Category: Fiction (Page 1 of 7)

Trails and Tributes

1 April 2026 / Editor

Fiction by Mattea Fitch

The Seminole-Wekiva Trail is connected to my neighborhood rather inconveniently. To get to the shade of its oaks, it takes a mile-long trek through bare Florida sun, reflecting off fresh white asphalt. It’s mostly uphill. Along such a noisy road that my mother always yells after me, “No headphones! Be aware of your surroundings!” She’s not watching, but I still obey. All I have is the sweat running down my back and the irregular pattern of cars whipping by at fifteen miles over the speed limit.

Needless to say, when I bike on this trail, it is no trivial matter. It means I have too many thoughts to process, and some of them need to dissipate through a great deal of exhaustion.

After a few miles under shifting shadows and pockets of golden light, my legs begin to burn. I pull my bike over and sit at a dark green bench. A bit rusty, but familiar.

There is an artist who lives right on the trail. A music fanatic, evidently, because all his fences are painted with tributes to the greats. Amy Winehouse, John Lennon, Kurt Cobain… lots of other faces I’m too young to know.

What must you do for some dedicated suburban artist to paint you on his fence? For people to recognize that painting? What must you do for your name to be in the morning news when you die?

A hunched-over old man walks his bike up to my bench as I rest my chin on my water bottle in thought. He throws his arm to the space next to me. “Anyone sitting here?”

“I… no, sir,” I reply.

He sits and lets out one of those impressive sighs that only comes from old people. He wipes his sweat, takes a huge gulp from his disposable water bottle.

“Ah,” he says, looking from my face to the fence. “The Wall of Dead People. Cheery, isn’t it? Just what I wanna see on my afternoon adventure.”

I laugh humorlessly. “Makes you think.”

“About what?”

I suddenly get embarrassed. Here I am, sitting on a public bench and contemplating death as strangers rush by. A bit dark. “I don’t know. But this can’t all last forever. What’s the measurement? When I die, how will I know I didn’t waste all my time?”

“What, kid, you’ve got dying on your agenda today?”

“No.”

“But you’re thinking about it.”

“Yes,” I say far too quickly. “Well… not thinking about doing it. Not like that. But just… thinking. About what it means.”

“Hmmph.” The old man reclines, spreading his arm over the back of the bench. “That’s something that goes away over time. Not for some people, I guess, but it did for me.”

“How?”

He chuckles and slaps his bicycle seat as if it’s the shoulder of an old friend. “I get out. I look up instead of down. I move instead of hiding away. I talk to strangers on benches. Those are things anyone’ll tell you. Things that can help. But there are some things that happen by accident.”

I’m only partially paying attention, as the breeze cools my sweaty face. It’s always at this spot, after a couple of miles, where I would stop as a child. I swung my legs while my dad pulled a huge water bottle out from his backpack, giving me some to share. Or I would sometimes try to draw the huge tree in front of me—the roots are so thick, they push the asphalt up into little mountains.

Funny, how memories can overlap in a single location. One point in space overflows with ideas, epiphanies, regrets, starting points.

“Sometimes,” the old man continues, “God gives you people that stick to you, like ivy on a dead, rotten tree. And you think, maybe, that the ivy is so full of life and far too beautiful to be sticking to that sickly thing. But it stays. It’s unfair, but it does.

“And that might be what’s stopping you from… well, you know, doing it instead of thinking about it.” He jabs a finger into my shoulder. “You’ve got some people holding you back. Let them.”

He takes another long swig from his crackly water bottle. At seventy years old, he doesn’t have much in the way of wrinkles. Only crow’s feet and a bit around the mouth from smiling.

As the moments stretch on, I forget he’s even there. The flaky, neon petals of the crape myrtle inch along the pavement. Skinny bicycles cut thin lines through the air while the normal ones push on. Squirrels hug to branches far too thin, causing acorns and leaves to flutter down.

The Wall of Dead People is hardly something to look at, really. That is, compared to the life that surrounds it.

Mattea Fitch is a freelance fiction writer based in West Palm Beach, Florida. She grew up in Orlando, Florida. Along with her passion for creative writing, she works as a peer mentor who helps fellow students discover their unique style.

