Editors' Choice: Tim Stiles, These Streets
Runner-up: F. J. Bergmann, Eft
Urmi Chakravorty, The Ride
Laura Eppinger, You're Carrying So Well
Ben Murigu, Coffee Shop Goddess
Ali Rowland, When the Earth Got Too Heavy
Jean Ryan, Earthlings
Gregg Willard, Jail House Rock Paper Scissors
Jonathan Yungkans, Billboard-Size in the Picaresque Night Sky
Micro-Prose artwork designed by Amanda Yskamp
Eft
Fiction • F. J. Bergmann
When we were all still in elementary school, my sisters and I, my mother discovered that we had pinworms. I can’t remember the exact nature of the discovery, or which of us it was (a complaint of feeling something crawling? a discovery in the white cotton panties all of us wore, or a surprise during defecation?). But all of us were treated with some nasty fluid, which gave me a lifelong aversion to medicaments in liquid form. (Would that dark rum, brandy or cognac were considered medicinal!)
So when, a few months or years later, after a certain amount of straining and discomfort, as I recall, I discovered a small animal, blood-red and slimed with glutinous membranes, fluttering and squirming in the toilet like some scarlet amphibian variant of a weasel, I flushed it without a word to anyone. Sometimes when I cross bridges over rivers, far from where I grew up, I think I see a gilled presence deep beneath the surface, the swirl of a crimson tail down there in the rippling darkness.
F. J. Bergmann is the poetry editor of Mobius: The Journal of Social Change (mobiusmagazine.com). She lives in Wisconsin and fantasizes about tragedies on or near exoplanets. Her work has appeared in Asimov’s SF, Haven Speculative, Polu Texni, Spectral Realms, Vastarien, and elsewhere. She thinks imagination can compensate for anything.
The Ride
Fiction • Urmi Chakravorty
A strong antiseptic smell hits my nostrils, while the whitewashed walls blind my sight.
Do our senses get heightened after death?
Right now, I feel like a housefly, hovering over the hospital bed where my body lies still. Multiple wires connect it to various life-support devices. An LED monitor shows a greenflickering line — clinical evidence that I’m still alive. But that’s enough hope to inure my mother, my only family. After a week of non-stop bedside vigil, she looks paler than my intubated form.
She had fared better when Dad passed, although she was too young for such a loss.
I feel light...free...relieved. Especially after the excruciating pain that assaulted every fibre of my body last week. My prized motorbike, flung to the kerbside, resembled a mangled mess of metal and fibre glass.
The mechanical beeps, alternating with Mom’s stifled sobs, help break the deathly silence pervading the room. I hate myself for doing this to her. But how do I tell her that it was Dad on the highway that morning, with his sunshine smile and dependable arms, beckoning me towards him. I revved up and vroomed ahead, my moist eyes missing the minivan right ahead of me.
Urmi Chakravorty, from India, is a former educator who writes creative fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Her work has found space in over forty domestic and international literary magazines and anthologies, both in print and electronic form. Her literary contributions have been awarded a few times, too. Urmi's other passions include travel, music and working for community animals.
You're Carrying So Well
Fiction • Laura Eppinger
You’re carrying so well says my ten-thousandth auntie, touching my six-month bump without asking. I still wear regular clothes, though aunties say those days are numbered. I didn’t gain in my face, arms, or all the other places they look me over. Patting me down during post-Thanksgiving crème de menthe, they search for the extra cells and fat and growth.
Because you can’t see all the life leaking out of me, I think but do not say. I admit that every toilet I piss in sprouts tendrils of algae in my wake. The bi-weekly haircuts don’t help; I’m shaggier than Teen Wolf these days. There was the day I accidentally touched a piece of bread next to the one I grabbed from the loaf: An hour later, that clear plastic baggie was a petri dish, choked by mold.
My belly “carries well” because it must be holding half, or less, of everything I’m incubating. The bump is kicking, throbbing, even my breath is germinating.
Can’t help but wonder: What happens once the baby is out? Am I once again a neutral force to life outside me—or, being forever changed—will I become the void who takes it all away?
