Gaslight Gertie

by Heather Babcock

Here comes that girl again. Slipping through the basement window and bringing the night in with her. A skid row Pippi Longstocking, her long orange tails of old-fashioned curls fanning out behind her like wings. I've told her to pin her hair up like the other girls her age do, but she just blinks her dimpled smile at me and stuffs the bobby pins I give her into the pocket of her apron, later dropping them in the top drawer of her little oak dresser, alongside her maid bonnet and the childish diary with its cheap tiny lock. A lock so flimsy and ridiculous that a hairpin easily substitutes for a key. Not that the girl ever writes anything interesting.

6S

Heather Babcock has had short fiction published in various literary journals, including Descant and The Toronto Quarterly, In 2015, her chapbook Of Being Underground and Moving Backwards was published by DevilHousePress. Babcock's debut novel Filthy Sugar is now available with Inanna Publications.

Let Me See

by Aileen O’Dowd

I take up residence in my lover’s eyes so that I can be there when it happens — the inevitable fall from grace. I’ll watch, safely sheltered in the canopy of his lids, when he rips the candy from my lips and tells me — he never loved me anyways. I’ll look down at myself with disgust — see the red-faced, mascara-stained woman, begging him to stay. Please, she’ll say, I never meant to hurt you. It meant nothing. I was drunk.

6S

Aileen O’Dowd lives in Toronto. Her fiction has appeared in the Berkeley Fiction Review.

In a Country Far Away

by Kent Oswald

When I had the money I put a baby crocodile and a baby alligator in an oversized fish tank, with a salt water pool at one end and a fresh water pool at the other so each could both be at home, together. A friend inspired me to think this would demonstrate a path to coexistence among people. My fear that at the same time was admittedly a perverse hope was for the two to create a master reptilian race. In retrospect, it was a mistake to not at least check that one was male and the other female, which was probably an unforced error compounded by having minimal knowledge of the science of whether or how they might be encouraged along familial lines. In a few weeks of observation, I didn't see much happening, but I ran out of money (and most of my interest), and needed to move away, letting the experiment continue in perpetuity for me as a sort of Schrodinger's outcome. The experience serves as a metaphor, with learnings - even if I can’t quite define them - that will surely be applied in the future.

6S

Kent Oswald instructs and learns at CUNY.

Mandarin Fractions

by Sherice Kong

In Mandarin, we denote fractions by their whole first, then by parts. In English, you say, One-third of all daughters resent their mother; in Mandarin, we say, 三分之一女儿憎恨她们的母亲. The three parts come first. In America, my individuality matters more than my uniformity, and everyone spotlights my mistakes, ropes my name into their mouths, claims my identity for their own. But in China, it doesn’t matter if individual cogs are broken as long as the whole machine is still predominantly well-oiled. Unfortunately, I really do like math, so when my teacher picks me in calculus class, I open my mouth and shatter my tongues to fractions, simultaneously splicing myself into the whole and the part.

6S

Sherice Kong is a 16-year-old writer from New Jersey. She works at Midlight Magazine and Café Au Lait Magazine, and her work is forthcoming in The Aurora Journal and Superfroot Magazine. She enjoys playing League of Legends to an unhealthy degree.

Spark

by Mary Rohrer-Dann

The lumber yard’s on fire again, Dad shouts to Lucy and Abby, wanna go see? Mom’s at choir practice, so they pile into the Galaxy station wagon and roar down the street, two-way radio screeching, night air swelling with sirens, smoke, blasting horns, ash. They swerve behind the A&P, park at the far edge of the lot overlooking the train tracks, and inch down the steep ravine and across the tracks to the back of the fire. The whole world swirls black and orange, churning with flying cinders, terrified birds, cracking trees, the colossal boom of super-heated air. Lucy knows there will be no hiding this from their mother, that tonight will spark some kind of end, but for now, she clutches her little sister’s hand and her father’s, breathes through the wet kerchief tied around her mouth, and stands trembling before the waterfall of flame. Exhilarated, rapturously alive.

6S

Mary Rohrer-Dann published Taking the Long Way Home with Kelsay Books (2021). Her poems and stories also appear in Philadelphia Stories, Clackamas Review, Vestal Review, South Shore Review, Rats Ass Review, Third Wednesday, Flashes of Brilliance, and other venues.

