What My Grandmother Said
by Louise Bezirdjian My maternal grandmother was a difficult and demanding woman. She lived in another seaside resort along the coast from our house. I have not one happy memory of her to relate, except perhaps the garden. She had a fuchsia bush and I loved to pick the flowers and turn them into ballerinas by pulling out the extra filaments, leaving just two, like slender dancer’s legs. She had a narrow, square paved path running down the middle of the lawn which was perfect for playing solo hopscotch but I had to remember to wipe the chalk markings after I’d finished or there would be trouble.It was strangely cold and dark in her house, even in summer. There was red Linoleum in the lavatory – she called it a lavatory – and I could hardly reach the flush chain. The paper was hard, in a box on the floor. The kitchen was cramped, smelled of stale bacon fat and, to protect the prized, it was covered in a dusty, crumpled, polythene bag. Curled inside a mauve toweling shower cap in her bedroom wardrobe was an exceptionally long rope of her plaited auburn hair, cut from her head when she was 30. Sometimes she uncoiled it and held it against my own head, and it brushed the back of my calves. She maintained her hair was so long and heavy she was forced to have it cut to assuage her headaches and back problems.
She was sour; her mouth turned down at the corners. Her small eyes squeezed together in a constant disapproving frown. She must have been badly wronged in her life to make her so mean, mean spirited as well as ungenerous.
She never read me stories or bought me sweets, or baked a cake with me. She did teach me how to knit, but the lessons were fraught, she was impatient and would snap like a cat if I didn’t catch on to an instruction immediately. I don’t ever remember hugging her or her cuddling me. There would only be a polite peck on the cheek, when I would smell that fusty, old lady smell, a mix of moth balls, a little body odor and lavender water.
There are letters my father wrote during WW2 where he mentions her fondly, so perhaps she wasn’t always miserable.
29 September 41 I was very sorry to hear that your mother had to have as many as 16 teeth extracted–what a horrid appointment it must have been to look forward to! It was bad enough when I had one pulled out so I dread to think how very painful it must have been for her.
From time to time I was sent to stay with my grandmother when my parents had the occasional escape from their boisterous children. I dreaded it. I was with her on 15th February 1971, the day the United Kingdom embraced decimalisation. She sent me to the butchers on the parade to buy sausages for our lunch and I ran excitedly all the way back to her house. I wanted to show her the shiny new decimal coins I had been given as change which jingled in my pocket. She was absolutely furious, ordered me straight back to the butcher to insist on her change in ‘proper money’. I was twelve years old, shy, cowered and so ashamed of my grandmother’s wrath.
On her sideboard in the dining room she had a large silver ball, about the size of a small bowling ball. It was never dusted because the dust that collected on top was alleged to have magic powers. Very occasionally I was allowed to place one finger on it, wipe off a little dust, and then make a silent wish. Needless to say, the wishes never came true: mine was probably Please can someone come and fetch me home in the next five minutes?
2nd October 1942 Are you going to French classes this evening or going straight home to finish a pullover and listen whilst Mummy recounts her experiences that afternoon in an air raid shelter?
I was transfixed by her underwear which consisted of layer upon layer, summer and winter, no matter the weather. Voluminous knickers went on first, followed by a heavily boned corset with dangling suspenders on which were hung thick beige stockings, 60 denier, with seams up the back. The corset ensured she always sat ram-rod straight, and walked with the deportment of a debutante even in her 80s. Her brassiere was satin, shapeless and offered little if any support to her sagging breasts which lolled over the top of the high corset, and had thick straps and multiple rows of fastening hooks and eyes at the front. She would pull a woolen vest on top of the bra and corset and long woolen bloomers on top of the stockings and suspenders, and finally a silk petticoat to smooth the silhouette of whole ensemble. It took her a very long time to get dressed and undressed each day.
We used to visit her neighbor, an ancient paraplegic called Mrs.. Goddard, who lay on a day bed in her geranium filled conservatory, her spidery veined hands clawing at the heaps of hand-crocheted blankets covering her skeletal body. If my grandmother perceived me to be naughty she would pinch my thighs and order me not to cry or you’ll end up with legs like Mrs.. Goddard’s. I never actually knew what poor Mrs.. Goddard’s legs looked like, hidden as they were under the blankets, but I knew she couldn’t walk and I’d seen her awful hands which was plenty enough grist for my imagination.
