Reviewed by Amanda Krupman Kathryn Aldridge-Morris’s flash collection Cold Toast [Dahlia Books, October 2025] opens with an ekphrastic story referencing its cover art by Irish printmaker Lee Mara. It’...

Vanessa Fogg has long been one of my favorite writers. Several of her short stories are on my secret “all-time best” list, so it’s a treat to learn about her new collection, The House of Illusionis…

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…

Oscar descends earthen steps compressed under his straw-soled feet. The cave walls ooze and drip on the books, on his bed; mud is life.

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…

Radiant mice tell me they want to live in my house. It’s night and I’m trying to sleep and I don’t think I want any roommates, not even when they glow and sing a cappella at midnight. You can’t stay here, I say. This is the wrong place for you. The mice show me their feet. Look, they say. We have clever mice feet. We will build temples for you. A wave of frothy mud fills my floor and the mice use their clever little feet to sculpt it into miniature Roman structures; a replica Colosseum, a small-scale Pantheon, a petite aqueduct. They hum ballads while they work and I wonder where they studied architecture. The mice pat the frothy mud into a bust of a scowling emperor. Not Caracalla, I say. He looks so angry. They re-sculpt him into a waterfall that tastes like sanctuary and cotton candy; and they create rosebud roads and starshine bridges and parks filled with velvet pillows; and they sing me disco songs that make my not-so-clever feet tap light, so I tell them it’s not the wrong place for them after all, they can live in my desk drawer, if they want, forever, if they want, as long as they don’t mind the stray paper clips.   --- Myna Chang is the author of The Potential of Radio and Rain (CutBank Books). Her writing has been selected for Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and WW Norton’s Flash Fiction America. Find her at MynaChang.com or on Bluesky at @MynaChang. 'Paperclip Empire' was first published in Gone Lawn, Issue 40 in Spring 2021.

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.

Cousin is a swordfish preserver, a purveyor of taxidermied marlin with a workshop filled with the glassy eye balls of the long-nosed denizens of the Pacific, his walls lined with paints of blue, of green, of silver, of yellow, hues that will shimmer in the lights of restaurants, hotels, million dollar homes, not the depths of an ocean deep and dark, and cousin labors on the labors of our other cousins, men who take our family boats on to the waters of our home with tourists ready to do battle, rod against spear, to claim victory, to reel in, to reel out, to struggle and sweat under a noon day sun, to feel their muscles burn with the knowledge that they are the heroes of their own story, and cousin captures every moment in the arc of the dead, bringing them back to life.   --- Melissa Llanes Brownlee (she/her), a native Hawaiian writer living in Japan, has work forthcoming in Cutleaf Journal and Prairie Schooner. Read Hard Skin (2022) and Kahi and Lua (2022) and preorder Bitter over Sweet (2025) from Santa Fe Writers Project. She tweets @lumchanmfa and talks story at melissallanesbrownlee.com.

They say you can’t start a story with a character waking up, with them crying, or knowing so much about themselves that they would never act against their own interest. But what if this isn’t a story, what if it’s a string of beautiful, covalent adjectives and adverbs, that sound of the bell of a heart chilled by the lack of notice, for him waking, for the first gasp of acknowledged breath in the morning, for the spill of cigarette smoke that blends with an unpolished sunset, that blends wit the smog of molten metal harvested down the street, the one that floods every time that it rains, and we let the kids wade in up to their waists, shoeless, and naïve to the dangers that swirls between their toes, that nature will bite and thrash, to survive in the droughts to come? Don’t ask questions, don’t dwell into the guts of anxiety and fear and loathing, and let us guess and judge, so that we, the dear reader, can feel a moment of mercury on the tongue, that quicksilver succor that keeps us projecting and never reflecting, for the light can never enter, otherwise it would bleach us to bone, and from bone to dust, to earth returned, and we have just awakened, and refuse to sleep, for we can’t admit to ourselves or to others one more death, for the sunsets only appear if we are a witness, the cast across our pupils the victory.   --- Tommy Dean is an associate literary agent with Rosecliff Literary, the author of two flash fiction chapbooks and a full flash collection, Hollows (Alternating Current Press, 2022). He is the Editor of Fractured Lit and Uncharted Magazine. His writing can be found in Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and elsewhere. Find him at tommydeanwriter.com.