The egg-wife easy-jogs to market

by Anne Howkins

smoothing through the mossy-cushioned lanes. She catches the auspiciousness of a day when the midsummer sun and full moon nod to each other — pockets it in her apron to cushion the smallest eggs. She oils into the marketplace as if floating a few inches above the cobbles, defying gravity, her brim-full baskets unruffled.

The other wives are lubberly-limbed laying out their wares, thrashing about like hens caught in netting. She nods to them; catches the scent of trepidation from a newcomer, her wide-eyed face pale as the morning’s moon. The new wife, hollow with yearning like the rest, flinches at the cackled clatterings echoing round the marketplace. The other wives, all broody-bellied fret for the egg-wife’s composure, for her craft, for her produce.

She will not bargain with customers like the other wives. Her well-husbanded flocks of geese and ducks, hens and pullets, bantams and quail lay the finest eggs—yolks as yellow as any sun that ever rose. By midday her baskets are empty, the market is quiet, and she signals the other wives to bring her their barter.

Rainbow trout from the fish-wife, punnets of berries from the strawberry-wife, finest Jersey Royals from the potato-wife, and a jug of cream from the milk-wife. The newcomer, the swine-wife, brings a bacon flitch which will keep the egg-wife breakfasting like a queen till winter.

Their barter heaped in her baskets, the egg-wife delves into her apron, she hands each wife a tiny parcel wrapped in the gold and silver of this auspicious day, advises careful husbandry is needed for successful hatching. The wives trill their gratitude, then smooth themselves away, clutching jubilant expectation tight against their bosoms.

The egg-wife trots homewards under an empty sky, her baskets brim full, her empty belly hungry for the gift she cannot give herself.

About the Author

Anne lives near Nottingham, UK. Recent stories can be found at Dribble Drabble Review, Paragraph Planet, Bulb Culture Collective, and NFFD and Bath anthologies. Trying to assemble words into something meaningful is what she does when not sitting about prevaricating, or being stupidly busy. Bluesky @anneh23.bsky.social

Damage

by David Swann

Everywhere, I saw Dad in the decaying chapel. A crack tilted drunkenly sideways. Ominous blotches riddled the rafters.

My Granddad, Hammond, sat beside me, clacking mints. Mysterious light had pooled in his glasses. Familiar smells were rising: carbolic-soap and kidneys, soldering-irons and brewer’s slops.

Outside, afterwards, we listened while worshippers discussed the usual topics: angina, drizzle, redundancy, etc.

But our neighbour Captain Lancashire hadn’t time for that. ‘You know me, Hammond,’ he said: ‘I’ll not call a wart a beauty-spot. This lad’s frail. He needs a feed of liver.’

‘Aye,’ said Hammond, squeezing between us, smiling, ‘but he’ll happen leave that for us old duffers to eat, eh?’

Relieved, I followed him home. My grandad was built like a wardrobe, big and rigid, but a wardrobe emptied of everything save its coat-hangers. The hangers rattled inside him, and sometimes he stopped to press a hand against his chest, to steady the contents.

The buildings we passed were knackered, too. Once, they’d made everything here: bricks, brushes, tallows, dyes. Telephone-wires to connect countries. Barbed-wires to divide them.

Now the factories had crumbled, the work vanished. Near home, I breathed it all in. Our town had failed, and the failure was ugly. But there was beauty in the damage. Or something damaged in me that liked the ugliness.

Passing another neighbour, Hammond lifted his cap. Studying me, she said he must be proud, and his false-teeth slipped a bit as he smiled. Then he said the sun was doing its best, and she said, aye, but the forecast’s bad.

We walked on, not speaking, because there was no need. He never put a fence around his silence. You could go into it with him, walk home through it.

So we did. We went on like that, towards whatever was waiting for us.

About the Author

David Swann is a former journalist, toilet cleaner, warehouseman, and university lecturer, now a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Cumbria University of Cumbria, where he helps nurses and paramedics. His novella, Season of Bright Sorrow (adhocfiction.com 2021), illustrated by Sam Hubbard, was named 2023 Rubery Book of the Year. Dave’s other five books include The Privilege of Rain (Waterloo Press, 2010), shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Prize for its evocation of a prison residency. His poems and short stories have won eleven awards at the Bridport Prize and two in the National Poetry Competition. In 2025, Dave worked as club poet at Blackburn Rovers Football Club, the team he’s supported since he was six.

Albermarle Street

by Cecilia Maddison

The holy souls blow litter and lost dreams down Albemarle Street tonight. Sylvia slumbers in the fluorescent frame of a bus shelter, snug amongst her bin bag bundles, sound within her cast of grime.

Sister Claudine, dead for decades, billows by with her hairpin back. Good egg, she crows above the flyover’s roar, and Sylvia remembers clever and promising, words of dough that never rose, as if an oven door opened too soon.

There goes Freddy Watson, all merry eyes and peach-fuzz cheeks, you’re the only girl for me. Still seventeen, he spirals past on a bluster of empty words, his whistle weaving through the lamp posts.

How gently they carry the baby, those holy souls, parading by with a lullaby. Sylvia sighs, for even in sleep her empty arms ache. When he reaches out, his open hands sear stars in the dark. 

Here’s the lady from the Social, the one who filled the forms for the bedsit by the market. The one who never judged when clutter crept across the floor and swallowed up the bed. Small steps, she says, and she tiptoes over the pavement cracks as if to show her how.