And The Winner Is

by Bart Van Goethem

For her birthday my wife got an Oscar award from our son, who was nine at the time. He'd picked it up at the supermarket, this yellowish-brown, plastic statuette that said “Winner." He wasn't aware of what an Oscar meant, he just saw it as a way to express she was the best. My wife displayed the award on her bedstand to show him how much she appreciated it. A few days later she left on a business trip. My first night alone I got woken up: the Oscar was belting out a devilish Jack Nicholson laugh, shaking its head at me.

6S

Bart Van Goethem is a micro and flash fiction writer from Brussels, Belgium. He's also a drummer, race gamer, and KISS fan. Find all his published stories here.

Clip After Clip

by Matthew McGuirk

Clip after clip and reel after reel, national news makes mass murderers household names. They plaster the perpetrators’ pictures on the glittering screens and wonder what causes this continual chaos and barrage of bullets. All the stations need to do is turn their rolling cameras around to find the culprits. Pointing barrels and emptied clips that shattered lives and broke families are splayed across screens worldwide making violence viral. The next clip is already being loaded while taking detailed notes on previous people’s mistakes. The world is watching a film session for the next face painted across shimmering silver screens.

6S

Matthew McGuirk teaches and laughs at his puns by day and scribbles somewhat coherent words nightly. He lives with his family in New Hampshire. Words in The Daily Drunk Magazine, Goat’s Milk, Idle Ink, Maudlin House, Purple Wall Stories, Sledgehammer Lit, Versification and others (and tweets here).

Agave Cotton

by Carolyn R. Russell

Our first night together was all jalapeño pepper-infused tequila and impulse. Passion came the following morning when I fell for his sheets. They were crisp but soft and smelled like something pure, like rain, like a freshly baked biscuit. So did he. He still does, I’m sure. I’m not sure.

6S

Carolyn R. Russell is the author of “In the Fullness of Time,” a dystopian thriller published by Vine Leaves Press in 2020. Her humorous YA mystery, “Same As It Never Was,” was released in 2018 by Big Table. “The Films of Joel and Ethan Coen,” her volume of film criticism, was published by McFarland & Company in 2001. Her poetry, essays and short stories have been featured or are forthcoming in numerous publications, including The Boston Globe, 3rd Wednesday, Litro Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, Club Plum Literary Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, Orca: a Literary Journal, and Lowestoft Chronicle. Carolyn lives on and writes from Boston’s North Shore. More here.

Seminole Towers: Tallahassee, FL

by J. Bradley

President Minotaur surveys what’s left of the high-rise condo, the rescue crews looking for who’s left. You need to do something about the ocean, one of the mourners yells at President Minotaur. This is the closest President Minotaur has been to the ocean since he escaped the orphanage, dragging the body of the only boy he loved onto the shore, the one who was supposed to escape with him. The ocean is American, the President’s press secretary reminds the mourner. It takes what it wants. President Minotaur charges into the waves to prove he can finally defeat the ocean, and everyone applauds.

6S

J. Bradley is the author of Teenage Wasteland: An American Love Story (WhiskeyTit Books, 2021). He cartoons on Instagram.

Gap Year

by Belinda Rimmer

Adam dumped Clara at the door of the shack, told her he was going walk-about, something spiritual that didn't include her, and that he'd be back the right side of next week. The right side of next week passed. The garden morphed into dust. Barely a drip from the tap, but she couldn't drink; an erasure of thirst. On one knee, like she did that time as a child when her mother went out in sling-backed shoes with the man across the way and didn't come home for days, she lit a fire. By the time Adam returned, the shack was rubble and smoke, and he looked like he wanted to kill her, at least to maim her, but then he looked afraid.

6S

Belinda Rimmer is a poet and short story writer. She is a joint winner of the Indigo-First Pamphlet Competition, 2018, with her poetry pamphlet, Touching Sharks in Monaco. Her pamphlet on the life and work of Tillie Olsen, How to be Silent, will be published soon by dancing girl press. One of her flashes made it into bestmicrofiction and the TSS Publishing list for for Best British and Irish Flash Fiction (2019). She is a runner up the 2020 Mslexia flash fiction competition. (For more, visit her website and follow her on Twitter.)

Waterloo

by Jacqueline Doyle

You’re always mansplaining, my wife says, but that’s because she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Like when she says, My hairdresser says cutting out fats is bad for your hair, am I supposed to say, Really, I’ll stop cutting out fats, like her hairdresser is some kind of authority? I’m not a big reader, but I’ve got a college degree, and I think I know a little bit more than her hairdresser. Or when she reads about the Napoleon Complex in some women’s magazine. Come on, it’s not like she didn’t know I was short when she married me. Now she wants a marriage counselor?

