Troll

by J.S. Apsley

I flee down the tunnel mouth below the river; confused, breathless. The heat and darkness oppress me. Above, behind, everywhere; a snarling: the creature I dare not see. Must not see.

I stumble, aching for neon lights which signify “Exit”. I see a figure there; incandescent with fear. He has my face; he is me. Guilt excoriates my senses. What have I done?

Her body, crippled and bloody, flashes in my eye. I stop as though struck by a bullet, clapping my hand to my forehead. I am the ugly creature that lurks in the shadows.

I am the troll.

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
J.S. Apsley is the pen name of an aspiring author from Glasgow, Scotland. He won the Ringwood Publishing short story prize 2024 for his debut fiction submission, Immersion. See www.jsapsley.com

 

Finding what matters

by Louisa Prince

Where I once slept, you’ll find a path to what matters most

The looping script, written in a journal, led her here. Twelve days since her grandmother’s death and three days since Clare found it taped under a bedside drawer.

Legacy’s key awaits,
where the nation’s wealth began

In front of the ornate Victorian building, she glanced down at her watch. Ten minutes until the vault closed. Her hands dug into her bag, fumbling for the key, and rushed inside.

Clare focused on the counter tucked away at the rear of the room. She weaved through chatting customers. “I’m here to access my locked box,” she said.

The woman behind the counter nodded. “This way, please.”

Their footsteps echoed off stone floors while traversing the wide corridor to the vault. Her eyes widened, taking in the large marble pillars marking the entranceway, echoing her grandmother’s words.

Beyond pillars of stone,
in drawers of steel layered row by row

Her hands trembled when she turned the key, and the small sturdy metal box flipped open to reveal a jumble of papers stuffed inside. Clare reached in and lifted out a twine-bound bundle. A faded snapshot slipped out, fluttering to the cool metal surface of a nearby table. The sorrowful eyes of her grandmother, cradling an infant, peered back—Clare at six months. A frail voice, raspy with age, drifted around her along with the last lines of the poem.

Sits treasures left,
cradled by fragments of stories once told.

Her tear-filled gaze turned to the collection of recipes torn from cookbooks, old photos, and a yellowed page that peeked out from between the string. With tingling fingers, she untied the layers of paperwork until revealing it—the deed to the family farm.

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Louisa Prince is a self-proclaimed late bloomer, living in Melbourne, Australia whose writing often focuses on family and health. Committed to honing her skills, she is an active member of The Society of Women Writers Victoria and Writing Victoria. Her work is forthcoming in Certain Age Magazine, appeared in CafeLit Magazine, New Plains Review, was longlisted for SWWV’s Margaret Hazard Short Story Award. Website HERE

 

Polly Ticks

by K. P. S. Plaha

Oliver felt the forest was weird when a pair of wooden double-doors with huge knobs appeared before him. A mayhem of voices could be heard from the inside. A bold sign read: “State Cabinet. Enter if you May.”

He knocked and the doors creaked open revealing a garden of colourful things that turned out to be sticky-notes.

“Power to the people,” read one, “lower electricity prices now!”

“For the people, of the people, by the people!” brandished another, “Faster Internet!”

A woman draped in flowers over her silky gown sat on the far fence facing an angry circle of crowds.

The guard startled him: “You May sit down. After all it’s the month of Maying!”

“Don’t you mean the month of May?”

“Maybe.” smiled the guard, “It’s a free country as long as you can pay your way.” He laughed conceitedly, then began humming: “Pay your way in May, they say. May you pay your way every day.”

Oliver sat down on one of the many benches. The old lady next to him gave him a quick glance when a voice boomed from somewhere: “Citizens, it’s the Question Hour, and we will take only the odd questions.”

Oliver exclaimed: “Why?”

The old woman gave him an amused look: “Cause we’re an oddience and May is an odd month with an odd number of letters in it!”

“Oh!”

“Can we have May the fourth declared a public holiday?” someone asked.

The floral woman scoffed: “Must be an alien from the Empire. I may or may not consider it!”

The questioner sat down in dismay.

“We have had enough of Demo-cracy! Will the final version be released soon?”

“It may or may not.” came the reply with a warning: “Beware, those are two strikes already. A third and you are all out.”

“What's happening?” Oliver was puzzled.

“She’s just been voted in and this is her first press conference.”

“But I don't see any journalists–”

“Silly boy! The citizens are pressing her for answers.”

Oliver shook his head, then asked: “But why is she on the fence?”

“Well,” replied the lady, “She is the Mayer after all.”

“Don’t you mean Mayor? And what’s with the flowers she wears?”

“Oh, you’re so dumb! Those are Mayflowers, my dear.”

Oliver nodded unknowingly. “Is she a good Mayor?”

“Who knows! It’s only the first of the month. But she’s a Mayonese so she might do fine.”

“Mayonnaise?”

“Same thing, really. By the way, the army guy who came to March was terrible.”

Oliver decided he didn’t understand elections. Besides, he had to find his way out of this crazy place. He stood up to leave when the old lady cautioned him: “Be careful of the exit poles ... oh, and the ticks!”

“Ticks??”

“Yes, the Polly Ticks. They get under your skin, suck your blood, and you don’t realise until it’s too late. Hard to get them out then!”

