Issue Twenty-Eight
Summer 2026
Sufi Rock
Raja’a Khalid is a Saudi-born, writer and artist from Dubai. She received her MFA in Art from Cornell University in 2013. Her stories have been nominated for Best of the Net (2025) and the Pushcart Prize (2025) and appear in publications such as Strange Horizons, Yalobusha Review, River Styx and elsewhere.
The band from Karachi is a purveyor of Sufi rock and we girls listen, lying sleepily, like dew drenched dupattas, our lissom bodies limp on the bed, on the sofa, on the carpet, our heads propped up by cushions sheathed in silk and velvet, supine like poisoned princesses or on our sides with knees pulled up into our chests. The slicing blades of ceiling fans spin and become like whirling mystics’ frocks and out the window a green moon trembles because the long promised summer rain has finally broken and brought with it that slippery shimmer in the air. Music slides into the room like the slow creep of rose sharbat spilled onto a white tablecloth and its rhythmic melange of electric guitar, tabla, synth, sitar pools around us till all we can see is a melting sky of deepest red in which the clouds are purple smouldering bruises and bats flutter like little glyphs of ink. The voice is rustic, husky, raw uttering poetry, telling tales of passion and in a manner faithful to the tradition it is not possible to tell who precisely is the object of the Lead Singer’s devotion; a lover, a friend or God Himself. We turn our faces to look at walls papered with centerfolds ripped from cheaply printed magazines, thin skins now, their corners curling, their colors leached to white and in the white we find only timorous eyes in palest cyan. It’s his eyes that got us, with that hint of violet and rim of black, eyes which entreated softly, eyes which said Listen to me and I will tell you the secrets of this life, the next and everything in between. He sings in his white kurta and shalwar of the tempest between each heartbeat, the pulling apart of limbs in sheer moments of ecstasy, the eternal temptation of enchanting sirens and he begs the Almighty to veil the world and its flesh based delights once and for all so he can be finally a noble man. As we cast our eyes on the posters we wonder too about the Drummer, the silent androgynous companion, as cool as a glacial lake, his head buzzed and bleached to silver, a choker tattoo of Ghalib’s poetry around his throat. His eyes are closed as he taps the tabla, giving the impression that his own soul is far from all the sounds his fingers make, far away from the crowd of hands that hold out a million tiny flames lit on a million tiny plastic cigarette lighters, the beat lifting off his body as his skin glitters with a thin sheet of sweat. The Synth+Sitar is a strip of a man, lithe and tall with blond curls, his mother Dutch, and he too plays in pale kurtas, long garlands of night-blooming jasmine in his neck woven in with the petals of those dark red roses Karachi is so famous for, so dark almost black, his eyes always hidden behind a pair of Ray Bans, his fingers twisting ragas like ribbons into the muscles of rock and roll. Voices from the street call out to us through ornamental grilles in the window from where also come the braided sounds of rain, rickshaws and hucksters of paan and twin scents of petrochor and well ripened fruit. Boys from school shout our names, Bilo, Farzana, Neelam, Shama and offer to hold up umbrellas and take us for walks and what they have to present are only mixtapes. We might have turned sixteen this summer but we are still bound to our homes, we say and in any case the band already has our hearts. There are rumors of a single, special for the season so we switch on our radios and it is true, up after the news and the weather. Tabla first then layers of mournful melody, strings and solemn voice vying for the center. This one is a slow, minor key, haunting story told in a tremulous whisper about a girl with long black hair and stellar eyes betrothed to a cousin though her heart belongs to the divine. She steps on the only path open to her and on the day of the wedding she shaves off her hair, cloaks herself in pale yellow robes and wraps the prayer beads around her wrists. The groom averts his gaze, releasing her from their engagement and she walks away from him into the forest where she has the peace and tranquility to drown herself in the fathomless lake of devotional poetry and prayer. The wolves are her disciples now and they gather around her listening to her song. We flock to the music stores, buy the cassette tapes and CDs, where the picture behind the plastic is not one of the band but a nameless girl, head shaved, sitting in pale yellow robes under the abundant sinewy ropes of an ancient banyan tree. It is the song of the summer, requested on the radio fifty times a day, played in our bedrooms on repeat and critics call it too, even at the risk of blaspheming, a kind of contemporary urban hymn. We learn, by heart, the lyrics, and sing them on the phone to each other, or when we link elbows and walk through the narrow paths of the colonies, scribbling it on our notebooks and arms. We wear shalwar kameezain of faded yellow, step in front of the mirror and run our thin fingers through our long black hair. There is only one day till the schools open. There is no other way. Clippers are seized from brothers’ cabinets and pressed onto scalps and down fall locks of hair like ropes of dark silk or dead black baby snakes. In the morning fathers are shocked, mothers bereft. We go to school, prayer beads on our wrists, light yellow dupattas on our heads, murmuring a story about a virgin saint of the forest.
