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Her Soviet Her Soviet looked, with the disdain of flowers, askance at all and sundry. A Collective,superior beauty but in constant need of a carer. Peripatetic petals all. Her Soviet composed of packets of meat offcuts imprudently piled. Bodies formed from the memory foam of misguided marital beds. They only consumed food that contained the potential to be formed in to a mound. She- topped with watermelon and bottomed unironically in the hue of the recently departed. Her Soviet lived by the Ho Ho Credo* For Her Soviet she made felt effigies, that they all kept in drawers, and not one of them could muster the required fervored hatred despite being allowed, being encouraged and hate being simpler than thinking. Peripatetic petals all. All living a life up on blocks. *it wasn’t Christmas until they had all seen the Wanking Santa in Pontypridd *** A wartime lecture* on nutrition delivered by Noel Coward from his suite at the Savoy Hotel wearing merely a smoking jacket and lipstick We had a few sherries on a pretty bad Blitz but not as bad as Wednesday. Couple of bombs and the walls bowed a bit. Carroll Gibbons played the piano, I sang as did Judy and a pair of drunken Scots Canadians joined in. They played ‘Danny Boy’ on humbled bagpipes. I played the part of their indulged indulgent cartoon. More bombs on Friday, more dancing. *the nutritional value of recreational piss is inestimably cloudy *** Kindness is logged The Wifi Password is ‘Love Everybody #1’. I drink from all cups and then none and I spectate as the dehoused individual is disgorged. A hot drink for a winter smile always struck me as a fair trade. The Wifi Password is ‘Love Everybody #1’ and all kindness is logged and all love rests into a milky dislike. *** Girls who laugh at death Finger entry girls,calluses on veiny hands, tap out looney tunes on chapel oak with nails as long as birds claws. Late to the font again. Valleys moga fuelled by fugazi fudge bombs and the feminine urge to crowdfund a coven. Russet cheeked alpha,buffet butt omega. Girls who laugh at death and pushover headstones. *** Work Party Every other day or so, a delicious new flavour of cope another way to lay,stitch eye shut coffined,attached to the floor,peering at the ceiling figures sheepishly rooting. One room after one room after a string of precedented times forming an orderlike can queue as the vacant lot of her belly bloated, all the while not feeling pretty pretty enough for play. A spirit raped and polished. That was Monday, finished. *** KG is a poet and author based in Wales. The author of the best-selling 'Troubadour Tales' series of books on Bob Dylan, he has now embarked on a poetic journey. Published in Wales, Ireland, England and now in the US his first book , 'Poetry For The Feeble Minded' was published to critical acclaim. His current WIP, 'A Working Class Book Of Psalms' from which these poems are taken, is due to be published in 2026.

The machine came in a box without instructions. No label. Just a black mark where the sender’s name should have been. It looked like a cross between a cassette deck and a bread maker. I had to drag it upstairs on a towel. The first time I plugged it in, nothing happened. No hum. No light. Just the bite of ozone, like air after lightning. It didn’t have a screen. Just a narrow slot and a tiny embossed label beneath it reading: handwritten only . I tried a grocery list. A recipe. A line from a poem I often misquoted. Nothing. It didn’t respond until I wrote a name. Just the name. No explanation. Then it spoke. It didn’t speak out loud. The words appeared on a small strip of paper, like a receipt printing itself in reverse. The font was old, serifed, a little uneven. The first message said: Do you want to hear it or say it back? I didn’t know what that meant, so I tried another name. Someone I hadn’t thought about in a long time. This time, the strip read: She said: It’s not your fault. But she wanted you to try harder. I stared at it for a long time. Folded it twice. Put it in my pocket. The machine took anything I gave it. Half-names. Nicknames. Ones I wasn’t sure how to spell. Its answers got quicker, more intimate. Some responses were brief. He didn’t believe you, but he wanted to. She left before the argument got bad. She only remembers your laugh. No . But he would’ve said yes if you’d asked again. Others were longer. Whole paragraphs, sometimes. Memories I never knew they had. Or maybe ones I’d invented and given to them. It never answered questions. Just spoke as if it already knew what I was asking. I started saving paper scraps. Anything I could write a name on. Receipts, old envelopes, the backs of takeout menus. There was a pen in every room. I told myself I wasn’t using it that often. Just when I couldn’t sleep. When something came back too sharply. When I wanted to know how it might have gone differently. I stopped telling friends when I let someone off the hook. I let the machine say it for me. It never gave me what I asked for. But the words were close enough to stand behind. That was enough. One night I fed it my own name. The paper took longer to print. I thought it had jammed, but then the strip appeared. You already know. I didn’t try that again. Then one night it printed a name I hadn’t entered. I was brushing my teeth. The machine wasn’t even turned on. Or I hadn’t meant for it to be. But there it was, a single strip of paper waiting beside the slot. You owe her more than you admit. I read it twice before throwing it away. Maybe I’d written the name in my sleep. But it kept happening. New names. Some I hadn’t thought about in years. Others I didn’t recognize. Messages waiting in the morning or when I got home. She forgave you. You just weren’t there to hear it. He told someone else first. You were too late. I started sleeping with the machine unplugged, but the messages kept coming. There were other changes, too. Names I’d never written down. Sentences that didn’t feel like apologies, but warnings. Don’t check the date on this one. You ’re not who you think you