6S

Jacqueline Doyle is the author of the flash fiction chapbook The Missing Girl (Black Lawrence Press). Her flash and micros have appeared widely. One of her first publications was a meta-micro in Six Sentences. Find her online here and on Twitter.

Her Hands

by Kay Rae Chomic

My mother had strong hands. She could break an apple into two perfect halves with one twist of those hands. She could smack sense into my brother with a hint of a slap. My dad let her massage his shoulders while he went into someplace like heaven. For me, her hands meant pinches, squeezes, holds — nothing I liked. I have her hands and try to keep them in my pockets.

6S

Kay Rae Chomic is a novelist (A Tight Grip), and writer of flash: Cabinet of Heed, Ellipsis Zine, Retreat West (1st place-micro fiction), Every Day Fiction, Hundred Heroines, LISP (semi-finalist), Storgy Magazine, Crack the Spine, Five:2:One, 50-Word Stories, Hysteria 6, and more. Kay lives in Seattle, loves Motown music, and delights in happy hours.

One Breath

by Andrew Stancek

When it was over I moved on, wounds heal, they say, and I wasn’t thinking of her any more than five-six times a day and every night, and then I am crossing Queen Street, rush hour traffic, light flashing and she runs towards me, dazzling smile, Dorothy Hamill hair and I stop in the middle of the intersection and she’s past, cars rush at me and through the honking I turn and she’s still running and I yell, “Portia.” Head swivels, eyes register but she doesn’t stop and calls, “We must get together.” The earth should open but it doesn’t. Must get together? Does that mean, “You may call,” or “You must call,” or “I miss you,” or “Drop dead,” or “I am married and have not given you a thought ever?” She’s gone, through the subway entrance, and her lavender coat is only a wisp of a memory and I lean against a store window and will catch a breath again sometime, tomorrow or next week.

6S

Andrew Stancek describes his vocation as dreaming – clutching onto hope, even in turbulent times. He has been published widely, in SmokeLong Quarterly, FRIGG, Green Mountains Review, New World Writing, New Flash Fiction Review, Jellyfish Review and Peacock Journal, among others. He has won the Reflex Fiction contest, the New Rivers Press American Fiction contest and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He continues to be astonished.

How Women Make Fools Out of Men

by Bob Jacobs

Gloria and I were sitting in the Café des Amis on our third date tucking into chicken nachos when she put down her cutlery, leaned forward, and whispered for the very first time that she loved me. I told her that I was flattered, but it was too soon to speak of love, but she giggled and said, "I'll prove it." She slipped off her shoes, raised a stocking-clad leg, and ate her foot, her calf, her knee and then her thigh, until she'd devoured the whole frigging leg. I said, "Gloria, really, there's no need," but she laughed, ate the other leg, her left arm, her right arm, then paused briefly to look me in the eyes before craning her neck and eating her entire tender body, beating heart and all, so that only her head remained, surrounded by flowing red hair. "I love you," she croaked, through blood-soaked lips. I drove her back to my place where she fellated me right through till morning, when I sent her home in a taxi and told her I'd call, and I have done, many times, but has she ever once answered the frigging phone?

6S

Bob Jacobs lives in the south-east of England with his wife and kids and Sony Vaio.

Silence Is a Stranger

by Kathryn Silver-Hajo

What we’d argued about seems beside the point. Mostly there was the sensation of my feet slipping on the shifting dune. A fall, a crash, a seemingly unbreachable silence. It took a death, a shared grief, to unravel it — our eyes meeting across a room filled with faceless mourners mollifying sadness with canapes, cake and wine. After that, it was almost easy. As if it had never even happened.

6S

Kathryn Silver-Hajo writes short fiction, long fiction, and poetry. She studied in the Creative Writing MFA program at Emerson College and has a degree in Middle Eastern studies. Her stories and poems appear or are forthcoming in Cleaver Magazine, Unbroken Journal, The Drabble, The Ekphrastic Review, Boston Literary Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Rusted Radishes: Beirut Literary and Art Journal. She is currently seeking representation for her novel, Roots of The Banyan Tree. Kathryn’s work may be found here.