June 1942 What thousands of happy memories come back to life as soon as I give our double bed a thought! Watching your pretty little face deep in slumber, making love to you in the afternoons at Blakewood Court, straining our ears for Mummy’s unexpected arrival…
There was another time that springs to mind. Rarely was I allowed in the dining room with its dark wood sideboard and matching dining table and chairs. Her knees were old and arthritic so I was given a yellow duster, stiff with polish and a tin of bee’s wax and told to clean the furniture, starting, crouched on the floor, with the barley twist table legs. She watched me, upright, beady eyed, her now salt-and-pepper hair crimped into artificial waves. I must have been about seven or eight and I said something like,
“Mummy doesn’t make me polish the furniture; she just dusts it.”
“Your mother was a harlot in the war!” she replied.
I didn’t know what a harlot was. It didn’t sound like a very nice word, and I was too frightened to ask. I couldn’t make head nor tail of the definition in my children’s dictionary: A woman of the night. A prostitute.
About the Author
Louise Bezirdjian was born in Beirut and grew up in England. She spent many years sailing small boats across oceans with her children, living and working in the West Indies. She has just finished writing a memoir about family secrets and lies. Following her husband’s premature death, she brought up her four children whilst graduating in Screen Production from Southampton University, U.K.. At the same time she began to lose her hearing. She became a filmmaker writing, shooting and editing material for diverse documentaries from tigers to prison inmates. She lives by the sea in England.
Women who leave with the Seasons
by Shuchi Masrani
The women in my family do not die normally. They disappear in seasons. My grandmother vanished during the monsoon.
My mother dissolved into summer. And I, well, I have always belonged to the wind. The village says this like a curse. I wear it like an inheritance.
The first thing u must understand is this: There are women born with bones made of obedience. And there are women born with storms stitched beneath their skin.
The second kind never survives quietly. I was born in a coastal village where the sea constantly sounded angry, the houses leaned into one another like gossiping widows, and every woman there knew how to lower her eyes at the right moment.
I never learned.
At eight years old, I climbed roofs instead of helping gut fish. At twelve, I cut my hair with my father’s rusted blade because a boy at the market said long hair made girls softer.
At fourteen, I was caught swimming too far into the ocean at dusk, floating alone beneath a bleeding orange sky while the village women screamed from the shore that something would take me.
Something already had.
The sea.
The dark.
Myself.
My mother used to say: “Wild girls are loved in poems and punished in real life”.
She would say it while braiding jasmine into her hair, her fingers smelling of coconut oil and saltwater. There was always something exhausted about her beauty, as though life had spent years trying to sand her down into something smaller.
She had once been wild too. You could tell by the way she stared too long at migrating birds, by the way music affected her shoulders before it reached her feet, by the way she stood at the shoreline every evening as if waiting for herself to come back. But then she married my father.
And slowly, invisibly, she disappeared without ever leaving.
My father believed women should be contained. Contained laughter, contained hunger, contained ambition, contained grief.
He spoke gently in public and cruelly in private, which is the most dangerous kind of man. The kind nobody believes could hurt you because he never raises his voice loud enough to echo.
He liked the silence in the house and I filled every room with noise.
I hummed while sweeping, read books while cooking, asked too many questions and stared directly into people’s eyes when they spoke. At sixteen, I told him I wanted to leave the village someday.
He looked at me for a long time before laughing, not because it was funny, but because he thought it was impossible.
“You were born here,” he said, chuckling. “Women like you always come back broken.”
Women like me!? As if I belonged to some ancient species of ruin.
The year I turned nineteen, something strange happened: the sea stopped returning the bodies. Fishermen began disappearing, three in one month, then five.
The village priest said the ocean had become cursed because women had forgotten modesty. Old women nodded solemnly while men drank nervously after sunset. And the sea just kept swallowing people whole.
I remember the night they blamed a girl named Leela. Leela, with her silver anklets and loud, free laugh, who smoked secretly behind the temple. Leela had once kissed a tourist girl beneath the pier because she wanted to know what freedom tasted like.