Volcano

14 March 2026 / Editor

Flash Fiction by Robby Sheils

Noel Hammond looked out his townhouse windows to the fractured sidewalk, its bricks covered in ant hills and tufts of beige grass. All of Brooklyn had been dry for a month, and the seventy-year-old grew to believe the bizarre fantasy that it wouldn’t rain until he pitched a new mystery for adaptation.

Amid the drought, Noel struggled to find his next success. He had made a living from his mystery novels, many of which went on to become bestsellers, though most of his success came from production companies buying him out. He had recently written a novella’s worth of pages on a retreat to his lake house, about a boy who fished dinner for his folks and fell in love with the girl in the cliffside mansion. It marked the fastest story he ever wrote, but it ended without a twist. And a movie without a twist seemed foolish, and so Brooklyn remained dry.

Noel recognized that blaming himself for the dry spell was a silly thought. But it was also a haunting one. He agonized over this supernatural burden until his stomach grumbled, and with great reluctance he stepped outside.

The afternoon sun hung high, and the clouds above him loomed massive and ominous. It was the hottest June in memory; every afternoon the sky threatened to break and every night it balled up and looked ugly and never did. All waiting on Noel.

Lost in a brainstorm, he meandered the quiet, upscale streets of Fort Greene. He daydreamed of Polly. Had it really been five years since she passed? Every step down their block felt undeserving. She was the one who pointed out the flower beds, who took great interest in holiday decorations and raved about the font of street numbers. Never Noel.

In the deli, four Hispanic men sat huddled, joking about something. Or nothing. The cold air from the AC snapped Noel back to Brooklyn, and rainless guilt spread across his arms in goosebumps.

He grabbed a ham sandwich and moved along. Home happened to be past an old Episcopalian church, but the heat made him lightheaded and so he paused to stare at the copper steeple, its years worn into a muted patina.

And right then and there the sky made up its mind and broke wide open. In an instant, rain fell in buckets and the road rumbled like a revving jet engine.

Noel ran as fast as his arthritic knees could take him, beelining for a skinny overhang outside a laundromat. A woman, about Noel’s age, and a boy were also marooned. Out of courtesy, they shuffled as close to the edge as the tiny cover allowed. The woman stood tall and elegant, and the boy had shins that marked a lanky and painful stretch of puberty. He held an orthodox paper-mâché diagram of a volcano, complete with a construction paper forest and a bright blue river of churned up Jell-O.

“Thank God for roofs!” he yelled over the slugs of rain, attempting to dodge awkwardness from their suddenly close quarters.

“Ah!” the woman agreed, along with other words that got swallowed in the storm.

“Pardon?” yelled Noel. The rain beat the roof at an alarming speed.

“My grandson! He wants to become a chemist!”

“Aha!”

The woman edged closer to Noel. He could see that when she smiled, like she was now, two dimples peeked through her wrinkles. “What about you?” she asked. Her voice sounded clear and steady.

“Sorry?”

“What did you want to be? When you grew up?”

She stared at him warmly, like an old friend or lover, and the inside of Noel’s chest fluttered in a way it had not in years. He glanced at his shoes and down the road. “An author.”

“Ah, that’s a good one,” she said, looking towards her grandson. “And what did you become?”

Noel rubbed at his knuckles. “An author.”

She laughed with her whole body, beautiful and earnest, and rounded it off with a clap that rang above the rain.

“Have you written anything good?”

“I think so.”

“Are you writing something now?” she asked, turning back to Noel.

Despite years of answering this very question—his agent’s favorite one—it still caught him off guard. Her tone sounded neither critical nor demanding, but honestly curious. It defied business. “Trying to,” he said.

“How much have you got done?”

“The whole thing.”

There was that laugh again.

“The whole thing?” she asked.

“Yes, but it needs a twist.”

The rain toned down to a pitter. The grandson used his pointer finger to do touch-ups on his Jell-O river.

“That’s silly,” she said, dimples showing again.

“No one would buy it,” he said.

“I would.”

The rain had nearly died, and the wet road began to glint. Noel looked at her, straight in her unblinking hazel eyes, and believed her.

“Would you like to get a coffee sometime?” he asked, the words out of his mouth before he could digest them himself.