are. Close the drawer. Close the drawer. Close the drawer. I opened the nightstand anyway. Inside were the folded slips. All the messages I told myself I kept because maybe I’d need them. I found one I didn’t remember reading. Didn’t remember saving. It said: You’re not done yet. That was the last message for a while. I stopped feeding names. Stopped checking the tray. A month passed. I thought it was over. Then one morning, the machine was humming again. There was no paper in the tray. Just the name already printed, faint and curling out of the slot. It was a name I’d never spoken out loud. Not to anyone. Not even myself. My hand shook as I tore the strip free. It said: He would have stayed if you’d asked. He was waiting for you to say something true. It  wouldn’t have fixed everything. But it would have changed everything. I didn’t fold that one. Didn’t pocket it or throw it away. I slid it back into the machine and closed the lid. I put it in the hall closet and shut the door. I haven’t opened it since. I still keep a pen in every room. I don’t write names anymore. That doesn’t mean it stopped collecting them. Ryan T. Pozzi is a writer and cultural critic who explores legacy, myth, and reputation, with particular attention to who shapes our understanding of history. His writing has been accepted by Rattle, Fjords Review, Northern New England Review, and Ponder Review, among others. He is a 2025 Best of the Net nominee. Find him at ryantpozzi.com  or on social media @ryantpozzi.

The girl who swallowed coins Let’s say the first five pence went down between handfuls of popcorn. As Elizabeth’s teeth hit metal, it was a do or don’t, spit or swallow moment. Let’s say she calculated the risks of this coin getting lodged or causing mischief at the other end and found them within tolerance limits. She swallowed, thinking of Carmen, the precise lines of her bob, the moon pebble perfection of her teeth when she laughed.  The next evening, she gulped down another five-pence piece. Let’s say she began to see these coins as protection, as a way to steel herself through all those do or die moments at school, like whether to eat lunch with the artsy crowd (tolerated, not much to contribute) or the outliers (lots to say, not much listening) and how to stop when she could see people’s eyes glazing over but hadn’t finished her story. In short, how to navigate the mysterious world of other people. She found the metallic lick of the coin, the brief pressure at the back of her throat, reassuring. Let’s say the coin girl correlated the greater percentage of copper, nickel and steel in her insides to a greater strength of character. She made friends who didn’t mind her iffy eye contact. When Carmen started dating a football player, Elizabeth honed her attention on a gutsy girl who hung around the edges like she did. Marina had sea green eyes and the lean energy of a whippet. She liked how much Elizabeth knew about dogs, her encyclopedic knowledge of different breeds.   Let’s say Elizabeth’s mother discovered the coin swallowing and booked her in with a therapist to rid her of this “dirty little habit.” While speeding through twenty-mile-an-hour zones and zipping through amber lights, her mother monologued a series of “If you think… I keep telling you… You have no idea…” while breezily cheerful Magic FM DJs chimed in: “Tell us what you like for breakfast. Cold pizza? Hula hoops? We don’t judge!”  Let’s say in the soothing greens and plastic plants of the therapist’s office, Elizabeth found a person who asked questions and listened. After multiple conversations were stalled by her mother’s “I keep telling her… She seems to think…” the therapist asked her to leave. In the quiet that followed, Elizabeth decided that swallowing her mother’s judgement exceeded tolerance limits. And so she learned to say when she was overloaded, to say “I’d rather you didn’t” and “What I think is.” She called out social rules she found meaningless. She learned illogic wasn’t always a stumbling block for other people.  And so a family truce was eventually negotiated.   And so she discovered that coins and character were not cause and effect, that she was already made of copper and iron and strength and forged her path without them. Cole Beauchamp (she/her) is a queer writer based in London. Her stories have been in the Wigleaf Top 50, nominated for awards and shortlisted for the Bath, Bridport, Oxford and WestWord prizes for flash fiction. She's been widely published in lit mags including Mr Bull, Ghost Parachute, The Hooghly Review, Gooseberry Pie and others, and is a contributing editor at New Flash Fiction Review. She lives with her girlfriend and has two children. You can find her on bluesky at @ nomad-sw18.bsky.social

Another exhausted day yawns, a winter chill painting my knuckles white as I sink into my pillow and replay January. A plane ride ago, the herd of us spilled out of Worthing Square, bellies half-full with cold beef patties and pockets empty as we flooded the sidewalk to go who-knows-where—the boardwalk, Quayside, any corner we could claim. The streets were ours and they were just driving in it, the gaze of grizzled men on my bare waist, their Mazdas throbbing with bass and spilling soap-bitter smoke as I looped arms with the girls because they couldn’t take us all if they tried. We poured into a moonlit beach no one will ever call Private, traced our sand-filled sandals into Chillymoos. In chipped plastic chairs, coconut ice cream melting down our fingers, we threw our heads back with laughter and fuck-you ’s that meant Never change . A table from us a guy in a cliché Hawaiian shirt scorned, I thought this was a tourist spot , but the ground was ours and he was just playing on it. Choiselle Joseph is a writer from Barbados. Her recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Rust & Moth, Gone Lawn,  and elsewhere. Her writing centres gender, the body, and decolonisation and their current project is Hummingbird , an in-progress chapbook exploring daughterhood through myth and surreal imagery. They are an editor at The Saartjie Journal.

