Inlay

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

Year’s first mow, the roar of cut grass in his nostrils, a weak tickle of antihistamines in his blood. The birds are interested, a pair of robins on the fence eager to jump in once he’s finished. He’s slung the headphones he’s supposed to wear around his neck, doesn’t like barriers between himself and the world and he likes to hear the birds, before and after the petrol motor. Spends his days dirtygloving his phone to identify them on Merlin, today already a Eurasian Blackcap, a Great Tit and a Wren, on top of the robins now tucking into the lawn. The minute he’s heard them, he’s forgotten how they all sound, so it’s a non-stop occurrence, slowing him down. A face pops into the kitchen window as he’s packing up; he raises a hand to wave, but they’ve gone. He thinks back to remember when Matthew, his boss, last called, realises this could end up being his sixth day in a row without actually speaking to anyone, which vaguely interests more than bothers him. His truck’s parked in the shade and he takes his time loading the mower and blower, goosebumps eventually rising on his forearms and throat to meet the morning air. According to his schedule, he should be halfway to the next job by now but today’s his birthday and if feeling the difference between hot and cool’s a present he can take for himself, he’s going to take it. Blackbird, he thinks. Robin, says his phone. --- Nick Black manages 2 public libraries in North London. His story collection Positive and Negative is published by Ad Hoc Fiction. He posts as @fuzzynick on Bluesky

In the staffroom, Kate plugs in a fan which swings from side to side, moving the stale air around. Beside her, a physics textbook is open, and she reads – An atomic second is defined as 9,192,631,770 oscillations of a caesium-133 atom. There is an orange on her desk and she peels it, inhales the bright, sweet scent. She reads about the transition between two hyperfine levels of the ground state of this atom. She is in transition between breaktime supervision and her final year French students. This atom must be at rest, at zero degrees Kelvin. Her foot taps as she refreshes her email; refreshes again. There are sixty seconds in one earth minute. Sixty of those in an hour. Twenty four hours in a full spin of the globe. One hundred and sixty eight (she imagines this in the voice of a darts commentator) hours in the space between one weekend and the next. Between an interview, and a possibility. The orange drips juice and her fingers are sticky on her phone as she calculates the number of seconds in a week. The app refuses to multiply the 604,800 seconds by the oscillations she’d read in the textbook. She agrees. Whatever it is, it’s too many to contemplate. She feels every single oscillation. Balances the needs of her students, and her desire for a promotion. Other factors: what her ex will have to say about it; are her children happy; does she need to worry about her pension or will the world have ended? She goes back and forth. The effect of waiting on the passage of time should be studied. Maybe it has been, she doesn’t know. Maybe it becomes quantum time. An oscillation of a caesium-133 atom, under observation, approaches infinity. She checks her email again. --- Fiona McKay is the author of the novellas-in-flash, The Lives of the Dead and The Top Road, and the collection Drawn and Quartered. Her flash fiction is in The Forge, Gone Lawn, Ghost Parachute, trampset, Peatsmoke, Fractured Lit and others. She lives in Dublin.

On her way back from the shops, she tripped over nothing, and fell flat on the pavement. A young man wearing shorts, despite the autumn chill, stopped to help. He squatted down and asked if she was okay. ’Think so,’ she said, attempting to get up. He hoisted her to her feet. ‘My gran used to have lots of falls,’ he said, kindly.” Still went out though.’ ‘I didn’t “have a fall’, I fell,' she said . He looked baffled. ‘I was an English teacher,’ she explained. ‘Cool,’ he said. He collected up the vegetables that had spilled on to the pavement and put them in her bag. She leaned against a garden wall to catch her breath. His arm was tattooed with the message ‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.’ He saw her looking. She used to know the rest of that prayer once. Something to do with courage and wisdom. ‘Life’s hard isn’t it?’ she said. He nodded. ’Any damage done?’ She patted her knee where a dark stain had spread though the denim. ‘Just a graze,’ she said, although her hand smarted and her legs felt wobbly. ‘Nothing to speak of.’ ‘You take care, lady.’ He strode off, texting, not looking where he was going. He’s not afraid of “having a fall”’, she thought. A glossy heritage tomato she’d bought as a treat still lay in the gutter.. She couldn’t risk bending down to pick it up. But the sight of it lying there, next to an empty crisp packet, made her want to cry. --- Jude Higgins' is a widely published flash fiction writer, whose collection Clearly Defined Clouds was published in 2024. She founded Bath Flash Fiction Award and is Director of Flash Fiction Festivals UK and the short short fiction press, Ad Hoc Fiction. judehiggins.com