April 2025 | fiction
When she came to live with me, my mother spent most of the day in her green velvet chair, which the movers had placed in the guest bedroom, along with some of her other favorite items – framed photos, her bookshelf, a lamp shaped like a teapot. The rest we put in storage.
She had bought the chair at Bloomingdale’s years ago. Button-tufted with birchwood legs and Victorian flair, it was the color of an olive in a dirty martini. Sometimes she sat and read the paper, but mostly she stared into space, trying to remember.
Do you want to go to the mall, I’d ask. To the supermarket, Target, the park, the movies, out to lunch, for a drive, on a walk through the neighborhood? All met with the same glazed stare, like she was the sole survivor of a plane that had crashed on an unfamiliar planet. I worked from home but tried to make time for her, to coax her from where she was hiding.
Finally, I dragged the chair outside, where it sat on the grass, an uncertain remnant of a bygone age. The back lawn was fenced. She sat there in her bathrobe, too exhausted for the usual niceties about the weather. Wrens flitted through the maples, cocking their heads in puzzlement. My bee balm returned, fluffy red stalks wobbling in the breeze. At night, I moved the chair under a soffit, where rain and the sprinklers couldn’t reach.
One afternoon, I went to tell my mother that lunch was ready and she wasn’t there. The chair was empty, save for a blue jay pecking the velvet determinedly, convinced worms lurked underneath.
I ran to my car, scoured the surrounding blocks. Mom, I shouted from the open windows. No answer except for a few lawn guys who gave me the stink eye. I didn’t want to involve the police. Wasn’t sure what she’d do if an officer approached. Finally, I pulled over and resumed the search on foot. It hadn’t been that long. I’d brought her more tea at 11 and it wasn’t even noon. Who was I kidding? It was way too long. Panic tickled my throat, like I’d swallowed a dragonfly. I’d made her wear one of those bracelets with her name and my address on it. But who would see it? She wasn’t a lost dog, where people checked the collar.
I started to run aimlessly, down cul-de-sacs and courts, sprinting past houses whose eyes were like vacant windows. I ran until I couldn’t take another step. Screaming Mom Mom Mom Mom. Then I heard a sound I recognized. Laughter. The gate was open. Beyond it, a swing set. Two figures on the swings. A girl of about five, with pigtails. And my mother. Her feet were bare, her chin tilted back. Arching her body away from me, she launched herself toward the sky.
Beth Sherman
Beth Sherman’s writing has been published in over 100 literary magazines, including Flash Frog, Gone Lawn, Tiny Molecules, 100 Word Story, Fictive Dream, and Bending Genres. Her work is featured in Best Microfiction 2024, and she won the Smokelong Quarterly 2024 Workshop prize. A multiple Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net nominee, she can be reached on X, Bluesky or Instagram @bsherm36.
April 2025 | fiction
The soul of each moment is alive. A living voice, a broken down song. Like an abandoned car in an alleyway, from another life you’ve lived. Within another’s ghost towns.
* * *
“The most beautiful thing about you, is that you’re strong enough to be vulnerable.”
(Fuck you).
“The ugliest thing about you, is that you’re weak enough to be impenetrable.”
If I could break into your mind (love) like a shattered vase, I’d find no water on the floor.
I spilled too many of my flowers at your feet, thirsting for the voice and breath I’d given you.
Silence. You’re the profound silence from the bottom of a well many women fall into, seeking the fragile child only to find a Black Sun staring down upon them, laughing.
Your little boy is an illusion, a mirage the Queen of Hearts stole a piece of to complete her own, and you believed it, you actually believed that love is a finite thing, and petals can’t grow from stone, and floors must always be washed clean of dirt.
Memory is a sin and a stain, but you remember every fingerprint, catalogued in a desk of drawers next to a collection of video games and pornography, and stamps to worlds you’re too afraid to travel to, lest you should leave some piece of yourself behind.
The White Pawn was your pass, the Black Bishop your port. And yet, you are a grown man hiding within a child’s fort.
I am no better, with curtains for eyes and a home inside built on dreams as fragile as a web of tears.
Blow them away, love. Wipe the dust off your radiator, and watch all the women you’ve buried your head in drive past in their sleek cars, out your window frame, your standing-still-moving picture, and beyond the eclipse of your White Knight.
