Inlay

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.

The girls dance in the road outside a party after midnight at a boy’s house, a boy whose parents are away, whose parents are visiting another child at college and have no idea there are kegs in their kitchen and bongs on their porch. There’s an ice storm, and the girls are a little bit high and a lot bit drunk on tequila, dancing here in a quiet road a few miles from the center of town, and they can see a long way in one direction and only a little way in the other, where the road turns into the woods. But there are no cars coming, not yet, not now, not in this storm, so they hold hands, partly to keep themselves upright on the ice, but mostly because they are the kind of best friends who drape over each other in chairs, who sleep entwined in each other’s beds, who wear each other’s socks and admit to each other fears they haven’t even admitted to themselves. They slide to the right on the ice and then to the left and start singing a song they learned when they were in camp together, back before boys and cars and storms and tequila and mothers who waited up on stormy nights worried about things that make headlines. The girls know all the lyrics to the song still and they feel each word in their chests, in their cheeks, in their bellies, on their scalps, and they keep singing, even when they fall, even as they lie on their backs in the center of the road, laughing, still holding hands, and they can’t hear the party anymore and they can’t hear the ice-on-ice of the falling sleet and they can’t hear anything over the sound of each other’s laughter. --- Emily Rinkema lives in Vermont. She recently has stories in Cleaver, Vestal Review, Milk Candy Review, and Wigleaf, and in Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and the Best American Nonrequired Reading anthologies. You can read more at https://www.emilyrinkema.com/ or follow her on X, BS, or IG (@emilyrinkema).

My sister sells her body when she hits middle age. Ovaries first. She sprinkles wildflower seeds in the empty spaces, waters them until they sprout. Her breasts go next and fetch a handsome price despite the 47-year-old droop. She absconds to Europe with the profits, refusing to return even when her eldest is arrested for stealing narcotics from his grandmother’s medicine cabinet. Small shrubberies bloom in her breast space with small white blossoms. In Berlin, she sells her liver, her left kidney, her spleen. She buys a castle in Scotland and haunts it like an ancient queen, polishing suits of armor she collects like lovers. Wisteria seeps through her skin, purples itself into the walls of the castle, snakes to the ground, twines through my sister's chains. Come home, her youngest implores in letter after letter which my sister ignores. The children turn to me. Go get her, they demand, caustic bird voices scratching over me like pokey little claws leaving pinpricks kisses up my arms and neck. My sister sells her hair, her maternal instincts, her fingertips. She’s wealthy now. But I need nothing, she tells me on the phone, and she collects experiences and plants, and she sells her feet because her legs have grown roots that force into the castle walls, crumbling stone. Make her come home, her children cry. She already is, I tell them, and I make an appointment to sell myself, too. --- Finnian’s work appears in Writer’s Digest, Geist, Pulp Literature, CBC books, and more. They’ve had three novellas-in-flash published, including the recent Redshirts Sometimes Survive—a love letter to Star Trek. Finnian lives in British Columbia with their wife and several demanding houseplants.

Denial: Oil Slick Spillage, Family Grade We’ve never seen the sea so flat and black. The tanker, like you, is long gone, too damaged to return. You leave our ecosystem petrified, from the drill-bits you bored us with and the crude oil fires you lit. We don’t realise, that to recover, we must decontaminate ourselves of you. Anger: Dali Bends Time For Me In the photo, I’ve no idea I’m lounging on Mae West’s lips, leather-cracked and red, eyes framed photos of Dali’s soul, Paris and Perpignon. I hold the undeveloped Polaroid, wanting to let go of reality, swearing on those lips that I’ll destroy it all, the golden-eggs, melting time, and Marilyn Monroe, until a tour-guide corrects me, a case of mistaken identity, he says. I discard the pills. There’s time to be reborn. Bargaining: Primordial Soup ‘How many times has life begun on earth?’ I ask. You answer, ‘About 117 billion times.’ I say, ‘Not human life, not homosapiens, not Adam, Eve, the snake, apple or tree, but the soup to create civilisations, that dying out imagine such myths?’ You answer, ‘So many it’s happening now.’ Depression: I Rain I rain days, flood waters carry me to land, where I lay in camouflage, run off, slip into darkness, watch sea levels rise, to take me on a wave, make me buoyant, uplifted in evaporation, to peak in condensation, head in the clouds, until once again, I rain. Acceptance: Neptune Grass My family tree is underwater, a single ancient organism, roots anchoring shoots, spreading over hectares and years, growing into seagrass meadows, floating fields of flowers, and fruit, olives of the sea, Neptune grass rising like rainforest reefs, protecting our ecosystem, birthing a future, a new reality, pollution free, for our land-bound progeny and our tiny seeds of hope. --- Rosaleen Lynch is an Irish community worker, teacher and writer in London with work selected for the Wigleaf Top 50, Best Small Fictions and Best of the Net and is currently exploring the power of stories to promote social change.

