Michael M. Brownstein, "Paperbacks & Baguettes"

Michael M. Brownstein is a writer of fiction and poetry. His work has appeared in The Interstitial, Catharsis Chronicles, and The Lark, among other online journals. He is an editor for Scrittura and New Choices. Paperbacks & Baguettes: Stories Between Us is his debut novella-in-flash. Michael lives with his family in Massachusetts and can usually be found making coffee and easing into the day.

About Paperbacks & Baguettes: Stories Between Us, by Michael M. Brownstein
Paperbacks & Baguettes is a novella-in-flash set in an independent bookstore café. Across forty interconnected stories, booksellers, baristas, managers, regulars, and passersby move through the rhythms of early mornings, busy afternoons, and late closings.

The stories focus on the small exchanges that gradually give the place its character: a mug left warm, a playlist shared across the counter, a scarf caught on a shelf, or a familiar customer acknowledged from across the room. Running quietly through the book is a developing relationship between a woman who frequents the store and the man behind the counter.

Together, the stories explore how attention, routine, and small acts of care can turn an ordinary place into somewhere people feel they belong.

Below, you can read one of the flashes from the book. 

From Paperbacks & Baguettes

The Folded Page

And the bell stammered once.

The aisle was narrow, just wide enough for two people to pass if neither lingered. Shelves leaned in, jackets pressed close when a hand pulled one forward. A cart bumped in the back and went quiet.

He bent the cover back, not much. A corner page still showed a fold.

From the other end, a woman slowed at the shelf. She pulled the same book from lower down, her copy stiff, his already worn. Their eyes moved between the two.

“You should take that one,” he said.

She turned it once in her hand. “Yours has history.”

He looked at the fold again. “Someone marked a place.”

She pressed her thumb there without opening it. “Maybe that’s where I’d stop too.”

A boy passed behind them, dragging his sleeve across the spines, the sound faint as paper brushing paper. Near the front, the register opened and shut, coins shifting in the drawer. The bell stammered once, then stopped.

The woman slid her copy under her arm, shifting her bag to make space. He kept his a moment longer, then pushed it back until the row leaned straight again.

When he looked up, she was already at the counter. His finger stayed on the folded page before he let go.

Light from the high window stretched over the jackets, then slipped away. The aisle was empty, except for the book pressed back into place. 

Kathryn Aldridge-Morris, "Cold Toast"

Kathryn Aldridge-Morris is a Bristol-based writer whose debut collection of flash fiction Cold Toast has recently been published by Dahlia Books. Her work has been published in various anthologies and literary magazines, including the Aesthetica Creative Writing Annual, Pithead Chapel, The Four Faced Liar, Stanchion Magazine, and elsewhere. She has won the Bath Flash Fiction Award, The Forge's Flash Nonfiction competition, Lucent Dreaming’s flash contest, and Manchester Writing School’s QuietManDave Prize, and her work was selected for the Wigleaf Top 50 in 2023 and 2025. She is currently working on a novella-in-flash, supported by an Arts Council England DYCP Award. Her author website is here. 

About Cold Toast, by Kathryn Aldridge-Morris
Rooted in 70s and 80s Britain, this evocative flash fiction collection captures the moments when girls and women first glimpsed their own power – or lack of it.

Set against a backdrop of smoky kitchens, playground politics, and flickering TV sets, these stories trace the quiet rebellions and uneasy compromises of lives shaped by expectation and constraint. Two women discuss an unfaithful husband at the school gates. A father trades his daughter’s first kiss for a fishing trip. A girl becomes convinced the silent calls to her home are from the Yorkshire Ripper.

By turns tender, raw, and defiant, this collection lays bare the tension between freedom and conformity, love and survival, and what it meant to come of age in a world that wasn’t always ready for you.

You can read more about Cold Toast on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a sample flash fiction from the collection. 

From Cold Toast
Note: this flash fiction, ‘Double Lives,’ appears in Cold Toast and was the winner of Manchester Writing School and Manchester School of Theatre’s ‘QuietManDave Prize’ in 2022, and also appears in Fuel: An anthology of prize-winning flash fictions to raise funds for fuel poverty, edited by Tania Hershman. It is written in the form of a breathless sentence.

