Category: micro monday

Inland Ocean | Heidi Bell

Our parents park the ancient pop-up camper in the sandy driveway. We kids and our friends sleep out here in the summer sometimes, at the bottom of what used to be an inland ocean. We fall asleep to the suck and billow of the heavy canvas sides, as though we’re on a sailing ship or inside the body of the breathing night, the belly of the whale.

I wake to my father’s shadowed face, his incandescent eyes. He and my mother are shaking us all awake. His hands gather me up. “It’s going to rain. Let’s go in.”

Instead, he holds me in his arms in the yard under the boiling purple sky as wind turns the oak leaves inside-out and bends the young poplars almost to the ground.

Nights when my father doesn’t come home, I imagine his permanent disappearance—car-crashed, drowned. He makes promises he doesn’t keep. He makes our mother cry.

“Look,” he says now.

A slender starfish stretches its legs across the sky, and its voice is everywhere, thunder woven through the air. It reaches across the humped backs of the bluffs, and an electric charge rises up from the ground to meet it, up through my father’s body and through mine, and we laugh with delight.

There will be years of strife between us before I accept what he is—elemental, a creature of instinct and chaos—before I understand how I am like him. How none of us asked for this. We all just ended up here somehow, together. Unjustified.

About the Author:

Boyfriend Jeans | Heidi Bell

Rose Marie’s younger son chauffeurs her to the cookout; she is too weak now to drive. She comes across the yard, her sagging cheeks bright with blusher, drooping lips painted pink. She is wearing faded straight-legged jeans and a shirt unbuttoned at the bottom and tied up under her bust, revealing several inches of midriff scarred from surgery. She sits down across from me at the peeling picnic table, and, behind her, the sun comes—a girl stepping down the sky—to dip her toes in the shimmering river that flows by at the edge of the lush midsummer yard. Rose’s auburn wig begins to glow.

Rose and I have forged a connection through the years over various mental health crises and then female cancers—like a Ping-Pong game. But we won’t see each other again. What is there to say? I win.

The grilled meat like river sand, ashes in my mouth.

Later, my sister, Rose’s daughter-in-law, says in a bewildered voice, “I don’t know why she was wearing that outfit.”

There are clothes that live at the margin of my closet—sleeveless blouses and miniskirts and fitted T-shirts and turtlenecks that I long, against all reason, to wear again someday. The flowered fabric and cashmere seemed to have slipped through my fingers before I had a chance to appreciate how they felt against my skin, how it felt to be who I was then.

Maybe Rose, ravaged by uterine cancer, has finally reached her target weight. Which of us women past a certain age wouldn’t be tempted to accept that mean little gift—the sharp edges of hip bones, the shadows between the ribs.

About the Author:

Heidi Bell’s short story collection Signs of the Imminent Apocalypse (Cornerstone Press, 2024) was named a 2025 Book of the Year by the Chicago Writers Association. She is at work on a novel and a collection of micro memoirs.

Detroit Salt | Linda Drach

When my father says, Dress warm. No tube tops or flip flops, I’m flummoxed. He’s one of the good ones – he mows the lawn and pays for my flute lessons and comes home from work at 4:15 every day – but in our world, the care of daughters is the province of mothers. Even a ride-along to K-mart or Jiffy Lube would be surprising. Could he be taking me ice skating? It’s summer, but the Zambonis run all night, keeping indoor rinks pristine for men’s hockey leagues. 

He doesn’t say a word as we drive past the giant Uniroyal Tire and miles of manufacturing plants wrapped in concertina wire, but we’re listening to WJZZ, and when Artie Shaw comes on, he turns it up and drums the wheel with his fingers. His good mood continues as we join a group of middle-aged men – all of us outfitted in hard hats with headlamps – in a cramped elevator that will take us to our final destination 1,000 feet below the city. On the long descent, our guide explains that the salt mine will be closing permanently, and we are among the lucky few who get to see it. Now, I understand why I am here. My father, proud American son of immigrant parents, will never call me a pet name or ask me what I’m reading, but he’ll help me walk into worlds that are bigger than his, even if he’s not sure what they will look like. 

When we reach the bottom, I think about my mother, vacuuming or flipping through a Better Homes and Gardens, unaware of the vast cavern beneath her feet. The mine is cold and clean, and the salt is older than the dinosaurs, formed when fish were just beginning to grow legs. It’s as if I’ve been invited to tour my father’s inner world. The men ask our guide questions about production quotas and drill rig maintenance, the height of the tunnels and the length of the roads snaking into oblivion. My question is different: how dark does it get? The men agree to show me. 

On the count of three, we snap off our lamps, and for a moment, I’m part of a shared emptiness. I grab my father’s arm, and when the light returns, I keep holding on, and he lets me. Together, we watch conveyer belts carry the ancient ocean to the surface, where it will be crushed and sorted and screened and bagged, and some of it will make its way to our garage next winter, where my father – alone, in the frigid pre-dawn – will toss it on our icy driveway and sidewalks to clear a path for us. To keep us from falling.

About the Author:

Linda Drach is a writer, public health policy manager, and creative writing teacher at The Writers Studio. Her poetry and prose have been published in Bellingham Review, CALYX, Crab Creek Review, Lunch Ticket, Okay Donkey, and elsewhere. Her poetry chapbook, Pop-Up Shrines, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2025. Find her online at lindadrach.com and on Instagram: @inky_lyrics.

i use google more than i care to admit | Jessica Hudson

as bluelight stereo / pixelated dictionary / define coruscate / as tree of knowledge / branches laden with every contortion of fruit / i am so curious / unlike my youngest brother / who never read himself into more than basketball &  finances / we don’t talk often / my favorite movies are the ones with women in the title / films split into chapters / i feel the equivalent of marking the fifth box across & yelling bingo / when i can recall the name of that one actor in that one movie / without begging the internet to sherlock it out for me / feels like memory more & more these day is an unlearned skill / yet we pity the elderly for losing theirs / perhaps lost isn’t the right word if what is lost / amazing grace lyrics / can be found by listening to a song / i tell my mother not to call herself old / languid lazy retired yes / word for beauty that doesn’t sound pretty / but not old please not yet / the phrase there’s a spirit in man comes to mind suddenly / some apostle’s quote the teen elders read to me / the last time i walked too slowly past the latter-day saints church / i wonder what words those boys google / how to keep a wife / their faces smooth & soft / not yet whispered or wrinkled or wiry / they look like my brother did in high school / wrists pale, chests narrow  / scriptured breaths hardly filling their pressed shirts / Book of Mormon the musical / two thousand year old words impressed in the same place behind their foreheads that lights up in mine when I recall a poem I memorized in grade school / map of every residence within walking distance / they pressed those words on me when i paused / hesitation mistaken for agreement / the mulberry tree outside our kitchen already in sight / berries dotting the ground like pixels squashed blue / my mother once sang me songs of love & sheep / for now i’ll let that be my definition of heaven / something to look forward to when i can’t / thank google / remember anyone’s name

About the Author:

Jessica Hudson (she/her) received her MFA in Creative Writing from Northern Michigan University. Her work has been published in DIAGRAM, New Delta Review, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. She lives in Albuquerque.