Laura Eppinger (she/they) knows that the Jersey Devil is real. Laura's work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize as well as Best of the Net. Follow Laura: facebook.com/eppingermonsters
Coffee Shop Goddess
Fiction • Ben Murigu
From behind the freshly-cleaned counter, the uniformed teen watched. Ached.
Prayed.
Ogled shamelessly at the lanky, curvaceous African goddess in a polka-dot dress and black strap shoes as she strutted across the room... long, luscious hair and all... performing to perfection her charming, nightly ritual: high-fiving with unbridled pride, and flashing her unnaturally-even white teeth at, the remaining ten or so burger-gobbling and mostly septuagenarian late-night patrons that were on that drizzly Sunday scattered around the black-and-red leather booths of the dimly-lit, slowly emptying wildly-popular 24-hour Opapo-shopping-center-based coffee shop that her long-retired dentist-dad Darius Osewe had owned, and successfully run hands-on, for four solid decades now.
Stifling yet another yawn, he smiled sheepishly and felt all tingly with yearning... both his madly-throbbing heart and his lust-befogged brain suddenly, and oh-so-eerily, reminded of Dusty — the busy, buzzy beetle on a string that, at age eight, had, for a whole eight days, made his hitherto dreadful orphan-barn-life a lot less unbearable, and definitely worth living...
Before he’d so unselfishly unstrung her that wet Thursday night; smilingly let her buzz off — happy, healthy... finally free and unencumbered — and watched her head straight for the woods.
Ben Murigu is a versatile creative from Nairobi-Kenya who, while teaching high school English, has produced a mental-health-themed short film, Let It Go, authored an urban fiction novel, Toy Soldiers, and most recently published works in World of Myth, Flash in a Flash, Tell-Tale Inkings, Words Empire Magazine, Steel Jackdaw, Magique Publishing, Masticardores Taiwan, Mystery Publishers, Positively Up, Cease & Caesura, Otherwise Engaged Journal, Literary Cocktail Magazine, Worthing Flash, Bright Flash Literary Review, Coachella Review, Lit eZine, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Fairy Charter, 50 Give or Take, Dear Booze and Yours2Read.
When the Earth Got Too Heavy
Fiction • Ali Rowland
We regularly asked Sisyphus if he needed a hand, if he wanted to have a break.
He always declined.
We kept on offering, feeling more guilty as time went on.
It’s an obligation thing, he just can’t bring himself to stop, someone said.
We all knew it was the handover he feared. How, when one or more of us went to relieve him, the boulder, or “world” as we called it, would slip a little, inevitably. The weight of it was going to be a surprise to those taking over, we might lose our footings, feel intense pain, or give up.
Because he kept refusing, we stopped worrying about it and looked around us at the world.
The war, the ugliness, the struggle.
We went and said, Let it down, friend, it’s not worth it anymore.
He was surprised, he turned, not sure what we’d said. And in that moment, the world slipped back, and he let it go.
We watched it roll away. Then we got Sisyphus a drink and took him home.
Ali Rowland is a writer from Northumberland whose first poetry collection Rooted was published by Maplestreet Press in 2024. You can follow her work at Musings of a Mad Woman on Substack
Earthlings
Nonfiction • Jean Ryan
Earth through a porthole. Seven continents. Eight billion people. Deserts, oceans, earthquakes, floods. Poverty, war, taxes, debt. Banish it all with one raised hand.
Freewheeling in a black forever, astronauts are daredevils rented by the month. Pay is reasonable so long as you don't mind being strapped in at bedtime or sending your bodily waste into the puny orifice of a wet vac potty.
They must be relieved, at least at first, to shove off that aluminum outpost and return to sure ground. Above them are the sky and sun and moon, each where it belongs, and that old friend gravity keeping everything in place. Do they feel the pull of the planet? Do their wrinkles appear at once? What do they crave—a grilled steak? a real bed? a little privacy?
Mostly, I want to know how they manage later, when they are fully restored and back in their Nikes and Nissans. What do they think of the stock market, hair loss, teeth whitening?
Do they miss that lightness of being, floating free of earthly burdens? When they gaze into the night sky, does it beckon them back? Having seen the big picture, are they adrift among us?