Double Lives

I see Gwen at the school gates and she does this thing where she’s looking but not seeing and I’m not in the mood so I wave my hands in her face and she says sorry, but she’s still got this unseeing expression and I ask is everything ok? and she says yeah, if finding out your husband’s living with another woman in the arse end of Wales is ok, and I say what, you mean your husband Rhys? and she nods, and says yes, my husband Rhys, and it’s a crazy way for us to be carrying on because she only has one husband, but I’m not getting it, so I say Rhys Rhys? and she says, Rhys Rhys, and I feel a kind of vertigo because it was only last March when I noticed how he’d started hanging back after dropping the kids off, how easy it was to talk to him about all the stuff no one else ever wants to talk about, like how we all create our own prisons and how we’ll bring our kids up to know there are more choices out there, how I was the only mother he spoke to, the only mother whose jokes he laughed at, and how good it felt to crack a crooked smile in the face Gwen always described as being like a slapped backside―and I think they’ve been together since they were fifteen, to be honest, I had thought a lot about that, about getting to your forties and only sleeping with one other person and if Rhys had ever thought about sleeping with other women before―before that first crazy time―and Gwen says she’s going to get a test from the pharmacy because how many other women has he been sleeping with, and I’m like, you think there could have been more? and she shrugs, and I’m getting this weird double vision thing where the canopies on the horse chestnuts in front of us aren’t lined up with the trunks and my left arm starts going numb, and I say, I’m not feeling too good and she says, Rhys told me you got migraines, and says, bye then, so I say, bye then, and watch her go; double-Gwen surrounded by an aura of fucked electrical impulses only I can see.

Meg Pokrass, "Old Girls and Palm Trees"

 

Meg Pokrass is the author of The First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories (Dzanc Books, 2024) and eight previous collections of flash fiction and two novellas in flash. She is a two-time winner of San Francisco’s Blue Light Book Award. Her work has been published in three Norton anthologies of the flash fiction form, including Flash Fiction America, New Micro, and Flash Fiction International. It has also been included in The Best Small Fictions 2018, 2019, 2022, 2023, 2025; Wigleaf Top 50; and hundreds of literary magazines including Electric Literature, Lit Hub, Rattle, SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, New England Review, American Journal of Poetry, McSweeney’s, Washington Square Review, and Passages North. Meg is the founding editor of New Flash Fiction Review, festival curator and co-founder of Flash Fiction Festival UK, and founding / managing editor of the Best Microfiction anthology series. She lives in Inverness, Scotland, where she serves as chief judge for the Edinburgh Flash Fiction Award.

About Old Girls and Palm Trees, by Meg Pokrass, illustrated by Cooper Renner
Old Girls and Palm Trees is an illustrated collection about iconoclasts, perpetual dreamers, tightrope walkers, living room magicians, cat lovers, and female friendship. The "old girls" in these linked hybrid pieces are women of a certain age who, in an alternate reality, refuse to accept the stereotypes of aging. The collection is conjured from dreamscapes of what just may be true. The poems, prose poems and micros in this collection invite us into an alternate reality where joy and love for same sex friends become a magical force to be reckoned with.  

You can read more about Old Girls and Palm Trees on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read five sample pieces from the collection. 

From Old Girls and Palm Trees

Rosy 

 

Late August we adopt a cat. The house brightens up. We name her after the pinkish-red clouds hanging around like half-eaten cotton candy. Rosy is a kisser, jumping on my desk, sniffing my lips. Twirling around in the living room chasing her tail. 

"Did you know that a scattering of wavelengths and blue light in the sky could be so lovely?" she says as the sky turns even more rosy than the night before.

Plunking Away on the Sofa 

 

It trickles down from my scalp as if it doesn’t know where to go or how to stop going there. "Stop moping about your mop," the old girl says. She smiles at me as if I’m perfectly imperfect and sits with the rosy cat while I plunk away on my ukulele, singing "When the Saints Come Marching In" to an audience of whiskers. 

"All we need now is a New Orleans funeral," she laughs, her arms around the cat—the three of us floating away to the islands.

Grand Entrances

 

At the Japanese lantern festival, the old girl and I hip-bump in, psyched about whatever people think of us, two zaps of purple in the crazy shuffle, licking wasabi from our lips, ignoring our hair, unpedicured, unmanicured, candid with hard-earned frumpiness. "You are my badge of honor," she says, holding my fingers. "You are my lantern in the wind."

Collector of Days

 

Late August, the dampness eased. We watched a squirrel collect nuts and take them back to her nest. I told the old girl, It’s almost September, you’re still here. She smiled. Where else? At the pond in the woods, we cast our fingers into the water, felt the cold sting. At the end of each dripping day we swung on the porch, kissing the rims of our wine glasses.  

 

Diane Simmons, "William Prichard & Co"

Diane Simmons is a writer, editor and Co-Director of National Flash Fiction Day (UK). She has been widely published in magazines such as New Flash Fiction Review, Mslexia, Splonk and FlashBack Fiction and placed in numerous flash fiction and short story competitions. She is the author of four published novellas-in-flash: Finding a Way (Ad Hoc Fiction), An Inheritance (V. Press), A Tricky Dance (Alien Buddha Press) & William Prichard & Co (Arroyo Seco Press). You can read more about Diane on her website here, and connect with her on X/Twitter @scooterwriter.

About William Prichard & Co
William Prichard & Co is a novella-in-flash. The novella starts in 1886, and in 33 flash fictions, it follows 65 years of the Prichard family and its perambulator business, holding up a mirror to society and the changes in attitudes, industrial practices and politics, as the family move from the Victorian era to the 1950s.

You can read more about William Prichard & Co on Diane's website here. Below, you can read one of the flashes from the book. 

