MFC Feeley

October 2025 | nonfiction

Transfer

Long crooked stem, blunt thorns, deep red, tight center, black ridging outer petals that curled back—I forget how I acquired the rose. People were always giving me flowers, but I bought them, too. I could guess a bouquet’s price in any neighborhood, or vased on someone’s shelf, with stunning accuracy. I picked up many a five that way, guessing to the penny, knowing that if I bet more I’d feel too guilty to take the money. I was waiting to transfer at the 168th street station, a dank cavern sepia-ed in failing light and staling urine. It took anywhere from five to one hundred fifty—but usually forty—minutes for the train to come. I read Moby Dick and War and Peace on the subway, but that night I had Beloved. When I felt nervous I took a cab, reasoning that if I got attacked I’d kick myself if I’d ignored my instincts, but it was a long way to Inwood. Cab drivers always tried to take the bridge, because they didn’t believe Manhattan went up that high; I’d have to fight to keep them on the Henry Hudson—a repeating course in assertion. I was nineteen. Some drivers asked me out, some confessed that they were on drugs, one muttered over and over that I was as tender as a young brussel sprout, but we were above 176th, and I was scared to make him pull over and let me out on the dark un-sidewalked thoroughfare — there was no riverwalk then—so if I felt OK, I’d save the twenty dollars. I slipped the rose into the triangles of space between the crooked elbows and concave chest of a long thin homeless man, hugging himself as he slept it off on a bench, then chose a place to stand where I’d see anyone approaching (I wasn’t dressed for the walk of shame and thought it was obvious that I was waitress coming home with a wad of cash and wanted to be ready) and watch the rats emerge from the tracks, the third rail, the garbage, the puddles, and the chunked-out walls exactly as they emerged if you were hallucinating them coming down from acid or X while I waited and read. Two chattering women crossed the platform. I did not fear them; I saved my fear for men. They looked dressed for church or a baby shower—vinyl pumps with ankle-wobbling heels, pastel polyester dresses with deep ruffled necklines. Tiny hats. Stiff curls with banded grooves where bobby pins had recently secured plastic rollers. The bar closed at four and it took until five to get out of there, and I’d made it this far from the village, the women were probably headed to an early service. They were loud and bright, and I watched them without turning my head. One slipped the rose out, like a Pick Up Stick, or a Kerplunk skewer, without waking the sleeper, but her friend said, “that’s not for you” and made her put it back.

MFC Feeley

MFC Feeley has an MFA in fiction from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and is a board member of 49 Writers. She wrote a series of ten stories inspired by the Bill of Rights for Ghost Parachute and has published in Best Micro-Fictions, SmokeLong, Jellyfish Review, Pulp Literature, and others. Her one-minute memoir was featured on Brevity Blog. Feeley was a writer in residence at The National Willa Cather Center and a Fellow at the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. She has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, The Pushcart Prize, was an Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Quarterfinalist, and has judged for Scholastic. More at MFCFeeley.com

Paula Burke

October 2025 | nonfiction

What I Could Have Said Instead

“Selfish!” he spat towards me as I stood to leave.

“Huh, I wonder where I learned that?”

Holy crap, I think to myself. Where did that come from?

I mean, it’s true. Dad was selfish and self-centered.

Now, his dementia puts him into a separate category of selfish and self-centered. He can only think of himself—just like a toddler. His hunger, his needs, his wants.

I am just finishing spending a week at his house to help with his care, closely inspecting anything found in the fridge—even the condiments—before ingesting it, throwing away black-market Viagra, snooping through his papers to see what his financial situation is, staying in the damp dark guest room making sure to always keep the door closed so his cats don’t pee on my suitcase. I have taken time off work, been away from my kids, my husband, and my cat who doesn’t pee where she’s not supposed to. And now that my sister has arrived to relieve me, I’m going to go home.

It’s my 47th birthday, which he has not acknowledged at any point throughout the day.

He just told me he wants to die and I am thinking about how I could help him even though I decide that I am not going to help him die on my own birthday. Of course, he doesn’t know any of this.

Selfish! I could have ignored it and said: “I love you, Dad. I’ll see you next week.”

Selfish! I could have bent to whisper in his ear: “Get your affairs in order, I’ll be back to help you.”

Selfish! I could have brushed it off: “Sure, Dad, whatever you say!” or “Oh, Dad, don’t be so dramatic!”