Black Bishop, White King. Black Pawn, Yellow Rose. Friendship is a hard thing to come by, in this land of salted flowers; and real love, harder still.
Tomorrow, I may write of the Crocodile and his tears, the Cowardly Lion and fields of rippling poppies in a sea bleeding with dreams. Or perhaps I’ll scale a different rainbow, find marigolds and lavender and sunshine. I’ll write forever. After all, words are the only thing left of us once we’ve turned to Stone.
Sincerely, the Queen of Diamonds, from the bottom of her cavern, Spade in hand.
*Originally published in Deep Overstock Issue 18 (2022)
Carella Keil
Carella is a writer and digital artist who creates surreal, dreamy images that explore nature, fantasy realms, portraiture, melancholia and inner dimensions. She has been published in numerous literary journals, including Columbia Journal, Chestnut Review, and Crannóg. She is a Pushcart Prize Nominated writer, Best of the Net Nominee, and the 2023 Door is a Jar Writing Award Winner in Nonfiction. She is the featured artist for the Fall 2024 Issue of Blue Earth Review. Her photography has appeared on the covers of Glassworks Magazine, Nightingale and Sparrow, In Parentheses, Blue Earth Review, Colors: The Magazine, Frost Meadow Review, Straylight Magazine, and Cosmic Daffodil. instagram.com/catalogue.of.dreams | x.com/catalogofdream
April 2025 | fiction
In April of 1968, Luisa Guerra created Eseidra, a board game she says has been played to completion by 11 people over 20 years. This claim has been contested. “No one has ever finished a round of Eseidra,” wrote Phillip McKenzie in the gaming journal Squaare. “It is nearly as impossible to understand the rules of the game as it is to know when a match has ended. Furthermore, combatants who abandon the game in frustration may not even realize they are continuing, in some manner, to play it.”
Critics contend the game fosters a type of compulsion. Guerra considers this a virtue. “The hallmark of any successful amusement is its ability to elicit obsession,” she has said.
Guerra made her name and fortune with Around the Whirl!, a multi-player dice-and-card game that sold in the tens of thousands worldwide after its release in 1962. Though Around the Whirl! was credited with ushering in an era of so-called “heavy logic” gaming, Guerra eventually disavowed the game, citing not only “the dreary conventionality of its objectives, strategy, and maneuvering,” but also “the abominable illustrations on the board, box, and instruction sheet. It is an ugly game in all respects.”
In interviews, Guerra has often invoked a piece of family lore to explain her interest in games. Following the Sergeants’ Revolt in Cuba in 1933, Guerra’s father was to be executed behind a hotel in Havana for alleged loyalty to Gerardo Machado, when an officer with the assigned firing squad recognized the condemned man as a champion backgammon player. The man offered to play Guerra’s father a single game of backgammon and promised to spare his life if he won. “I credit my existence to a double-six my father rolled in the lobby of the Hotel Nacional,” Guerra has said.
In her early-thirties, following a tumultuous divorce, Guerra began experimenting with board games she called, alternately, “transcendental” and “infinite.” Early efforts yielded games whose rules shifted according to readings of players’ heart rates, games whose “boards” were the given physical environment of the players, and games that included increasingly perilous feats of physical endurance.
In 1985, following an estrangement from two of her four children, Guerra moved to Hibiscus Coast in New Zealand. She denies all requests for interviews and does not respond to letters or phone calls. She publishes an annual “update” in the magazine Straits of the number of Eseidra games active worldwide (last year’s tally was 32), though she offers no explanation for her accounting. In 1986, in what may be read as an act of apostasy or pique or both, she stated that several members of the Lisbon Circle have been playing Eseidra for twenty years now, even if they claim ignorance of the fact. Sembla Intelligencer – March 6, 1988
Ben Guterson
Ben Guterson is the New York Times bestselling author of The World-Famous Nine, a Barnes & Noble Young Reader Pick of the Month, The Einsteins of Vista Point, and the popular Winterhouse trilogy. Winterhouse was an Edgar Award and an Agatha Award finalist, and an Indie Next List Pick. His books have been translated into eleven languages worldwide.
January 2025 | fiction
There is something very large building a nest in the parkway by the house I grew up in. The house where my father still lives. He takes walks in this parkway. It makes me nervous. I guess I first noticed it after my mother died. It looked like a large pile of brush in the clearing. Maybe from a storm or from the efforts to rid the area of an invasive species like buckthorn or thistles or the contents of my mother’s hospice supplies. But it was in a perfect circle.