Next up is Jackson, dear old friend, frozen through last spring. They say the frosted steps he slept upon glittered like a West End stage, yet no applause honoured his final breath. Mighty taters, he mutters, stumbling by with joints that creak like cellar doors.

It is the coldest hour, when breath hangs in clouds and clock time is a memory. Sylvia stirs, furrowing her forehead where her mother used to kiss. She’d shrug off the weight of this body and blow away in a windmill of limbs, but the holy souls tuck her hair behind her ears.

Not yet, they whisper. Not yet. 

About the Author

Cecilia is a writer from London, UK, where her career as a health professional has run alongside her love of real and imagined stories. Her work has appeared in Phano, Cranked Anvil, Intrepidus Ink and elsewhere. She won the Edinburgh Flash Fiction Award in 2025, the Bournemouth Writing Prize in 2026 and the Anthology Personal Memoir Competition in 2026.
Read more of her work at ceciliamaddison.com.
Find her on Instagram @cec_maddison.

The Siren Squad Tries a New Flyer

by Kate Horsley

This girl Mackenzie’s new to Echo Lake High, an eighty pound package of spraytan and Instant Freeze Hairspray, guitar-string-tight when she stands on our hands. All nineteen of us are torso-tense, muscle-sprung, feeling-not-seeing Mackenzie tuck her back so we can launch her high in a basket toss. She lands in a cradle of laced fingers and Team Captain Taylor beams, besotted, murmuring, Mackenzie’s way lighter than Susie! Mwah! My new favourite girl! Perfect Taylor, strafing the raked seats for her Quarterback boyfriend, Mike. The crowd admiring us stomp and shake the gym. Slicking lipgloss alongside the lockers, lacquering, flipping our hair. We’re one blue-uniformed beast, hunting for blood like the electric eels Mr Hickie showed us in Science. Tubes of tight muscle patrolling the Amazon basin in packs. Did you know eels use electricity for more than zapping things? Did you know they can do real mind control, shocking dumb fish so they swim right inside their mouths? Eels hypnotise, like us. They’re tough like us, cool like us, rather less deadly. Our bare legs, bare midriffs, hypnotising highschool boys and teachers who are nothing to us. Electrifying them. At Echo Lake, the Siren Squad is the apex predator. And we watch out for our own – unless anyone breaks a rule, like eating carbs, or wearing slacks, or messing up a cheer. Or unless it’s Susie, who Taylor caught making out with her boyfriend Mike at the kegger on Saturday night. Or Mackenzie, who was Taylor’s new friend-crush until we all caught her watching Taylor shower, sizing up her dew-dropped flesh the way a boy might. Poor Mackenzie, so small and delicate, teetering to the top of the pyramid, putting her faith in Taylor’s love, in the mesmerising net of our electric, outstretched hands.

About the Author

Kate Horsley’s first novel was shortlisted for the Saltire Award. Her second was published by William Morrow. Both have been optioned for film. Her recent fiction can be found in Smokelong Quarterly, The Cincinnati Review, The Citron Review, The Vestal Review, Wigleaf, Moon City Review, and Flash Fiction Online, and she has been shortlisted for the Bath, Bridport & Oxford Flash Fiction competitions. She’s on the editorial board of Best Small Fictions, is the co-founder/editor of Inkfish Magazine and Press, and lectures in creative writing at the University of Hull.

Nao Yare Nbadi Yonni

by Sara Hills

My husband is on a bus outside Bolgatanga, windows open to red dust, chickens and goats strapped to the roof, when he first hears the song. The one he says reminds him of our marriage. We’ve been married six years, not nearly long enough that the itch to leave should have overtaken him, but his small handwriting on thin blue paper tells another story.

I couldn’t care less about the state of the road, the paragraphs he expends on pocks, ruts, and the heat; how his seated neighbors bounce and lurch in time to the music from an overloud cassette, punctuated by bleating, by chickens squawking for freedom.

The bus, a grayish-white, reminds him of an old bone we once found while weeding our carrot bed, back when we did things together: dancing as our mirepoix sweated on the stove, drinking each other like cheap thin wine, making room for things to grow. That bone, I was sure, was the head of a femur, a dog or cow, but what did I know of death then, or of any body but his.

The song, he tells me, is incessantly upbeat. His seatmate translates the meaning as ‘You must suffer to gain,’ and I picture him, my once-husband, displaced along the dust-lined road and low painted houses of Tiébélé, their community symbolism, his windswept features. The skin of his neck and arms scarletting in the heat, freckles expanding along his exposed hairline because a hat is only a barrier to life’s experiences.

For once, I lay down his letter without finishing, without searching for buried promises or devotion, and let the cat out, the stray he asked me to stop feeding months ago, watching as it shits in the dense weeds where our carrots grew forked and long like fingers.

About the Author

Sara Hills is the author of The Evolution of Birds (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2021), winner of the 2022 Saboteur Award for best story collection. Her flash-length stories have been taught internationally in schools and workshops as well as widely published in anthologies and journals. She has won the SmokeLong Quarterly micro contest, Bath Flash Fiction Award (twice), QuietManDave flash nonfiction prize, National Flash Fiction Day micro contest, and the Retreat West quarterly prize. Originally from the Sonoran Desert, Sara lives in Warwickshire, England. Find her online at sarahillswrites.com.