Signs Are All Around

by Barb DeMoney

I see signs you sense me around more lately. Ambling through my presence you shiver and look for my oversized flannel, the one you can’t stand - yet wear all the time. Your eyes widen and dart about, as if knowing you're being watched.

I wish I could tell you it's me. Make you feel better, less alone, but you never hear my delicate whispers in your ear. As you stare off into space making a turkey sandwich, I try getting your attention.

The lights flicker; you hesitate. I'm here. I need you to listen. Instead, you continue to spread mayonnaise, while a silent tear slides down your cheek.

Sitting down, you sigh and drop your head into your hands. You reach for our framed picture. Peace washes over me seeing our wedding photo. Taken last year, yet it seems a lifetime ago.

I know you blame yourself for the accident, but you weren't responsible for my death. You couldn’t have reacted any quicker.

My spirit aches as I suffer your pain as my own.

You push the plate aside; the cold sandwich remains uneaten, and you stand up. You stride towards the bathroom. I have an idea, perhaps I can leave you a message on the mirror? I've never tried that before.

Moving into the bathroom, I feel the warm steam engulf me. Exiting the shower, your breath catches and eyes shimmer as you behold a lone word on the foggy glass - Forgive.

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Barb DeMoney is a writer and flash fiction contestant whose work blends drama, comedy, and horror. Her stories explore themes of grief, love, and hope. Her story A Fresh Start will be published at Flash Phantoms in July. There’s Something About Gary will be published in Micromance Magazine this fall. Barb's Bluesky account: HERE

 

Dreams of Fish

by Mark Thomas

My obsession with fish has become pathological.

Driving in my car, I think every curve in the road must follow the contour of a trout stream and every flashing bit of industrial metal must be a waterfall. It doesn’t matter how often I am disappointed by geography. I assume fish are hiding nearby and will appear if I remain vigilant. The next urban ditch or sluiceway will teem with spawning salmon. Whitefish, expelled from sewers after a heavy rain, will slither across flooded pavement. Perch will flit through blue depressions in lush green lawns.

During work meetings, I make fish-shaped doodles in the margins of important memos and watch the presenters’ mouths open and close without hearing words.

At night, I dream of fishing and when I catch one, the creature judges me with black-marble philosopher’s eyes. Of course, angling is a form of ritualized torture and is indefensible, nothing likes to be dragged, gasping into an alien environment.

But love has always excused bad behaviour.

In my dreams, I often paddle my canoe through fairy tale landscapes full of bridges, castles, and ogres. I cast towards rippling movements, desperate to feel a living creature wriggling on the end of my line.

Water is supposed to be a symbol of the subconscious, because it has a thin surface skin that hides deep-dwelling demons and monsters. Dream psychology books say “fishing” represents an attempt to capture dark knowledge, to learn awkward, stubborn lessons that can only be retrieved with a hook in the throat.

It would be convenient if the subconscious communicated via clear text messages or itemized lists, but it refuses. It just sends fish.

Endless fish.

And I paddle my canoe through meandering switchbacks with surprising hidden ponds, where herons rise into the air like winged, squawking dinosaurs.

Cast and retrieve. Cast and retrieve. It’s a form of meditation and the varied properties of water are my focus.

Calm water is metal, and braided fishing line is a laser, slicing the reflective surface open. When a hooked fish rises, it feels like an act of creation because the fish materializes from nothingness, from chaos. A shadow-form simply separates from other shadows and is simultaneously light and dark, honest in its duality. Suspended in that strange murk-jelly world, fish are solemn and wise, able to feel the rotation of the planet and sense its trajectory around the sun.

But fish also dance in dangerous currents, invigorated by subtle barometric changes that presage storms. They congregate, siren-like, near submerged rocks and the hulks of scuttled boats, daring humans to follow.

Cast and retrieve.

Sometimes, in my dreams, I leave the fairy tale landscapes and fish near modern lodges. Those faux-rustic buildings are always full of incompetent dream-anglers, lounging on shore waiting for bad weather to break. They sit under covered porches, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee while guides untangle their line and ready the tackle.