From William Prichard & Co, by Diane Simmons

Perfectly Put  

1891

‘You look magnificent, Bertram,’ William says when his son walks into the breakfast room.

Bertram bows, removes his cap and examines it. ‘That’s the school crest,’ he says, pointing to the badge on the front. He runs his fingers over the four blue ribbons that criss-cross over the cap. ‘I like these too.’

‘You’re a lucky boy – it’s a marvellous school. You must make sure you work hard – I will be relying on your brains when you’re old enough to join me in the perambulator factory.’

Bertram giggles and sits down at the table. He displays no signs of nerves for a boy about to start his first day at prep school and tucks into toast and scrambled egg with enthusiasm. He is an impressive child – so clever and self-assured. 

As William eats, he allows himself a momentary day dream and imagines an adult Bertram at the helm of the factory. Such a move would enable William to have more free time to pursue other interests such as politics. William Prichard M.P. would sound rather fine and it would be satisfying to help halt the rise of the blasted Liberals; factory owners like himself should not have to put up with constant government interference. His employees are paid well and have excellent working conditions; he hears no complaints.

His younger son calls out to him and William looks across at him and smiles. Hugh is an exceptionally good-natured child, a pleasure to be around. But he doesn’t have Bertram’s confidence or academic promise. It’s surprising – the operations he endured as a young child meant that he’s always received plenty of attention from the family.

‘When I’m big will I work in the factory?’ Hugh asks. 

‘No, no. It will be Bertram. It is always the eldest who follows their father into the family business.’

Hugh screws up his forehead. ‘But Clara is the biggest. It should be her.’

Bertram laughs and digs his little brother in the ribs. ‘Girls can’t do things like that, silly. They need to stay at home to look after the men and children.’

William lifts his son’s cap and ruffles his hair. For a seven-year-old, Bertram has such a grasp of things – William really couldn’t have put it better himself.  

Diane Simmons, "A Tricky Dance"

 

Diane Simmons is Co-Director of National Flash Fiction Day UK, and a former director of Flash Fiction Festivals UK. She has been widely published in magazines such as New Flash Fiction Review, Mslexia, Splonk and FlashBack Fiction and placed in numerous writing competitions. Finding a Way (Ad Hoc Fiction), her flash collection on the theme of grief, was published in 2019 and shortlisted in the Saboteur Awards in the Best Short Story Collection category. Her historical novella-in-flash An Inheritance (V. Press) was published in 2020 and shortlisted in the Saboteur Awards Best Novella category. Her new novella-in-flash, A Tricky Dance, was published by Alien Buddha Press in January 2024. You can read more about Diane on her website here and connect with her on X @scooterwriter and Bluesky @scooterwriter.bsky.social.

About A Tricky Dance, by Diane Simmons
A Tricky Dance is a novella-in-flash. It is set in 1970s Scotland and follows spirited teenager Elspeth as she navigates the challenges of friendships, family life and ambition, discovering that even in the face of adversity, life can hold endless possibilities.

You can read more about A Tricky Dance on the author's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novella-in-flash. 

From A Tricky Dance

Dancing 

Rory McMaster corners me after double geography.

‘You ken how we had a go at the Gay Gordons the other day?’

‘Aye, you were great.’

He does one of his wee bows. ‘I’ve been learning Scottish Country Dancing at the church hall every Thursday. We do Highland Dancing too. Do you want to come along?’

I hesitate and he goes bright red. 

‘No’ like that,’ he says. ‘I mean I’m no’ asking you out or anything …’

I smile, tell him I know what he meant, but I don’t answer his question. I’m fed up of having to make excuses for not doing things. And this is dancing. I bloody love dancing. I sigh. ‘How much is it?’  

‘It’s only 75p a week,’ he says.

I can’t imagine thinking 75p was nothing. I get £3 for doing my paper round and I’ve to pay for everything out of that. Maybe if I took on a Sunday paper round too? ‘What do the girls wear?’ I ask. 

‘Your gutties and a skirt would do.’

I picture myself turning up in my gym shoes and school skirt, imagine the looks. ‘I don’t think I can.’

When I get to school the next day, there’s a plastic bag on top of my locker. Expecting something gross, I peer inside – it’s a pair of dancing pumps. 

I hound Rory down at break. ‘I can’t take these,’ I say. ‘They must’ve cost a bomb.’

‘They were my sister’s,’ he says. ‘They don’t fit her anymore.’ 

I examine the pumps again. There’s no sign of any wear – there’s not a single mark on them. He must think I’m daft.

‘That’s nice of your sister,’ I say. I stare at the pumps, then at Rory’s worried face and grin at him. ‘See you there on Thursday,’ I say. 

‘Seven o’clock,’ he says, and grins back. 

The Sound of Music: Ekphrastic Review Contest

By Lorette C. Luzajic, editor, The Ekphrastic Review

The Ekphrastic Review is pleased to announce a new flash fiction and poetry contest called The Sound of Music. Explore our curated collection of music-themed artworks, and use them to inspire your stories and poems. 