You Don’t Know
Rebecca Klassen is fiction editor of The Phare and lives in Gloucestershire. She won the London Independent Story Prize and was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and the Alpine Fellowship. Her stories have featured in Fictive Dream, Mslexia, Flash Frontier, New Flash Fiction Review, Baltimore Review, and on BBC radio.
that when I was twelve, I snuck out at five in the morning when I knew you were comatose from whiskey, a log on the sofa, unaware that I ran through dew and darkness to the Peterson’s barn, climbed bales and rafters, and slipped my gloved hand inside the nesting box. Only she knew that I yelped in time with her screeches as she bit and flapped when I snaked past, stole from her, three altogether, her wispy white breast feathers stuck to eggshells as fragile as you.
You knew the coach was leaving school at 7am bound for Roman Bath, that the local bus wouldn’t get me to school in time and you were my only way of getting there because we lived out in country lanes, that all I wanted to do was dig with my friends, scrape silt from hollowed bone charms, hold ingredients of brittle faith healing.
You don’t know that I googled hangover cures again because water, aspirin, coffee, toast, or anything I wanted weren’t enough to get you up and behind the wheel.
Do you know the Romans slipped raw barn owl eggs into red wine to combat the effects of drinking?
You don’t know that I stood in the kitchen with the three cool eggs on the table next to the full glass of Merlot, the tattered glove in the bin, blood rivulets dried in criss-crosses on my wrist as I imagined you swallowing their pinhead hearts, fragile spines, and useless weak wings.
Next They Ruled That Only Men Could Wear Buttons
Chris Cottom’s work features in 100 Word Story, Bending Genres, Fictive Dream, FlashFlood, Flash Frontier, Gooseberry Pie, Leon Literary Review, MoonPark Review, NFFD NZ, New World Writing Quarterly, Oyster River Pages, Roi Fainéant, The Lascaux Review, and elsewhere. Find him in the public library in Macclesfield, UK, and at chriscottom.wixsite.com/chriscottom
I’d barely got back from school when Mum told me to take off my skirt. She snip-snipped my buttons, plinked them into her shamrock-shaped biscuit tin, promised to have me all-elastic before the cock-a-doodle of dawn.
She woke me at midnight as church bells everywhere bonged that the ban had started. She touched the tin to my cheek, bid me take a ‘good long look’ at what she called a woman’s birthright, wept with me while we walked our fingers through our Sea of Buttons, spilling filigreed silvers and swirly tortoiseshells, scarlet hearts and wooden-rimmed blues, the mother-of-pearls from my First Communion dress.
Mum sealed the tin twice-round with tape, commended it into the care of Saint Clare of Assisi, the patron saint of sewing. Dad left with it immediately, making for the Knockmealdown Mountains, where Waterford borders Tipperary, where Auntie Carmel’s farm had a slurry pit so deep and hobgoblin-dangerous that no one could get too curious.
There our heirloom stayed submerged, while we waited for better days and I curved into womanhood. As I learned to stitch endless zips and strips of Velcro, I wondered how it might feel to unbutton someone, whether I’d linger, or fumble and rush.
Now, as I teach my daughters to sew, I tell them how Granny and Auntie Carmel could play all day with a coral reef of buttons, how there’s a shamrock-shaped tin waiting on a farm in the mountains, with a treasury of Celtic knots in ivory and silver, a motley of fun- shapes in puddleduck yellow and tree-frog green. I tell them one day things will change, how they’ll claim these riches and bring them home. They tell me one day, at her shrine in Assisi, they’ll lay a rainbow of buttons at the feet of Saint Clare.
The Neighbor Boy’s Got Stickers
Amy Allen is a writer based in Shelburne, Vermont, where she serves as the town’s Poet Laureate and runs the writing and editing business All of the Write Words. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals, earning nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net in 2025, with one of her flash pieces having been selected for publication in Best Microfiction 2026. She’s the author of the poetry chapbook Mountain Offerings (2024).
sheets and sheets of them tucked under an arm, rolled up and poking out of his pockets, sometimes in an army green cloth backpack, sometimes in a plastic ziptop bag, spilling out as he runs across his lawn.