Leopard Print

by Brad Rose

Spent all month cutting and pasting. After a while, like the alphabet, you get used to it. Of course, you can’t help but wonder, Who are all these blue-eyed animals? even on horse day. Fortunately, all my muscles are connected. Magnolia assured me that everything looks better in leopard print. That’s why whenever I’m given a choice, I like to choose the house that isn’t burning.

6S

Brad Rose's website is here.

Fam Idyll

by Sean Ennis

Grace has hidden a powerful stone under my pillow. I’m waiting to hear about a job that might change our lives, and I have been so dumb as to flirt with salmonella in the kitchen. Does my family doubt my loyalty? Not good enough is an idea so poisonous, vile, familiar. The cat is sick, so the cardinals and squirrels have come back to the front yard. Now, Grace is in the tub full of water heated by moonlight.

6S

Sean Ennis is the author of CHASE US: Stories (Little A) and his fiction has appeared in Bending Genres, Diagram, New World Writing, X-R-A-Y and Expat. More of his work can be found here.

The Floating Platform

by Theodore Sorkin

Not far from Fiji, out in the Pacific, a floating platform moves lazily with the tide. The platform - a twelve foot square - was built many years ago by a tribe of nomadic carpenters. The carpenters' intention was to create a place of safety and refuge for anyone lost at sea who happened to notice it. It's anchored nearly a mile offshore from Suva and has four contoured, comfortably-shaped chairs. Each chair is bolted to a corner, each faces out to view the ocean. The carpenters didn't like each other.

6S

Theodore Sorkin once ran a mile in five minutes flat. He lives in San Francisco.

Navigating City Streets

by Lois Perch Villemaire

Mom walked confidently on the streets of downtown Philadelphia. She was well acquainted with the big departments stores, restaurants, and shortest way to get from place to place. For me, a walk along city streets wasn’t so glamorous. I was busy stepping carefully to avoid the metal grates on the inner edge of the sidewalk, afraid they might give way and I would tumble into an unknown dark abyss. Besides that, there were unfortunate souls sitting on the ground up against buildings looking scary to me, disabled in some way with a bowl or bucket in front. Mom leaned down to kiss my cheek, took my hand, and pulled me along to our next destination - lunch at the automat.

6S

Lois Perch Villemaire resides in Annapolis, MD. Her stories, memoir flash, and poetry have been published in such places as Trouvaille Review, FewerThan500, The Drabble, Pen In Hand, North of Oxford, Flash Frontier, Flora Fiction and several anthologies published by Truth Serum Press.

The Melted Bicycle

by Rod Drake

So I watched my bicycle melt, like it was made out of wax, into a multi-colored puddle on the sidewalk. I would have said I was tripping on LSD or something, but at 10, I didn’t do drugs. Then, I heard laughing, and in the upstairs window of our bedroom, my brother, only 8, but brilliant, leaned out with the heat-ray gun he had apparently finally perfected (he had long worked on it). “That’s for not defending me on the playground yesterday,” he shouted down to me. Instead of getting angry, I sat on the step, wondering how I could use it, and him, to my advantage. “Hey, Mikey,” I called out, “come on down; I’m not mad and bring the gun - I’ve got some ideas.”

6S

Rod Drake writes to live, lives to write, so the relationship works out well.

I Became a Gem in a Necklace

by Aimee Parkison

The sun and water are husband and wife. Their courting, being timeless, goes on forever because the necklaces the sun gives the water are food chains. While dying in the ocean, I witnessed the sun romancing the water and became an unwitting part of their romance. I saw the sun giving the water the most dazzling timeless romantic jewelry — violent jewelry of life, death, and hunger — necklaces so magnificent they sometimes hurt to gaze upon, so I had to cover my eyes. Eaten by sharks, I became a gem in a necklace the sun gave the water. I was devoured into the chain.

6S

Aimee Parkison's Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman won the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize and named one of Brooklyn Rails Best Books of the year. Her newest book Girl Zoo is a co-authored fiction about women in captivity. Parkison writes to explore voices and open doors to unusual journeys through language. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals, in translation in Italian, and in the Best Small Fictions anthology series. Since 2019, she has served on the FC2 Board of Directors. Her fiction has won awards, including a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship, the Kurt Vonnegut Prize from North American Review, the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, the Jack Dyer Prize from Crab Orchard Review, a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship, a Writers at Work Fellowship, a Puffin Foundation Fellowship, an American Antiquarian Society William Randolph Hearst Creative Artist Fellowship, and a William Faulkner Literary Competition Prize for the Novel. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Oklahoma State University. For more, visit her webiste and follow her on Twitter.