Oliver left with the guard’s song following him: “This May, no dismay. No mayhem, this May, ahem!”

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Kanwar lives in Sydney and loves doing the write thing. He writes flash fiction, mostly. Kanwar also likes to shoot and hang things, as in photography and painting. He taps a keyboard and pushes a mouse for his "day job".

 

Faunaffables

by Jonathon Ward

Two millipedes were out for a walk along the basement floor. They were expressing sympathy for their more recently evolved cousins, the centipedes. “Oh, the aches and pains in their knees.” “The hours to reach their exercise goals!” They twiddled their antennae in amusement as their feet rippled across the floor - ten thousand steps in seconds. They scooted behind the bathroom sink.

An ant was hauling a taco crumb through tall blades of grass and a wasp flew overhead. He hovered above the struggling bug, musing on the poor ant’s plight as she escaped from the footsteps of the picnickers around her. “I remember the day when I was a pupa and could only crawl. One day she’ll evolve and have wings. Then she’ll steal food from the picnickers and sting them!” He zinged a buzzing sneer at the ant and flew away.

Two bees gathering pollen from a garden full of honeysuckle vines looked down and saw a line of ants carrying morsels from the compost heap. They exchanged fluttering looks and chuckled. “They carry garbage in their mouths!” “Their queen must be a pig!” They hummed happily bagging pollen on their hind legs and buzzing with giggles. A hummingbird, who was tasting a variety of blossoms nearby, overheard them. She whirred closer to them and let them know, with a glint of sun on her feathers, that bees and ants both served queens, and she could live as she pleased. She darted off. The bees weren’t pleased and went on about their business. “Who does she think she is?” “Our hive is in a tree.” “We don’t live in the ground!” “Ants dig dirt all day!” “We make honey!” But they tasted bitterness in their work, now, knowing that in bee’s business, they only taste their honey in the winter - if the beekeeper lets them have it.

On a hot summer night, the feral black cat stole into the zoo and wandered through the paths and passed many cages before coming to the panther’s cell. She sat down in front of it and looked at him as he lay sleeping. The panther raised his majestic head and looked back at her with his yellow eyes. He wished he was as small as she was, and he could slip through the bars and go hunting in the night. He could stalk one of his captors at the very least and feed his resentment with his teeth and claws. He lay his head back down with a vague memory of a wilder place where the foliage and the ground beneath him smelled and felt so different. The cat licked her lips. The panther flicked his tail. He saw her pink tongue preen and smooth her ebony fur. She had done a full night’s work, and she was proud of it. In her hunt, the rat had been bossy and arrogant, slipping along the wall beneath the zoo’s fence, until she cornered him. “You don’t dare!” the rat said with bared teeth. “Hunger does,” she pounced. Rat was dinner. The old lady, who used to put out week-old fish in the alley on paper plates, was no longer doing that. Rat poison boxes were put out instead, and the cat had to look further afield for food to take care of herself. The cat lay down beside the panther’s cage and purred herself to sleep. The panther closed his eyes and slept. Their black fur blended into the dark shadows of the zoo, and they dreamed. In her dream, she was as big as he was and could take on bigger prey. In his, he was free to come and go and make his way in a wider world.

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Jonathon Ward is mostly a playwright but also a writer and poet who creates stories in which the weakness of the stronger leads to the desire and delusion to be higher up on the evolutionary tree than others - a quality even in the most highly evolved creature of all, i.e., us.

 

My Mother

by Amanda Hutchins

It was my favorite kind of day at the beach; blustery and clear and practically deserted. We stood at the edge of the water, the waves choppy and unwelcoming. I shivered and wrapped my coat more tightly around me.

“It’s pretty rough out there,” I said.

“You don’t have to worry,” she answered, with a firmness I hadn’t heard in months. The wetsuit hung off her body. I hadn’t realized how much weight she’d lost since Dad died.

She waded out confidently, bent forward against the wind, her flippers giving her a strange duck-like walk.

I knew she wasn’t coming back.

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Amanda Hutchins has a BA in Film from the University of Utah and an MBA from Pepperdine University. She is a software consultant by day and a writer by nights and weekends. She lives in Oregon with three spoiled cats and one spoiled husband.

 

Is your tense consistent?

Using a consistent verb tense in your writing is important, because it establishes when the story takes place and how the events relate to each other.

Nevertheless, it is not necessarily true that you can't - or shouldn't - use more than one tense in the same sentence. For example:

I hand the detective a photograph of the man who went missing last year.

The action (handing the photograph) takes place in the present, but it makes reference to something in the past (when the man went missing). The reader is unlikely to be confused by this; in fact, this avoids confusion by clarifying the sequence of events from past to present.

On the other hand:

Nancy perches on a bar stool and orders a margarita. When the drink arrives, she sips it cautiously while the bartender watches. "I'm leaving my husband," she said.

This is confusing. Here is Nancy enjoying a drink in the present, and suddenly we hear about something she said in the past. Did she talk about leaving her husband before or after coming to the bar? Who did she speak to?

Automated grammar checkers do not always find errors like this. A good way to detect confusing content in your writing is to read it aloud or have a critical friend read it aloud to you.