There’s a line of cedars between him and me that have grown sparse over the years and, so too, their offering of privacy. I watch him as I garden, glancing up from my tomato cages as he darts by in navy rain boots, a sticker perpetually stuck to the tip of his index finger, poised for its destination, others already stuck to his forearms, t-shirt, up and down his red, plastic slide, covering one side of a green plastic watering can, all over their hose reel.
“Not the car,” I hear his mom call from their front porch as he jogs through their circular driveway, then back down into the grass. I think how patient she sounds, doubting I possessed that same patience with my own kids back in the day.
He stops by their gray wheelbarrow, and I watch as he plows through sheet after sheet, sticking them to the inside, outside, handles, even wheels until he steps back, admiring his work.
“There,” he says. To me? I wonder. Perhaps to himself? “Now you’ve got friends,” he says, and I’m clear now it’s the wheelbarrow he’s addressing. I realize in all the times I’ve seen this boy, he’s never playing with friends. He’s always alone, entertaining himself. I wish my kids were still his age. I’d send them over, get them to invite others, make up for all the times I probably snubbed kids like him at school, on the playground, in life.
He’s moving again, smoothing stickers onto a birch tree before settling into the grass next to his patient golden retriever. I take a step closer, peer through the bushes, watching as he adds stickers to the dog’s tail, hips, snout, and then to himself, one after another covering his little boy bare legs. The dog sneezes, and as her snout sticker launches, disappearing into the summer sky, he quickly pulls one more off the sheet. “There,” he says, carefully replacing it, the dog’s tail thumping, and he’s up once more, armed and ready, endless territory to cover.
Eigengrau
Brenden Layte is a writer, linguist, and editor of educational materials. His work has previously appeared in places like X-R-A-Y, Lost Balloon, and Pithead Chapel. He also won The Forge Literary Magazine’s 2021 Flash Fiction Contest. Brenden is on Bluesky at @brenden.bsky.social and X at @b_layted.
The ambulances are here again. Their lights overlap, forming astigmatic beams that swallow the apartment blocks behind them. I look up the street as the man approaches, all exasperation and accusations. Just like last night. Just like the others before that. I put my hands up and yell that I still don’t know what’s going on. I say that if I did, why would I be here waiting to be blamed again. I say that if anybody should be accosting people, it’s me. He yells back, saying that he doesn’t know what I’m talking about. That this all just started. That he doesn’t know me but the fact that I’m acting so defensive is suspicious. He stops a few feet away and studies me, his face flashing in the lights as he looks me over. His brow furrows, wrinkles forming one at a time like waves rolling down his face. This moment always seems so endless. The one right before he looks at the buildings and recognition spreads across his face. Right before he exhales and smiles sadly, his eyes focused beyond the explosions of red and blue, beyond the weathered brick walls.
“I guess you’re right,” he says, his face now more weary than aggrieved. “I remember. It just keeps happening. On and on.” He looks back to me and I meet his gaze, waiting for him to continue. “It’s a shame, though. Shame it keeps having to happen this way… Shame it has to happen at all.” I want to ask what he means. I want to ask where we are. I want to ask if we’re the same or different each time we do this. But I remember that I can’t. I remember that when we look back at the buildings, they’ll have vanished. I remember that when I open my mouth to speak, I’ll be alone. The lights will flash into a void, grow dimmer, then become part of the darkness, too. I’ll see the image of a distant forest I once knew, beyond the buildings, somewhere in the night.
Revelations
Wendy BooydeGraaff's short fiction has been included in X-R-A-Y, Alaska Quarterly Review, Ninth Letter online, the South Dakota Review, and elsewhere. Born and raised in Ontario, Canada, she now lives in Michigan, United States.
Each day after her epiphany, the teacher went to her classroom of third graders wearing one less piece of clothing. The first day, the lack of camisole was imperceptible, except to the teacher across the hallway who kept a close eye on her chest.
The second day, she removed her shoes. Her soles, blackened from the accelerator pedal, the school linoleum, the rubberized entry mats, flashed at the students as she paced between their desks. They didn’t know what it was that was different; she often kicked off her shoes, usually high-heeled pumps, next to her desk and padded quietly around the room, crouching alongside their bowed heads, their pencils, their notebooks.
The third day, the principal came to speak with her. There’s something, he said, no one can quite tell what it is but you know, he said, you know both what it is and what to do about it. You are the pillar of our literacy team, he said. We need you. They need you. He gestured to the empty desks of the students who were at Art.