“Yes,” she said, “as a friend. Could we be friends?”

Noel surprised himself with a smile. Like a boy crushing on a schoolteacher, he recognized the flutters in his stomach as butterflies of respect, not romance. Having someone to talk to—about whatever, about nothing—he missed dearly.

The two brainstormed a café where they could meet, and then said their goodbyes. Noel crossed the road, smelling the sweet metallic rain, and wondered if others would read his story. It was the fastest one he ever wrote for God’s sake, and it may as well be finished.

Robby Sheils is an emerging writer from Portland, Maine, who primarily writes slice-of-life fiction. He spent two years as an editor for The Telling Room, and in 2022 released a self-published novel, Shelley Avenue. He was most recently published in Rock Salt Journal. He now lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Blue Sky

21 February 2026 / Editor

Fiction by Darlene Eliot

Unfurl the blanket and sit down. Lie back with your nose tipped to the clouds. Listen to Rainbirds sprinkle water on the grass. Let mist caress your shoulders and cheeks. Watch the bees flirt with open-faced roses. Run your hand over the damp grass. Get up and rush back to the house. Retrieve the Sumo orange you forgot when you ran outside, shoeless and expectant. Rest your head on the blanket. Let the sun warm your eyelashes. Pine and eucalyptus tickle your nose. Run your fingers over the orange rind. Cradle it the way you wish the universe would cradle you, if only for a moment.

Darlene Eliot’s work has appeared in Bellingham Review, Sundog Lit, Epiphany, and elsewhere. She lives in California.

Rudolf and the Flashing Red Lights

25 December 2025 / Editor

Fiction by Kenneth M. Kapp

Many explanations have been given as to how Rudolph’s nose became red. One claims that Rudolph was often found dipping in Santa’s punch bowl and another that reindeers, like dogs, were always sniffing around and once he got too close to a freshly painted fire hydrant. Nevertheless, they don’t concern our Rudolf, who was born in America and whose name is spelled with a “f.” It’s the tips of his antlers that are red and not his nose!

Rudolf is a natural leader and the head of his herd. When they are on the move, he’s at the front showing them the way, the old routes for pasture deeply etched in his mind. He’s always concerned about their well-being; on the trail he’s continually looking back, making sure everything is OK. It would be a poor leader who let his herd become sick or lost. Rudolf was not going to let it be said of him: “Tsk, Rudolf’s a poor leader, a sorry excuse for a reindeer!”

And so, he took note when the herd began showing signs of lethargy and their coats appeared rough. He circled back and began asking questions: “Donner, how’s your appetite?” “Blitzie, how long have you had this discharge from your eyes and nose?” “And, Dancer, you seem to have trouble walking, never mind dancing. What’s up?”

No one could give him an answer. Me thinks I should meditate on this. (Recently, when the herd paused at night, Rudolf read Shakespeare and now his thoughts were so peppered with “Me thinks” that he often found himself sneezing and losing his train of thought.) He knew the signs of scurvy, and he knew what to do!

“Cranberries,” he addressed the herd from a hillock, “cranberries! You need to eat cranberries. You’re manifesting signs of scurvy and need vitamin C in your diet. And cranberries are an excellent source. Tomorrow, I will lead you to a bog with wild cranberries. We’ll be there before noon!”

The entire herd cheered. And true to his words, by noon the next day, they were at the bog. Few reindeer had ever eaten cranberries, and most wouldn’t recognize a cranberry if it bit them on a hoof.

Vixen was impatient. “So, now what? It’s too cold to go swimming and there’s ice on top!”

“I’ll show you what to do.” And he broke the ice with his antlers and plunged his head into the freezing water, emerging with cranberries stuck on the tips of his antlers. “These,” he said, sounding as if he was an ancient Greek orator, “these are cranberries, and you can eat them right off my antlers. They have lots of vitamin C which cures scurvy. And then we can take turns spearing cranberries for each other. We’ll all get healthy together!”

Comet was impressed. “Rudy, that’s a wonderful idea. Cooperation cures us…and I think those red cranberries on your antlers are cute.”

Rudolf was happy: the reindeer were helping one another. He didn’t care that the cranberries stained the tips of his antlers and even left some in place as a badge of honor.