But what I really say: “I wonder where I learned that?”

Paula Burke

Paula Burke lives and writes along the Salish Sea. She is revising a memoir that is variously about old cars, family lingo, bad birthdays, and her father’s seven-year descent into dementia. Her work has been published in the Seattle Review of Books, Booth, and Hippocampus. Paula will always look at the dessert menu.

Eileen Vorbach Collins

October 2025 | nonfiction

Chasing Lasers

The cat will sit on my desk and help me write stories about love. About loss. About a cat who will claw up the furniture, but I won’t give a damn because she will make biscuits on my poofy belly and never suggest I work on strengthening my core. I know her, this orange kitten, the one I dream about. I belong to her as she belongs to me. It feels like love, but the kitten isn’t real. It’s been a few months since our old dog, Sugar, died. The kitten will purr away the ringing in my ears. The kitten will love me back.

The vet said Sugar crossed the Rainbow Bridge. Do humans cross there too? Do we remain who we were, with the same endearing traits? The same annoying habits? Become stardust? Do we know we’re dead? Wish we weren’t? Glad we are?

It’s 25 years since my daughter died. Will she see the kitten and be glad for me? Will the kitten know we’re being watched as we make our biscuits?

The kitten isn’t real. But how can I live without a kitten? How can I live without my daughter? Nine lives wouldn’t have been enough. Clawed up furniture won’t kill me or even make me cry.

Here kitty. Come, let’s make some biscuits. Let’s dig our claws into the soft nubby wool of the sofa. Shred it. Now try the linen on this chair. See how good it feels. Rip it. Bite it. Flex your little claws and grab another thread. Here, I’ll help you. Watch it all unravel.

We’ll grow old together. Cover the sofa with blankets. Haul the chair to the curb. What will any of that matter? Where will you go, I wonder, when you leave this earth. Fur heaven? Chasing lasers across the galaxy? Will you remember me? Will you make biscuits for another grieving mother or a sad child, a lonely dog longing for a companion? A dog who will love the feel of your tiny claws raking his fur? You don’t want to be an indoor cat. You have always been free. Claw the furniture, darling, but you must leave the birds alone.

My daughter wanted to be free.  Of rules and curfews. Of her own relentless expectations. Of me. I dreamed that she was alive. I lifted the veil and found her living nearby. All those years in the same town. I begged her to come home. She refused and closed the door.

We used to bake bread together. Six braid challahs with an egg wash. Always a piece separated. Tossed into the back of the oven, a nod to tradition not our own. An offering to sanctify the bread.  How do I sanctify her?

What will I offer the kitten? A screened porch from which to watch the birds. Will she love me back? Or want to be free. Of rules and curfews. Of relentless expectations. Of me.

Eileen Vorbach Collins

Eileen Vorbach Collins writes true stories she wishes were fiction and fairy tales she wishes were true. Her essays have received the Diana Woods Memorial Award for Creative Nonfiction, The Gabriele Rico Challenge Award, a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, and two Pushcart Prize nominations. Her essay collection, Love in the Archives, a Patchwork of True Stories About Suicide Loss, published in 2023, was a Foreword Indies Finalist and received a Pencraft Award for Literary Excellence and the Sarton Women’s Book Award for memoir.

Dana Stamps, II

July 2025 | nonfiction

Why I Hate to Read

Trimming a bonsai tree is probably better entertainment. Listening to good music, from classical to jazz to rock-n-roll, is so much better that I cannot overestimate the difference. Watching television is even more addictive nowadays with YouTube’s endless gobbledygook. Looking at paintings at MOCA, or at my local Art Walk, is much better than reading. Read this. I simply don’t like to read, even a little bit—plain fact.

And, since for many readers, this anti-reading confession of mine hits too close to the wobbly eyeballs, let me just say, though, that I like to have read most of what I reluctantly read. That is, I like to have the knowledge that comes with reading, the erudite vocabulary, for example. I like to learn new ways of punctuating sentences, too, and especially of complicating sentences. Or fragmenting them. I even like learning about crap I wouldn’t otherwise care about. Work?

Reading is work, period. You see, I grew up watching TV, lots of “I Love Lucy,” and funny movies starring Eddie Murphy. Reading was something that teachers made you do, not something you did for pleasure. The movie The Matrix has its characters learn jujitsu and how to fly a helicopter instantly, with no reading required. I would sign up for that.