Someone claimed they saw her walking near the cliffs before the last fisherman vanished. That was enough. Villages like ours do not need proof, only a woman different enough to carry the weight of everyone’s fear. They dragged her mother into the village square first and then her.
I still remember the color of her lip where someone struck her, I remember the sound of men calling her a witch, whore and a curse on the village.
I remember standing frozen in the crowd while rage clawed at my throat like an animal trying to escape and I remember my mother gripping my wrist hard enough that it had started to bruise.
“Do not speak”, she pleaded, whispering.
But something inside me had already stood up.
There is a particular moment in every woman’s life when fear and fury meet each other and one always devours the other. That night, fury won.
I stepped into the centre of the square. I do not even remember deciding to move, only the feeling of heat beneath my skin.
“You blame women for everything you cannot control”, I spat out.
The crowd went silent and even the sea seemed to pause.
My father looked horrified, while the priest looked murderous. And suddenly every woman in the village was staring at me with the same expression: not of shock but of Recognition. As if they had all once possessed this exact fire in their being before life and society taught them to swallow it.
“You fear the ocean because it behaves like a woman”, I continued, my voice shaking but growing louder. “Unpredictable. Powerful. Impossible to own.”
Someone spat near my feet, but nobody dared to interrupt me.
“Maybe the sea is not cursed,” I said. “Maybe it is just hungry after centuries of being fed women”.
That was just the beginning, not the end. Beginnings rarely arrive beautifully. They arrive like storms.
After that night, the village changed around me, or maybe it simply revealed itself more honestly. Women stopped speaking when I entered rooms, while men watched me the way hunters watch unfamiliar animals. Children whispered stories that I could control tides, my father stopped looking at me altogether. Only my mother remained unchanged. Which somehow hurt the most.
One evening, I found her burning old photographs behind the house; she fed them to the fire one by one without expression. In one picture, she was younger than I had ever seen her, hair loose, laughing openly beside a motorcycle, wearing trousers instead of sarees.
Another version of her, one which was alive and free.
“You could’ve left,” I said quietly.
The fire crackled between us, “Yes,” she replied, “Then why didn’t you?”
For a long time, she didn’t say anything, but then she whispered, “Because survival and living are not always the same thing.”
That night, I could not sleep. The wind outside sounded like women screaming underwater. I walked to the shoreline, the tide was violent, hewing against rocks beneath a swollen moon. And there, standing ankle-deep in black water, was Leela.
Alive, Bruised, but Unbroken.
“They wanted a monster,” she said without turning toward me. “Sometimes I think women become monsters simply because men need them to.”
I stood beside her silently. The ocean sprayed salt across our skin.
“You know what terrifies them the most?” she asked. “What?” “A woman who no longer fears being alone,” she replied, smirking.
Those words entered me like a prophecy.
Three weeks later, my mother disappeared. No note. No body. No explanation. Just an open back door moving softly in the wind. The villagers said she must have drowned. My father said nothing at all. But I knew. Women in my family do not die normally.
They disappear in seasons.
And my mother had finally chosen herself over survival.
For the first time in her life. I think I loved her most for leaving.
After she vanished, something inside me split open completely.
I stopped apologizing. Stopped lowering my voice. Stopped pretending softness was the only acceptable shape for a woman. I began writing at night. Stories and poems first. Then confessions, then truths sharp enough to cut open generations. I wrote about mothers who buried their desires alive, girls taught to confuse silence with goodness. Women who turned themselves into smaller and smaller things just to be loved safely. I wrote until dawn every night, as if language itself had become a form of escape or resurrection.
Months later, during another violent storm, the sea finally returned a body. Not a fisherman, but my father.
They found him tangled in fishing nets along the shore, eyes open toward the sky as if shocked the world could end without his permission.
The villagers called it a tragedy, but the women did not.
At his funeral, old widows looked strangely peaceful. Leela squeezed my hand once beneath the rain and for the first time in my life, I felt no fear standing among ruins. Only space, air and possibilities.
I left the village before winter, no dramatic farewell, no tears. I took my notebooks, three dresses, my mother’s silver ring and boarded a bus heading north before sunrise.