It was only later that Chaz, the proprietor of “This & That” in North Pole, New York, 12946, wired the tips of Rudolf’s antlers so that the cranberries would flash at night. But that’s another story.

Moral: Using your head to help others may have results that are not immediately evident.

Kenneth M. Kapp lives with his wife in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, writing late at night in his man-cave. He enjoys chamber music and mysteries. His stories have appeared in more than ninety publications worldwide. Please visit www.kmkbooks.com.

The Original Real Housewife of New Jersey

28 November 2025 / Editor

Fiction by Jim Parisi

The trouble started when my father said the spaghetti and clams looked like cat food. My mother said he was a real comedian and should be on “The Tonight Show.” He scooped mounds of spaghetti onto her plate and asked, “How about this? Is this funny?” She told him to stop being a pain in the ass. He kept adding spaghetti to the pile. She warned him to cut it out or there was going to be trouble. 

I focused on twirling spaghetti around my fork. My younger brother made slurping noises as he shoveled spaghetti into his mouth. I flicked a piece of clam into his hair. He whined for my mother, who was busy spitting words at my father.

“That’s it. I’ve had enough.” She slammed her hands on the table and pushed herself out of her chair. “Get out of the way, Bobby.” I was confused about what I was getting out of the way of, but I did as I was told. 

She yanked up the table. It landed on its side where I had been sitting. Plates, cups, and utensils clattered across the small dining room floor. Rivulets of Hawaiian Punch and Shop Rite cola coursed their way through mounds of spaghetti, clams, and salad. 

My brother yelped. I stared in disbelief at what had been my dinner. My father started to say something but stopped when my mother glared at him. “Come on, boys,” he said. “Let’s leave your mother alone for a few minutes.”

My mother grumbled in the dining room while my brother and I sat on the floor of our bedroom, watching “I Dream of Jeannie” reruns with our father. Major Nelson’s slapstick efforts to hide Jeannie from Dr. Bellows seemed more grounded in reality than what I had witnessed. I asked my father if we should help clean up. He said, “Let’s let Mom have some time to herself.” He told me to change my pants; they smelled like clams.

After putting on my pajamas, I crept out to the dining room as the “F Troop” theme blared behind me. The table was in its usual place; the rest of the room betrayed no signs of the wreckage. 

My mother was mopping the kitchen floor. “I’m almost done. Then I’ll come talk to you and your brother.” 

“Are you still mad because I hit Mikey with a clam?”

She laid the mop against the stove. “No, Bobby, I’m not mad at you. Your father was in a mood and did something that made me angry, and I lost my temper and went overboard. It’s the Sicilian in me.”

“Do I have Sicilian in me?”

“Half as much as I do. You’re lucky.”

“What’s the rest of me?”

“Neapolitan. So maybe you’re not so lucky.” She smiled. “I’m kidding. But I’m sorry for making you upset.”

“But this girl Denise in my class—”

“I know that Denise. She’s got a mouth on her.”

“She said her parents had a fight, and her mother cut up her father’s clothes when he left the house, and he had to move, and her mother has to work all day, and she comes to school with a key on a rope around her neck.”

“Cut up all his clothes? That woman’s something else.” She squatted to look me in the eye. “Daddy’s not going anywhere, except maybe the doghouse.”

“Where’s the doghouse?”

“Ask your father in a few days.” She put her hands on my shoulders. “Don’t worry, kiddo. Everything’s going to be fine.”

“But when I told Denise that we were having spaghetti and clams for dinner, she said clams were stinky and she was going to make macaroni and cheese out of a box all by herself when she got home. Then she called me a baby when I told her I didn’t know how to do that.”

“You tell Denise it’s not because you’re a baby, it’s because you’re Italian.” She ran her hands through my hair. “I’ve got an idea. Want me to teach you how to make macaroni and cheese out of a box?” She reached into the back of the cupboard above the counter. “I bought one a couple of years ago in case we had an emergency and I didn’t have any sauce in the fridge.”

She filled a small pot with water, placed it on the stove, and let me turn on the burner. Then she called to ask my father and brother if they wanted something to eat. My father yelled, “How about leftover spaghetti and clams?”