Because she wore belted shirt dresses, it wasn’t until the sixth day, a bleary-eyed Monday, she arrived wearing only the lotion she had applied after her shower. She climbed the stairs, made it into her classroom, began laying out the activities of the day before the children arrived.
Of course, the sixth grade teacher had seen her, as did the speech and language consultant. She was escorted from the premises by the security guards called in from the superintendent’s offices. The superintendent, too, arrived in her green suit, flared at the waist, eyes squinting behind her glasses. Someone had found a white sheet (why a school had a white sheet, no one understood except perhaps the administrative assistant who found the sheet). The teacher walked between the uniformed guards, sheet tied hospital-style around her neck, an air of crucifixion descending on the crowd. The superintendent loosened her green jacket, owing to the early humid spring, she told herself. She gave a statement to the mental health consultant while exposing the cream shell revealed beneath the green, and before releasing her statement to the two local news reporters, she kicked off her shoes.
Manners Class
Haley Souders holds a BFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College and an MFA in Fiction from Bowling Green State University. Her work has previously been published in Wilderness House Literary Review and The Lemonwood Quarterly and is upcoming in Flyway and BULL. She is currently an adjunct instructor in English at Ohio Northern University.
The boys slouch. Bend down to scratch at ankles beneath wooly socks. Throw their cloth napkins on the dinner table. The boys shove squares of cantaloupe in their cheeks. Eat with their mouths open, flashing orange pulp. Their forks aren’t even on the left of their dinner plate.
The girls move glasses of unsweetened iced tea an inch too far from the right while Miss Betty frowns at them. They cross their legs at the ankle to prevent their skirts from opening up.
They practice the proper way to climb into a boy’s passenger seat without flashing cleavage. At home, they’ll boil broccoli in salted water and bake snickerdoodles with their mothers while the boys play video games in their rooms.
The girls slice butter from the dish, place the slab on their bread plates, and pass it clockwise around the table. They wait for a prayer to be said before eating. They remove the legs from shrimp with forks and knives. The boys rip off legs and shells with their hands. They slurp meat from the tail.
When the music plays, the boys don’t remember the steps to the ballroom waltz. The girls put their right hands in sweaty palms, their left on the boys’ shoulders, and drape their arms atop the boys’ so he supports them. When the girls step backward, pull the boys along, spin on the eighth beat, the boys will get the praise for leading so well.
Chosen
An editor, writer, and poet, Charles Grosel lives in Arizona. He has published stories in Western Humanities Review, Water-Stone, and The MacGuffin as well as poems in Epiphany, The Threepenny Review, and Cream City Review. His chapbook is The Sound of Rain Without Water.
Being chosen by K was what I fervently needed and the worst thing for me. It was like grabbing the first piece of pizza out of the box and blistering the roof of my mouth.
I played freshman basketball. He was a recent alum, the volunteer trainer sweeping wads of athletic tape into a pile on the training room floor of our boys’ Catholic prep school, catching my eye above the books I was always reading, even in the locker room. Talking about these books. Giving me a few of his favorites—Hermann Hesse, James Joyce, Michaelangelo’s sonnets. Noticing the scribbles in the spiral notebook I left open on the bench between the lockers. Sharing that he, too, wrote some, plays, mostly. Asking me if I wanted to be in one of his plays, though I wasn’t an actor. Saying that that didn’t matter, he’d write a part for me. Inviting me into the training room with its dank towels and Tiger Balm sting. Showing me how to wrap an ankle so the sharp white edges of the tape didn’t cut into the skin and cause infection. Letting me sit on the varsity bench at basketball games as his assistant, then tag along to pizza with the seniors, who called me his puppy dog. Bearhugging me to loosen my strained back. Having me lie on the training table to loosen my back further. Loosening my back further. Writing long letters to stay in touch after the season ended.
K was the man who persuaded me in one of those letters to go to Santa Fe one college summer against my parents’ wishes with the lure of working on a Hollywood movie. He was the man who didn’t get me a job working on the Hollywood movie or anywhere else. The man who had me sleep on a mattress on the floor in his bedroom because he sublet the other room to a Deadhead waiter (who did get me a job, at the restaurant where he worked). The man who told me he was dying and that only I could massage the pain away. The man who, when I balked at being the only one who could massage the pain away, scolded me for being stingy and emotionally stunted. The man who (I can’t prove this) roofied my beer after pizza one night. The man who was leaning over me when I came to.
K was all of these, the good and the bad, but I was thirsty for—something, something I thought only he could give me. Thirsty for books, for talk, for some acknowledgment that I wasn’t alone in how I wanted to make my way through the world. K was thirsty, too, but for something I couldn’t—he said wouldn’t—provide.