The judge is Jonathan Taylor, from the University of Leicester. 

The deadline is March 25, 2023.

Selected works will be published in The Ekphrastic Review. First place wins $100 CAD.

Entry is $10 CAD for five poems and/or stories. You can read the rules in full for the competition here. 

You can read more about The Ekphrastic Review on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Aidan Semmens, "The Jazz Age: An Entertainment"

 

Aidan Semmens has been publishing poetry in small-press magazines since the mid-1970s, apart from a gap of around sixteen years from 1985 to 2001. A former winner of the Cambridge University Chancellor’s Medal for an English Poem, and a former chair of the Cambridge Poetry Society, he published his first pamphlet in 1978, but it was not until 2011 that his first full collection, A Stone Dog, appeared from Shearsman Books. Five more volumes have followed since, most recently The Jazz Age, one of the titles chosen by Salt Publishing to relaunch its Salt Modern Poets series. After a 43-year career in journalism, mostly as a sports sub-editor and writer, he now lives in Orkney, where he continues to work online.

About The Jazz Age, by Aidan Semmens

Having previously tended to write darker, more “difficult” poetry – The Book of Isaac is a sequence of “distressed sonnets,” while Life Has Become More Cheerful is largely about the Russian Revolution, its causes and outcomes – I was encouraged to produce this lighter, funnier and more accessible book by the response I got at readings to some of the early pieces in it, which confirmed the publisher’s description of it as “laugh-out-loud funny.” It consists of a loosely structured sequence of prose vignettes, surreal fantasies in which famous figures from (mostly) the past – sometimes singly, sometimes in unlikely pairings – make incongruous, anachronistic appearances in modern settings and situations, or in episodes from times not their own.

I can’t really say how I began writing these rather whimsical pieces, but once I did it became quite compulsive. Characters, scenes and phrases would suggest themselves to me on dog walks, so a whole poem / story (The Fortnightly Review billed them as “very short fictions”) would be fully composed by the time I got home; or they would take shape as I lay awake in bed at night. The process began purely as an entertainment for myself, so I was delighted to find others seemed to be entertained too. I can’t stop now, so there’s sure to be another volume some time, should anyone want it.

You can read more about The Jazz Age on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read four sample pieces from it. 

From The Jazz Age

La vie en rose

Tiring at last of gazing out over the streets and monuments of Haussmann’s new Paris from the heights of Montmartre, Eleanor of Anjou turns on her heel and walks away. She has always loved the phrase ‘she turned on her heel,’ since encountering it long ago in the pages of some otherwise forgotten gem of children’s literature, though there, no doubt, the pronoun was strictly male. In much the same way she has always loved the crunch of feet on gravel, and been drawn to heavy black boots of the kind she now wears, ever since watching as a child the ominous opening of an early episode of Z-Cars.

The first Churchills

Idly flicking through Facebook while she waits for the bus, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, comes across something that causes her to spit her Wrigley’s spearmint in startled fury – a close-up of the Duke in intimate nightclub clinch with her till-now friend Marie-Antoinette. By the time she gets to Woodstock her status has changed from ‘In a relationship’ to ‘It’s complicated.’

A walk in the woods

Arrested by the sudden appearance of a dark shadow among the trees, Walt Disney halts in his tracks. The thing moves just slightly towards him, then stands its ground. He can tell it is bigger than him. It may be a bear or perhaps an unfeasibly large dark mouse with perfectly spherical protruding ears. Walt holds his breath. Somewhere behind him, Pocahontas has the whole scene in the telescopic sights of her high-velocity hunting rifle. She takes careful aim, trigger-finger poised. Are the crosshairs trained on the bear or on Walt? How accurate will her shot be?

Ferdinand Magellan misses his connection at Mombasa

He cannot understand why Africa is known as the Dark Continent. It does not seem dark to him. Indeed, its days seem almost unnaturally, not to say excessively, bright. He should not have elected to wear this shirt. The sun has burned a likeness of Che Guevara into the skin of his chest.

Sharon Eckman, "I See You"

Sharon Eckman is an actor, singer and writer. Winner of the Time Out Travel Writer of the Year, she has been longlisted twice for the Fish Memoir Prize and shortlisted for the Words & Women Prose competition and the Jerwood/Arvon Mentorship Scheme. Short fiction has appeared in Shooter Lit, Words & Women: 3, 100 Voices: An Anthology, 100 Voices for 100 Years and New Flash Fiction Review. She is currently working on a novel and has just completed her first short film. Her website is here. 

Below, you can read a story by Sharon, first published in New Flash Fiction Review here. 

I See You

Grace Savage arrives as the supermarket doors open on Christmas Eve morning. ‘Twice widowed, now shy,’ as she invariably describes herself, Grace browses the fruit and veg aisles, inspecting carrots and parsnips, furtively popping a green grape into her mouth. Her youngest grandson loves green grapes and this is the best way to tell if they are ripe. Grace doesn’t consider it stealing – she will buy after she tries.