“Your father’s a real laugh riot.” She helped me tear open the packet of cheese powder. “I don’t understand why people eat this garbage. How hard is it to make a real cheese sauce?” It sounded hard to me, but I kept my mouth shut and focused on stirring.  

After declaring the pasta to be al dente, she poured it into the cheese mixture. Then she stabbed the macaroni with a fork and took a bite. “Not bad. Now you can tell that Denise to go pound sand.”

The four of us sat around the dining room table, eating the dinner I helped make. With each forkful the lingering aroma of clams and cloyingly sweet Hawaiian Punch grew fainter. My parents laughed as my brother speed-talked his way through a story that none of us could follow. The table remained upright.

“That was good,” my father said. “Almost as good as your spaghetti and clams.”

“Back away from the table, Bobby.” My mother pressed her lips together—in what I hoped was a smile—and shook her head at me. I stayed in my seat. 

“A regular Rodney Dangerfield, your father thinks he is.” She continued to look at me. “Someone let Johnny Carson know we’ve got a real comedian in the house.”

Jim Parisi is a freshly unemployed editor who lives in Washington, D.C., with his long-suffering wife and their sweet but highly reactive boxer-pitbull mix. His flash fiction has appeared in FlashFlood Journal and The Good Life Review.

Temptations

1 November 2025 / Editor

Fiction by Fabiana Elisa Martínez

I never told you about the onion soup. How I craved it and how I came to abhor it. You asked about my aversion to white towels. This story is less sinister, though. I was never again able to approach a table displaying that dish since that late September in 1940, when ironically that was the only meal I would have, even if the crew had served it for breakfast. At first, I attributed the inexplicable craving to my permanent state of surprise and elation, to the waves of adrenaline swaying in my heart just as I recreated and foresaw the intrepid, ardent nights your grandfather and I were waving under the changing sky. The new constellations prying through our second-class porthole were not the only elements transitioning during our trip. The breeze had also dropped its autumn cloak once we passed the Canary Islands, and even its salty flavor preannounced the spring I would meet in Buenos Aires.

But my craving for onion soup did not respond to the changing parade of hours as we moved steadily into southwestern waters, and I detached myself from Lisbon, as Sarita’s polka-dotted handkerchief, waving her newlywed friend goodbye, faded in my memory. This was not the typical Portuguese onion broth that my grandmother used to prepare to enhance the flavor of our meager chickens in the Alentejo. This was a French dish your grandfather described to me with every atom of elegance and bad accent he could produce. I don’t remember it well. A brownish, thick, and sweet concoction, crowned by a golden piece of fried bread drowning in the golden magma of melting cheese. I wonder if my obsession with the soup sprouted when your grandfather decided to stop talking to me in my language and resort to Spanish so I would be ready for my new life. I sensed a change beyond the salty air.

Anyway, after the two first weeks of waves, wet recliners on a crowded deck, and late dinners in the second-class dining salon, I only wanted to have onion soup. None of the other delicacies tempted my appetite: the roasted meats, the yellow beets, the abundant selections of chocolate cakes and bonbons that were always sliced and tried before by the silent first-class travelers. That third week of my honeymoon, the boat took revenge on my happiness, and a stubborn sickness pushed away the new bride’s effusiveness. The tides in my heart were replaced by a whirlpool of vertigo that only the caramelized onions in the soup seemed to appease.

“Come on! We are wasting the music,” your grandfather would say pulling my arm while I resisted, anchored to my chair, and regarded the musicians with a hooded apologetic look. “I cannot dance, all is moving under my feet, darling,” I muttered every time, covering my mouth with a white napkin preluding an inelegant accident. I marked my muffled words with inappropriate hiccups more proper of the inferior classes sleeping already in the belly of the boat. Your grandfather always thought that a rumba, a cha-cha, or a tango never danced was a waste, an irretrievable killed opportunity. Perhaps due to my sickness or because of his metropolitan nature, he did not hesitate to ask any other available young lady. His young Portuguese wife could not understand the urgency of a handsome gentleman who knew how to play the keyboard of women’s spines better than all the Cole Porters they might be in love with.

