Asking Why Rather Than Accepting What Is
Benjamin Woodard's fiction has appeared in journals like Joyland, F(r)iction, Funicular, and SmokeLong Quarterly, as well as in the 2019 and 2021 editions of Best Microfiction. He can be found at benjaminjwoodard.com.
As a detective, it’s unprofessional to let trust cloud your vision. Clues simmer. Patsies fold. Bottle blondes and bindle punks. Beneath gentle nods and arched brows, you don’t even trust yourself. What if you pulled the trigger? It’s hard to know this early in an investigation. You can’t remember where you were on the night of the tenth. Thus, you keep your name on the list, inked between the car salesman and the debutante, because strangers are capable of extraordinary feats when placed under pressure. This weight is all so heavy. Like the phrase I have something to tell you, it loosens stones when dropped from great heights. Today, the phone rings. Yesterday, a letter arrived. A shadow followed you home to ask if you had experience tracking lost people. But what about the murder weapon? There’s a pond nearby. A thousand dumpsters. Anything’s possible. Light cuts through venetian blinds, paints white lines across the wall. You convince yourself that you need to find reason. You dig too deep. Always. That’s the problem. You care like a chump. If only you could take a nap. If only this life allowed detectives to stop detecting now and again. Too often, hatchet men spoil the fun; every task ends at the bottom of a bottle. A looker once said we’re all in it together as solo artists. And in a case like this, it’s easy to be the wrong man. Double crossers snuff the night like vampires. Even the daily special tastes of last week’s pot roast. Just now, you notice there’s something between your teeth. You mine away with a toothpick, then store the morsel in a plastic bag. Behind the eight or not, you’ll never forget rule one of gumshoeing: all evidence is important.
You Didn’t Leave Your Husband Because the Tarot Reader Told You To
Christina Tudor is a writer living in Washington, D.C. Her fiction has been featured in or is forthcoming from Matchbook, HAD, Flash Frog, Litro Magazine, Funicular Magazine, Stanchion, Best Small Fictions 2024, and more. She has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and the Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, and was a 2022 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow in fiction. She can be reached on social media @christinaltudor
You left because she pulled the seven of swords (lies, deception) and the eight of cups (a turning away from the familiar). Because of the way your husband is on edge around you especially that time you asked about his co-worker, the one with the Medusa tattoo on her thigh, and he couldn’t look you in the eye. Because you had a martini and then another martini and slid the olives off that little sword with your teeth and swallowed them whole because you craved salt, flavor, feeling, something. Because you don’t even believe in this shit but you sat down at a booth in the back of a dimly lit bar and asked the tarot reader to tell you about your love life, your future, and please, God, will things get better? Because your husband turns on the garbage disposal while you’re still asleep and listens to podcasts while he works out without wearing headphones and says the best he can do is turn the volume down—and when was the last time it was quiet? Because you told the tarot reader you don’t want to leave your husband, you can’t leave so can she spin your fortune into something new, re-shuffle that deck to give you a better answer? Because of that look she gave you when she slid her Venmo QR code across the table so you could pay for the session, a quick flash of pity but also exasperation like she was holding back an eye roll. Because you vomited up your martini in the parking lot and tasted salt, acid, and brine in the back of your throat like the olive was coming back up whole and you were choking on it. Because you were someone else once and now, while you wait for your husband to pick you up, you’re dizzy and you gasp and take full-bellied breaths, like your head was under water and you’re finally coming up for air.
Ghosts
Jane Wageman holds an MFA in fiction from Bowling Green State University and is currently a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute in Minnesota. She writes at the Substack Quick Bright Things.
When we were ghosts together, we moved through the house like it was all times. Every wall a suggestion, the gapped bones of an animal that had shed its flesh and left the spaces between them wide. We walked on through.
Easy to press from one space to another. We could blink and be back in the Oregon woods. We could put our hands to the bedroom door and open it to our old college dorm. See, the long stretch of busy shops by the sea. See, the little chapel. See, the hospital room, the child in our arms. Our child. Still, in our arms.
We left, but we kept returning. You can haunt memory, we found. But it’s easiest to haunt where you live.
