October 2026 | fiction
Potato Patch
The rocks were slick and he carefully made his way along them. He wasn’t as agile as he was as a child and he stepped with care. There was a light breeze and the sounds of chickadees and the steady whoosh of the water seemed to be all around him. That made him feel much younger than he was. He was looking for the pool where he used to fish as a boy with his father, when they camped here all those years ago. It was where the trout gathered to feed and to rest and where he caught his first fish. But he was worried that he went the wrong way. He couldn’t remember and that made him uneasy.
Then he saw it. It was calm and glistened like stained glass in the light. It was exactly how he remembered it being. He felt a deep relief.
His father had always told him to fish the head of the pool, the faster water, so that’s where he began, perched on a rock. The clouds moved over the sun and everything became dull. Then the clouds continued and the sun returned. The colors beamed like a movie.
He cast and put the worm near the entrance of the pool and allowed the current to take it. It felt good to hold the rod and watch the line leave the reel as it disappeared farther and deeper into the stream. But before the worm could make its escape, he dropped the bail, preventing the line from feeding too far into the water, hoping the worm would soon feed a fish.
It had been a long time.
As he waited, memories returned, not as scenes or photographs, or anything he could ever describe or even recollect, but as sensations too strong for a single moment. It was as if a lifetime forgotten had suddenly been remembered. There was a penetrating warmth to it. Then, when he began to bring the line in, slowly and with rhythm, flashes of his father came to him—him sitting on a rock in a wide-brimmed hat, his eye glasses wet and smudged with fingerprints; him in the glow of the campfire, smoking a cigarette, quiet and composed, watching the embers crack and pop. And his father drunk and crying in the kitchen in the middle of the night after everything went bad. He imagined the worm beneath the surface and hoped a fish followed close behind.
Cast after cast there was nothing. A limp, loose line returned every time. His broken reflection in the moving water. The sun moved and he moved with it. The shadows had turned and he thought about returning to camp, but he didn’t want to go back empty-handed, so he rebaited, stood, and cast.
As soon as the line hit the water there was a strike. It was violent and broke the surface. He snapped back and felt the setting of the hook. The feeling rushed through him like a drug. He pulled the fish from the water, its smooth green spotted skin and pink stripe shining in the sunlight. He used a rock on the fish. He slit its belly open, removing the insides and the little heart, which still beat, and threw everything back to the stream, then he rinsed the fish and placed it in the kill bag and made his way back to camp where his wife and one-year-old son were waiting around a warming fire.
S.E. Wilson
S.E. Wilson lives with his family in Franklin County, North Carolina. His work has been nominated for Best of the Net and has appeared in Chiron Review, The Berlin Literary Review, Louisiana Literature, Arkansas Review, The Louisville Review, New World Writing Quarterly, The Saturday Evening Post, and elsewhere.
October 2026 | fiction
Surprise, Surprise
Maria placed her caramel latte next to the corpse and cracked the window.
Light seeped into the basement generously, interrupted by people’s legs treading on the pavement. Morning freshness diluted the air of chemicals.
Maria rolled her shoulders and turned towards the corpse. It was small, deflated. Its cover hung low on the gurney’s sides. The right arm jutted up shriveled and dry, culminating in an outstretched index finger lecturing God herself somewhere up there.
Maria frowned. The frozen gesture looked almost familiar. She shrugged it off as a stroke convulsion. She would have to break the bones to fit the arm into the coffin.
“Okay, let’s make you handsome,” she said, slapping latex gloves on.
The corpse didn’t reply.
Maria pressed a sip of silky caramel against the roof of her mouth, and wheeled the instrument cart closer.
Pulling the cover, she recoiled.
Only once had she encountered a familiar face at work — Acho, a gypsy boy from her neighbourhood that had got mangled in a mechanised dump truck whilst rummaging.
Then, she’d curled up in the corner and wept. Now, warmth spread over her.
“Professor Ivanov, what a surprise!”
Maria let down her hair, browsed her phone’s playlist for “Sympathy for the Devil”, pressed play and swayed her hips in tune.
“Remember what you told me years ago when you wouldn’t let me pass chemistry, professor?”
Maria clasped the outstretched hand.