As we drove away, the ocean glimmered beside the road like something alive and watching. I pressed my forehead against the glass and suddenly I understood. The women in my family were never disappearing. They were returning to themselves.
My grandmother in the monsoon.
My mother in the summer.
And me, finally with the wind.
Years later, people still tell stories about the village by the sea. They speak of cursed waters and vanished women. Of storms that 0arrive without warning. Of girls who became impossible to tame. But sometimes, if the night is loud enough and the tide violent enough, the women there swear they hear laughter carried across the ocean wind.
Wild.
Unashamed.
Free.
And somewhere far away, in a city that does not know my old name, I write stories about women who survive becoming themselves.
Not because the world allowed them to,
But because they chose to anyway.
About the Author
Shuchi Masrani is a writer living in South Dakota. His poetry, short fiction, and creative non-fiction are about the people, challenges, courage, and land of the Plains states. Epp is a finalist in The Good Life Review’s 2026 Honeybee Poetry Prize.
A Place for Our Blue
by Alice Jade
Blue — bright blue, sharp blue, lightning blue — is, apparently, a color not found in nature.
You first hear it one autumn morning from a sixth-grade classmate, too clever by half, and then echoed not much later by a teacher: blue is a color not found in nature.
At ten years old you’re far too shy to try and belabor the point — you accept right away that you hadn’t understood things properly before, because that’s what good, smart children do. In this world, all blues brighter than those grey “blue” cats are unnatural, and you should’ve known that already but it’s better late than never. Into your mind it goes, filed away in your growing archive of trivial, immutable facts about the world: blue is a color not found in nature.
Sometimes, though, you just can’t help but wonder.
Blue – rich blue, paint blue, blue like your favorite shirt – is the colour of so many minerals. Cobalt, lapis lazuli, sapphire… it might take a little effort – digging and searching and polishing to a fine gleam – but they’re all at least as vibrant as any blue light on a screen.
Is effort not natural, then?
That’s the wrong question to ask – it’s sarcastic, apparently, even if it really is what you wanted to know. Your teacher is unamused; he accuses you of starting fights.
So you nod along the next time it comes up, saying nothing. Blue – vibrant blue, electric blue, saturated blue – is a color not found in nature.
Except that it happens in the sky sometimes, when the Rayleigh scattering lines up just-so: blue, blue, blue, as stark and rich as any paint. On clear, bright wintry days, the snow tosses it back, faded but only by a little.
Surely the sky is natural, isn’t it?
You get some clarification that time: when people say “nature” what they mean is life – flora and fauna. Blue exists, yes, but it is not found in nature because nearly no creature reflects it. That’s not a bad thing – it’s just that blue light is full of energy, nourishing, too valuable for living beings to give away. That means that if you look at nature – at life – the way you’re supposed to, you shouldn’t be seeing much of it.
So, for the most part, blue does not occur in nature. For the most part, it’s the color that fills your head, and that haunts you. In this world, there’s a place for blue — deep blue, propane blue, your blue — and that place is outside the realm of the natural.
What does that mean, then, for someone who has always been blue on the inside? Everyone agrees that it’s so, both that you are blue and that blue is not a part of nature.
Your student, your friend, your little sibling happens to put it like this one day:
“Humans are part of this world too, aren’t we?”
And there’s your answer, years after you needed it but perhaps right on time all the same.
About the Author
Alice Jade was born in Toronto, raised in a lab (also in Toronto), and remains based in Toronto.
The Hum
by Todd Epp
My dad, Rodney, sleeps
in his electric easy chair.
Ninety-three years.
Mouth open.
Slipper half off.
The TV is on the news,
soundless.
Angel, our poodle, takes the deck chair.
Again.
She sits in the sun,
lifts an ear
when the refrigerator cycles on.
I sit where I see them
and listen to the house.
About the Author
Todd Epp is a writer living in South Dakota. His poetry, short fiction, and creative non-fiction are about the people, challenges, courage, and land of the Plains states. Epp is a finalist in The Good Life Review’s 2026 Honeybee Poetry Prize.
Snettisham Scalp
by Glennis Moore
They call it the stubborn sand
as it never gives way to the sea
despite its urges, threats and promises.