We thought it would be the hardest time. We didn’t know we would ever long for it. That we might look back and miss the brief span where grief was a wild, strange place inhabited only by us. When we thought we might disappear in it together.
I don’t remember the morning I came into the kitchen, still my ghostly self, and saw you eating your cereal, fully corporeal. Or maybe it was the other way around.
I remember, only, how it felt when it happened to me. Waking up solid. Immutable. The walls of the house thick. Every time and place set in iron. I woke and I was alone in this; I would always be alone after that; I would never go back.
Bone China
Barbara Westwood Diehl is senior editor of The Baltimore Review. Her fiction and poetry appear in a variety of journals, including Fractured Lit, South Florida Poetry Journal, Poetry South, Painted Bride Quarterly, Five South, Allium, Split Rock Review, Blink-Ink, Midway, Free State Review, Ghost Parachute, Pithead Chapel, and New World Writing Quarterly.
If I’d had a younger sister when I was a child, I would have hidden her in the cupboard with the wedding china that was never used. The bone china, which I believed was made of ghosts. I would have put her under a spell with crow bones and feathers, a long, deep sleep until she awakened in a world without phantom parents. I had younger brothers. They were feral things. Blunt instruments. Chipmunks scurrying through fields and forests and junkyards. Dirty faces and yo mama and I’m rubber, you’re glue. Skinned knees and popsicle tongues and popped gum on cheeks. They were loved. But they were not a sister. While my younger sister dreamed in spell sleep, I could teach her how to be—not a brother but a something other. I would teach her new words until she found the name she liked best. We might whisper brister to each other in the cupboard or sother to each other while we broke the wedding china. While we let the ghosts go.
Wendy, Darling
Sumitra Singam is a Malaysian-Indian-Australian coconut who writes in Naarm/Melbourne. She travelled through many spaces, both beautiful and traumatic to get there and writes to make sense of her experiences. Her work has been published widely, nominated for a number of Best Of anthologies, and was selected for BSF 2025. She works as a psychiatrist and trauma therapist and runs workshops on how to write trauma safely, and the Yeah Nah reading series. She’ll be the one in the kitchen making chai (where’s your cardamom?). You can find her and her other publication credits on Bluesky: @pleomorphic2 & sumitrasingam.squarespace.com
I am seven, or three, or five. I take chairs – green plastic with aluminium legs - and put them back-to-back on the living room carpet – soft and lush like uncut grass - then drape a starry black blanket over them. I immediately crawl inside and this is how I understand the word safe. I call this my Wendy house, and in my seven- or three- or five-year old mind, this was invented by a girl called Wendy, darling. Wendy, darling is a little older than seven, or three, or five, and she is capable. She can sew all sorts of things (including shadows), she can fly, and she can look after Lost Boys. I like being in Wendy, darling’s house because she is capable. She is darling. I am capable of nothing at all – the world is a confusing mess of sounds that I cannot separate out, itchy clothing that I am not allowed to take off, and everything about me – my skin, hair, name is wrong. My parents do not come looking for me when I am in my Wendy house. In my Wendy house, my skin could be any colour at all, and any sound, light, feeling is just big enough. Wendy, darling and I talk about crocodiles, and ticking clocks, and people with hooks for hands. I ask if the hooks might reach in here, into the house I have made that bears her name. Wendy, darling is pretty and kind and she shakes her head in a very English way, and says, “Of course not, dear, what a silly thought.” In Wendy, darling’s house, with the soft, grassy carpet holding me, that is a silly thought indeed - the idea that someone with a hook for a hand might come into the room of a sleeping child aged seven, or three, or five. I ask Wendy, darling what they do all day in Neverland, and she says, “Why, have fun, of course!” which means she feels free to spread her body wide, and laugh and dance and play. I ask Wendy, darling if anyone is ever cross with her, and she says, “Why only Tinkerbell, and that is because she is jealous, the poor thing.” Which makes me think of reasons why my parents might be jealous of me. “How do you cope with it?” I ask Wendy, darling. “Why, I know that I am loved by all the Boys!” she says, and I will test out the truth of this when I am eighteen, or twenty-five (or seven, or three, or five). Before I leave my Wendy house, I ask, “Aren’t you afraid, Wendy, darling?” “Of what?” she says. “Of ticking clocks,” I say. And Wendy, darling tells me, “It is the ones who don’t tick you should watch out for.” Every time I come out of my Wendy house, I listen carefully. But nothing ticks.