“You wagged that finger of yours,” said Maria. “This little piggy,” she began and snap-snap-snapped the brittle bones one by one, tucking the limb at the professor’s side.
“I begged, proved your marking wrong… but you wanted more than chemistry answers, didn’t you, professor?… Remember wagging that finger at me, saying… ‘over my dead body’?”
Maria jumped, leapfrogging over the corpse. She plopped onto the dead man’s stomach.
“It’s good you did, or I might have got another job and never seen you again. Because look where I am now, perv… over your dead body!”
She placed her fingers on the corpse’s eyelids, pulled them open by the lashes and leaned over the milky eyes. Jagger’s voice screeched through the loudspeaker. Maria swayed her hair and whoo-hooed over the corpse. Warm light and shadows of pedestrians’ legs danced on her triumphant face.
Stefan Sofiski
Stefan Sofiski is the pen name of a double miscast in the literary community: a left-brain structural engineer writing fiction, and a Bulgarian doing it in English. He holds a PhD in engineering and a Pushcart nomination in writing. He juggles these two worlds, often embarrassing himself in both. Stefan works in two intertwining registers: literary fiction (Unbroken Journal, Flash Fiction Magazine, Tint Journal) and thriller/noir (Shotgun Honey, Close to the Bone, Thriller Magazine).
October 2026 | fiction
A Woman Walking Not Alone
dreams of marmalade cake and silk throw pillows to lean upon, to rest her swollen ankles when she comes home from stocking Aisle Two of the local WaWa, a bus, two blocks walking, and a second bus away. A woman walking not alone hears in the beat against her ribs a Vivaldi, a Dr. Dre, Taiko drummer when she sits on the toilet to relieve her always-full bladder, day-dreaming of future ifs. A woman walking not alone must be cautious who she is walking not alone with, must use X-ray vision to peer into the dark alley she passes to get to her front stoop, must meet the eye of every not-aloneness she passes to let them know that she is not the one they want. A woman walking not alone is always thinking of what may be and why nots, even as the bearing pains seize her and split her in two. Even after her not-aloneness becomes a two-ness of lone souls.
Elizabeth Rosen
Elizabeth Rosen is a native New Orleanian and a transplant to small-town Pennsylvania. She misses Gulf oysters and Southern ghost stories but has become appreciative of snow and colorful scarves. Her stories have been nominated for the Pushcart, O. Henry, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. Colorwise, she is an Autumn. Rosen still wants her MTV and has the T-shirts to prove it. You can order her flash chapbook, Survival Skills, through her website www.thewritelifeliz.com.
October 2026 | fiction
The Collector
I like walking. I can think about things that need thinking about. I found a workaround, by the way, I got tired of death taking everyone I loved, so I started collecting.
There’s nothing death can do about it except take me away, too, and even then, I think I’d have the upper hand. I’m going to figure out a way to remember forever.
I started by pretending. I could take the memory of any person in my family, or my dog, or the actress who didn’t deserve it so hard, or my friend from when I was a kid, and I could picture them, dream them, and remember them.
The more real they became, the more of them I kept in my mind’s eye and in my heart, the better I heard their voice or their laughter, or their bark or their triumphant holler, the better my plan worked.
I couldn’t tell anyone, though. If I did, the magic would die, and so would everything I’ve collected. The only way magic works is by keeping it secret. You start blabbing about it, everybody thinks they can do it, and then there’s nothing special about anything, anymore.
You have to hide your collection, too, keep the pieces in pictures on the walls and in trinkets loved, in the desire to know them and feel them again, just once more. The bigger you can feel them and the more places you can hide them, the safer they will be.
Should I put them all back where I found them? Let myself forget? It would be so much easier to let go, fall, give into hopelessness, but to me, that’s as horrible as death taking them in the first place.
My way, you can remember them forever because if you can’t do that, what is worth doing? Love is why we’re here and death is why we go and sometimes I welcome the thought of dying. Those days are when it is hardest—to remember I’ve collected anything—when nothing’s real and all I know is I don’t want to feel so devastated anymore.
I keep pretending, reminded of the things in this world I’d rather never remember, all those memories are phantoms in shadows—good memories getting harder to keep in focus the further I get from the day I was born.