She transfers the basket to her other arm; she hadn’t change for a trolley and everyone else was in too much of a rush to be bothered with an elderly lady dithering by the entrance.

Carefully checking her list, Grace Savage treads her accustomed path past milk and yoghurt, stopping for a pot of double cream for the Victoria sponge which had been her eldest grandson’s favourite. Someone jostles her basket arm and she turns to apologise to the track-suited young man who impatiently pushes past her.

“Fucksake,” she hears him mutter. “Get out of the way you stupid old cunt.”

She considers responses. 1. Ignore. 2. Push back. 3. Point out that her ‘cunt’ is not so old and that she feels sorry for the ‘cunt’ responsible for his entrance into the world.

“Do you talk to your own grandmother with that mouth?”

Grace Savage hasn’t said this – a middle-aged man with an army haircut and cold grey eyes accosts tracksuit man who opens his mouth to spit bravado, meets that cold stare and smirks instead.

“Just banter, innit? Bit of bants? Here love, let me get that for you.” And he reaches for another pot of double cream she neither wants nor needs. Banter. Of all the words currently swilling around the world, she particularly loathes this one.

Grace Savage shakes her head. “No thank you,” she answers politely and returns the pot to the fridge, exchanging a look with army haircut man who gives her a brief, chilly smile and fills his own basket with French cheeses and crème fraiche. Tracksuit man mutters something and her hands shake as she transfers the basket again and bumps her knee on the edge of the chiller as she turns away. She hears him huff a laugh and a pulse begins to beat in her forehead.

She alters her usual route and stands in front of a shelf of cat food for the cat she no longer has. Tracksuit man has followed, picking up a two-for-one special on Pedigree Chum. He has a badly-trained crossbreed called Tyson, she decides. Tyson would be a good dog with another owner.

Tracksuit man replaces the dog food and picks up some wild bird seed. Grace is now convinced he is following her; she feeds her garden birds, whereas this man probably shoots them with an air rifle.

The game is on. Grace leads him past sanitary products, home baking and novelty cakes. He remains perhaps five paces behind. Eventually, via a circuitous route taking in electrical goods, cleaning products and makeup, they arrive at the tills. Her basket is now full. He holds nothing but a copy of The Sun.

She queues at ‘baskets only’. He slots in behind her and she hears his breath come short and sharp, can smell cigarettes mixed with something rank and rotting. His soul, she thinks. His bantering soul.

Two tills down, she sees army haircut man. He is watching and she feels a little comforted.

At the last minute, she veers away to the self-checkouts and yes, tracksuit man follows with his threatening breath and folded newspaper. Her grandson’s death went unreported in that paper; they were too busy sharing stories of overpaid footballers to bother with a boy who’d killed himself after relentless bullying. ‘Just banter,’ they’d said. Fourteen years old. His little brother found him swinging from the curtain pole.

She places her basket, scans each item deliberately slowly. His breath is louder, close by her ear and she can hear him muttering. “If you were my grandmother, I’d have smothered you in your sleep. I’d drown your cat and leave it on your doorstep.”

Grace Savage packs the last item – the plump grapes bursting with sweet juice.

‘Unexpected item in bagging area’ says the scanner. She looks around for help. Army haircut man walks by, nods to her with another chilly smile before passing through the automatic doors. ‘Unexpected item in bagging area’ the scanner repeats, insistent. She looks down at her bag. An unexpected item pokes out of the top. A bottle she doesn’t recall picking up because she never uses that brand of bleach. Oh well, since it’s there …

She unscrews the top and with calm, considered precision, flings the contents into tracksuit man’s face and as his agony fills the store and his skin starts to bubble, she reaches into her bag and eats another grape.

Congratulations to Laura Besley!

Many congratulations to Laura Besley, University of Leicester MA Creative Writing student, whose book of micro-fiction, (Un)Natural Elements, has just been published! 

Laura Besley is the author of micro-fiction collections (Un)Natural Elements (Beir Bua Press, 2021) and 100neHundred (Arachne Press, 2021), and flash fiction collection The Almost Mothers (Dahlia Books, 2020).  

She has been listed by TSS Publishing as one of the top 50 British and Irish Flash Fiction writers. Her work has been nominated for Best Micro Fiction and her story, 'To Cut a Long Story Short,' will appear in the Best Small Fiction anthology in 2021. 

Having lived in the Netherlands, Germany and Hong Kong, she now lives in land-locked central England and misses the sea. She tweets @laurabesley.

About (Un)Natural Elements, by Laura Besley

(Un)Natural Elements is a collection of micro fiction – none of the stories longer than 150 words, the shortest being only a handful. Many of the stories were written as tweet-length stories from daily prompts on Twitter under the hashtag: Very Short Story 365 (#vss365). 

While collating them, it became apparent that there were patterns and themes, and also a strong sense of nature. Therefore, the collection is divided into nine elements and each element is comprised of five stories.  