Player Pianos
Vincent James Perrone is the author of the poetry collection Starving Romantic, a contributor to the anthology Collected Voices in the Expanded Field, and the winner of the 2025 Phyllis Grant Zellmer Prize for Fiction. His recent and forthcoming work can be found in Wigleaf, Split Lip, and The West Trade Review. Currently, Vincent is an MFA candidate at the University of Virginia, where he won the 2025 Balch Short Story Prize and serves as the fiction editor for Meridian.
It’s striking, you’d attest, the raw beauty of Dead Eye Mountain, that peak between two countries that looks like a face with a one-hundred yard stare, though really it’s like a two-hundred mile stare because it can be seen—the stare of Dead Eye Mountain—from six towns over, past the cowboy bars with player pianos cycling through tattered scrolls for lonely ghosts and tourists, past red clay earth furrowed with cracks, footprints worn down by wind into apostrophes, and still further past the vined alcoves, all the way up the summit where some so-many lost and lose their lives in the pursuit of seeing the thing, Dead Eye Mountain, for real and up close, but the problem is, if you get too close to Dead Eye Mountain, right up facing the face, the stone eyes that were formed sixty-thousand years ago by towering, asymmetric glaciers start to appear less dead, more alive and watching and seeing right through you and your ambitious travel plans, right through your desire to say you’ve seen a place as opposed to your desire to actually see it, or to be seen at it—or in it—by a camera or another person who you’ve been seeing—been with—for enough time for them to see right through your ambitious travel plans and right into the reality that is Dead Eye Mountain and its raw beauty and the nine-mile hike it took to arrive there—dizzy and nauseous from the altitude or the linger of bad tequila from a cowboy boot shot glass or the steady ring of striking hammers played without touch—and when you look again, Dead Eye Mountain is gone, vanished like a wish, replaced only by nameless rock formations, behind another person eager to step out of view.
The Woman in 7C
Sydney Koeplin is from northern Illinois. She is an MFA candidate at Bowling Green State University and fiction editor of the Mid-American Review. Her work has been published in Moon City Review, Qu Literary Magazine, Hypertext Review, and elsewhere.
On Friday, May 12, 1972, sometime between 4:00 pm and midnight, Edna Plumgarten spontaneously combusted. Neighbors didn’t hear a thing. Not a scream nor a screech of a fire alarm. The building’s super called CFD when he went to check complaints of overactive heating and saw smoke snaking out beneath the door to 7C.
When firefighters burst in, the apartment was largely unscathed. The walls were a little sooty, covered in a greasy residue that some worried was the remains of Edna, who had all but disappeared into a pile of ash on her singed sofa, save for the stockinged lower half of a left leg with loafer attached. The firemen hadn’t seen anything like it before or since. Their official report declared her death accidental, the cause of the fire unknown.
Edna wasn’t a well-liked woman. She chain-smoked. She hit the walls with a broom handle when her neighbors played their TV too loudly, which was any volume. She kept watch from her window and yelled at children in the courtyard for a myriad of infractions known only to her—too fast, too happy, too late in the day. So when the investigation ended, the neighbors moved on with little care, the super cleaned her apartment, and a couple with a newborn moved in shortly after.
But children still whisper about her in the courtyard, below the window where she used to lord over them. They say she lit up like a moth in a polyester house dress. They say the crone rose from the melted fabric of her sofa like a phoenix, slipped through the crack in the window, and took to the sky. They say they feel her sharp eyes on them still. When the wind blows, you can smell her cigarette smoke on the breeze.
Xiao’s Reckoning
Wanying Zhang is a Chinese-Canadian writer of speculative fiction based in Montreal. Since she was young, she has dabbled in mixing potions and writing stories fusing elements of Asian and European fairy tales, folklore, and science fantasy. She is a flash fiction winner of the 61st issue of Flame Tree Fiction Newsletter. Her work has been published in Every Day Fiction, Flash Fiction Magazine, Literally Stories and upcoming NewMyth.com. Currently a college professor with too many degrees, she sprinkles the magic of chemistry for future generations. She holds a B.Sc, M.Sc, B.Ed from McGill University and UOttawa respectively and she was mentored by Gayle Brandeis through the PocketMFA program.