The circle, the size of a small house, was furrowed in the middle, like something was lying there at night, and I wondered what could be so big. I thought of a bird the size of a hatchback car, and when I thought of the car, it was the car my father drove when I was four. A black Volkswagen Rabbit. I remember driving behind him in my mother’s car, in the passenger seat, and seeing the muffler drag on the pavement, making small orange sparks. My mother saying he would explode, and sometimes he did.
New things started to appear in the tree limbs of the nest. I saw my father’s pocket knives that fell between the couch cushions over time. Once, I saw a chair, and I had seen that chair before. It was in my parents’ living room when I was small. My father once threw its matching ottoman across the room. There were ash marks from my parents’ cigarettes on the seat of it, and a perfect circle burn. I would bring my father pepsis while he smoked and read to me. Scary stories or even just my name written on an envelope, so I would know it.
Once, during a fight, my father slammed an unopened pepsi can against the counter so hard it burst. My mother, in silence, cleaned it, while my father apologized, circling her. Now, the chair looked just the same, still stained with ash, and it was covered in leaves and empty pepsi cans and little, yellowed, sharp crescents, my mother’s fingernails that she tore off with her teeth.
My mother’s clothes weaved their way throughout the nest. My father has been asking me for years to look through her closet–her drawers for anything I might want. But there is nothing I want. I’m afraid to open the door. I’m afraid of what could be hiding in there, now. It would be dark. She wore black because she believed in black, but there were embellishments. Gold buttons. Large plastic jewels glued to the sweaters in purple and gold and silver. What is the bird that collects shiny things? What color is it? I’m very nervous.
The nest is getting bigger. My father has been doing work–making it more and more like home. The oriental rug that is soaked through with dog pee and baking soda lines the bottom. There are eggs, now, a bluish-green with spots of brown. I know that color. My father’s eyes are that color. He is stopping to rest more and more on his walks. And I want to tell him no. Do not stop here.
I can see something else in there. Something is moving. It’s crawling. It looks like it’s made out of the trimmings from my father’s beard he collected with his white electric razor. They would spill all over the sink in my parents’ bathroom and my mother would peck at him about it. The shedding. Brown at first, but as the thing moves, it goes gray, then white, then patchy and I can see the skin. It is not smooth. It is papery and thin and folds over itself like an envelope. I imagine it would be soft, but I won’t touch it because you are not supposed to touch the babies, or their mother will not come back. Your smell will get on them and she will know it. And this is what makes me nervous. I do not want their mother to know my smell. Though, I suspect, she does already.
Mary Thorson
Mary Thorson lives and writes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She received her BA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and her MFA from Pacific University in Oregon. Her stories have appeared in the Los Angeles Review, Reckon Review, Cotton Xenomorph, Milwaukee Noir, Worcester Review, Rock and a Hard Place, Tough, among others. Her short story, “Book of Ruth,” was included in Best American Mystery & Suspense, ’24, edited by Steph Cha and S.A. Cosby. Her work has been nominated for Best American Short Stories, A Derringer, and a Pushcart Prize. She hangs out with her two feisty daughters, the best husband, and a dog named Pam when she isn’t teaching high school English, reading, or writing ghost stories. Lori Galvin represents her at Aevitas Creative Management. Thorson is currently working on a novel.
January 2025 | fiction
She lived to host dinner parties. It was a need, a compulsion, to fulfill it she would look for the most absurd reasons. Like the time she bought a purse and messaged our group: Guess what it’s dinner party time. I just bought a purse. Or when she had a fight with her parents over not hurrying to marry a nice boy and having his babies before her biological clock froze. Then there was one where her blind date stood her up. Soon, the reason to hold dinner parties gained as much popularity as the dinner party itself. Her friends couldn’t fault her since her hostessing skills were flawless. She was an extraordinary cook with a knack for chopping her feelings and emotions into itty-bitty pieces and adding them to her dishes. She preferred the food to tell us stories and hold all the intimate conversations while she laughed, twirled her hair, and talked about anything and everything except what she felt
Like when the guy she thought was the one broke up with her, she held a dinner party and made her version of Cassata, a three-layered ice cream on a sponge cake, and served it with a sprinkling of pistachios. With every spoon we took of this dainty ice cream, we tasted her thoughts of that guy, her love, her heartbreak forming a bitter-sweet taste in our mouths, stirring our own uncomfortable memories of having loved and lost. We looked at her, imploring her to talk, to tell us what she felt but she kept pushing the Cassata in front of us. That night, we left feeling betrayed by love, and with a deep unsettling fear of layered ice cream cakes.