None of the stories have titles. There is no concrete reason for this, except perhaps that, while collating it, it seemed fitting, almost as if a title would detract from the brevity of each piece. 

You can read more about Un(Natural) Elements on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample stories from the book. 

From (Un)Natural Elements

Salt 

III

Tangs of sea-salt air and vinegar-drenched chips lure me to my home town. 

A charity shop window displays my mother’s dinner service and I realise she’s dead. 

Overhead, gulls cry. 

Skin

I

It’s everywhere. It’s there when I close my eyes to go to sleep at night. It’s in my dreams. It’s the first thing I see when I wake up in the morning. It’s stenciled onto my retina, overlaying all the good memories I have of my daughter. It’s there when I recall her body with bruises in all the wrong places. 

That smile is everywhere.

 

That it-wasn’t-me smile; that I-know-people-in-high-places smile; that released-due-to-inconclusive-evidence smile. 

The same smile I saw fade just before I cut it from his face. 

At home, I pull down my daughter’s childhood worry box and blow off the dust which curls and dances in the quiet of her room. I open the lid, and without looking at the faded notes in her child-like scrawl, put the smile inside. ‘All gone,’ I whisper, just like I always did, and put the box back on the shelf. 

(Previously published as ‘Silenced’ in Emerge Literary Journal and nominated for Best Micro Fiction).

Lorette C. Luzajic, "Winter in June"

Lorette C. Luzajic writes from Toronto, Canada. Her flash fiction and prose poetry have been widely published, including in Cleaver, The Citron Review, JMWW, The Miramichi Reader, Unbroken, Ghost Parachute, Cabinet of Heed, and numerous anthologies. She won first place in a flash contest at MacQueen’s Quinterly and was longlisted at Furious Fiction Australia. She has been nominated three times each for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Lorette is the creator and editor of The Ekphrastic Review, a journal devoted entirely to literature inspired by visual art. She is also an internationally collected collage and mixed media artist. Her website is here. 

About Winter in June, by Lorette C. Luzajic

Winter in June is a collection of flash fiction and prose poetry, small stories haunted by art history and memories real and imagined. Each piece is inspired by an artist or a work of visual art, but stands alone. You will meet a monk, a stripper, a man obsessed by taxidermy, and take a ride on a train with a man who isn’t there. You will smoke salvia divinorum, the most psychotropic plant known to humankind. You will sample salami in Italy, and join a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Death in Mexico City. You will see the phantom of Flatwoods for yourself, reluctantly attend a bullfight, fall in love with a convict, search for Andy Warhol’s grave, and ask a machine to grant your deepest longings. You will swim with a barracuda and watch a man eat his own grandmother. You will also visit a safe space, an art gallery where there is nothing to see but clean white walls. Even with all this terror and enchantment, it is really just a scrapbook of snapshots of everyday moments and ordinary magic.  

Winter in June is available here. You can see more details here. Below, you can read a sample piece from the collection. 

From Winter in June

Night Flight

Imagine, we were half bird. Our flight is fleeting, yes, but still we sometimes slipped into the sky. You are new to this world and don’t know the half of it. Even so, you show us the way. How to slay the dragons, how to turn the page. We gnaw on plastic poultry legs and rubbery bananas and you fake punch a random price into a toy cash register, hold your grubby paw out for my pocketful of coins. I wouldn’t have wished the world on you, but here you are. You have arrived, starry eyed and surprised. You have a blue-green bike and a matching bow in your hair. You love cucumbers and mangos and the frilliest pajamas. Every word is a victory and you’re starting to string them together. We were dancing in our sock feet in your toy room, stripes and polka dots a blur in your swirl. If only we had more ice cream, you say when I pull out the goodnight story. You stall for time before lights out and I guess it’s the same for all of us. Lord, just one more year, just one more day, just one more hour. But soon you are drifting through the clouds and I watch sleep soften your small face. The moon is your witness, I think, kissing you where she does on your dimple. I cover you in a thin sheet, watch your shifting shoulders, small wings dark as earth.  

“Night Flight” first appeared in Gyroscope Review.

Gaynor Jones, "Among These Animals"

Gaynor Jones is a writer based in Oldham. She is the recipient of a 2020 Northern Writer’s Award for her short story collection in progress, Girls Who Get Taken & Other Stories. She has won or been placed in writing competitions including the Bridport Prize for flash fiction, the Mairtín Crawford Short Story Award and the Bath Flash Fiction Award. She has performed her work at spoken word nights in the North West and at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe with For Book’s Sake. Her website is here. 

About Among These Animals 

Among These Animals is a novella-in-flash that traces the lives of farmer Derfel and his daughter Carys from the 1950s onwards in North Wales. An experimental take on a traditional historical saga, the hybrid form of the book reflects the themes within: this is a story about how family can break us, but can also put us back together again. 

You can see more details about Among These Animals on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a sample from it. 