Soft words whispered
on warm summer days,
or curses thrown on the wind
in the depth of winter, have no effect
except to litter the never-ending beach
with dank puddles and sinking mires.
In the distance waves lap and roll
but the sand withstands it all
a haven for gulls and terns
and intrepid fishers
digging for bait in the evening gloom.
About the Author
Glenis Moore is a writer who currently lives in the flat lands of the Fens just outside of Cambridge UK with her partner and three rescue cats. When she is not writing, she reads, makes beaded necklaces, knits, cycles and runs 10K races slowly.
Funny If It Makes You Cry.
by Favour Agiande
Before the first time I was ten, I was afraid of my father. He was angry all the time. He scowled at everything. We bit our thumbs to please him but that didn’t work. I turned another ten, again, the fear still there. The fear is constant like it came to stay, like the next year after I was the first ten and squatted outside to pee and blood came out instead. I ran to my mother, another constant, who’d said “it has come to stay’.
I hope she never leaves. I remember the last time I wrapped my arms around my father’s frame. I was ten years plus three years old. My father returned from a trip to see his mother and would not look anyone in the eye. Maybe he thought to humor us when he moved to a new house with a new woman. She was younger. She wore mascara. Take ten years, plus six years, call it my ‘rain’ years. I spent it crying at his bad joke, ‘It’s not funny if it makes you cry!’
I am ten plus seven years old. I am still afraid. I still bleed. I still have my mother. My rain years give way to script-a-suicide-note days between school and visits to my mother who is leathery. She has circles where her face is trying to swallow her eyeballs. The only thing she wears well is her smile, unwrinkled at it’s edges. I cry less often, so I gain weight…all those held-back tears. Did I forget to mention Beulah?. She is the girl child they welcomed when they thought I’d be a boy. Beulah is model-toned, her eyes lean out of their sockets. She is the sibling that takes the separation and swallows it for seven plus three years.
It is two thousand and too empty one. She moves 17 hours away. So much road between us. Trauma may feel like luggage, but you can’t forget it in your room, so, once she settles in, she pukes that separation over everything she owns. She is anxious most of the time. she cries. she calls, crying. Nobody told her how hard our bodies remember – The small of our backs, our hands, the way we act when we are tired. She takes pills to help it forget, but they don’t work, so she prays and cries some more. No comfort, just that same thin hollowness we both feel. The same one women who have to father themselves must feel. We are forced to learn how to distract our bodies, and to disrupt the old patterns, we must adopt new gestures consciously. Pray. Set boundaries.
It has been ten and three plus years since my father told a really funny joke.
I know because I laughed at his not-so-funny ones and didn’t really cry.
His humor must be the heirloom my sister and I are trying so hard not to inherit.
About the Author
Favour Agiande is a writer and visual artist from Obudu in Cross River State, Nigeria. Being the youngest child meant playing by herself a lot and running errands, which helped shape her imagination and gave her a knack for figuring things out — now she uses that to write about social and environmental issues, her relationships and life as she sees it. She studied Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Calabar and has participated in several group exhibitions and has several art publications. When she’s not writing or making art, she’s singing and playing guitar.
The Soul Call
by Elle Becker
My cell phone rang. I answered with my eyes still closed.
“Hmmmlloo?”
“Hey,” Mom said. “Quick question. Do you think something can be wrong with you if you feel completely fine?”
I rubbed my eyes and checked the clock. It was 2:17 am.
“What? Mom? Where are you?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I called. I can’t find my car, and everyone keeps ignoring me.”
“What street are you on? Turn on your location.”
“I tried. It says I’m nowhere,” she continued.
“Mom, where are you? What do you see around you?”
“Everything looks like it’s already been used.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s like I arrived after something finished.”
I sat up very slowly.
Fully awake now.
I had buried Mom on Tuesday.
“Sweetie, I think my phone is broken. All my files and photos are archived.”
With a dry mouth, I rasped, “Mom, who’s there with you?”
“Oh, lots of people. They’re all people I used to know. I saw my high school English teacher. They’re not the same, though. It’s all different.”
The line crackled with white noise. “Mom? Mom, are you there?”
“Did we talk today?”
“No.”
“Can you remind me what I’m like?”