Untitled

by Darren Sant

I was the king of all I surveyed. The lord and master of the Longcroft Estate. Challengers come and they go, but I remain on top. In Every alleyway I fought against all odds. Around every corner a would-be gangster armed with gun or knife. I sadly reflected as I bled out that when you're on top the only way is down.

6S

Darren Sant has published a collection of Longcroft Tales. They remind him of his youth and the school of hard knocks he was so glad to leave.

Fainting

by Laura Stamps

I had a dream last night, and in this one I kept passing out with no warning, out cold, boom, anywhere, everywhere, strangers picking me up off the street or wherever I collapsed and telling me what had happened, since I had no idea I had fainted. It kept getting worse and worse, fainting and falling, fainting and falling, with no memory whatsoever, until I finally woke up terrified. At first I thought it was real, that this was my grim future, and I had developed dementia or Alzheimer’s or something. Okay, no more watching those popular soapy hospital series every night on television. Obviously, I’ve absorbed enough medical trivia to convince my subconscious I’m going insane. Goodbye to my favorite nighttime surgeons and your romantic relationship disasters/crises, which you will now have to resolve on your own without my help, even though I love all of you, and I do, but not that much.

6S

Laura Stamps writes wacky narrative poetry and flash/micro fiction. (Life should be fun, right?) Author of THE YEAR OF THE CAT (Artemesia Publishing) and IN THE GARDEN (The Moon). Winner of the Muses Prize. Recipient of 7 Pushcart Prize nominations. Mom of 5 cats. Visit her website and follow her on Twitter.

Grit

by Annie Bien

Today my cellmate mentioned that most of us inmates are in prison because of material needs, they’re poor and got caught robbing or stealing, got mixed up in drug busts, or in a fight, but why would I give up my freedom for freedom so that I’m not free? My voice got this tightness, realizing it must seem a luxury. He clapped my back. “Saw you on the news. You’ll be written down in history books for fighting to not lose our freedom so losing for a bit is worthwhile. You’re now a piece of grit in their eyes.”

6S

Annie Bien has written two poetry collections and published flash fiction in print and online. She is a flash fiction winner and finalist of the London Independent Story Prize, 2020, and a Pushcart Nominee. She is an English translator of Tibetan Buddhist Sūtras for 84000.

The Hunger

by Karen Crawford

A storm is coming, ready to touch down with an insatiable frenzy. One that pulls me in then spits me out when I no longer feed it. It’s a Mother of a storm, hurling judgment at my doorstep, ready for battle. Ready to put a dent in the temporary armor I’ve reserved just for her. The hail is persistent, her winds all howl; I take shelter under the bed to protect my head, my heart. But I can’t just let her wither away, so I brace myself, and once again, I feed her.

6S

Karen Crawford lives in the City of Angels where she writes to exorcise demons one word at a time. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Flash Fiction Magazine, Flash Boulevard, Reflex Fiction, The Daily Drunk, among others. You can find her on twitter.

Bad Hair Day

by Tim Frank

One day I woke with a shaved head and I found Neo-Nazis goose-stepping outside my front door while protesters lobbed rocks at my window. Scuffles broke out, gunshots fired. The next day my hair grew long, stretching below my shoulders. Hippies camped on the pavement, smoking weed and dropping acid as peals of laughter twisted into dry-mouthed paranoia. The next day my hair was shorn into patchy tufts and I was locked in a cell as audiences glared at my deformed body. How I missed the days of a short back and sides from a monosyllabic barber and the comfort of a simple life.

6S

Tim Frank's short stories have been published in Bourbon Penn, Eunoia Review, Maudlin House and elsewhere. He is the associate fiction editor for Able Muse Literary Journal and tweets here.

Unseen

by Mike Hickman

Roger had to say something, so he told Laura the red walls were stylish. They went with the Ray Ban wearing chic, he joked, as he had in the darkness of the club. He heard her close the door behind her. He knew what she’d taken from her bag. But he couldn’t have guessed the answer to her question until now. “You know how kids think that, if they hide behind their hands, they can’t be seen?” she asked him.

