Editors' Choice:
J Bosley, Dropped Dead in a Bowling Alley
Runner-ups:
Anna Dudley, So You’ve Misplaced a Century (Again)
Barry Yedvobnick, Three Vanishing Acts
Owen Bridge, On Electric Blankets
Urmi Chakravorty, Swinging
Terry Ehret, Prose Sonnet for Susan
John Johnson, A Lost Step Is a Kind of Amnesia
Khen P Julia, Balcony
Nathaniel Mumau, Will Feud for Work
Don Narkevic, I Need to Stop Here
AlexanderReagan OsborneMcReagan, Chef and Glutton Baby Beau
Eric Peters, Caesar
Kimberly Peterson, Breakfast Interrupted
Ken Poyner, A Matter of Consistency
Zahra Setareh, Time to Die
Micro-Prose artwork by Amanda Yskamp
Dropped Dead in a Bowling Alley
Fiction • J Bosley
You’ve never been in a bowling alley when somebody drops dead. Everybody stops bowling. They all come around to see the guy on the floor with his face turning green. They stand with their hands in their pockets. They speak in hushed tones. The wait for the ambulance is awful. They’re wondering, when is it okay to start bowling again. The manager comes over and puts a towel over Dad’s face, a towel he got from the kitchen. Then I hear the first ball go down, soft, like they want to bowl but they don’t want to make too much noise, like they don’t want to be disrespectful. The ball slowly going down the alley, I can still hear it, clumping along, taking forever. It hit the pins so softly they took turns falling over. Then another ball, then another. Mom is howling as she runs in. She throws herself over Dad and heaves great sobs. Bowlers watch from lanes over as balls continue to go down. That they were bowling didn’t bother me. Life is short.
Bosley is a published playwright, poet and author, esteemed by a discerning few. His plays have been produced around the U.S. and translated into German, Romanian and Flemish for productions in those lands. This is his first shot at micro-fiction.
On Electric Blankets
Nonfiction • Owen Bridge
You purchase a new electric blanket every winter, until one year you finally find the magic undying blanket. It lasts a year, two years, before you know it you’ve had the same electric blanket for a decade. One winter night you wake up at three in the morning and realise this is the blanket they’ll find you wrapped in when you die, and no matter what you do you can’t get warm.
Owen Bridge is a writer from Wales.
Swinging
Fiction • Urmi Chakravorty
Time has its own way of healing. That is what Ayaka realised as a volunteer at the relief camp sheltering the survivors of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake. Among the hundreds of residents living there for the past six months, Ayaka felt strangely drawn towards Keiko, a twelve-year-old orphan girl. Obedient and accommodating, Keiko was the epitome of fortitude and cheerfulness in the face of this massive disaster.
One afternoon, Ayaka took Keiko to the newly set up makeshift park that was already a hit among the displaced children. After exploring the slide, merry-go-round and sandbox, Keiko finally got her turn at the swing. And then it happened! Keiko unexpectedly broke into a sweat, her hands turned clammy, her heart hammered against her ribcage, till she started gasping for breath.
A detailed investigation followed.
“Keiko has developed Pendulophobia,” the doctor announced gravely. “She saw their ornate living-room chandelier precariously tottering in the tremors and finally crushing her mother to death.”
After six months of targeted therapy, Keiko revisited the swing. Her wind-swept hair, gay abandon, and mirthful laughter misted Ayaka’s eyes.
“Fly high and live up to your name, my Keiko,” Ayaka cried, choking on her words.
Urmi is an award-winning freelance writer-reviewer living in Bangalore, India. Her fiction, nonfiction and poetry have been published extensively in both domestic and international presses and publications. Her other interests include travel, reading, music, photography, and spending time with her community dogs. Urmi’s writings can be read here: www.wordsnverses.com
Keiko — a Japanese name for girls meaning “the adored one”
So You’ve Misplaced a Century (Again)
Fiction • Anna Dudley
Whiskers was no ordinary tabby. He wore a forest-green cravat, owned a brass watch that ticked backwards, and lived in a house the council removed from maps in the 1970s for “temporal irregularities.” The milk bottles still arrived, though they sometimes exploded.
The watch had once belonged to Professor Thistlebaum, who vanished while alphabetising the future. Whiskers found it beneath a collapsed grandfather clock and had been ageing in reverse ever since. He was currently on his third kittenhood and found banking increasingly difficult.