I’ll keep walking, though, nothing else to do. I’ll keep collecting, too, there’s no one to stop me. I will stuff my pockets with phantoms and pain, burn with desire to see them again—hold them and tell them I’m sorry I took them for granted, I didn’t know any better.
I need those memories. If I collect enough of them no one ever has to die all the way.
So, come here, look at my collection. This is it, everything I remember, everyone and everything I’ve ever loved; they were everything to me. I’d tell you more, but that part’s secret.
Josh Price
Josh Price lives in Northern California with his patient wife and terrible dog. His debut chapbook, Trailer Park Ocean, was published with ThirtyWest in 2025 and features “Philemon,” which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. The Los Angeles Review, SoFloPoJo, and others have published his flash. Scribble Magazine and others have published his short fiction. Find him on Instagram and Threads @s.joshuaprice and at josh-price.com.
April 2026 | fiction
How to Go Through the Drive-Thru Car Wash Without Your Car
Leave it back home in the driveway: this is your chance to be purified. Approach the drive-thru entrance on foot, like it’s a cathedral of cleanliness. Shift your body into neutral, and get ready for the ride of your life. As you are splashed and soaped and buffed and waxed, exorcise all the dirt that has accumulated in your bones, your skin, your fingernails, your toes. Clean every last surface of your most desirous thoughts: your mind should shine pristinely, all dreams of chocolate cake or tight-sweatered strangers or public figures you wish to strangle safely sequestered in a supply closet at the back of your brain, a place you can’t access without a skeleton key, or two-factor authentication. Ever since you were young, you’ve dreamed of this moment. Ever since you were strapped in the back seat while your mother—harried, hurried—ran your red Volvo wagon through its glow-up shower after retrieving you up from elementary school. You remember watching the show through the cranked-up window, the mops of rubber hair that slopped wet all over the car’s body calming you somehow. Becoming a vehicle wash voyeur also made you think of your excursions to Lion Country Safari, the sadness of that drive-thru zoo; what, you wondered, did these regal but strangely emaciated beasts make of your huge-wheeled and armored animal as it slowly idled through their artificial, exurban habitat? Now, you’re a grown-ass adult pretending to be a Porsche, and paying $19.95 plus tax for this strangest of baptisms—or at least you’re test-driving the idea as reverie. Hand an extra fiver to the guys who finish hand-drying you, and thank them for their efforts. Well: do you feel cleansed? Are you ready to face the horrors and pleasures of this blemished world with fresh-faced and sudsy energy? Or do you desperately want to get dirty again—to go roll around in a puddle of mud somewhere, like the filthy, sinful creature you are?
Matt Leibel
Matt Leibel’s short fiction has appeared in Post Road, Electric Literature, Portland Review, The Normal School, Quarterly West, Socrates on the Beach, Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, matchbook, and Wigleaf. His work has also been previously anthologized in Best Small Fictions 2024, Best Microfiction 2025, and Best Microfiction 2026. Find him online at mattleibel.com.
April 2026 | fiction
Four-Way Stop
The driver to my right is smiling, gazing at each of us in turn, waving us on. For her, I have no sympathy. But for the one directly across the intersection, a big-eared fellow at least eighty years old, if not closer to eighty-five, who came to a stop before either of us and first had his signal blinking to the right, but now has it blinking to the left, who has inched forward and pumped his brakes at least three times, I feel an overwhelming sense of pity, for within moments I will jam on the gas and swerve around him, honking if necessary, shouting obscenities out my open window, because I am in my forties and overwhelmed with mundane but nagging tasks that await me at work and at home—emails to return, spreadsheets to fill in, bills to pay, plumbers to schedule—boiling over with irritation whenever I’m in a car, having grown up in traffic-choked New Jersey, full of aggressive drivers who’ll cut you off the moment you give them an opening, and now living in mild-mannered Oregon, a place I love for its friendliness and slow pace of life, except when I’m on the road waiting for someone to recognize his obvious right of way. A fourth car approaches from the left, and before it can slow, I’m off.
Scott Nadelson
Scott Nadelson is the author of nine books, most recently the novel Trust Me. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, New England Review, Five Points, and The Best American Short Stories.