6S

Mike Hickman - sometimes Doctor, always writer - is from York, England. He has written for Off the Rock Productions (stage and audio), including a 2018 play about Groucho Marx and Erin Fleming. With lockdown sending his writing and submissions into overdrive, since 2020 he has been published in Agapanthus (Best of the Net nominated), EllipsisZine, the Bitchin’ Kitsch, the Cabinet of Heed, the Potato Soup Journal, and Red Fez. He is a regular contributor to the Daily Drunk, and tweets here.

Man Made of Hours

by Meg Pokrass

In the Museum of Time you stand there staring at a grandfather clock. It has a smooth face, like a man you used to believe in until you saw he was made of hours. There are fathers and husbands everywhere you look, living in the faces of these clocks. The clockmaker’s daughter walks over, looks at you as if you might have suffered a stroke. What makes you think you’ve been dreaming these guys up? she asks, taking your hand in hers with the papery feel of dried leaf. The two of you and your wrinkly hands, staring at the museum of everything you have ever wanted.

6S

Meg Pokrass is the author of 7 flash fiction collections, two novellas-in-flash, an award winning collection of prose poetry, and a new collection, "Spinning to Mars" which won the Blue Light Book Award. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Washington Square Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Split Lip and McSweeney's has been anthologized in New Micro (W.W. Norton & Co., 2018), Flash Fiction International (W.W. Norton & Co., 2015) and The Best Small Fictions. She is the Founding Editor of New Flash Fiction Review, Series Co-Editor of Best Microfiction and Festival Curator of Flash Fiction Festival U.K.

35mm

by Melissa Llanes Brownlee

Every inch of the film from our wedding is sitting in a trash bag in the back of our closet. I wanted throwaway cameras and you insisted on 35mm film and rental Leicas on the tables as party favors, an expense I wasn’t willing to give in to but you persisted, so I did. You were never worried that they might be stolen or damaged, losing us the sizeable deposit, which we could have used to just pay a damn photographer in the first place, but you wanted authenticity and truth. So now, we have canisters of film in a black plastic sack on the floor of our closet, because you wanted to develop them yourself, but then you forgot, even though I remind you, again and again. I buy a kit to process the film into digital images, finally unveiling our wedding as seen through the eyes of our friends and family. The truth of us is captured in each frame, over and over again, making me wish I had left it all in the trash bag on the floor in the back of our closet.

6S

Melissa Llanes Brownlee (she/her), a native Hawaiian writer, living in Japan, has fiction in Milk Candy Review, Claw & Blossom, Bending Genres, Micro Podcast, (mac)ro(mic), Complete Sentence, The Daily Drunk, Sledgehammer Lit, Necessary Fiction, Have Has Had and elsewhere. She was selected for Best Small Fictions 2021. She tweets here and talks story here.

On the Train

by Linda Lowe

Tonight on the train the conductor is talking to an angry man in the seat in front of me. Angry because once he got on the wrong train, and what a mess that was. He’s complaining about a man’s dignity, how once he’d worked with people in Kentucky, how it never hurt to be decent. I dissolve into my own world as he continues talking to no one after the conductor leaves. I’m drifting along in the peaceful darkness when he abruptly stands and faces me, shouting, Why are you following me? “I don’t know,” I say, but I did.

6S

Linda Lowe's stories and poems have appeared in The New Verse News, Defenestration, Gone Lawn, BOMBFIRE and others.

Taxi to Miami

by Francine Witte

Greta Feinberg is old and getting older, lines like flowers around her mouth, lines like spiders around her eyes. She stands on a New York City nightcurb, hailing a taxi, single suitcase by her side, single lightbulb still burning in a lamp upstairs. Morris, her husband, died out of her life one year ago, left a dent in the sofa, and she’s never been able to fluff it out. She needs to travel solo, my beautiful little diva, Morris would call her, and boop the tip of her nose, so it’s a taxi she needs. In Miami, she can blame the wrinkles on the sun. The taxi that stops to pick her up is yellow, not as yellow as the sun, but it’s a start.

6S

Francine Witte's poetry and fiction have appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Mid-American Review, and Passages North. Her latest books are Dressed All Wrong for This (Blue Light Press), The Way of the Wind (AdHoc fiction), and The Theory of Flesh (Kelsay Books). Her chapbook, The Cake, The Smoke, The Moon (flash fiction) will be published by ELJ in Fall 2021. She is flash fiction editor for Flash Boulevard and The South Florida Poetry Journal. She lives in NYC.