The sea continued to rock us, the sky, the carefree dancing partners of your grandfather, and my uneasiness until we approached the new city. I had been told that it would look like a mix of Paris and New York inside a kaleidoscope. I had created in my mind a golem-like landscape with parts of big metropolises that I did not know. As tempted as I was, I tried to spare the image I fathomed of any lacy sections of Lisbon. But the sky got dark and darker, and when I was able to climb to the deck under the call of multiple sirens, I just saw a black, pervasive cloud of smog, factory chimneys, and an immense port. The countless accents of the arriving immigrants seemed to leave their print on a carpet of soot.

I craved one last time the sweetness of the onion soup, as a melancholic smile followed my vision that onions can also make you cry when you think about them. My husband was showing the profile of his city to his dance companion from the previous night, a Dutch beauty who did not understand a word he said but looked at him with the same awe that I felt when, only two months ago, he had rescued me from a broken shoe at the entrance of the café A Brasileira.

Our boat, my crib of love and dizziness, docked at three o’clock on a grey Friday afternoon. By then, I knew that the black cloud was an omen, that your grandfather was a spoiled soul in disguise, and that the real vessel had always been inside me. I was rocking your mother and half of your soul, my child, in her. All maternal grandmothers cuddle half of their granddaughters in their bellies like Russian dolls marching in a revolution of cells. I followed all the wrong temptations, and I am happy I did. You come from a sea of insane love, a broken map of constellations, and the breeze of an unknown hemisphere. You come from me.

Fabiana Elisa Martínez authored the short story collections 12 Random Words and Conquered by Fog, and the grammar book Spanish 360 with Fabiana. Other stories have been published in Rigorous Magazine, The Closed Eye Open, Ponder Review, The Halcyone, Hindsight Magazine, Libretto Magazine, and the anthology Writers of Tomorrow.

Photo by Carlos Andres Gomez on Unsplash

The Brightest Stars Burn Fastest

1 November 2025 / Editor

Fiction by Richard Gotti

Your oil paints and soiled rags, my unfinished story. Your newspapers in plastic sleeves, my underwear limp in the dryer. Your cats on the kitchen table nibbling the birthday tulips we forgot to bring. Your daughter at her father’s house crying to go with us. The new moon rises.

We drive east eating turkey sandwiches, the moon roof open to the March-chilled air and Etta James singing How Deep is the Ocean— the ocean we’re seeking this first weekend of spring. Then the Cape Cod Canal’s charcoal waters, white-veined from lights on the Sagamore Bridge. On Route Six four lanes dwindle to two. Dunes grow. Suddenly harbor lights glister beyond like blue stars scattering light in the invisible turbulence.

Richard Gotti’s short fiction has appeared in Chautauqua, Literature Today and The RavensPerch. A finalist in the Lost in Words international fiction contest, he co-authored the nonfiction book, Overcoming Regret. His plays have been performed in New York’s Hudson Valley and Finger Lakes.

Rita and The Thin Man Welcome 1940

1 September 2025 / Editor

Fiction by Lois Anne DeLong

Rita’s feet hurt. She had been patrolling the aisles since the theatre opened at ten that morning. Outside, New York City had begun celebrating the end of 1939 hours ago. But here, in this dark hall, there was no sense of anything new coming into being. And, by the time Rita re-entered the real world, the big moment would be over. 1940 would already be in motion.

Meanwhile, here in the Roxy Theatre, where the walls weep paint from its glory days before the Great Depression, the only meaning time had was how much more of the film was left to unspool. Rita guessed it had perhaps another 15 minutes to go. A different film might have helped the time pass quicker. Down the street, they were showing “Raffles,” starring David Niven as a charming jewel thief. Here it was the day’s sixth showing of “Another Thin Man,” the third installment of a film series that, in Rita’s mind at least, was wearing thin. Really, she thought, how many times can you watch Myrna Loy and William Powell make elegant chit chat?

“Hey, William, I could use a martini about now,” she said under her breath, as Powell, in the guise of detective Nick Charles, was prepping yet another drink on the screen. “Come on,” the fictional conversation continued, “It’s New Year’s Eve, for Pete’s sake. Why does everyone get to lift a glass but me?”

