October 2025 | fiction
Carcinisation
When we were little, my half-brother named all his pets after different animals, which our mom initially thought was a vocabulary issue. His goldfish was called Butterfly. His hamster was named Lizard. The family dog responded to “Rhino,” though only when snacks were involved. The cat? Octopus. The snail? Gory. (He later clarified Gory was short for “Gorilla.”)
Despite what everybody might think, I knew this wasn’t random. He once told me that he believed every animal secretly wished to be a different animal on the inside.
“Like nesting dolls,” he said, “but with fur and fury.”
He once watched his shrimp float listlessly near the tank filter and whispered to it: “You’re a whale in captivity, and I see you.” I guess it felt like the right thing to say.
He never named anything Human. That probably felt too ambiguous.
Years later, I told his story in group therapy and nobody laughed. A man named Kyle asked, “So what does he go by these days?”
I gave his question a thought. “Mostly Crab,” I said. “But working toward Pigeon.”
He nodded like that made perfect sense.
Sarp Sozdinler
Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, Flash Frog, Vestal Review, Fractured Lit, JMWW, and Trampset, among other journals. His stories have been selected or nominated for several anthologies, including the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Wigleaf Top 50. He’s currently at work on his first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam.
October 2025 | fiction, Pushcart nominee
Crawlspace
Veronica opened the paper bag of tomatoes, inhaling their earthy scent. Big Rainbow, Early Girl, Jubilee. Her favorite, heirlooms, were stacked at the bottom. They always had such beautiful cross-sections. Outside the window, a trail of birdseed stretched to the banks of the creek, raspberries clustered in rows along the hill. A thunderstorm was building at the horizon, clouds so dark she estimated ten more minutes before the rain fell.
A man cleared his throat behind her. Veronica jumped, dropping the lone Brandywine on the floor. She braced for it to erupt, but it landed with a dull thud and a minor leakage of seeds. Grabbing the tomato, she dusted it with her shirt. Jonah was back from errands. “Sandwiches?” he asked. “Sandwiches,” Veronica answered. They worked in a team, slicing the rye and the bulbous red fruit, spooning wads of mustard onto the bread. As they added their finishing touches, the clouds burst, emptying into the creek. This was good, Veronica thought. It had been so dry, and the animals needed the water.
As they ate, Jonah fiddled with a chisel he’d left on the table. Blue rust spanned its length like moss. “What’s up?” Veronica queried. “Nothing,” Jonah said. “Just, you know. Long day.” Veronica nodded. One of the goats had wandered to the door in the storm and was battering its horns against the wood. Rolling her eyes, Veronica shooed it from the entryway and back out into the yard.
As she turned back to the kitchen, Jonah was nowhere to be seen. His plate lay empty in the sink, save for a thick stream of red juice. The goat attacked the door again, incessantly now, as if timing its pummeling with the thunder.
Curious, Veronica climbed the stairs to their bedroom. Maybe Jonah had laid down for a nap. As she reached the landing, she startled. The hidden door to the crawlspace was open, its darkness a still column. Jonah looked up at her with a terror so naked she nearly felt a brief current of remorse pass through. The body inside was partitioned perfectly, limbs stacked in neat rows. Veronica thought of the tomatoes. Sighing, she lifted the chisel from her side and slowly positioned it in front of her chest. A floor below, some of the cattle had joined the goat, hooves striking the floor in tandem. With her eyes closed, Veronica could almost imagine the sound of applause.
Meggie Royer
Meggie Royer (she/her) is a Midwestern writer and the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Persephone’s Daughters, a journal for abuse survivors. She has won numerous awards and has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize. Her work has been published in The San Antonio Review, The Rumpus, The Minnesota Review, and other notable publications. She thinks there is nothing better in this world than a finished poem. Her work can be found at https://meggieroyer.com/.
October 2025 | fiction
St. Mary’s Call Room 403
Dr. G. laughed when colleagues refused to sleep in call room 403. The 4 East wing of St. Mary’s once housed pediatrics, then orthopedics, then maternity. They said people had heard things in 403—the rattling of long-gone nuns’ rosaries, a woman crying for her baby…
She didn’t believe in ghosts. Even if they were real, couldn’t someone have died in every room of the hospital? Didn’t every call room look haunted? They stank of old dust and bleach, with a sweet, roach powder undertone, and the shower stall curtains were stained with orange mold.