Poor Thing

by Andrea Lynn Koohi

The dog had three legs but it didn’t care. It frolicked and rolled on the path ahead, barking and sneezing powder puffs of snow. It was there the whole time your words painted air, as the space between our footprints widened. I heard Things can happen over 21 years and it’s just a coincidence she’s 21 too. I wondered How long can a dog like that live? From every direction there were pitying smiles, the same kind directed at me these days, except now they’re obscured by my own breath in the cold, dancing alone before fading away.

6S

Andrea Lynn Koohi is a writer from Canada with recent work appearing or forthcoming in Cleaver Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Emerge Literary Journal, Ellipsis Zine, Idle Ink, filling Station, Lost Balloon and others. Follow her on Twitter.

One Day, There Will Be Summer

by Marzia Rahman

“You will soon be released,” the doctor says, grinning. I wanted to tell him it was a mistake, not a sin, to give in to the temptations. To treat death as a lover who left me with scars and a handful of stupid poems only. Has it been a year, or eleven months, living amongst strangers whose minds are like zigzag puzzles and Van Gogh’s starry night? My mind is clear; I don’t wake up in the middle of the night, screaming the names of past boyfriends, a broken marriage. What I will do now is pack my thoughts, climb the mountains and wait for summer!

6S

Marzia Rahman is a fiction writer and translator based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Her flashes and translations have appeared in 101 Words, Postcard Shorts, Five of the Fifth, The Voices Project, Fewerthan500.com, Dribble Drabble Review, Paragraph Planet, Writing Places Anthology UK and The Book of Dhaka (Comma Press, UK). In 2018, her novella-in-flash ‘Life on the Edges’ was shortlisted for the Bath Novella in Flash Award Competition. She is currently working on a Novella in Flash. She is also an artist.

Breath in / Breath out

by Wes Thorne

Breathing in plastic and all of its various mutations is not a fun experience. It threatens to tear apart every one of my biological components which are already being destroyed by the natural passing of time. I press on. The official estimation was that I would only last fifty minutes, yet I have been out here for three months. I am not sure which will go first, will it be my mind or my body? An unformable desire compels me to put one foot in front of the other.

6S

Wes Thorne does not live in a dystopian wasteland.

Tenure Track

by Jon Fain

The professor has lots of books on her desk. A student she meets with sees one of the titles and reports her. She suspects it’s the kid who rocked back and forth like one of those plastic birds that dip up and down, pretend to drink water out of a glass. He’s the one who couldn’t pronounce Charlemagne. He was the type of student who, when she first started, she’d want to help find a way to flourish. Now, with the Dean’s terse letter in hand, she wants to lift the drawbridge, drag buckets of scalding oil to the ramparts, and rain them down upon him.

6S

Jon Fain's micro fiction has been published in Molecule, Star 82 Review, The Daily Drunk, The Dribble Drabble Review, The Drabble, Scribes Micro Fiction, and Blink-Ink. He lives in Massachusetts.

Second Skin

by Kristina T. Saccone

“You’re too old for that bear suit,” Papa growls. But 10-year-old Matheson feels a squall rolling in. Sure enough, Papa starts knocking them back like a sleet storm. The bear curls on the couch, nesting under a blanket. His heart slows to dormancy, waiting till the ice melts in Papa’s last whiskey. When it calms, the suit slides off, and Matheson emerges, a boy who is old enough to survive the long winter.

6S

Kristina T. Saccone writes flash fiction and creative nonfiction. Her work has appeared in 365 Tomorrows, The Bangor Literary Journal, Emerge Literary Journal, and Unearthed. Find her on Twitter, online, or haunting small independent bookstores in the Washington, DC area.

Fireflies

by Angeline Schellenberg

Leaning against the weathered doghouse, Dan shivered. Though the sky was shrouded in clouds, the stars felt so near. When he closed his eyes, he saw his mother, just lying there, coughing and coughing. Dan grasped the air and closed his fist, over and over. He smeared the sides of his shoes until they glowed. Then he ran—a trail of borrowed light.

6S

Angeline Schellenberg's debut about raising children on the autism spectrum, Tell Them It Was Mozart (Brick Books, 2016), received three Manitoba Book Awards. Her new book Fields of Light and Stone (University of Alberta Press, 2020) is an elegy for her Mennonite grandparents. Angeline hosts Speaking Crow — the longest-running poetry open mic in Winnipeg, Canada.