Inlay

Think of cherry smoke curling and crawling in white tendrils from a skinny chimney as a fat trout sizzles and spits—tonight’s dinner. Think of fingers clacking a keyboard, mom muttering to herself, her face lit with a bluish glow and forehead scrunched in concentration. Think of the bitter roasted aroma of decaf drip coffee left too long on the burner, stale but still hot and ready for company because like pizza, like sex, all coffee is good coffee. Think of the kids yelling. Think of the grown-ups groaning. Think of the trout—the trout is good, but the spaghetti squash tastes like play-dough. Think of the day—it was defeats, altercations, frustrations, and food. Think of the good, the smoke, the clacking, the bitter, and yes even the spaghetti squash. --- T.L. Tomljanovic is a flash fiction writer from Vancouver, Canada. She is a Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction nominee, a founding member of the Pride Roars writing collective, and judge for Off Topic Publishing’s monthly flash fiction and CNF contests. Find more of her work at tomljanovic.wordpress.com/

Duct tape the corner where the cardboard is frayed. Tie a ribbon around the flap that threatens to bend back. Apply super glue to the seams and blow it dry carefully with pursed lips, the way you used to blow a kiss across the room to someone you were sure loved you and always would. Don’t shake the box. Don’t listen too closely. Don’t peak inside. Never open it. --- Melissa Flores Anderson has published work in swamp pink, Chapter House, HAD and Best Small Fictions 2025. Her debut short story collection All and Then None of You is out now from Cowboy Jamboree Press.

Signs it is time for a self-clean cycle: buildup of grease, odors and heavy emotional residue. Some say there is no bad time for self-cleaning, but avoiding special occasions such as wedding anniversaries is recommended. Self-cleaning requires extremely high temperatures, which will trigger an automatic shutdown. During this time, you may experience reruns of bad decisions, like having sex with your partner’s best friend in the bathroom at Lowry’s. The unit will unlock once these errors have been processed and temperature is within limits. Ensure good ventilation and wipe out any debris with a soft cloth and a heartfelt apology. --- Cole Beauchamp is a queer writer based in London. Her stories have been in the Wigleaf Top 50 and nominated for multiple awards. She’s a 2026 Smokelong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow and contributing editor of New Flash Fiction Review.

Although we enjoyed reading your ballad, unfortunately it didn’t quite hit the sweetmeat spot for this submission call, and we can only accept a handful of lovers in each window. Actually our windowsills are heaving with wan, lyre-plucking youths moaning how fair I am, how ardently they want to get under my kirtle. Not that they have a chance, with unrequited being the whole point, unless of course they’re as hot as Sir Launcelot. We’ll reopen for regular courtier submissions after Rick’s next crusade and hope we’ll see more from you (loved how you paired ‘wimple’ with ‘pimple’). Keep balladeering! --- Chris Cottom lives near Macclesfield, UK. He’s packed Christmas hampers in a Harrods basement, sold airtime for Radio Luxembourg, and served a twelve-year stretch as an insurance copywriter. He liked the writing job best. Find him at chriscottom.wixsite.com/chriscottom

Pihu was not a question-spurting-fountain child. Unlike her sibling. That doesn’t mean she didn’t have them. Those questions. She was a secret-bagful-of-questions child. The nondescript owner of a magic bag heavy with questions, somehow buoyant. They didn’t get lost like keys in a cluttered purse. She never had to fumble for them. Why she kept them there is unclear. Maybe she thought they were less cute or intelligent than her sibling’s. Maybe no one indulged them. Maybe she didn’t like ready-to-eat stuff. Or perhaps she could float on it, as on a secret magic carpet. Whenever she came across an answer, the correct question would pop out of the bag of its own accord. She’d paste them side by side in her private encyclopaedia. The answer on the left page, the question on the right. The order was important to her because sometimes, having received an answer, the question would grow a horn or a tail or a limb. She wanted them to veer right. For instance, once, when her mother was telling someone that it was considered inappropriate for women of her previous generation to smile at the camera, she stumbled upon the answer to why her dadi, who had died before her birth, wore a formidable look in the picture framed on the wall. But there was a spurt of branching limbs on the pasted question. Did not smile mean look angry? Was she pressed to pose? Was she resenting the direction? She kept searching for answers in her mother’s unending anecdotes, and then, forgot about it. Years later, someone asked her to flash her best demure smile for a matrimonial proposal. She smiled, plastic, and knew: how a face obliged to be arranged goes for its own rearrangement. Was that not smile still travelling? --- C. Oulens is an emerging poet and former academic. Winner of “Annual Poe-It Like Poe 2025” poetry contest, her works appear in The Broken Spine, Lothlorien Journal, The Candyman’s Trumpet, The Starbeck Orion, SHINE International, Eunoia review, TiaC, Spillwords, FromOneLine, Verseve, SciFanSat, The BookBag, Sixty Odd Poets and haiku journals. * dadi: paternal grandmother

You, an alchemist, undid my bones into atoms, trained them through the fractals of you your rivulets and creeks so I could fill you with my humours so you could claim my essence as your own so you could weight yourself with my gravity so you could feel solid earth under your arched feet so you could feel something alive so you could move and breathe and hope and wish and so you did wish and hope and move and hunt and gather and stuff stolen stones into your interstitium so you sunk into the earth where you met grubs and scurrying chittering things and it rained and became muck and mud and you looked to me to unstick you and the only way I could was to springmelt through you and reconstitute myself atoms molecules mitochondria cells bones ligaments fascia muscle skin so I could see who I was outside you something new something alive something separate and this mud is your mud and I live in the sun, the sea, the sky, the everywhere with my bones and flesh and skin.