On Tuesday, or perhaps last Thursday, he realised he had misplaced another century. The air smelt of spearmint and pharaohs. “Bother,” he muttered, pawing at the wallpaper. “I was saving the 1800s for a rainy day.”
He ducked under 1902, hopped over the Blitz, and found the century sulking under the chaise longue. It refused to come out, even for sardines.
“You can’t keep running off,” Whiskers said. “We’ve talked about this.”
The century eventually slunk back into place. The wallpaper sighed, the fern looked smug, and time resumed its peculiar hum.
Later, Whiskers sipped time-infused cream, watching rain fall upwards. He made a note to tether the next century with string. Just in case.
Anna Dudley grew up largely with her grandparents and was an avid reader and writer from an early age. Now the pressures of family and career are largely over, she has returned to writing and hopes others enjoy reading what she enjoys writing.
Prose Sonnet for Susan
Nonfiction • Terry Ehret
I was standing in the cool shadows on the west side of the river when you met me. On the wooden dock below us, pleasure boats tossed and sighed in the sun. Around us, poets milled. The buzz and hum of coffee and chai and the scrape of chairs. Someone took our picture. We debated the photogenic virtues of light and shadow.
“It’s come back,” you said. “Blooming in my lungs. Not operable. Not curable.”
I stood awhile, shading my eyes against the glare, saying, “Oh!” and “Oh, no!” Eventually you turned away. And then I set out alone over the arched footbridge, thinking of Eliot, thinking of Pound, thinking of Dante and Virgil—So many! I had not thought death had undone so many!
When I looked back, the empty bank seemed suddenly crowded with ghosts.
Terry Ehret has published four collections of poetry, most recently Night Sky Journey, and three bilingual volumes of the poems of Mexican poet Ulalume González de León. She is a co-founder of Sixteen Rivers Press and poet laureate emerita of Sonoma County where she lives and teaches writing workshops.
A Lost Step Is a Kind of Amnesia
Prose Poem • John Johnson
I stepped outside my wheelhouse to get a peek at the diorama (maybe I could see where here was) and a fog rolled in. Thankfully, it was one of those fractal fogs that turn up when the old ratios and harmonies begin to fade and the hours rhyme with trees and flowers. I stood there at the rail I don’t know how long, marveling at so many things I never knew existed, until at last that vertigo you hear so much about took hold of me, and I fell away.
John is the author of Toss Repeat, winner of the 2024 James Tate Prize (SurVision Books, 2025), and co-translator of Plagios/Plagiarisms, the poetry of Ulalume González de León, winner of the 2021 Northern California Book Award for poetry in translation. His poems and translations have appeared most recently in Clade Song, Hidden Peak Press, Right Hand Pointing, The Prose Poem, and Uut Poetry.
Balcony
Nonfiction • Khen P Julia
Sitting here, six floors up on this worn-out balcony, Gunfire cracked, and the boys scattered like shadows. My eyes dropped to the lot beside Jason’s Bar, and there in the weeds lay something dark and still. I knew right away ‘twas a body—and I knew it was dead. The papers said he was fifteen. That night, the street burned with sirens, voices, and flashing red lights spinning across the walls. I watched until they carried him away, and then the world went quiet—quiet the way it always gets around here. His people weren’t there; I would’ve seen them.
Come morning, I looked down again. A man and woman walked slow along Frankstown, a little girl between them, holding their hands. Must’ve been the boy’s parents and his baby sister. They stopped where he fell, right beside Jason’s. How did they know? They began to move—swaying, bending, clutching one another, hands raised to the air. Forgive me, Lord, but it looked like a dance made of sorrow, like the ground itself was burning and they couldn’t stand still. Maybe they heard my heart calling them, wishing I could rise from this wheelchair and lead them there myself.
Khen P Julia is a campus journalist with a deep passion for storytelling and feature writing. This creative nonfiction piece “Balcony” reflects on the quiet power of witnessing tragedy and the invisible connections between strangers in moments of grief.
Will Feud for Work
Fiction • Nathaniel Mumau
I hate New York. If not for the torrent of people, if not for the stench, if not for the price of existence, then wholly for the casual, street corner guilt.
WILL WORK FOR FEUD. The cardboard sign trembles between his hands. Despite the tattered coat, I can tell his skin is stretched tight over his skeleton. His squinted eyes catch mine. I make the mistake of not looking through him. That’s enough to telegraph I’m not from around here. Hence why I paid the tourist’s price for this gyro. Hence why I welcome his gaze.
