Take a look at the flash fiction, short stories, and nonfiction of our latest issue.
Flash Fiction
Elaine Wilburt
The Bread of Life
Robin pushed the slightly sticky mound of dough away from her with the heel of her hand. Then a fold, a turn, another push. Just like Nonna used to do. Robin liked the repetitive rhythm, the comfort of the small confident motions that would form the gluten in this challah studded with cranberries and pecans, the Christmas bread she had been making for as long as she could remember.
– from “The Bread of Life“
Robert Garner McBrearty
A Trace of Music
I never heard the music when I was sober, and not when I was really drunk. Just drunk to a certain stage; Not in the beginning stages of drunkenness, not in the later stages either, but in some little reprieve of being able to turn one way, or the other.
– from “A Trace of Music“
Kale Sastre
On Becoming
My apartment is a cocoon, made of thread so thin I can’t fully metamorphosize into a butterfly. I lay there, deformed, begging for rest, but instead all kinds of aphids and gnats and maggots get in, chewing away at my developing body, preventing my wings from sprouting.
– from “On Becoming“
Short Fiction
Don Stoll
Passion
A shrill cry from the back of church announced the beginning of the service. Tim interpreted the cry as a command to sit. As he sat, he twisted his head to see that the man who had emitted the cry was already parallel with the row that he and Josie had chosen. The man’s compact figure was clothed in a white T-shirt, white chinos, and white athletic shoes. He could only have traveled from the back of church so quickly by way of a sequence of leaps. His culminating leap had ended in a crouch from which he now emerged slowly, in time with the spread of a radiant smile across his face.
– from “Passion“
Margaret Koger
A Christmas Gift
Janie walked tiredly to the car, worn out from an afternoon of research at the library. Her thoughts flitted back and forth from between the black and white characters of the alphabet dotting her textbooks like the tracks of field mice in yesterday’s snow to what she faced at home. She looked forward to returning to her apartment, its welcoming scent of warm chocolate—if the children had followed her instructions. Then she would take up her new role as a single mother.
– from “A Christmas Gift“
Nonfiction
John C. Mannone
The Cleansing
Crisis of faith is not unusual for many. War, disease, famine, pestilence. Those four horsemen can surely make one wonder if there’s a God, let alone a Redeemer. I have no simple answers. I can’t prove a priori God exists, but I sense Him. Nature tells me that; I see His handiwork. I am constantly awed by the universe and its language of expressed beauty, its mathematics.
– from “The Cleansing“
Andy Fairchild
Mortar and Pestle
One of my daughters is afflicted with a disease called Spino Cerebellar Ataxia, Type 17 – a condition that causes a person’s cerebellum to shrink. It’s a neurological-deteriorating disease, and it’s terminal. Not like tomorrow terminal, or next week terminal, or even six months. It’s more like a few decades of wasting away until one expires, and their spirit leaves them like a puff of steam.
– from “Mortar and Pestle“
Heart of Flesh Literary Journal 