Dr. G. seldom got a chance to sleep, but she’d volunteer to take Room 403 when she was on. When she did make it to the call room, she’d fall exhausted into a REM sleep. She dreamt of doing CPR on her favorite patient as a student, kneeling on the edge of the bed for leverage, feeling a rib crack under her hands. She dreamt about willing her hands to stop shaking the first time she did a spinal tap: slow, full, damp breaths under her mask. She dreamt of standing in surgery in her third year of medical school, two months post-partum, breast milk leaking through her gown. She dreamt of the plastic surgeon who teased her because her left eye was lower than her right, something she’d never noticed. He said it in front of the nurses, “Easy fix. Botox.” As if she had time for that.
Dr. G did a lot of night shifts, with one colleague on maternity leave, and another recovering from surgery. The more she worked, the further she fell behind in her own life, even forgetting her own wedding anniversary. She was overdue for doctor’s appointments, her mammogram, and her routine colonoscopy.
The dreams worsened: an elderly man in a lower body cast, who shook his fist, “We routed the Kaiser!” then clenched his chest, and a girl with stringy blond hair, dark circles under her eyes. She thought about trying a different call room but discarded the notion as silly. She was just overworked.
One night, Dr. G admitted ninety-five-year-old Sister St. Catherine. “I ran old 4 East. I loved maternity, except when we lost a baby.”
Dr. G. did get some sleep that night, but at 2 a.m. she awoke, and found herself staring at a woman whose left eye was lower than her right.
The woman was thin. Too thin. Bald.
Michelle Morouse
Michelle Morouse’s work has appeared previously in Burningword and in various journals, including Third Wednesday, Vestal Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Gemini, Midwest Review, Prose Online, Bending Genres, Best Microfiction, The MacGuffin, and Unbroken. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. @michellemorouse.bsky.social
July 2025 | fiction
The Tender Earth
Our mothers die quickly. When we grieve, time rushes out of us like old light. They lowered the body into the black end of the ground. All the worms turned, delighted. The sun threw itself on the dirt like a lover returning. I couldn’t help but sink after her. I went in like a delirious fly. My body thunked with the weight of all its years. I was made of gold. They didn’t pull me out; a mutual understanding flossed between their silence. One hand after the other tossed the tender earth over us, the dirt a showering of black stars. I curled my head on my mother’s dead shoulder and pressed against her like a newborn shadow. A year later, I emerged from that grave, a thousand sheets of air driving though me. I could feel her moving beneath my feet like a barge on the river. But I adored the sight, the sun with its throat on display, yellow on either end of this terrible world.
Rome Smaoui
Rome Smaoui is a Tunisian poet and writer born in 2003. Her work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, SMOKE Magazine, Litbreak Magazine, Rejected Literature, and other places. She has recently received her Bachelor’s in English Literature with Creative Writing from the University of Manchester. Upon graduating, she was awarded the 2024 George Gissing Memorial Prize for her Fiction and the 2024 Alun Lewis Prize for her Poetry.
July 2025 | fiction
The Dreamer’s Nightmare
I was frantically seeking asylum in a land renowned for kind-hearted Giants but found horror instead. The Giants were “cleansing their land of all lesser life,” maniacally self-replicating and seeking immortality to “last forever.” A Supreme Council of Sorcerers bestowed immortality upon the Giants with one absolute condition; “You must spare The Plant Kingdom!“
After becoming immortal, the Giants grew even more arrogant. They disregarded the Supreme Council’s Decree and continued to indiscriminately exterminate animals and plants. The Sorcerers were furious but could not reverse their grant of immortality. Instead, they shrunk the Giant bodies to minuscule size, morphed their little arms, legs, and faces into ugly crablike creatures, and called them “Cancers.”
The miniscule Cancers were undeterred. They invaded and killed animals and plants by replicating wildly within their hosts and remained immortal. The Sorcerers responded by arming plants (only plants) with formidable defenses against Cancer. If Cancers invaded plants, they either retreated or perished.
I plucked a leaf from a plant and pleaded before the Supreme Council of Sorcerers. “What about humans? We suffer, too. My sister is dying from Cancer.” The Council decreed. “Humans are Animals. You are unworthy! Go back where you came from.” With one puff, they blew me back to my cancer-ridden sister, leaf still in hand.