And the time her cat died, she had made Rogan Josh. That dinner party, with candles lighting up the room instead of electricity, as we mopped up the soft naan bread with velvety Rogan Josh sauce wrapped around meat pieces tender as a child’s kiss, we digested her sadness. We could see her dicing onion crying, pretending her tears were onion tears and nothing else. Her heart was raw, her eyes swollen, and she smiled and chatted while shadows danced on her face. By then we stopped asking her to talk while we wrestled with a million conversations within us.
Happiness also occasionally found a seat at her dinner parties like when she passed her driving test after four attempts, and she made bitter gourd curry that tasted like a mother’s hug. We remembered when our mothers stroked our hair and cheeks and rocked us with milky breaths to sleep. With every dinner party we partook in, we felt, we were swallowing a part of her soul, her memory, her being; our souls blending into hers. When, at long last, we realized we needed these dinner parties more than she needed them.
Roopa Menon
Roopa lives in Dubai, U.A.E. but was raised in Kochi, India where swatting mosquitoes at dusk is considered a life skill, to be honed and perfected. Some of her short stories have been published in Corium magazine, Nunum, Bright Flash Literary Review, Tiny Molecules, Crow & Cross Keys, and elsewhere, and have been nominated for Best of the Net and Best of Microfiction. Her debut middle-grade fiction, Chandu and the Super Set of Parents, has been published by Fitzroy Books. She tweets erratically @RoopaMenon1
January 2025 | fiction
In brown and grey demob suits, stoked up well with Woodbines, the three of them, from the same regiment, were thrown up cheek-by-hip on the platform: Tim, Spence, the younger David. They were packed into a wooden-slat-seat train and Spence, a chunky pugilist of a man, the veteran of bar room scraps, now weathering twenty-six, knew, like the other two, that hostilities were over, that the lights were out at last on the theatres of war.
The theatre was part of home for lanky Tim. For five, six years pre-war, he’d done amdram. He had the wavy hair, indeed the coaxing smile of a film star, so in the local Little Theatre, he could charm the ladies, court the audiences, bask in the warm reviews. But for six years nearly (Tim was thirty-two in a fortnight’s time), he had found, in conflict and in barrack room, you got to see the truth of fellow men, naked and in the raw. He was thinking rather differently now, of men and audiences and acting and affection. Post-war things would be difficult for him and only finally, decades on, would he reach a personal peace.
Spencer had married back in ’41, and yes, he was looking forward to going back to Lily. There was the physical part, of course, the regularity, and in the years that followed he would settle, despite the criss-cross and the alleyways of love, for what was more or less OK. He’d think of her, always, as ‘the Missus’, just as he’d think of ‘the boy’ and ‘the girl’. And decades on, when the cancer struck, he would cope and care for Lily with a dour devotion.
David was bound to think, on that journey home, of the breathless Rachel, the schoolgirl daughter of his mother’s friend. She’d been there at their house, on each of his leaves, and he knew full well she loved him blatantly. Everything in him, of manhood, pride and celebration, yearned for her. Yet somehow now, post-war, aged twenty-two, she not quite seventeen, he would keep feeling the gulf between all he’d seen, the nauseous blood, the gristle exposed, and the world of the child. So they would circle each other for several tremulous months, before in time they panicked and married others.
Each married a shit. Only after many, many years, after the bitterness, the blows, the pettiness, were they free, their every emotion rising with a rush.
In 1995, the celebrations marked the end of the war, and the following golden peace. None of the boys attended. Spencer said, ‘I’m just glad I came back and I think of the boys who didn’t’. He stayed in playing rummy with Lily (recovered years ago but frail). Tim and his partner Sebastian drank their Merlot in their favourite London wine bar. David and Rachel went in a rural morning for their walk in the Teifi marshes, saw the radiance of the kingfisher, felt the wetlands’ wealth and depth.
Robert Nisbet
Robert Nisbet is a Welsh writer whose work has been widely published in the USA. Burningword Literary Journal and three other magazines have nominated him for a Pushcart.