A child steps into an orange grove.  Not realizing it, he continues to strut along.  I am sorry that I can’t explain to you my dear why the earth does its magical things.  But at that very moment, an orange broke from the tree and made home for the boy’s head.  This snapped him back to earth’s beautiful reality.  Coming to sense where he was, the boy began to smell the delicious fragrances, and the beautiful state of all of the oranges.  Not one was rotten or miscolored.  All had the same fresh painted skin, golden in the sun.  The boy, still admiring their beauty, plucked one effortlessly.  He held the orange with cupped hands. It seemed to humble him, the sight of a single but mighty aspect of the moment. Celia Johnson is 11 years old, and a native of Minnesota.

Before you stopped talking, you told me you were nervous about what might happen to you in the days or hours leading up to the end. It was the only time the two of us talked about your impending death without dancing around the pale, cold particulars of it.  “I want you to promise to remember me this way,” you told me, sitting up in bed. “Not in my pajamas obviously, but I want you to remember me how I am right now and not what I might be like in a few weeks or whenever this supposedly all goes downhill, ok?” You carefully smoothed the blanket across your lap, the once red polish on your fingernails faded to pink. “Ok,” I said, trying to understand the cruelty of life that it makes people have to warn loved ones that they might become unrecognizable to them. “Maybe we can have a code or something?” you asked. Your voice was still light then, almost playful. “What do you mean a code?” “A way for you to know if I’ve still got a light on upstairs.” “Very funny. Ok, what’s the code?” You thought for a moment, tilting your head slightly to the left the way you always did when you were searching for the right word. The light from the window catching the icy gray of your chin-length bob.   “I’ve got it,” you said. “Nevertheless, she persisted.” “Where’s that from?” I asked. “It’s the motto for the Sausalito Women’s Club.” “Of course, it is.” “The minute I forget the code you can start remembering the way I was up until that very moment. Deal?” “Deal.” This was our little inside joke over the next few weeks. Every once in a while, I would catch you in the middle of breakfast or watching the nightly news and say “Nevertheless?” and you would smile and answer back, “She persisted.” It seemed impossible back then. That someone like you could one day no longer exist on this planet. You were a mythical creature that could not die. Tuesdays. Major League baseball. The southern migration of sandhill cranes. How could they go on as if nothing had happened?  But then the smiles became few and far between. The news was rarely on. You were in bed one morning when the hospice nurse told me to get you up for an early lunch. I went to your room where I found you lying on your side, the covers tucked around you like armor. I touched your shoulder. The fabric of your nightgown was soft and worn thin. “Nevertheless,” I said. But instead of answering, you let out a low moan, your eyes shut tight to some private agony. I said it again in case you hadn’t heard, but you just lay there in silence.  That was the moment I stopped remembering you.  Trevor J. Houser works in advertising and lives with his family in Seattle. He published his first two novels, PACIFIC (2021) and THE PRUMONT METHOD (2023) with Unsolicited Press. His third novel comes out in 2026. He has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and has had stories published in dozens of literary journals, including Zyzzyva, StoryQuarterly  and  CutBank .

