This week’s feature…
The Softness I Owe by Joemario Umana
Where they taught me to shut the door, flowers pressed through the hinges, bloomed and held it wide open. Look, I know how to hold a butterfly and not tear its wings. I know how to water a flower without drowning it. I know how to cradle ache and not mistake it for the end. Once, I almost lost it, my hands curled into the shape of a tangerine, to summon red out of a man who called me fruity and laughed. But softness arrived…
Keep readingMicro Monday features brief fiction, cnf, and poetry. It’s like a shot of literary adrenaline to jump start your week.
Previous features:
She tells us how we feel and we agree. The therapist we didn’t hire. Her misremembered facts become our story. She trades in gossip: who has an addiction, a love affair. No lovers allowed. She’ll be our only love. She leans…
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Valentine’s Night in County Clare by Dan Thompson
“the crashing Atlantic forever tackling the rocks below the village – it wasn’t the cold that froze me there or anything else that might have prepared me for what I saw when I looked up…
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House Party by Dory Rousos Moore
When her new boyfriend’s black Grand Am swerves into our complex, she jumps up, her drink spilling over the edge. The way she falls in love is with a whoosh, like she’s being sucked into a vacuum, and the way I fall in love is by pretending not to…
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The Taste of Absence by Bethany Bruno
My father drank black Maxwell House from a repurposed Big Gulp cup, the kind with a faded NASCAR logo and a plastic straw he never used. Every morning, long before the world stirred, he filled it to the brim and cradled it between his knees as he drove to work. No cream. No sugar. Just…
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Chia Shower Pet by Crockett Doob
and what else besides chop sticks could get in the hole but then I thought, the shower head (the water gun setting) and I tried it and it worked, nailing the middle of the funnel, blasting the seeds out and I made my chia drink, finally, with herbal tea, and it looked beautiful and red and I…
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The Echo of Footsteps by Ibrahim Abdulhakeem
Each step carried the weight of exhaustion, of dreams deferred and dignity swallowed in silence. Ayo would listen from his room, curled up with his homework, his hands clammy as he gripped his pen. Would today be different? Would the tension in the air dissipate, leaving room for laughter instead of raised voices?…
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Rocks by Mk Smith Despres
In the waking world, she asks for pajama pants for Christmas so she can wear them to school. So she can go cozy up the front walk, the one where she saw her friend last week, neck red and swollen with trying and trying and trying. So she told, right away she told. The friend…
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wedged together we are flying by Reva Elise Johnson
The spinning top is a tailbone stuck upright, wrapped in broad swaths of gluteus, squashed into the middle seat of an airplane row that my favorite 9-year-old would say smells exactly like a freezer full of farts. We are wedged together; we are flying. There was someone on a plane when the divorce decree was…
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Return by Adesiyan Oluwapelumi
You did not understand the words but that didn’t matter. God hears his creations in all the dialects of their yearning. You remember weeks of the storms on the ship sailing the Caribbean Sea where God was a thin thread you hanged on for dear life…
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The cure to all the maladies that ail us by Jonathan Greenhause
won’t be scooped from a ballot box, nor delivered on the wings of a dodo. You may ask yourself why seek what’s extinct? Why brush your filling-packed teeth with Sriracha, then wonder why your gums are a 5-alarm fire? Your skin’s a jellyfish armored with translucence, the paleontology of a fragile skeleton divined underneath…
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Golden Hour in the District of Columbia by Noah Lane Browne
when I’m halfway through my beer I use the restroom and when I come back you nod towards a young man a few picnic tables over (young man being my words not yours and maybe a bit condescending or something my grandmother would say, what I really mean is just some guy) who had strutted…
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The Weight of His Chair by Sam Aureli
Around me, the room spills over— sermons stacked in leaning towers, paperclips rusting in jam jars, receipts from decades ago filed by no logic I can decipher.
Drawers bristle with broken pens, old prescriptions, notes to himself written in a hand growing looser, like thoughts slipping their leash.
He always seemed so certain— a man…
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Isaac Newton reorders the rainbow by Lucinda Trew
for Newton knew the mysticism of music and mathematics, the alchemy of seven seven notes and seven wonders, seven sacred luminaries circling a single sun, a kaleidoscope of reason, with indigo blue shoehorned in….
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yes, she did by Ashlie Hyer
she has a plan. she parks her bike and buys a bag of potato chips. she gets back on, crosses down to main street, to the ice cream place. it’s a jumble of fenced-in water pumps now, but when she walks up it’s the ice cream place, pink and white. she buys a vanilla cone…
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On This Hill by Lin Marshall Brummels
Neil, another darn good horseman offered to take the outlaw, save him from the abattoir. He couldn’t tame wild from Junior either, called him Lucky-to-be-Alive Spot, kept him as a companion for Ghost…
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Florida Fairgrounds by Liz Robbins
the steel ride is painted blue over rust, its many arms symbolic of family. If we still
have people to love, does it matter the ones fled or stolen? Somewhere near the Wheel
of Fortune lies an idea of fairness undone…
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Issue #10 Cover Art: Scarred Beauty by Gerburg Garmann
