut shells and bits of chapati scattered on the floor, and peels of onions and garlic pods stuck to the sides of the drawers. In fact, there is so much food spilling around the kitchen creating little hills of more food I can only think the fruit flies themselves feel beaten. Or perhaps they are embarrassed for me and don’t want to compound my humiliation with their presence. Or perhaps they are faced with a task so beyond their extensive experience that they rather not wrap their fruit fly heads around it, killing whatever joy that remained of their short lives. The best they think they can do is wait on their window sill home, where they can give me withering looks, transferring their shame and annoyance onto me hoping that I tidy the kitchen just enough for them to scavenge calmly without any pressure. --- Roopa lives in Dubai, U.A.E. Some of her short stories have been published in Bending Genres, Tiny Molecules, Bath Flash Fiction Anthology (forthcoming). Her middle-grade fiction, Chandu and the Super Set of Parents has been published by Fitzroy Books.