I paddle through driving rain that threatens to liquify the air, and I float right in front of those clumsy hunters. I stare at them with black-marble eyes and inevitably experience an instant of pure happiness: a fish jumps at the end of my line, shakes its magnificent head, and flares armored gill plates like a creature from Revelations. The mouth yawns open, lips contort, and it tells everyone that it loves only me.

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Mark Thomas is an artist and writer living in St. Catharines, Canada. Check out his work HERE.

 

Hunting Earthworms

by K. Mark Schofer

With my Dad on a night darker than expected, much darker as lightning bugs flicker. He dug. I held the flashlight. He shoveled. I was sleepy, almost sad as I never liked fishing, and put worms in a day old tin can which we used to lure a fish to its ultimate death, the worm forgotten until the next day. My Dad would forget the unused worms in the back seat of the car, baked by the sun. That smell lives forever, it lingers, and the memory of the fish that we killed. I remember its one eye staring back at me with its last breath.

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
His friends observe Mark as wired a little differently. Perhaps it’s more likely that noticing little things often missed by others is a relic of a quieter, simpler time. He has a way with words, which he refuses to let be hindered by sub-par typing skills. People have great stories to tell if you sit and listen. A belief dear to Mark is that there is certain beauty in the world. You simply have to look for it.

 

Albatross

by Huina Zheng

Her finger hovered above the workbook. The pencil tip tapped where the final stroke of 飞 (fly) was missing.

“You forgot a dot,” she said, surprised by the rasp in her voice. Only then did she realize—since dashing out of the office at five, braving the subway crowds to pick up her daughter, then stir-frying that plate of spicy cabbage—she hadn’t even had a sip of water.

She wrote the correct character. The pencil carved deep lines into the page, like the claw marks an albatross might leave skidding across Antarctic ice.

She thought of the documentary they’d watched last week. “Look, Mama!” her daughter had cried, pointing at the screen. A white albatross soared across the wind, graceful as a ballerina. The narrator said they could fly for months without eating, crossing the entire Pacific.

She looked at the torn paper and thought: even the most elegant fliers crash hard when they land.

The door slammed open.

“Babe!” Her husband staggered in and collapsed on the couch. “I’m home!” he called, mumbling more words she didn’t catch. “Babe!”

She sighed. “Mama’s going to check on Daddy,” she told her daughter. “Keep writing.”

In the living room, he beamed at her. “Old Wang got promoted today…” he slurred, his voice sticky with drink. He smelled like grilled meat and someone else’s perfume.

She straightened his shoes. “I’m tired,” she said, setting an overturned cup upright. “Hope always lets you down.”

He reached for her. She stepped back, pressing against the damp balcony door.

“You feel so far away,” he murmured.

On TV, couples kissed in staged rain. Outside, real rain lashed the balcony. Wind-whipped drops burst on the tiles, pooling into dark stains.

“TV lies,” she said.

“What’s real, then?” His eyelids drooped.

She returned to her daughter’s room and glanced at the deep grooves on the page. Was she now like an albatross too—wings heavy, but still forced to take off?

“Mama, I finished 飞 (fly). Is it right?”

She paused, then stroked her daughter’s hair. “Mama’s just about to take off.”

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Huina Zheng, a Distinction M.A. in English Studies holder, works as a college essay coach. Her stories have been published in Baltimore Review, Variant Literature, Midway Journal, and others. Her work has received nominations three times for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She resides in Guangzhou, China with her family.

 

After

by Jenny Morelli

Since that November, civilized discussions have failed and all there’s left to do is eat ice cream, watch Lifetime movies, and shower in the stillness of our house among the hills where we absconded after that fateful day.

We’ve escaped what once was and still is for those who steered right and not left, but sometimes, when the air feels cold and thin and clear, I’m compelled to yell from the hilltops ‘Doesn’t this hate and blame and paranoia ring a bell?’ or wander back to that place that was once ours because she was certain, that friend I once had, that things wouldn’t change, but back then, they couldn’t see, those most delusional, who are now watching through their binoculars, paranoia perched on their shoulders.

They’re watching, I’m sure, and waiting for us, although we’ve never returned; haven’t and couldn’t and wouldn’t, because it wouldn’t be a return. What we left is gone, and what remains was left behind by us, who’ve been left behind by them.

