January 2026 | fiction
Clockwise
Quite late into my pregnancy, the day I eventually did pregnancy tests and all three came out positive (Surprise! I’m here!), my husband said he’d always yearned to be a father, (Have I developed something new? These are voices outside!), a statement of desired fatherhood that came as a shock, or, let’s say, a seven-degree alarm on a scale of zero to ten, (Water, water, wateeerrrr, swimming in a blister) because my husband used to say it’s crazy to bring a baby to this world, and I believed he understood my point and accepted my decision, though he always beamed at babies and said to fathers they were lucky, so I guess (she says: I will change diapers, will hear a baby cry, will be like my tired girl friends), his huge capacity of devotion had been seeking a route, which didn’t pass solely through me, (Here I am! Feel me. I’ll kick a little, see? Again! Again! Happy?), or maybe not at all through me or anyone, yet, because in his youth, my husband credited people with more generosity than they actually had, lost his family in a war and that pain squandered his capacity for love (A head against my kicking leg. Father! A hand over my head. Mother!) or so he thought, but his love for our child grew high and bright like wheat in the following months, and after all he did trust my contribution to his child, and this grew into a plant of love between us too, and I was afraid to lose it when the baby came out, so I wanted to turn the clock back (something’s wrong, what’s wrong, I’ll see you soon, Mother, Father, I promise! I’ll be yours, I want out.), but when the baby was born, and light I didn’t know existed within me burst out too, there we were, the three of us, and the clock, for all I cared, could go on and never stop.
Avital Gad-Cykman
Avital Gad-Cykman is the author of the story collections Light Reflection Over Blues (Ravenna Press) and Life In, Life Out (Matter Press). She is the winner of Margaret Atwood Studies Magazine Prize and The Hawthorne Citation Short Story Contest. Her stories appear in The Dr. Eckleburg Review, Iron Horse Review, Prairie Schooner, Ambit, McSweeney’s Quarterly, and Michigan Quarterly, among others. They have been included twice in Best Short Fictions, W.W. Norton’s Flash Fiction International anthology, and Best Microfiction 2025. She lives in Brazil and holds a PhD in English Literature, focused on minorities, gender, and trauma.
January 2026 | fiction
Test
This is a test. A heartbeat test. A bloodbeat test. My doctor tells me I’m going to die. This is certain. I want to tell the doctor it’s OK
My doctor is a quack. Quick homemade remedies — everything to cure halitosis and eczema. You can’t leave his office without buying.
****
My husband is in love with another woman. This is not a test. My heartbeat knows it. My bloodbeat knows it. My husband is going to leave me. This is certain I want to tell my husband it’s OK
My husband is a jerk. Quick homemade remedies of stink flowers and empty promises. You can’t leave an argument without buying.
***
I’m heading into loveless now and lifeless now. I am almost not a patient I am almost not a wife. There is no test for this, I just know it. There is nothing I can buy that will change anything. I want to tell myself it’s OK.
Francine Witte
Francine Witte is a flash fiction writer and poet, and the author of the flash collection RADIO WATER. Her newest poetry book, Some Distant Pin of Light, has just been published by Cervena Barva Press. Her work has been widely published, and she is a recent recipient of a Pushcart Prize. She lives in New York City. Please visit her website francinewitte.com. She can be found on social media @francinewitte.
January 2026 | fiction
Phoebe Sneezed and Smelled Bacon
Phoebe sneezed and smelled bacon. “What is this?” Nobody else was home and hadn’t been for four days so it couldn’t be a lingering smell. It was distinct. Bacon.
“I’m gonna look this up,” she said aloud to herself. It should be understood that Phoebe talked a lot to herself. You might say it was a function of being older and living alone, but that wouldn’t be true. She had always talked to herself, rather enjoying the conversations.
Funny, because when she sat down to write, she didn’t transcribe the words in her brain. Instead, she saw a picture and just wrote down what was happening. Sometimes it was a still. Sometimes, an actual movie. Even her dreams, back in the day when she had them every night and remembered them. She was pretty sure she still had them, just that trauma made her unable to recall more than a dozen over the past twenty years.
But smelling bacon. This was new. She had always had a great nose and would often detect things that people around her said they didn’t smell. She had always thought she was catching a whiff of something on a draft of air blowing in from somewhere. Sometimes she would speculate from where and write a little story.
But that was when she lived in the midst of a family and there were the usual comings and goings of busy people. Now, Phoebe recognized the responses of a solitary older person, and a certain tendency toward hypochondria. As soon as she had a twinge or a twist that was even the slightest tad unusual, she was sure she had something.
The sneeze smell. She went to Google, surprised to find answers to her exact query What does it mean when you sneeze and then smell bacon? “This is too easy,” her skeptical self verbalized. The dog was in the room so she looked over toward the sweet creature. “How could it be a thing that people might smell bacon when they sneeze? This has to be a tailored AI response.”
Still, she kept reading and discovered a condition called phantosmia where people do become aware of scents after a sneeze. “Ooh, I love the word.” The dog paid little attention.
Faithful Google went on to tell her that it was probably meaningless, a chance triggering of some olfactory nerves. “How do they come together to smell like bacon?” she asked the screen. Scrolling informed her it could be a symptom of a seizure if it didn’t go away in a couple of days.
“Hmmm,” Phoebe said. “Do I have some sort of precondition for a seizure? Okay, I know what I’m doing, I’m speculating about all the things that happen to old people and assuming I am minutes away from something catastrophic. Well, maybe not minutes, but soon enough.”
“If I have a stroke, it better be the kind that kills me right away.”
The bacon smell disappeared. “Too bad,” she said. “I like bacon.”
Holly Redell Witte
Holly Redell Witte has been writing and publishing in newspapers and magazines for years. Turning to fiction in the last five years, she has been published in Blood+Honey, Screamin Mamas, Sudden Flash, the Red Wheelbarrow Anthology, An Unsuspected Place, and a forthcoming anthology benefiting victims of the LA fires. She workshopped her short fiction and a novel at the Yale Writers’ Workshop, 2023 and ’24.
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