I extend my meal. “Here, take it.”
He scowls. “Mama never taught you how to read?”
I retract the offering. “And yours never taught you how to spell!”
“She taught me manners.”
“And nothing else, apparently!” A vice of guilt snaps my lips shut. Another hint that I am not. From. Around. Here.
He shrugs. “I’m working on it, man. Studying.”
I want to apologize. I want to throw the gyro in the gutter. “Studying what?”
He giggles. “Law!” Then he whisks the food from my hand. “God bless you!”
I nod as if sharing in the joke, but clearly, I am the punchline
Nathaniel Mumau is an aspiring writer based in southwest Michigan. HIs short stories have been published in Flash Phantoms, Variant Literature, 101 Words, and The Bare Bones Book of Speculative Fiction (forthcoming).
I Need to Stop Here
Fiction • Don Narkevic
“I need to stop here,” Dad says, the tumor in his brain affecting his vision, he unable to drive. To get Dad to the Muncy Motel, I raced through two red lights.
The Muncy Motel looks like the lair of some femme fatale. I half-expected to see Gene Tierney, with scandalous cheekbones, searchlight skin, and green-gemstone eyes. Instead, a spectacled woman in sweats with the electricity of a dead car battery stands outside room 12.
Earlier, when Dad and I left home, Mom talked on the speakerphone with the oncologist who explained nothing more could be done, except a visit to Lourdes if she was into that. After I parked, Dad threw me a twenty and said, “Get yourself something to eat.” I could have been a doorman. I felt like a pimp.
I also felt like pancakes. Taking my order, the waitress scratches her nose and bites a lower lip in need of lipstick. Her cheeky face features counterfeit cheer. After taking my order, her perfume lingers. I imagine her waiting for me in the lobby of a noir motel, we tearing at each other in the bedroom, me asking if she’s into that.
I need to stop here.
Don Narkevic: Buckhannon, WV. MFA National University. Poetry appears in The Trillium, Agape, Blue Collar Review, Dappled Things. In 2022, Main Street Rag published a novella of poetry, After the Lynching. In 2024, The Potomac Playmakers produced From Birth. In 2025, the author won the Ziolkowski Poetry Prize.
Chef and Glutton Baby Beau
Fiction • AlexanderReagan OsborneMcReagan
I have a baby who would do anything for flour!
Six-month-old Beau would stagger towards me in the kitchen.
“Ahdadada,” he'd saunter close to the pastry cabin.
“Maami, bishbish!” he'd gibber.
“Bishbish what!? Beau, go to the living room! Go to the living room!”
He'd U-turn, go hide behind the kitchen wall and peek at me. When I’m gone, he'd plod quickly and funnily, immerse his face in the flour, lap and lick to his satisfaction, and come out looking like Zombie Apocalypse.
At night, Beau wakes up, climbs down his cradle, sneaks to the kitchen, reaches for the bowl above, pouring the whole content all over himself. Unpetrified, his face looking like a ghost, he'd still poke on the particles on the floor and suck them from his finger.
What can I do? He's still my baby; a little or more flour won't do any harm, and I love him after all; chef and glutton baby Beau!
AlexanderReagan OsborneMcReagan is a short story writer and poet who loves the English Language, Literature and arts. Aside from being a short story writer, he loves to read and be himself.
Caesar
Fiction • Eric Peters
On his final evening watch, Caesar surveyed the plaza. For centuries he had stood, his granite eyes superciliously pursuing the passers-by, reminding them of heroic pasts and degraded presents.
Years ago, we played in his shadow, imagining ourselves at Teutoburg Forest or Milvian Bridge. Imperial disapproval stamped into stone kept us from climbing too high.
As youths, we frequented the clubs lining the plaza. Caesar glared down as we cavorted in and sighed his granite sighs as we stumbled out. Somehow, we made it home; Caesar would allow no one to sleep in his plaza.
I proposed in the plaza cafe. But even this did not impress the Roman frown. Caesar had seen it coming. He had seen it before.
Ellie and Louis skipped around the pedestal. They knew better than to quarrel underneath those knit brows.
*
Then a team of muni-workers and archaeologists removed Caesar to a museum. “To preserve it from vandals and weather,” read the newspapers.
The tourist kiosk that replaced Caesar does not disapprove of children’s squabbles or snoring drunks. Old-timers sit in the plaza, our beards and hair and skin dull granite. But our glares invoke no imperial memory.