As she braced herself against the wall to take some stress off her aching legs, Rita found herself beginning to doze off. At one point, she barely caught herself from pitching forward onto the threadbare carpet. Like other elements of the once beautiful Roxy, the rug had seen better days. The city may have recovered from the Depression, but the Roxy reaped no such benefits. She brushed a hand across the wall of the small alcove, near the exit sign and the shedding paint fell like leaden rain. Rita was grateful for the job—shift work like this made it possible for her to continue her studies— but it certainly wasn’t the most pleasant place to spend one’s days.

As she lightly stomped her feet to reduce the tingles, she found herself questioning every decision in her young life. She let out a sigh as she acknowledged how much easier it would have been if she had accepted Allen’s earnest proposal and become a New Jersey housewife. Instead, she had chosen to continue her slog toward a degree that did not even guarantee her a job, and a life in one room of a boarding house so small she knew all the intimate details of her neighbors’ sex lives.

The back door of the theatre opened quietly and Charley, the manager, stepped in. Rita moved into the aisle to be sure she was seen. Charley hated it when the staff sat during their shifts. He must have seen her at her post, because he waved vaguely in her direction and then shut the door behind him. A lifelong bachelor, with no family to speak of, the Roxy seemed to be Charley’s whole world, and it was a world he guarded with surprising ferocity. Rita didn’t like him much, but she had to admit he was fair, and everything he asked of his staff was designed to keep the marquee lit. For all this, he had earned her grudging respect in recent days.

Rita walked back a few aisles and as she did, each step reminded how long she had kept her vigil by the exit. She contemplated heading up to the balcony now to get a head start on clean-up. But, there were dangers in the dark up there, from tripping on the stairs to being groped by the drifters who used the balcony as their own personal flophouse. Instead, she decided to sit out the last few frames of the film. Charley be damned, she thought. As she sat down, the rush of blood through her weary legs was as refreshing as one of the ice-cold bottles of Coca-Cola chilling by the snack bar.

A quick check of her watch revealed that 1940 was only seconds away. What would that year hold? And, would she still be celebrating the start of 1941 within these walls? She was too tired to contemplate the answers to such questions. Instead, she watched William, Myrna, and their surprisingly intelligent dog solve yet another mystery. As the credits began to roll, she wondered if Charley might want to have a drink when they finished closing up. There was a New Year to welcome and neither of them had anywhere else to go.

Lois Anne DeLong is a freelance writer living in Queens, New York, and an active member of the Woodside Writers literary forum. Her work has appeared in Dear Booze, Short Beasts, Bright Flash Literary Journal, The Bluebird Word, and DarkWinter Literary Journal.

Bees

16 July 2025 / Editor

Fiction by Iris J. Melton

“How many this week?” I asked.

“Three,” she answered.

“Three’s a lot. What did they say?”

She continued typing. The tap of the keys was the only sound other than the dog licking his paws under the table.

“The usual. Not the right fit for us. The selection process is so subjective. Thank you for submitting, but…”

She continued to type. “Would you mind making the coffee? I just want to finish this bit before I take a break,” she said, adjusting her tortoiseshell glasses by the earpiece.

I ground the dark, oily coffee beans and placed them in the carafe of the french press. When the water I put in the microwave began to boil, I poured it over the ground coffee. Then I collected two teacups and saucers from the cabinet. None of the teacups matched. She only used bone china teacups, never mugs. She said the coffee tasted different from a teacup. Lucy and I drank from mugs at home. But it always felt like drinking coffee was a secondary activity when I drank from a mug. I was also reading, writing, or driving. But when I drank from a teacup with a saucer, I was only drinking coffee. That was the primary activity.

“I dreamt of bees again last night,” she said as I placed the cups on the table.

“Bees?”

“You know those films where they show all the bees crawling over a big piece of honeycomb?” She pushed the press down to the bottom of the carafe slowly and then poured the coffee into my cup. It smelled of bittersweet chocolate and orange peel.

“Was it scary?”

“Scary?” She considered for a moment and pushed a loose strand of her dark hair behind her ear. Then she poured coffee into her own cup. “No, not scary. There were just…so many.” She held the cup under her nose and inhaled slowly. Then she lowered it to her lips.

“Have you been reading about bees?”

“No. Swords,” she answered.

“Swords?”

“For the book. How they’re made. The percentage of carbon to steel. How a smith forges and heats and quenches them,” she answered.