I placed the leaf in boiling water and drank the brew directly above Nadia’s body. Within seconds, vines sprung from my chest, entwined my dying sister, and embraced her with healing red, white, and blue leaves. Fleshy lumps of Cancer squeezed from her skin and coalesced into a jellied star-spangled mass that hovered above me. I reached up, drew the cancerous mass into my pounding chest, and awoke in a sweat.
There was a loud pounding on my front door. Armed ICE agents in police uniforms had come to arrest and deport me as an undocumented immigrant. Just a week earlier, my sister Nadia, a nurse, had been arrested at work and deported. I handed them a letter issued by the US citizen and Immigration Services–Form I-797– certifying the approval of my DACA request and deferral of deportation. I also held up my Diploma from MIT and insisted, “I am here lawfully.” They backed off, but one of them scoffed, “Not for long, Dreamer.”
As a Dreamer, my nightmare was rooted in the constant fear of deportation. But as an MIT graduate in plant biology, that nightmare sparked an epiphany: the same chemicals that give plants cancer resistance could be transformed into drugs to treat cancer in humans. The ICE raid on my home was the catalyst that drove me to make it happen. I am just as worthy of being here as anyone else.
Arthur Pitchenik
Arthur Pitchenik is a retired professor of medicine with a lifelong love of storytelling and sharing experiences. Since retiring, some of his stories have been published in Tall Tale TV, Literally Stories, Fabula Argentea, and Flash Fiction Magazine, with one forthcoming in After Dinner Conversation. His poems have appeared in The Annals of Internal Medicine (Ad Libitum section) and The Anthology of College Poetry.
July 2025 | fiction
Jellicle Song For Jellicle Clint
Not long ago, after I started devouring my Chicken McNuggets, this old man, who by the way I’ve never met in my life, tells me that normally food is forbidden inside the cinema, so my first thought is oh, he must be hungry with all that skin that’s falling off him like a blobfish put out of water, so I offer him a nugget, and he says he will allow it but it wasn’t like that back then I tell you that, are we still talking about the chicken I ask, he follows by saying that back in the seventies he used to work in a cinema and most cinemas had leaking roofs, which sounded odd because humidity helps your skin stay hydrated and look younger and that man looked almost as dry as a tardigrade in the Atacama Desert, he then says that in addition to the water infiltrations there were mice everywhere because of the food scraps that people made around the seats, so the cinema decided to buy a cat called Clint to chase the mice, and when there were no more mice, Clint had no home to return to, so this old man whose sweat gland functions have clearly deteriorated during this conversation, decided to adopt Clint and he fed him normal processed food for the next twenty years of his life, then he went to Paris with Clint and met Clint Eastwood at the George V, they took a glass of champagne together which didn’t make up for the missing thirty percent his body needed to achieve his sixty percent normal water intake, so he decided to go back to London, he stood still outside in the wet soil and that allowed him to grow and grow and grow until he turned into a magnificent cardinal flower, and right before he was about to perform for the funeral of another dry king he turned progressively brown and felt the moisture wasn’t enough anymore, so Clint stepped in, put him in a sink filled with water, and his topsoil started feeling damp, that’s when he realized he should probably cancel his paid Patreon membership to this odd fantasy podcast he’d been listening to before his billing date to ensure he wouldn’t be charged for the next period, but as he was about to reach for his phone Clint put his paw on his mouth and whistled shush, and Clint in Boots was way more persuasive than Puss in Boots, and that is how this old man got his military discharge.
Zoé Mahfouz
Zoé Mahfouz is a multi-talented French artist: an award-winning bilingual Actress, Screenwriter, Content Creator, and Writer whose work spans fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Her writing has appeared in over 70 literary magazines and best-of anthologies worldwide, including Cleaver Magazine, OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters, NUNUM, as well as Ginyu Magazine, a respected journal of avant-garde and contemporary poetry, and The Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan’s largest newspapers. While her fiction is often described as “very tongue-in-cheek,” “kookie,” and “random,” her poetry, which ranges from seventeenth-century eerie Japanese haiku and haibun to more classical forms and the occasional ekphrastic poem, draws on anthropological strangeness and sharp mythological references. In contrast, her other poetic and prose works lean into a darker, more introspective register. They weave fragmented narrative with sensory overload and philosophical undercurrent, exploring themes such as psychiatric care, neurodivergence, and the collapse of identity.