Notes for a Community College Commencement Speech From a certain perspective everything looks like math but if you pay attention to the subtext it says to work on being charming and go into sales. Not cut out for sales I got a job redirecting people’s negative thoughts. I think the mind is sometimes a vaulted ceiling and sometimes a shallow pit. Everyone wants to be both a child and a great Oak tree. My father wanted me to be a simple country doctor; my mother, a tech giant. Everyone wants a billion dollars. In my line of work what seems to work is sharing mildly interesting anecdotes or asking personal but superficial questions. Bach had 13 kids and none of them played the piano. Jack-o'-lanterns used to be carved from turnips. What’s your favorite kind of mail to get? What’s the hardest part of the day for you? That’s when you should make a snack. You can try and try but you will never be happier than when you’re eating a snack. If your dog is there with you then that’s better. If you give your dog a little bite that, too, is even better. You can try and try but that’s the best you can do. But keep trying because you never know.  What’s Happening in the World of Sports Today Is That the World’s Top Tennis Players are Beating Each Other Over the Head With Their Rackets Because of an Out-of-Bounds Call One guy says it’s good and the other guy says it’s shit. I don’t argue on the internet anymore. I might not even believe in the internet anymore. How do I know if I exist? I’m sitting outside in a lawn chair, that’s how. Entrepreneurs invent something new every two hours. They don’t think it’s funny but everyone else does. I watch the news once a day, and what I miss, I miss. I’m studying a picture of our daughter standing on a drawbridge at night in the summer. She’s looking out at the water. She seems content and beautiful but minutes before it was taken she was crying. The picture invents an ache that lives inside me. It’s my favorite possession. I think every door is saying open a door and walk through but I think every bridge is saying you could be happy either way. I suppose the ability to take a punch is something you’re born with. Either you have it or you do not. No, wait. That’s wrong. Taking a punch is not something you are born with. Taking a punch is something you will need to learn. Everyone Come Back We never decided which color to paint the bathroom. If you want sky blue, raise your hand. If you think eggshell, take a step forward. If you want wallpaper I guess take a step back. The average person spends seven minutes and 19 seconds in the bathroom every day. Not counting extraordinary circumstances. In a public restroom people cut that time in half. If I had to choose I’d say California is the most dream-like state. Second is Kansas, of course. Having decided is probably the saddest thing you can do. All those lives shriveling to nothing behind you. The color no one wanted. The jobs you never trained for. You could have been a good surgeon or a bad surgeon. I never punched a guy I wanted to punch and I told myself I was better for it. The world was better for it. A violence that surely would have borne more violence was instead kept on a leash. Kept in my jacket pocket. We have fists but we also have hands. It’s always 50-50.  Not that Kind of Funeral I once donated five boxes of books to the library. The next day I couldn’t find the novel I’d been reading. The main character was about to take dramatic action. I went back to the library and found my book shelved under new arrivals. I brought it home and started from the first page like we were strangers. Turns out the hero fails every challenge. In the end she is worse off in most ways. Does not untangle the web of clues to her past. Does not find love. Someone steals her car and her mother dies unexpectedly. At the very end she is faced with a decision. I’ve been asking myself my whole life what’s worthwhile, what adds and what diminishes. I taste my own blood and wonder if that’s God. I wash the dishes and wonder if that’s God. The soft belly of my dog, is that God? When a Prince song comes on and I remember after having forgotten how beautiful his voice was, is that God? They’re interviewing a basketball player on the news who wins every game at the buzzer. He says he’s no hero. He thanks Jesus and his mother and his teammates. They show a clip. Time is running out. He is most alive as everything comes to an end.   It’s Hard to Tell If You’re Doing It Right I let my dog chase rabbits. I do it because it makes him happy. I think it reminds him of a distant past. A code in his mind. A true self. The rabbits are safe. I make sure. Though they must be frightened, I imagine. I try to do right in life. I care for helpless things. Delicate things. I would care for a wounded rabbit if I saw one. After chasing a rabbit my dog and I keep walking. Both of us scan the grass along the row of thick rose bushes. This Goddamn world. Everything is hungry. All the flowers and all the animals. The Sun and whatever will destroy the Sun. I’m wrong more than I’m right. That’s something I admit. There’s something I want that’s hiding in a small space I cannot reach. My breath is hot and smelling like iron. The D Poem Our daughter asks for help writing a poem for school. We tell her all the rules they gave her are wrong. Her poem gets a D. People say there’s a lot wrong with the D poem. But the D poem doesn’t pay attention to any of that. It gets up every day and faces the world. I’m a D, it says to itself. I’m a D poem. Not an easy thing to do in a world that believes mostly in As. A world that might lower itself to admire a B, maybe. Someone tells the D poem that it would have been an E poem except they don’t give out Es in poetry. In an infinite universe there’s no way to know if that’s true, we say. We tell the D poem it’s doing great. We love you, we say. On its birthday our daughter sends messages to the D poem. She says things like, “D is for dare, D is for dream!” She says, “D for donuts and Daytona Beach!” The D poem is in love with the world and it doesn’t matter if the world loves the D poem back. “D is for desire and demand to live in the sun!,” she writes. Nothing can stop the D poem now.  Jeffrey Hermann's work has appeared in Okay Donkey, Passages North, Heavy Feather, Wigleaf, and other publications. His first full-length collection of prose poetry and flash fiction will be published by ELJ Editions in 2026. Though less publicized, he finds his work as a father and husband to be rewarding beyond measure.