From Among These Animals

Yolk 

The letters are carved like a secret. The base of the thick tree trunk at the entrance to the farm now bears her name forever. It will stretch and grow with the tree, the letters reaching skyward, growing as the boy who carved it grows, until the leaves reach the clouds and she is nothing but a memory. 

Owain had tried to climb the tree but Carys shooed him away. She can hear him bashing stones together at the top of the drive. She wants to be alone to feel the carving under her fingers, to imagine the hand behind it. 

Carys does not know which farmhand it was; it could be any of them. She has heard them whispering about her as she passes in the yard in her summer shorts. She could stop and join in with them, could watch their cheeks turn crimson as she leans over to roll a marble or toss a jack, but she is not interested in such games. Instead she roams the fields after school, shirking her work, beheading dandelions that have no right to be growing there anyway, looking for the young man with the dark eyes and the scarred arm. Lately he lingers when he drops off the keys after his work, taking warm cups of tea or slices of honeyed toast, whatever her mother offers. 

Carys is leaning down in the late autumn sun, tracing the letters of her own name, when she feels the body behind her. A hand moves onto hers, the sleeves rolled up above it just enough to show the criss-cross pattern of wire in flesh. The hand flattens out her own until it covers the carved letters, and a voice whispers her own name into her ear. She feels a peck-peck-pecking low down in her groin as though there is an egg in there, something trying to get out. When he turns her around and presses his mouth onto hers, the egg bursts open, and it isn’t a bird in there, but the white, and the yolk, viscous and warm, flooding her body. 

Her eyes are closed. She is gone. She doesn’t hear Owain drop his stones. She doesn’t see him run towards the fields. She doesn’t feel the rain, thick and heavy, falling onto her skin. 

Carys arrives home to her mother cracking eggs into a pan for the morning batter. The shells pile up, jagged edges slotting into each other imperfectly. The twins are in their pyjamas, tearing at pages in a comic book. Carys grabs a towel and rubs at her hair. Her father looks up at her and then up at the clock, and then back at her. Carys drops the towel and keeps her hands at her side, refusing to flatten down her skirt or check her arms for tiny scratches from the tree. 

‘Come on now, boys. Let’s get you to bed.’ 

She looks back over her shoulder at her father at the kitchen table, rolling an egg in his hand. He is moving it gently, as if he knows how easily it might be broken. 

Congratulations to Isobel Copley!

Congratulations to University of Leicester MA Creative Writing student Isobel Copley, whose story "Too Much Space to Dream" recently won Cath Barton's 2021 Flash Fiction Competition.

Isobel says she is and always has been a dreamer. Fortunately, as a wannabe scribbler this is at last of some value. She is the co-owner of the best little second-hand bookshop in France which gives her legitimate days, weeks and months to read and dream all day long. Winning Cath's competition was the best encouragement for a mature student on the cliff face learning curve that is an MA Creative Writing. Isobel remains astounded and delighted: "Thank you, Cath, for nurturing the magic!"

You can read Isobel's winning story here.

Incidentally, you can also read a review of Cath Barton's novella, In the Sweep of the Bay, on Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Laura Besley, "The Almost Mothers"

Laura Besley writes short (and very short) fiction in the precious moments that her children are asleep. Her fiction has appeared online (Fictive Dream, Spelk, EllipsisZine) as well as in print (Flash: The International Short Story Magazine) and in various anthologies (Adverbally Challenged, Another Hong Kong, Story Cities). The Almost Mothers is her first collection and is published by Dahlia Publishing.

About the book
The Almost Mothers by Laura Besley is a flash fiction collection exploring the theme of motherhood.

A first-time mum struggles with her newborn baby. An alien examines the lives of Earth Mothers. A baby sleeps through the night at long last.

Written with raw honesty, Laura Besley's debut flash collection, The Almost Mothers, exposes what it really means to be a mother. 

Below, Laura talks about the experience and process of writing the book. 


Writing The Almost Mothers 
By Laura Besley

I stopped writing for about a year after having my eldest son. Not because I wanted to, but because I was exhausted: physically, mentally, emotionally, and it left no space for anything else. When I started writing again, in fits and starts, one of the first pieces I wrote was ‘The Motherhood Contract.’ Elspeth, the main character, is not me, but like me, she is struggling with becoming a mother, and making sense of her world now that she is a mother. 

As I started writing more, I noticed that I had a growing number of pieces about motherhood, with different characters, covering different facets of motherhood, and in 2018 I did FlashNano (write a piece of flash fiction for every day of November) and most of these pieces were about motherhood too. In December 2018 I put the collection together to enter into a competition. It was long-listed and this gave me the confidence to submit to Dahlia Books when Farhana Shaikh, editor and director, put out a call for submissions in April 2019.  

There’s been a surge in ‘honest’ writing about motherhood, something I felt was lacking only five or six years ago when I first became a mother. There was an expectation of motherhood and the gap between that and reality, I felt at least, was insurmountable. I’d like to think that the overall message of this collection is honesty; we’re not all going to find it easy. 