As babes, you toddling with the cleaver, your Ma yelling. As fresh pupils, you whispering the answer, us caned by Sister Adele. As fourth graders, you taunting Bhavani-the-Bully who gave us horsey bites that stung for days. As first formers, you daring us to drink our chemistry experiment leading to a glorious sickie together watching Rage, our hands thigmotropic on the couch. As third formers, you passing the joint to me, us semi-comatose on the rug, a flash of your caramel-soft midriff. Yesterday, me finally finding your lips with mine: you finally finding a line you wouldn’t cross. --- Sumitra Singam is a queer, neurodiverse Malaysian-Indian-Australian coconut who writes in Naarm/Melbourne. She’ll be the one in the kitchen making chai (where’s your cardamom?). You can find her and her other publication credits on Bluesky: @pleomorphic2 & sumitrasingam.squarespace.com

Bill’s kids signed the papers, now he’s trapped with the Von Trapps. High-backed chairs. VCR’d harmonies. But each Saturday night, the black Ford Fiesta with a souped-up car stereo, rattles locked windows to blast Bill’s favourite anthem the stinkety-stale cabbage and fresh ammonia. And in those precious, closed-eye moments before Bill’s wheeled away, strip-washed. Before rubber-gloved hands yank rabbit-boned limbs into somebody else's name-tagged pyjamas, Bill tastes dry ice. He throbs with the bass. He’s back in the club reeking of cigarettes and sex. Hands in the air. Leather jackets, unzipped. The rush of amyl nitrate. His mind exploding. Fireworks. --- Kate Axeford ( she/ hers) social works by day. She lives in Brighton and loves the sea. Her work has appeared in Brilliant Flash Fiction, Bending Genres, Splonk and others and she’s been short and longlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award. Find her at @kateaxeford.bsky.social

Rummage through the depths to find that long-forgotten bottle of Jose Cuervo you once shared. Don’t skip the next steps - running a lime wedge along the rim, dipping the glass in salt; some things are worth the extra effort. Fill the mixer with tequila, lime juice and triple sec, add plenty of ice, then shake until your hands are so cold you can’t feel anything. Strain the mixture over rocks, till you’re all poured out. Garnish with a lime wheel - just for you, just because. Savour what’s to come: an initial sourness, before a finish of bright citrus. --- James Montgomery writes from Stafford in the UK. His stories have been published by 100 Word Story, Gooseberry Pie, Fractured Lit and more, and his work was recently selected for 2025's Best Small Fictions and the Wigleaf Top 50. Find him at www.jamesmontgomerywrites.com.

dlvr.it

When baby-picking season comes around, Meredith says we should go, says it’ll be fun to pick newborns off trees, fill buckets with them. We can make a whole day of it. We’ve just graduated from college, and our lives stretch infinitely before us, the relative freedom of youth still on our side. Neither of us has ever been to a baby orchard before, so I agree, curious to see what it’s like. Another life experience. That’s what we said all through college. Fail a test? Life experience. Get too drunk? Have a bad date? Just more life experiences. At the baby orchard, the orchardist tells us that we came at a good time. He makes small talk, says that business isn’t what it used to be. Fewer people with interest in babies nowadays. We don’t tell him that we aren’t interested in the babies, that we’re only interested in the experience. The picking is easy, and our buckets fill up fast with chubby, noisy, smelly babies. We’ve heard that some people go baby picking every year—tradition—but neither Meredith nor I can imagine that. It reminds me of summer camp years ago, collecting lightning bugs in jars, then letting them go a few minutes later. Just to try it. Just for the experience. Didn’t need to do it again. When we’re done, we ask the orchardist what we should do with the babies, where we should leave them. What do you mean? he says. They’re yours, you take ’em home. You can’t put a baby back once you’ve plucked it off a tree. Why else would you come to a baby orchard? And the one thing Meredith and I both know from our life experiences is that there is no correct way to answer that question. --- Jessica Klimesh (she/her) is a US-based writer and writing coach whose creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Moon City Review, Milk Candy Review, and Ghost Parachute, among others. Her work was selected for Best Microfiction 2025 and Best of the Net 2025.