We are waiting for our flight.  We are a group of four (the Beatles but worse): Alan, Susie, Paul, me. We are playing eye-spy and two-truths-one-lie and all manner of exciting games. We are attempting handstands.  We are still waiting for our flight. We are researching the history and etymology of goldfish on Wikipedia.  We are eating all our food, a royal buffet of sandwiches and apples and salted almonds. We are talking to an old lady—she is going to Malta to spread her husband’s ashes. We are nodding seriously.  We are informed by a self-serious Italian man about his scruples with the corrupt Italian government. We are nodding in confusion.  We are analysed by an American. We are lectured by an Argentinian. We are quickly running out of fun anecdotes to tell each other.  We are called suddenly to Gate 5, but once there we are told by airport staff to go away. We are seriously and diplomatically discussing our options as if we have any at all.  We are watching the sun set on the sticky smoking balcony. We are more than slightly tired of waiting. We are planning on sleeping in shifts.  We are called again to Gate 5, but this time there is nobody there. *** There is no flight, says Alan, who hasn’t slept in at least thirty hours. There is no flight. There is no holiday. There is no plane. There is no hope. There are only duty-free shops and overpriced cafés and fast-food restaurants and all of them have kicked us out because we didn’t buy anything. There is no reason to get hysterical, I tell Alan.  There is no God, Alan continues. There is no afterlife. There is no reason for anything. There is no meaning and there is no time. There is nothing. There is nothing.  *** Alan falls asleep, finally. Susie wakes up and checks the live departures board and starts crying.  Phil wakes up and does some push-ups. I count the number of windows on the upper floor (it’s ninety-three).  Paul does jumping jacks. Susie falls asleep again. Alan wakes up. I am falling asleep. Paul is doing chin-ups. Alan falls asleep again. I begin talking to a wall to stay awake.  Paul does Tai Chi until the airport staff ask him to stop.  I fall asleep. *** Then I wake up.  Then I eat my second-to-last packet of salted almonds. Then I tell Paul I’m down to my last fucking packet of salted almonds. Then Paul says he finished his food two hours ago so I can join the club.  Then Susie starts physically attacking Alan, all punches and flying kicks and everything, and the rest of us just watch in shock. Then she stops and apologises, says that she doesn’t know what came over her.  Then we are called to Gate 5 again. Then, then, then—the plane is actually here .  Then we are actually boarding the flight, and I can’t believe this is happening, and Susie says this is the happiest she’s been in her entire life.  Then we are waiting for two hours at a standstill on the runway. Then we are told to get off the plane. Then we go back into customs.  Then Alan vomits on the floor. Then the flight is cancelled. Daniel Birch is a writer of fiction and nonfiction from the UK. He currently lives on the Cornish coast, where he studies English & Creative Writing at Falmouth University. More of his work can be found on his blog, https://contagiouswordsblog.wordpress.com

The Breakup I leave this with you— a few lines, hastily scratched on a page gone limp with the perspiration of sorrow. The paper retains, I believe, the faint chill of my grief, and my grief—what else?—bears the stale imprint of your desire. Bravo. You’ve always had a talent for undoing. The Destroyer: yes, that name will do. I bequeath it to you without malice. Do not search for me. I shall be elsewhere, in some God-forgotten hamlet the mapmakers have mercifully missed,  living in quiet congress with my own lamentations. Your love, as it turns out, was counterfeit— and now, at last, the world concurs. Verses about me—I hope—in her Snoopy diary So here’s the deal:  He’s basically a Neanderthal. Stone jaw. Big mitts. Cro-Magnon vibes all the way down.  But God help me, he delights me. He speaks fluent bear.  Not like “roar roar” bear—real bear. Actual ursine communication.  He whispers into the wind and animals answer back. Owls. Foxes. Once, a bison. No kidding. When he walks through a field, it’s not romantic.  Every flower gets crushed.  Every petal screams silently. It’s kind of beautiful. Kind of tragic. Like most things. His masculinity goes before him like a warning flare. Like: Caution. Primitive force approaching. He breaks things. He bites.  He’s bitten me, and—surprise!—sometimes I like it.  There. I said it. Cancel me. He might not be entirely human.  Might be 60% animal.  Might be 40% sadness.  Might be 100% wrecking ball. But our love-making? Earth-shattering. Literally. Once, a shelf fell down. Maybe that’s the only thread tying me to him. And if that makes me shallow—then I guess I float. The Map of Your Treasure There’s a trail I walk when the night presses in close, when the air thickens with want. It begins at your brow, salted with sweat, like the Gulf air in August, runs the line of your neck where the skin grows soft and shadowed, moves past the place your breath stutters to the dip of your belly, until I reach the ocean of you. And when I do, your toes curl like leaves in heat, your breath a rush of wind through pine and field. You make a sound— not quite word, not quite cry— and the sky splits open like a wound, galaxies pouring from the seam. In that moment, time forgets itself. The world rights its wrongs, and life— wild, beautiful, trembling— begins again. Albert Rodríguez  is an emerging writer based in Brooklyn, New York. A graduate of Borough of Manhattan Community College, his fiction has appeared in  Five on the Fifth, Litro Magazine, White Wall Review, Platform Review, Across the Margin, Modern Literature, Ink Pantry, Literally Stories, Active Muse, The Rye Whiskey Review, The Fictional Café, Yellow Mama, and The Piker Press , among other periodicals.