“Quenches? What’s that?”

“It’s when the sword-smith plunges the heated blade into oil or water to rapidly cool it. Part of the process,” she answered. “I like that word. Quench.” She took another sip of coffee. The teacup made a small, clinking sound as she replaced it in the saucer. “What would it mean if it were a noun. What would a quench be?”

“Oh, I don’t know…maybe a small, nocturnal mammal that eats only…honey?” I mused. I rubbed the knees of my corduroy trousers and looked at the gray afternoon sky out the window.

“Hmmm…I like that. Only honey,” she said. “How many for you this week?”

“Five,” I answered.

“Five’s a lot. Time consuming,” she said.

“What else am I doing?”

“Still, five. Five resumes, five cover letters. It’s a lot of stories. A lot of different stories.”

“Everything’s a story,” I answered.

“Oh, I forgot to tell you…I got an interesting rejection last week. It wasn’t the usual rejection letter.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“They said so. They said This is not our usual rejection letter. Then they complimented me on my writing and suggested I send them more.”

“Well, that’s encouraging, isn’t it?” I asked.

“A no dipped in honey is still a no,” she said. “Imagine if it were like the old days and I had to print everything and go to the post office.”

“That would be a lot of postage,” I said.

“Expensive…paper, ink cartridges, postage.”

“But you’d get to know the postal workers. Probably by name,” I said. “And they’d probably talk about you when they went in the back. They’d say, It’s that aspiring writer again.”

“Oh, I hope they wouldn’t say that.”

“What would they say, then?” I asked.

“Writer. Just writer.”

She poured more coffee into my cup, and then refilled her own. The loose strand of hair slipped out from behind her ear.

“Don’t they die after they sting you?” I asked.

“What?”

“Bees. Don’t they die after they sting you?”

Her mouth slowly widened into a wicked looking grin. “They do,” she answered.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“Just an evil thought,” she laughed. She stretched her hands on each side of her cup, with the fingers outstretched. The nail of her index finger was broken down to the quick. “I know what a quench could be…a writer in her forties who desires to be published but has not yet found a publisher. In spite of actively looking.”

“Assiduously looking, maybe,” I said.

“Yes. That’s better. Assiduously looking.”

“Or maybe a quench could be a man in his forties who desires to be employed. But has not yet found a job. In spite of assiduously looking,” I said.

We sat in silence for a moment.

“Where are you off to next?” she asked.

“The post office, oddly enough. I have to mail some pillows for Lucy,” I said.

“Who ever thought people would buy so many decorative pillows?” she asked. “I think Lucy is brilliant.”

“When we were first married, Lucy used to buy a lot of decorative pillows. We even used to fight about it,” I said.

“It probably wasn’t the pillows you were fighting about,” she said.

“No, it wasn’t.”

“What were you fighting about?” she asked.

“I don’t remember. I just remember being really angry about the pillows. There were so many!”

“Like the bees.”

“The bees?” I asked.

“There were so many,” she said.

Originally published in The Bluebird Word in July 2022.

Iris Melton is a former waitress/attorney living in the Appalachian Mountains. She learned to swim from a book and has a perverse affection for the Oxford comma.

Mid-Summer Saturday

4 July 2025 / Editor

Fiction by John Sheirer

2:10 p.m.: He awoke with an insect crawling inside his left ear. 2:05 p.m.: Darkness. Only darkness. 2:04 p.m.: He was surprised to notice the unscuffed red paint on the underside of the wheelbarrow. 2:03 p.m. The leaves rustled in the swaying treetops even though there was no wind. 2:01 p.m.: Sweat stung his eyes as he leaned on the sledgehammer handle. 1:38 p.m.: He split the first chunk of wood, beginning the pile for that night’s neighborhood firepit gathering. 1:36 p.m.: “Of course I won’t overdo it,” he assured his wife as he stepped from their air conditioned home.

[Originally published in The Bluebird Word in November 2022.]

John Sheirer lives in Western Massachusetts and is in his 30th year of teaching at CT State Community College Asnuntuck in Enfield, Connecticut. His latest book is the award-winning short story collection, Stumbling Through Adulthood: Linked Stories. Find him at JohnSheirer.com.