“You’re–you’re my mom.”
“Yes,” she said. “But who was I before that?”
I tried to answer. In the darkness of my bedroom, something pale and shimmering moved across the ceiling, like fading light forgetting how to shine. Something else in the room shifted. Not physically — just enough that I noticed the room had always been wrong.
“I think I’m being watched,” she said.
The line filled with a low, distant pressure, like sound underwater.
“Sweetheart,” she said, carefully, “when I forget you, do you still exist?”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t answer.
Something had just occurred to me.
I could not remember what she looked like. Suddenly, I couldn’t remember the sound of her laugh. Or the color of her hair. Or whether she had ever called me sweetheart at all. “Are you still there?” she said.
“Stay on the line,” I said. “Just stay.”
“I don’t think I can. There are fewer places to stand.”
Then, after a pause:
“Also… who is this?”
The call ended.
I sat in bed, holding my phone in the dark. I sat that way until the sun rose through my window, paralyzed with fear as I frantically tried to reconstruct her face from memory.
It felt like trying to remember a word that had never existed.
By the time the velvet sky had begun to lighten, the effort had made me exhausted. I fell back asleep.
When I woke, the sun shone and it was beautiful out, but the rest of the day felt surreal. I knew something important had happened during the night.
I couldn’t remember what.
I went to bed with a stone in my gut, feeling like I was missing something I couldn’t remember.
At 2:17 a.m., my phone rang. I woke up groggily and fumbled for the phone.
“He–hello?”
A voice on the other end said, “Quick question. Do you think something can be wrong with you if you feel completely fine?”
I listened politely, but I had no idea why the words made me uneasy. Or why I felt responsible for a stranger’s life.
About the Author
Elle Becker is a writer, speaker, and instructor. Published in Prevention Magazine, ACPA’s The Chronicle, Five on the Fifth, Twenty-Two Twenty-Eight, The Mighty, and various literary journals, she won the Tempe Writing Competition and was named Highly Commended in the McLellan Poetry Competition. She writes on Medium and Substack. She teaches From Idea to Edit, her six-week writing course, and serves as an editor for the humor publication Muddyum. A consecutive speaker at Medium Day, Elle loves all dogs, good books, cheese, and nice humans, and looks forward to someday becoming a crazy dog lady.
Cobwebs By Beth Sherman
Thomasin the witch got her haircut at the usual place – Hello, Gorgeous, at the corner of Willow and Vine. Her stylist was a chatty elf who she tended to ignore as she pondered the Big Question. Should she ask Bellatrix to move in? She’d consulted the Magic Eight Ball. Inconclusive. She’d read tarot cards. Made lists of the pros and cons. Cast at least 18 spells and still she couldn’t decide. As scissors danced frantically round her skull, she watched her raven locks slip to the floor. She missed her hair already. The back of her neck felt naked.
“Did you hear about Nimue?” the elf was saying. “Up and broke it off with Bellatrix. Scandalous. You can’t find a trustworthy witch these days.”
Thomasin felt the room go loopy, like she’d had too many Cranberry sours.
“Which Bellatrix? When?”
“The one with two warts and a tattoo of a ferret on her hip. Day before yesterday, so I’m told.”
“I must fly,” Thomasin told the elf.
“Wait. Your hair’s lopsided.”
“Never mind. Fix it next month.”
Thomasin ripped off her smock, threw some coins at the elf, grabbed her broomstick.
She soared over the treetops, past the Sign of the Crooked Finger where she and Bellatrix had first kissed. Bella the Traitorous. Bella the Terrible. The wind tore at her dress, blew her too short bangs into her eyes. The world was a dark and terrible place.
At home, she dragged her cello over to the bed and began playing Stravinsky’s Firebird. The chords were dissonant. They jangled the way she liked. She’d played this piece for Bellatrix on their third date, right before things got physical. Out the window of her hut, the moon was a thin piece of grey cheese. Illuminating shaggy pines, all the dead plants in her yard, the outskirts of her lonely, barren life.
Thomasin stopped playing abruptly when she heard someone banging on her front door.
Peeking through cobwebs, she saw Bellatrix holding a bouquet of dead lilies.
“No one’s here,” she called out.