1 . Costa had broken his leg. No sooner had he received his diagnosis than a stream of messages came flowing forth in the group chat, beweeping his state and putting in requests for alcohol, food, dexamphetamines, and other miscellania. He was going to be laid up at his mum’s house for at least six weeks, which obviously didn’t suit his lifestyle. For all that he had served our community, he was calling on us now to be with him in his time of need. Lachie and I were the closest to Costa. So it was incumbent on us to support him (more so than the others, who mostly just endured his dominion). Everyone liked him, but the cold hard fact was that liking him was forbearance. Lachie and I seemed to just have that subservient nature, like a Versailles footman or death row executioner. Simply put, when compared to everyone else, we’d spent more cumulative hours listening to him rant at four-thirty in the morning about democratic principles in contention with plutomania or whatever thesis happened to have sprung out of the last YouTube documentary he’d watched. The rest of them had better things to do. 2. We sat at Costa’s bedside, as though he had cancer or AIDS or something. His hairy toes were poking out of the end of his cast, pointing toward me with what felt like accusation. For someone who had always seemed so gargantuan, who shrouded a room just by entering it, he was small there in his childhood bed, bereft, like a shrunken head. It was somehow touching that this man, who could send quivers of seismic shock through a party at his merest whim, was so contained. He was midway through berating Lachie for having brought up his ex-girlfriend, even though it might have been him who had done so. In a brief aperture of his raving, he leant across to his bedside table to clutch at one of the cherry-and-pomegranate vapes we’d bought him (Lachie and I had argued about how many to bring - I was fast being proven correct that seven wouldn’t last a week). I took advantage of the breath to probe Costa about his accident. ‘I was playing netball and I tripped, that’s all that happened, it was innocuous , totally innocuous, but what happened was that I was going down and my foot didn’t go any further so my entire weight came down on it. Crushed the bones to dust, just a freak accident they said, so now I’m holed up like a fuckin… invalid .’ ‘Why, though? It’s not the eighteen-sixties.’ He puffed. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ ‘Why don’t you use crutches?’ ‘Fuck crutches.’ ‘Or a wheelchair.’ ‘I’m not using a wheelchair, Dylan.’ ‘Sorry I asked.’ There was a certain joy he was taking in his misery. He couldn’t bear the thought of six weeks with only his mum to talk to, with nothing to do but play his online chess games and watch the news feed of the upcoming presidential election. I didn’t feel that this prospect sounded vastly different from his routine, except for the one obvious major alteration; he couldn’t party. ‘I miss you all so goddamned much. I know it’s only been two days but it feels much longer because of the anaesthetic. And Mandy’s thirty-first is on Saturday. I was looking forward to it, even though she can go to hell for what she said about me. But I already paid for my drugs, so I’ll guess I’ll just be sitting here off my face on ket trying to keep myself from going in a hole - unless you guys want to come out here at like…twelve? We’d  just be doing what we’re doing now, or unless you want to bring a couple of the girls, they could see my cast and bring a few drinks, you know, that could be good…probably don’t bring Lucy though, or Adam, they’re a bit -‘ In the depths of his soliloquies, he had a way of self-perpetuating. As much as we were unable to interrupt or contribute, so too did it seem as though he were unable to stop. There had been moments in the dead of an early-morning high when I could see a panic flashing in his eyes like a far-off supernova in the depths of a forgotten galaxy. I got to feeling like that flash of panic was a communique from the innermost being of Costa, the truest Costa, that was desperate to be recognised. That true Costa, like a castaway or a media company, was reduced to a crude, semaphoric state in which communication was both the end and the means, and purely one-sided. I would watch him suck in giant gulps of oxygen to fuel his logorrhea. As though he were sucking in all the air in the room. All the air from us who watched and laughed for his near-perfect performance. This character who veered larger than reality. This engine of the social. ‘ - I’ll need more booze though, if you don’t mind doing another delivery, which is all right because then we can hang out a bit more- ‘ ‘Why will you need more booze? We’ve brought a whole case, plus the gin and the rum.’ ‘And the wine,’ Lachie said. ‘I’ll pay you back, it’s just that mum won’t get me anything, ‘cause of what the doctor said - ‘ ‘What’d the doctor say, Costa?’ ‘Some medical  bullshit, you know, they think we haven’t read up on these things, they’re talking out of their arse about stuff that appeared in a medical textbook forty-five years ago and got outdated forty-four-and-a-half years ago - ‘ ‘Yeah, so what’d he say?’ ‘He said I’m not ‘supposed’ to mix alcohol with the pain meds.’ ‘So why did you ask us to bring you alcohol?’ ‘I’m not going to go six weeks without a drink, dude. I went two days already and I was starting to shake like a bitch, and anyway Lachie didn’t mind - ‘ ‘You knew he’s not allowed to drink?’ ‘Yeah,’ Lachie shrugged. ‘Why did we get him alcohol then?’ ‘It’s his choice,’ he said. I turned back to Costa, who had slopped some dark red wine into the mug from which he’d been guzzling. ‘Maybe you shouldn’t  drink for six weeks.’ ‘I don’t want to be sober for that long.’ ‘That’s kind of my point.’ ‘Anyway, it takes the edge off the dexy’s, and I need the dexy’s for my ADHD, but it’s fucking lame when I have no one to talk to. So it’s good to take the edge off.’ ‘So you drink when there’s no one around. And also when there’s someone around.’ ‘When someone’s around, a bit of booze makes the conversation better. Jesus, Dylan, since when did you become a nun? Fucking rule-boy here.’ ‘I just don’t really understand why you wouldn’t listen to a doctor.’ ‘Doctors tell us to stop vaping, but you puff away on that little robot dick until you go crosseyed. And you’re one to bitch about booze; how many times have I carried you on my - literally on my back - to get to the Uber? And when exactly was the last time you paid me back for the coke I shout you? And the ket? And the MD? And the weed? I don’t even like weed, dude, and there I am spending my money on it so that you’ll stop being a killjoy all the time. God damn, excuse me if I’m not running a half-marathon every Tuesday. I have other interests. Shame on me for liking to hang out with people and for getting a good feeling from the people around me. I don’t have to stock everyone with wine from Auntie Grace’s vineyard, but I do it because I know that what’s good for one person is good for everyone. That’s what a community is, and that’s why we need to take care of one another. And you also, let’s not forget, wrecked my favourite - ‘ I’d set him off. To avoid doing so was one of mine and Lachie’s sacred rules. I was punished enough by Lachie’s glare to shut up then. We sat there for another few hours, never really being forgiven by Costa for our terrible sin of coming to see him. 3. I grabbed Lachie by the arm later that night, when we were briefly left alone in the courtyard of the Bowlo. The girls had gone to take a bump in the bathroom. I asked Lachie what the hell was his problem, and why he hadn’t spoken up in my support today at Costa’s. It wasn’t that I needed him to agree with everything I said, but I truly felt I was going crazy if no one else agreed that we had at least some degree of responsibility, as his friends, to help him. Not to coddle him like an infant, though he acted like it sometimes, but to make sure he was healthy when he couldn’t. At least, I thought, we could do that. At least, I thought, we could try. Lachie told me that I was being overdramatic, a nanna, trying to control people and how they responded to the world. He said I was like the state government, which had over the past decade slowly choked the nightlife out of Sydney, a city we’d once loved. I told him that I was different, because my intentions were altruistic and I wasn’t a corrupt bastard wrist-deep in a casino magnate. Lachie said that altruism isn’t about telling people what to do. Or what not to do. ‘But he’ll fucking die or something one day, mate. It’s not cute anymore. We’re not getting younger.’ ‘What’s our age have to do with anything? My dad still gets on the sauce, and your mum…well, fuck me, no offence. And that bullshit about your body getting less able to manage it, that’s nothing. If anything I feel way more capable of a bender than I used to be.’ ‘I can tell.’ ‘Like an athlete…practice makes perfect and that…’ The girls came back. Kate had a bit of powder ringed around her nostril. She told me to lick it off, which was an escalation I hadn’t expected. The chrome flavour of the coke numbed my gums almost immediately. Which meant it was good quality. Mandy asked us what we were talking about, and Lachie immediately told her. He made me sound like a prissy old conservative. Honestly, the way he told it he wasn’t wrong. Kate rubbed my leg. ‘…and he reckons Costa’s gunna die.’ ‘I’m not saying he’s going to die.’ ‘That’s literally what you said.’ I rubbed my eyes, frustrated as hell. ‘I’m just saying…he might be a bit much, but he hates to be alone. And he hates to sit still. Now he’s being forced to. For six weeks. I don’t know if he can take it.’ Mandy gave me a grim smile. ‘You don’t trust people, Dylan. You’re not afraid that Costa’s going to go nuts. You fully expect  it.’ I gave it up then, but I did ask if the girls wanted to go with me to see Costa tomorrow. I told them it’d mean the world to him. Mandy couldn’t be bothered, but Kate said she might. Lachie said he had breakfast with his parents. 4. The problem Kate had with Costa, she said as I brought her a cup of black coffee, was that the entire universe had to revolve around him. She didn’t blame him. It was just his way. He was like Pantagruel, excessive in everything. Including his presence. She was honestly looking forward to a month and a half’s worth of parties where she could talk to someone without Costa’s thunder booming down the hall, vibrating in our glasses. Think of it, she said, a whole six weeks where we don’t have to debrief the next day about whatever scandalous thing he had said or done, six weeks where the friendship group could just get along without fractures or tensions, six weeks without the garbage bags full of gossip that always seemed to have Costa as their subject. And besides, he was bad to women. He was rude and dismissive when he spoke to her, and she didn’t like to feel that way. She’d made her point. I told her as much. But I was still going to go, and I’d still appreciate her company. She muttered something under her breath and tried to find her bra. 5. ‘Lachlan told me you’re spreading rumours about me. I don’t appreciate that.’ Costa’s disdain was poised before I even entered. ‘You’re a little-goody-two-shoes worry-wart bitch. After everything I’ve done for you, you still talk shit about me behind my back. That’s being a bad friend. I’ve saved your arse on multiple occasions. Remember those chicks from Bathurst? I smoothed that whole thing out. And you say I’ve got a problem. Get thee thy plank outta thy own fuckin eye. You know what I’m talking about. You’re a fucking fiend on the gear.’ I told Kate to sit down in the chair by the window. Her hangover had kicked in. Costa hadn’t yet acknowledged her presence. ‘And anyway, I’m a remarkable human being. I read a whole thing on the Roman emperors when you left yesterday. Does that sound like a drug addict? How could I run a successful business if I were an alcoholic? Are you saying my business isn’t successful?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Goddamn right.’ Costa looked out the window, straight past Kate. The white light illuminated his dark skin and eyes. It was the first time in a while I’d seen him well-rested. But as I looked deeper into his expression of rough machismo, I realised how hurt he was. I’d embarrassed him with the one substance he couldn’t stomach. I’d intended to help him, but in doing so I had subjected him to mortality in front of his peers, whose opinions, for better or worse, he desperately cared for. He was a proud man. And if he had nothing else but pride, at least he had that. Lachie was right. Who was I to try and tame a spirit like Costa? I felt a wash of shame for my arrogance. ‘I’m sorry, mate.’ He shrugged. Kate looked at me dolefully. I saw how little she wanted to be here. ‘I just get worried, Cos. I’m worried that things will get worse for us all. Not better.’ ‘They probably will, you fucking idiot.’ ‘You want to play chess?’ ‘Nah, I’ll whoop you too quickly. We should play something for three players.’ Kate’s eyes brightened a bit. ‘I’ve got a pack of cards. We can play Gin Rummy.’ We sat there the entire afternoon, Kate and I, with Costa’s insurmountable, mountain-like presence beginning to eclipse his small room, smoking a joint, staggering out Costa’s and Kate’s dexy’s, sipping on some whiskey I’d found under the bed, laughing and swearing, competing and losing to Costa, who could not, in his indomitable excess, lose. Michael McStay is an Australian writer raised on Bangerang and Wurundjeri country and living in Berlin. He has produced five full-length theatrical plays to critical acclaim. If he isn't reading or writing, he's probably running or talking too much.

My son’s latest venture is hunting down and slaying vampires. From my seat on the porch, I’m watching him fling wooden stakes at a propped-up life-sized cardboard cutout of my sister that has been sitting around collecting dust since we’d used it for her 40th birthday party, the last time I had any contact with her.  My son’s getting better. Just now he nailed her body double directly between the eyes, although technically I think the stake is supposed to pierce the heart.  I take a sip of beer and then a drag from my cigarette. Together, they taste just like life does after a certain age—what I hid from, but suspected all along, came true: my life held no grander purpose, and everyone has been a disappointment. I’m tempted to ask my son how he’s going to be able to tell a vampire apart from a regular person, especially if the vampire is hiding in plain sight, but then I think that given his object of choice for target practice, he’s probably on the right track. Ah, there goes the stake into my sister’s heart. At this rate, my son will soon be ready to take on his own father—no need for a cardboard cutout of him . Eliot S. Ku is a physician who lives in New Mexico with his wife and two children. His writing has appeared in Whiskey Tit, Maudlin House, Carmen et Error, HAD, and Bending Genres, among other places. You can read more at www.eliotsku.com

You stare at the blank page, the cursor cursing.  You type; this is a story about anxiety. A story about the time the wind screamed until the sky grew orange and the clouds choked on ash and where do you go? Where do you go?  You backspace; this is a story about the doctor who gave you someone else’s diagnosis.  You backspace again; This is a story about the hand that bites, words that chew.  You backspace. Again. Again. Again.  This is a story about a flag your family wants you to fly, about the neighbor who wants to know why the light in your garage is blue, about the ice running through a government's veins, about a school on lockdown and how do you breathe? How do you breathe?  This is a story about the cracks that deepen every time the house shakes. This is a story about a cursor that won’t stop blinking. Karen Crawford lives and writes in the City of Angels. Recent work has been included in Best Microfiction Anthology 2025, Gooseberry Pie, Tiny Molecules, Switch and elsewhere. Find her on Bluesky @ karenc.bsky.social  and X @KarenCrawford_