But if I must read, poetry is my favorite. I started my latest poetry book, a longish anthology, at the end, reading backwards, poem by poem, so the experience wouldn’t seem a chore, fooling myself (almost) that the obligation is not a whole book, but just one poem, then done. Mostly, only poems with intriguing titles get read, but this time around I intend to read each poem, trusting the editor, not wanting to miss a good poem, an important poem … to learn from. Reading is research for me, always study. If inspired, I stop reading, and I try to write a poem. In this manner, like a pendulum progressing inexorably forward with each lumbering swing as the world creeps through space, I have been a prolific writer, and well-read, too.

So, why don’t I quit? I’m not in school. I seldom get more than a contributor’s copy for my efforts. Well, I think it is inertia … yes, that is why I still write. I have put in too much time to quit now. And I hear you arguing with me—like a remedial English teacher proofreading a slow student’s work, saying, “Why did you ever start writing in the first place … if you don’t like to read? Dunce! Nincompoop! Why produce writing—work, work which you, by definition, say that you don’t like?”

The answer: I wanted to validate my life, to give a deeper meaning to my experiences, my haphazard life, my astonishing life, my great life! And, of course, to express my unrelenting ennui … and love, such as it is.

Dana Stamps, II

Dana Stamps, II, is a bipolar poet and essayist who has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Cal State University of San Bernardino, and has worked as a fast-food server, a postal clerk, a security guard, and a group home worker with troubled boys. A Pushcart nominee, poetry chapbooks “For Those Who Will Burn” and “Drape This Chapbook in Blue” were published by Partisan Press, and “Sandbox Blues” by Evening Street Press.

A Message from the Ones Who Fly Above Me

April 2025 | nonfiction

A bird shit on my head today. It was at the bus stop. The shit is black and white. I am on my way to work and—

Drop.

I like my job. I get to teach people. I get to stand in front of a room. I get the attention. Normally, I wouldn’t get attention. Normally, I was nobody.

Drop.

Everybody is a nobody. I accept that. I still like being called “professor.” Even though I am not a full professor. I feel special. I feel like I am flying. Even if it is an illusion.

Drop.

I wish the bird shit was an illusion. I don’t have napkins. I don’t want to bother people on the bus. I don’t want to bother with the shit on my head right now.

Drop.

Birds don’t bother with shit. They shit where they want to. On the ground. On my head. It doesn’t matter. Their shit leaves them. It is far beneath them. But this shit on my head. It’s unavoidable.

Drop.

My hair is curly. The shit isn’t going to come out. It’s going to dry in there. It’s going to crust. My hair’s shape will be formed by the shit. I will literally be a shithead.

Drop.

I am used to shit in my hair. Inconveniences are a regularity for me. An email here. Oh, now seven emails here. All at once. You need to come to this faculty meeting. You didn’t grade my paper. You have one day to take this course offering. It’s in six months from now. You will barely make a living. And forget your free time.

Drop. Drop. Drop.

Maybe birds do bother with shit. It seems they are always chirping. Some must be annoying chirpers. Maybe those annoying chirpers command orders. Stand on this power line. Chirp with this frequency. Shit on that man’s head.

Drop.

I consider myself quite defiant. I know how to stand up for myself. I tell my bosses when I want more courses. Or if I have other plans. Or if I don’t like a policy.

Maybe the shit isn’t so bad. I can wash it out.

And maybe I can do more for myself. Not go for status. Go for appreciation. Make a stand. Tell them who I am. Tell them what I stand for. Even if they don’t care. I will be the one to change the world, the one who makes a difference in thought, a discreet social revolutionist, a martyr of sorts, throw my syllabus on the ground, set it on fire, even.

While slim, there is a chance that I could be a part of something bigger, create an even better life for myself while doing so, no longer be treated like a pleasant luxury, be treated like a necessity that is irreplaceable. I could be valued.

But then again, I feel like I’m valued. I just need to stick through it and—

Drop.

Christian David Loeffler

Christian David Loeffler is a fiction writer, teacher, and editor for Curious Curls Publishing. His work draws heavy inspiration from interests that span science, literature, philosophy, video games, and anime. His favorite book is J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and he will not stop talking about it.