“Tommy. Let me in. I have tickets to the Wizard Ball.”
Thomasin flung open the door, sizing up the witch who’d torn her heart in two.
“What happened to your hair?” Bella asked. “Did you stick it in a blender?”
“My hair is the least of your problems. I heard all about you and Nimue.”
Bellatrix rolled her eyes. She looked enchanting in her torn black dress.
“That wicked elf. Honestly, Tommy. It didn’t mean anything.”
Thomasin felt her skin turn a paler shade of green. “Then it’s true?”
“Let’s forget the whole thing happened. I much prefer you.”
Thomasin hesitated. Staring into Bella’s alluring gray eyes, she longed for more moonbeams and magic.
Bella flashed a snaggle tooth smile. “You and me canoodling under the stars at the Ball? How about it?”
Taking a deep breath, Thomasin cast her 19th spell. Lightning flashed. The sky clattered and broke open. Her body trembled.
When she was done, she set Bellatrix the frog on her bedside table and resumed playing her cello. The loud, jarring chords drowned out the frog’s plaintive croaking.
About the Author
Beth Sherman is the author of How to Get There from Here, a novella-in-flash (Ad Hoc Fiction). She has had more than 250 stories published in literary magazines. Her work is featured in Best Microfiction 2024 and 2026 and Best Small Fictions 2025
After the Rain
by Isabella Aleksander
Rainwater gathers in parking-lot constellations
every puddle briefly believes it is the ocean
The clouds leave as dramatically as they arrived
that’s Miami for you, qué cosa
A shopping cart drifts through reflected skyscrapers
an accidental astronaut of aisle seven
while ibises patrol the margins of civilization
The air smells like wet concrete and mangoes
like somebody left summer running overnight
Kids kick a soccer ball through a rainbow oil slick
the sunset overcommits, as usual
pink layered over orange layered over impossible
About the Author
Isabella Aleksander is too often confused with pop culture’s most topical red heads. She used to make the claim that her hair is orange not red. She isn’t creative but sometimes her poems are. Her favorite word is circumlocution.
Ponder
May 27, 2026
[editor’s note – Which is ultimately more essential: technical perfection or emotional truth?]
While glancing through the list of unknown words and their definitions trying to learn and use as is well. Known that, words can charge the direction of the course, life destiny, either for a good or bad. Ponder stuck out, just like that with a little pingpong ball on a stick standing and, one can think that is hiding strongly between other words and letters.
“Ponder,” I said. Looking at it thinking it will give me approval for actually say it out loud correctly the first time. Turning around and looking for the closest English-speaking person, who can verify my pronunciation. It was Tommy, little four foot nine lady that always had a mad face walking around, actually scary.
Pondering later while doing the same job and have the same stress as she has I realized was not mean, just stressed. Politely, with a low voice I showed her the word and said “Ponder.”
Tammy smiled and said “Yes.”
The pride of me verbally and loudly, correctly read and use my little ping pong word made sure it stuck in my memory while I ponder thought past in my memory lane.
Rays from the Sun
It’s been 23 years, and many stories and things have happen and is still happening. Many are there too with a remembrance (satkan – A Serbian (Latin) word that translates to “weaved” in English) in brain part, that requires actual therapy (shrink) in order to remove negative cells and have to re-learn new behavior.
After all hope and disappointment happens from humans and their offspring their only hope is Rays from the Sun that come through window, early in the morning, above the head to let everybody know – Everything is going to be fine.
Is amazing, it always sneaks behind, gentle. Even though the window is large, with 8 ft. high and 14 ft. wide with metal brackets in between to hold it properly so it doesn’t fall.
Behind those windows is a whole wall of glass. Those ones are 4 ft high and 50 ft. wide. (which always gives problems for being cleaned due to the size of it).
No matter how dirty or any obstacles are in between, Rays of Sun always find a way to gentle sneak in and touch the top of the head.
I’m trying to draw words in the Sun Rays that come through windows in the morning above my head.
About the Author
Selma D. came to the United States when she was nineteen years old. She has raised two teenaged sons and keeps a sharp eye out for abandoned firewood on the side of the road. She speaks Bosnian, German, English, and she writes stories in a little notebook under the counter where she is employed.