Thanks to the Internet, I recently found that K has been dead about ten years—thirty-five years after the summer he claimed he was dying. I hadn’t seen him since then, though the year after I returned to school, he asked me for money, and I sent him a thousand dollars, money that should have gone toward tuition. Guilt money, I suppose, though to this day I’m still not sure what I was supposed to have been guilty of.
Wound Paints
Sarp Sozdinler is a writer from Philadelphia and Amsterdam. His stories and poems have been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Wigleaf, Flash Frog, Maudlin House, and Pithead Chapel, among other journals. His work has been selected or nominated for anthologies including the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. He edits the literary journal The Bulb Region.
Jules says she doesn’t know how to make friends anymore. She says it like she’s talking about a missing sock. Like something you notice is gone when you need it most. Ironically, she’s folding a pile of mismatched socks on my couch while a reality show buzzes on in the background.
“I’ve read recently that people over thirty only make, like, three new friends for the rest of their lives,” she says, still not looking at me.
“Sounds optimistic,” I say, and she laughs but it’s the kind of laugh that has something else behind it.
That night, I drive Jules to her mother’s house. She fiddles with the radio and talks nonstop about a coworker who brings sardines to lunch. “Like, actual sardines, man. In actual fucking tin. Eats it out in the communal kitchen with us, with the smell and everything. Can you fucking believe it?” Her heirloom necklace glints in the moonlight as she shakes her head. We sit in the car for a few minutes before she gets out, her hand hesitating on the door handle for a moment like she might say something important, but then she just nods on and shuts the door behind her.
A few days later, she texts me: what do adults do on weekends these days? I tell her about farmers markets and long nature walks and overpriced brunches. She replies with three skull emojis.
Some weekends she wants to hang out, and the other times she disappears entirely. I try not to take it personally, what with her mother’s situation and everything. I remind myself that she’s still processing her grief, that it often comes along with forgetting birthdays and cancelling plans last-minute and not answering texts until much later. I console myself that she might just be having a bad day. Still, I miss how we used to talk about nothing for hours, how even silence felt like something that could be shared.
Once, at the beach, she asked if I thought we were still growing or if this was it. I asked if she meant it biologically. “No,” she said. “Like, as a person.” I said I didn’t know. She nodded bleakly and threw a pebble into the waves. Some evenings, I call her just to hear her voice. Sometimes she picks up, sometimes she doesn’t. When she does, we talk about dumb things like celebrities aging badly, her cat’s new diet, and that culty guy from high school who started a juice brand. Every once in a while, the old Jules slips through and tells a joke so sharp I laugh until I can’t breathe.
One Sunday before the spring break, before I head out for the laundromat, she shows up on my doorstep with a cake she baked from a boxed mix. “I added cinnamon,” she says, cradling the fold-in box like it’s something sacred. I leave my jacket back on the hook and take the cake from her hands. “Mom’s special recipe.”
We eat it standing in the kitchen and then drink coffee too late in the day. The sun hits her cheek at an angle that makes her look like she’s glowing like a saint. Somehow, she seems lighter than before. Or maybe just less tired.
After she leaves, I find one of her mother’s earrings between two couch cushions. I text her a picture of it: guess what i’ll sell on ebay tonite. She replies with three broken hearts.
And then, for a while, things are better. Not perfect or nowhere near like before, but better. We go to a concert together, scream-laugh through a terrible movie, start a shared Google doc for the books we’ll never finish.
Still, there are lapses. Long stretches of silence I don’t know how to fill as a friend. But I try. I send her memes. I tag her in posts. I ask her how she’s doing and mean it, too.
And some nights, when I’m falling asleep, I imagine us at fifty: our hair graying, bodies slower, but still side-by-side on some couch somewhere, still trying to figure it all out. Not always okay, but still showing up. Still folding laundry. Still sharing cake.
I text her: u know / i’ll still be your friend in 100 years.
I add: hell make it 1000000000000.
After a while, three dots appear underneath my message, blinking like a heartbeat. And I wait and I wait and I wait.
Too Near the Heels
Mureall Hebert’s writing has appeared in trampset, Hobart, Citron Review, matchbook, and elsewhere. She’s a reader for Broad Ripple Review, the Best of the Net, and CLMP’s Firecracker Awards. Her work has been nominated for Best Microfiction, a Pushcart Prize, and Best New Poets. She holds an MFA from the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts. Find her online at www.mureallhebert.com