Erik Peters is a father and avid mediaevalist from Vancouver, Canada. His writing is influenced by late antiquity, his family, and his students. Erik has been featured in Coffin Bell, Zoetic, Takahe, Beyond Literary Words, and Thirty West. You can check out all Erik's work at erikpeters.ca.
Breakfast Interrupted
Nonfiction • Kimberly Peterson
Strap Baby in highchair. Give Baby sippy cup. Toddler, please sit at the table. Put bread in toaster. Retrieve sippy cup from floor. Toddler, stop playing with your cars and sit down. Spread peanut butter on toast. Toddler, give sippy cup back to Baby and SIT DOWN NOW! Cut toast into squares. Pour milk. Place plate and cup in front of Toddler. Refill sippy cup. Turn to Baby. Peel banana. Break it into small chunks. Feed them to Baby, one by one. Uh-huh, un-huh, as Toddler explains why Superman had to take Batman’s car. When he’s suddenly silent, turn around to face him. See terror eclipse his chestnut eyes, little hands clutch his throat. Bend him over your lap. Thump heel of your hand in the small space between his shoulder blades until a congealed clump flies out. Pick up sobbing children. Lean against wall. Slide to the floor. Let yourself cry, too.
Kimberly Peterson’s work has appeared in Room, Entropy, Prairie Fire, EVENT, Qwerty, Pinhole Poetry, and The Prose Poem. She received honorable mention in the following poetry contests: The Banister (2016), Memoir Magazine (2018), Passager (2019), and TNQ Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse (2024).
A Matter of Consistency
Fiction • Ken Poyner
Our town fills up for the village idiot convention. Some participants come from half a country away. Every room is taken and some citizens agree to rent their spare rooms, or even move their children into the kitchen and rent out those rooms. The week before the gathering, all those providing accommodations collect at town hall and agree, in the spirit of the event, that while the idiots sleep a pebble will be slipped into one shoe. We will gauge how long it takes for them to solve their limps. Our new question is: left, right, or does it matter?
Ken’s ten collections of flash fiction and speculative poetry are available from most web booksellers. He was an information warrior for thirty-three years, and now supports full time his wife’s powerlifting. Recent work has appeared in Analog, Café Irreal, Mobius, Tiny Molecules. Latest collection: Science Is Not Enough, speculative poetry.
There Is Time to Die
Fiction • Zahra Setareh
He set the bucket aside.
The wind was blowing, and he felt cold in his wet jacket.
He sat down on the ground, brushed his fingertips over the unlit cigarette,
Turning it back and forth as though it might answer something.
He flicked the lighter open for a moment,
Held it there, near the cigarette —
Then closed it and slipped it back into the wet pocket of his trousers.
He gazed into the endless desert of night.
It seemed to stretch on forever.
The silence of the night had worried him.
He asked himself, “Do all these miseries really have any worth?”
With trembling hands, he took the lighter out of his pocket again.
The wind struck his body and spread the smell of gasoline across the desert.
He thought: “Maybe it was worth it.”
He dropped the lighter onto the ground and crushed it beneath his foot,
Then looked at the desert and murmured
“There’s always time to die.”
Zahra Setareh holds a Master's degree in English Language and Literature. She has authored and published three books to date, showcasing her passion for storytelling and literary craft.
Three Vanishing Acts
Fiction • Barry Yedvobnick
You and Mom’s sister, Aunt Katya, would visit our upstate home during summer weekends, and I’d fetch Dad’s tools as you worked on the green Oldsmobile that always needed something.
At breakfast, Mom’s ricotta-stuffed pierogi topped with apricot jam was my favorite, but not the eggs, which were diluted with milk, way too runny, and an affront to the cuisine of our blended family—Southern, Central, and Eastern European immigrants who settled in New York City at the beginning of the twentieth. I learned later that Eier mit Milch was a recipe her parents brought from Austria, and not just misguided cooking.
You became my favorite uncle the morning Mom gave me an ‘eat those eggs’ warning and left the kitchen. You scooped forkfuls into your mouth and praised me for finishing them. Then, like the eggs, several of Dad’s tools disappeared, followed by the weekend visits.
End.
Barry Yedvobnick’s fiction is forthcoming at Literally Stories and CommuterLit, and appeared in The Phare, Sky Island Journal, Neither Fish Nor Foul, 10x10 Flash Fiction, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. His nonfiction newspaper column received a 2025 First Place Georgia Press Association Award. chillsubs.com/profile/barryyedvobnick