Jean Ryan, a native Vermonter, lives in coastal Alabama. She is the author of two short story collections, Survival Skills and Lovers and Loners. She has also published a novel, Lost Sister, a book of nature essays, Strange Company, and a poetry collection, A Day Like This. https://jean-ryan.com/
These Streets
Nonfiction • Tim Stiles
Two Irish girls looking red-haired, blue-eyed and hecka County Cork came out drinking with me. They were my Twitch friends touring America. Their checklist: tour Walmart and see a Glock. Walmart is essentially a Museum Americana, and handguns are not ubiquitous in Europe. I took them to meet my plug; he always had heat. Severo ran 300 pounds and looked drug-thug scary: bro had Only God Can Judge Me on his arm and his set on his neck, but he had the charm of everybody’s favorite baby nephew. He always had weed and blow, so he could never be without a piece. Severo pulled his hammer out from under his Escalade’s seat. Biddy and Eve’s faces were enchanted-frozen. Biddy’s Crayola-blue eyes went wide. She lunged for the pistol, and Severo’s charisma evaporated. My dude reached up and pushed her into tumbling backward with his free hand. You need to simmer down and let me unload this bitch first, I’m not trying to catch a 192 for your curious ass. Biddy’s face gingered to the color of her hair. Severo: everybody wanna play in these streets, but everybody don’t know these streets don’t play.
Tim Stiles lives in the San Francisco-Bay Area. His Bichon Frisé is named Paleta Konnichiwa. Paleta's mother is named Roxy, and she lives nearby. Tim has published and won awards in poetry, short fiction, flash nonfiction, micro-fiction, micro-nonfiction and memoir. He also writes country music lyrics.
Jail House Rock Paper Scissors
Nonfiction • Gregg Willard
Rock-Paper-Scissors.… Jail-House-Rock.… My seven-year-old mind sees connections. The song’s first two guitar strums, dum DUM. Two E-Flat power chords, schooshed up half a step. Dum-DUM. Then the two taps on the guitar. Bump-Bump.
RockPAper,
SCIS-SORS
JailHOUSE,
ROCK-ROCK.
In the 1957 movie Jail House Rock, Elvis's cellmate is the actor Mickey Shaughnessy. He plays a spaceman from the 1955 Conquest of Space. Crewmate Ross Martin is punctured by a meteor. (Rock punctures Spaceman). His lit-up scream fuses with Elvis's orgiastic jailbird yowl. Even the title, Conquest of Space seems an allusion to impossible choreographies, flinging open jail cells and teaching old cons to rock. Dum-DUM. Bump-Bump. Elvis's conquest of space practically pours him between the bars, a glowing radioactive liquid man out of another movie, The H-Man (1958). But there are no black prisoners in Jail House Rock, and then (ten years later!), none in the southern chain gang in Cool Hand Luke. No black anyone. An invisible, oppressive black hole of assumptions about race, class, and sexuality swallows light and life out of everyone I know, like a scissors stab to the eyes or a meteor hole in the center of the chest. Nothing but this ink on paper.
Gregg Willlard's recent work can be found in Collidescope, Star 82, Ergot, Cult and elsewhere. He lives in Madison Wisconsin and does a late night book reading hour on WORT community radio.
Billboard-Size in the Picaresque Night Sky*
Nonfiction • Jonathan Yungkans
Every day I drive past a billboard for a personal-injury lawyer who died months ago. Someone should amend the tag-line to read, We’ll fight for you from beyond the grave. Or post a new ad—his gaunt, black-suited figure in an overstuffed leather chair, overlooking road and sky. Shades of actor John Barrymore, hijacked from the undertaker for a night at Errol Flynn’s. Or is a preternatural ambulance-chaser cliché, even with L.A.’s penchant for strange and unusual? Too closely resembling zombies who waylay an ambulance, one of them radioing dispatch to send more paramedics?
*Title taken from the poem “Litany” by John Ashbery, in the collection As We Know
Jonathan Yungkans writes before dawn and braces for a wet winter, belying the song which claims it never rains in California. He smells skunks as they pass from the hills and is glad when his work doesn't resemble their aroma. His pieces have appeared in MacQueen's Quinterly, Synkroniciti, Unbroken and other publications.