So here we sit, nestled safely between the indifferent hills where the pages from our stories have been blown wide open, eagerly inviting us to write our own future, one where we can live in peace and tolerance, acceptance and uniqueness, because we remain the enlightened ones, and our future, despite our precipitous present, will need to know that we were the brave ones who left so we could write.

We are the ones diminished from the deaths of those who fell for simply being who they were. We are the ones who embrace mankind.

We are the ones for whom the bell tolls, not the cowards who stayed and prayed and slayed, and we are the ones who’ll live on long after our demise, so that others can learn.

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Jenny Morelli is a NJ high school English teacher who lives with her husband, cat, and myriad yard pets. She seeks inspiration in everything, including her nightmares. She’s published in several literary magazines including Spillwords, Red Rose Thorns, Scars tv, Bottlecap Press and Bookleaf Press for four poetry chapbooks. Website: JennyMorelliWrites.com

 

Fingers Crossed

by Marie Anderson

I was looking through Mom’s binoculars at the cute neighbor boy mowing his lawn wearing only shorts when something in my own yard caught my eye. Near Mom’s rose bushes, a red tail hawk was feasting on a dead raccoon, pulling out and devouring red strands of guts. The raccoon’s sweet face was facing me, and then its eyes blinked.

What the? How could it be alive?

And then my bedroom door crashed open, and Ursula (aka The Evil Stepmother) burst in.

“Nora!” she screeched. “I thought I’d find you here, ogling the boy next door. You’re gonna wind up in prison if you don’t stop this Peeping Tom path you’re on.”

I suspect she knew it had been me peeping at her going at it in a parked car at our neighborhood park. I’d been walking the dog under a bright full moon close to midnight, and the curly-haired man all over her wasn’t my dad. That was three days ago. Dad was out of town on business, not due back until next week, and I still hadn’t decided whether to tell him. I knew he was still lusting for her and might not believe me. After all, he’d dismissed my suspicions that Ursula, Mom’s visiting nurse at the time, was overdosing Mom on pain meds, hastening her passing.

Now I faced The Evil Stepmother and muttered 66613, my zip code for Hell which is where all Evil Ones belong.

“I wasn’t looking at the neighbor, Urs, I was looking at that hawk eating a raccoon by Mom’s rose bushes.”

Ursula marched to the window, looked out. “What hawk? What raccoon?”

“You blind?” I looked back out the window and saw . . .nothing. No hawk. No raccoon.

What the?

The next morning, I glanced out my bedroom window and saw a red tail hawk attacking a raccoon by Mom’s rose bushes. The raccoon was nearly a goner. Only its eyes had life, blinking once, twice, then closing for good. Ursula suddenly appeared on the scene, shooing the hawk away. “Stupid,” I muttered. “Can’t condemn a bird for eating.” I grabbed the binoculars and looked through the lenses. But what I saw was no longer Ursula in the yard, but Ursula engulfed by flames strapped in a car next to a man not Dad.

The car was a silver Cadillac.

What the?

My mind spun with theories. Were Mom’s binoculars a portal to the future? Was her spirit from beyond behind this second sight?

Later that day, I was watching the latest season of The Crown when Ursula grabbed the remote and shut the TV off. “Nora. Pay attention please. I’m Ubering out right now for a spa weekend in Lake Geneva. Don’t forget to walk the damn dog, Nora!” And away she went, rolling her suitcase over the beige carpet that now covered the oak floors Mom had loved.

I hurried to the window and watched a curly-haired man place Ursula’s suitcase into the back seat and then open the front passenger side door. Ursula slid into the front seat. The man hurried around to the driver’s side, got behind the wheel, and the car purred off.

The car was a silver Cadillac.

I smiled. “Fingers crossed,” I whispered, and ambled back to resume watching The Crown.

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Marie Anderson is a Chicago area married mother of three millennials. Her stories have appeared in dozens of publications, most recently (2025) in The Meadow, Raven's Muse, Bloomin' Onion, Kismet Magazine, and Fiction on the Web. Since 2009 she has led and learned from a writing critique group who meets at a local public library.