We hear whispers of their people. We label them as the model minority. They toiled relentlessly laying track after track on the Pacific Railway for our vast country. They broke their backs lifting heavy pickaxes to mine gold and plough our farms. They worked hard sweating over woks, chopping imported ingredients, and folding dumplings in restaurants. We hired them as cheap labour to wash our clothes and clean our houses. Their children worked hard burning the midnight oil to ace tests, so they could have a better future. We said that they were stealing our jobs, so we taxed them per head. We lurked in the shadows counting our money and sharpening our teeth to drink their blood. We have been better since then.
We employ Xiao because she is hard-working, obedient and good for business. An unremarkable face, meek eyes with glasses, straight long black hair and a figure that blends into the background. She has a stellar report card and resume. She excels at math, plays the piano in her free time, and speaks perfect English. She listens to the superior without question. She follows orders and never complains about her salary. She computes algorithms with lightning speed. She wins the Employee of the Month award. We call her a nerd. She keeps her head down and tries to talk with us. We exchange pleasantries. We ask her about the tofu and rice noodles that she packs in a faded recycled yogurt container. We ask her about the jade necklace she always wears around her neck. We ask her where she was from and about her mother tongue. She replies politely. We ask her to stay late to finish the work we didn’t. She is afraid to say no. We take credit for Xiao’s work as our own. She doesn’t complain. In her office, we catch glimpses of her sketches in her notebook— dark images of pale vampires with blood-streaked fangs hovering over dead bodies. We didn’t ask her about them. We invite her to our house party to enjoy animal blood and cheese. She politely declines, as always, with a smile.
Our team is exposed for selling blood to the black market to improve our sales numbers. Someone has to take the fall. Poor Xiao was not aware of our team’s transgressions. A girl like that will find another job. She is called into the HR office, her expression unreadable, for a crime she did not commit. When she steps out of the office, she smiles at us revealing her glistening teeth. Under the fluorescent light, her teeth seem sharper than before. Her eyes are hungry as if she was sizing up prey. We watch from behind her office’s glass as she packs her belongings in a single cardboard box. She doesn’t have much—a notebook, a few books, and a photograph of her grandmother. Her movements are slow and deliberate. She steps into the hallway, her eyes sweeping over us as if calculating her next move. When she approaches the elevator, something primal drives us. We cannot resist the familiar rush of power. We close in on her, snap off her jade necklace and sink our teeth around her throat, expecting a warm trickle into our veins. But her blood tastes like ice when it touches our tongues and burns like acid. Her eyes, now sharp as knives, reveal that we have drunk poison, and we will regret this.
A Surfeit of Lampreys
Kate Horsley’s first novel was shortlisted for the Saltire Award. Her second was published by William Morrow. Both have been optioned for film. Her poetry and short fiction has appeared in magazines like The Cincinnati Review, The Citron Review, Fictive Dream, BULL, Paragraph Planet, Storyglossia, Ink, Sweat, & Tears, Blood + Honey, Fish Barrel Review, Cake, and Strix, and placed in competitions including Bath, Bournemouth, Bridport, Oxford and Smokelong. She's a creative writing lecturer. You can find her online on Instagram - @inkfishmagazine - and Bluesky - @katehorsleywriter.bsky.social - and her website is https://www.katehorsley.co.uk/
At least it’s not a hagfish, Hilda tells herself, or an electric eel. Tucked between Bible-crisp sheets after prayers, her hand probes downward to check if it’s changed back, but it never does. Where there were once furred folds, a mouth gapes. Needle teeth nibble her playfully at first, but if she lingers, they suck hard enough to strip the skin, leaving her fingers stung and blushing. Like when she was eleven and Mother made her plunge her hands into the scalding laundry tub because she’d smiled at a man in church; when she was twelve and Father fed her ring finger between the wooden lips of the mangle to teach her to be clean, the finger stunted once it healed – her wedding day, Frank forcing her ring down awkwardly over her knotted flesh.