Here’s an extract from one of the stories:


From ‘The Motherhood Contract.’

You must not tell the mother-to-be that she will lose herself.

Elspeth feels cheated. No-one warned her that she would no longer recognise herself: physically, mentally, and in every other way. She looks in the mirror and wonders who that person is with pale skin and massive purple globs under her eyes; lank and greasy hair; and a body that still looks six months pregnant months after birth.

Meeting her old friends no longer holds appeal as she has nothing to talk about but the baby, and their frustrations seem so trivial. Meeting the women from her antenatal class is unappealing because all they talk about is babies. And going out without the baby isn’t an option.

Typewritten Tales: Call for Volunteers

By Divya Ghelani 

Become an oral historian and learn the hidden story of Leicester's historic Typewriter Strike!

Typewritten Tales is an Arts Council supported Oral History Project about the 1974 Typewriter Strike at Imperial Co. on East Park Road. Participants will learn to conduct interviews with former factory workers. These oral histories will form the inspiration for a dynamic series of local flash fiction events called Typewritten Tales and will culminate in a chapbook publication in partnership with the Centre for New Writing at the University of Leicester. 

The project kicks off with an Oral History Collection training session led by the University of Leicester’s Oral Historian Colin Hyde. Colin runs the East Midlands Oral Histories Archive and will be training brand new oral historians on October 17th, 1-4pm in The Seminar Room, 3-5 Salisbury Road. You’ll learn about life on the factory floor, race relations in 1970s Leicester, and how the strike affected workers from the city’s settled working-class community and newly-arrived immigrant workers. We welcome a diverse pool of applicants!

PRE-BOOK this FREE Oral History training with Colin Hyde by emailing typewrittentalesproject (at) gmail (dot) com. 

"Growing Up" by Shae Davies

Here is a short prose poem by Shae Davies. Shae is a second year student at Leicester, studying Creative Writing. She writes: "Soon turning 20, I've been thinking a lot about myself at 17. Naive, lost and a bit out of place."

Growing Up

I didn’t know myself then, back when I was seventeen
And my coats were longer than my skirts
I thought I knew the world,
Thought I knew what the world wanted from me
But when I looked at myself in the mirror
I wasn’t sure who was looking back
And when I looked out at the world,
I wasn’t sure if anyone was looking back

Cathedral Stories, by Hannah Stevens

On Friday 3rd March Leicester Cathedral became a gateway to an alternate universe, a place where hidden treasure was discovered, where angels fell to earth, where wooden carvings began to talk.

As part of the BBC Storytelling Festival over 100 children from local schools joined lecturers, tutors and writers from the University of Leicester’s School of Arts for a Flash Fiction workshop. Using objects and artefacts all around the cathedral as inspiration, the young people wrote their own flash fiction (or very short stories) and shared their work to applause from the rest of the crowd.

Here is a story inspired by the Ypres Cross in the Cathedral:


The Ypres Cross


I visit the cathedral every week. I come to see the Ypres cross, to touch the glass that covers it, keeps it safe.


The broken beads wound around the crucifix remind me of the beads my grandmother used to wear.  She wore them for special occasions: for nights she wanted to feel beautiful. She looped the string around her throat and they looked pale against the dark blue of her blouse.


Next she added colour to her cheeks, lipstick to her mouth. She knew her own face well and did this with precision. Later, she slipped a shawl over her shoulders, stepped out to dance with her friends.


My grandmother doesn’t wear her beads anymore. She cannot walk, doesn’t have the strength to lift her legs. She spends her days in bed now, dying slowly from something they cannot cure.


Sometimes she asks me to put powder across her cheeks, to fetch a mirror so she can see. She tells me how she loves to dance and she asks me for her beads.


When I tell her that the beads are broken, that she cannot dance tonight, she begins to cry.

I wipe her tears with my hand, say I love her, but she looks confused. My grandmother doesn’t know who I am. She doesn’t remember me. But she remembers her beads. How they felt cool on her neck and how they moved against the dark blue of her blouse as she danced.

Hannah Stevens

"Caterpillars" by Hannah Stevens

Here is a piece of flash fiction by Hannah Stevens, which was first published in The New Luciad - the literary magazine hosted by the Centre for New Writing at the University of Leicester. The New Luciad will be open for submissions again soon.

Hannah Stevens is from Leicester and is a PhD student in Creative Writing at Leicester University. She has published a short story collection called Without Makeup and Other Stories (Crystal Clear Creators, 2012) and has had stories published in Crystal Voices (2015), The New Luciad (2015) and others.

Caterpillars

They’re laughing. They think it’s all a joke. The youngest one is collecting them from the low leaves of trees. She screams when they move in her hand. The older one holds them beneath the water in the bucket with a stick. 

They are my children and they’re drowning caterpillars. I wonder if they know that these crawling things would’ve become butterflies. 

Soon, the childminder will be here. Maybe she will tell them. Maybe they will cry. 

My bags are already in the car. I have written a note that I will leave by the kettle when I go.