She dreams her parents back to life, in the delivery room where the doctor battles between her legs for a day and two nights, finally wrenching her son – the size and colour of a skinned hare – from her with forceps. Mother, always one to pry, claps eyes on Hilda’s monstrous privates and beckons Father over so her can look. Buttoned into their Sunday best, they nod. They always said she was a bad girl.
Have you seen the mouth of a lamprey? It’s a circular saw whittled from chunks of meat. A vampire from some trashy bodice ripper you’d tuck under your Bible, under the bed, out of your mother’s sight, a whorl of teeth raked like seating in an auditorium, corkscrewing salmon, cod, dogfish, leaving half-crown wounds that never heal. Lambton Worm. Old Serpent. Nine-eyed Eel. Yet the face of a lamprey is sweet – smooth pearly skin, a round blue eye.
In the year 1135, King Henry I died of a surfeit of lampreys, Mr McKinnon at school told them. She never heard how. Why bother listening when she was leaving to work in the pub. Fourteen and the woman of the house after Mother went, Father swarming her in the kitchen, hands tugging at her apron strings at the cooker. Slippery as an eel, he’d say, as she ducked away from him into the larder. Slippery as an eel. I bet. Sometimes she’s pulling a pint in the Mariner’s Arms, coaxing the pump to get the right measure of head, and she sees the thirsty look on a punter’s face, that stealthy gluttony, same as the look on Father’s face when he tugged his leather belt free loop by loop and tested the bite of the buckle and told her pull down your drawers. He was never her real father was he, any more than Mother was her real mother – she was left on their doorstep, was what they always said.
Clutching a lamprey in your hands is like holding a man’s and a woman’s sex, one camouflaged inside the other, like the time she watered Father’s marrows at the allotments when the summer was sweat-hot and desperate and she saw slugs intertwining, their long, pale penises twirling and merging into a lunar-pale parasol, a spectral flower bloom of slug privates. Is that what happened to her, when she stepped out with the butcher after Frank died, the grocer, the fishmonger? A plague, like in the Bible, a punishment, Jonah and the whale. Making whatever’s wrong with her worse – there’s no hunger that matches a lamprey’s, she’s discovered, keener than the wish to have someone see you for who you are; to still love you after.
Ablaze
Kathryn Silver-Hajo’s work appears in Atticus Review, Centaur Lit, CRAFT, Emerge Literary, Ghost Parachute, Gone Lawn, Milk Candy Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Pithead Chapel, Ruby Literary, The McNeese Review, The Phare,and other lovely journals. Her stories were selected for the 2023, 2024, and 2025 Wigleaf Top 50 Longlists and nominated for Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and Best American Food Writing. Kathryn’s award-winning books include flash collection, Wolfsong, and YA novel, Roots of The Banyan Tree. She lives in Rhode Island with her husband and curly-tailed pup, Kaya. More at: kathrynsilverhajo.com; facebook.com/kathryn.silverhajo; twitter.com/KSilverHajo; @kathrynsilverhajo.bsky.social; instagram.com/kathrynsilverhajo
My parents both died in October, and I light two pear candles five days apart, to sit with the feeling of them in flickers and whispers, the flame bobbing atop melting beeswax while I bake squash, scowl at the news, stroke the moss-soft head of my dog. They loved Autumn, loved raking leaves into towering heaps for my sister and me to dive-bomb and demolish, and it seems more fitting to die when things are dying all around, more suitable than springtime with its abundance of life taking root, shooting through still-hard soil with confounding vigor and strength, sassy with energy and what-me-worry forget-me-nots.
My parents died in October and though summer is all soul-soothing warmth, life-renewing kindness and ease, October teeters between shadow and light, inviting reflection and taking stock. It never promises more than it can deliver; offers without apology its chill wind, its bounty of wood smoke and wool.
My parents died in October, as leaves turned vainglorious vermillion, honey, and flame. A blaze of swagger and swank, of we are still here…never forget us…before dropping gentle, gentle to the cooling earth.
Shades of Red
Lauren Ferebee is co-creator of the recently launched anthology sci-fi/horror podcast FEMME FUTURE PERFECT, a Kennedy Center Award winning playwright, and a 2024 Austin Film Festival teleplay finalist. Her flash fiction is featured in Flash Fiction Online and Emerge Magazine.