When we expect nothing

by Alison Woodhouse

The spider plant has a new baby. We slide the bolt on the bathroom door, like we’re not supposed to. We lift the pot from the top shelf and dip it under splashing water. Soil specks the sink making a mess like it’s playtime. They said we’re not to be trusted alone.

We’re okay.

We plug the bath and throw in handfuls of dead sea salts because floating is definitely the answer.

They said beware going under.

We’re okay.

Steam coats the mirror. It’s a rainforest in here and the knocking on the door that sounds like pounding, or could be shouting, is a small mammal disturbing the undergrowth. If we stay very quiet, it’ll go away.

It doesn’t go away.

Crouching between the toilet and the bath, our wet hands covering our ears, words skitter, splutter, stutter, scrabble and we’re down in rat’s alley.

They said the trick is to breathe. They said trust. They said still.

We’re okay.

We scrub our teeth, spit the blood, swill the sink and take our calcium. Elbow dip, careful like we were shown, we were always careful. Careful. Careful. Here we go baby. Slide down lower, into the hot salty tears, but never ever cry.

Now we’re two hearts pounding, echoes of fists demanding, we’re colliding, but it’s safe down here, safe and warm. So take a big breath for me, ready? Now hold, hold, let’s do it together, and one and two and three.

Maybe today’s the day we come up for air or maybe today we stop counting.

Stop.

They said stop. They said born. They said still. We said no.

Hey baby girl? Your daddy’s back with full blown lilies, drowning outside our locked door. The smell makes us sick but we’ll never say.

We’re okay.

About the Author

Alison Woodhouse is a writer, teacher and mentor based in the Southwest, currently in her 3rd year of a funded PhD in Creative Writing, exploring polyphony. In 2026, she was awarded a UKRI fellowship to conduct 3-month archival research into the writing process of contemporary authors, including Kazio Ishiguro and Rachel Cusk, at Texas University, Austin. Her short fiction has won a number of competitions, most recently Mslexia, and many other pieces have been placed or shortlisted and are widely published both in print and online. Her debut Novella in Flash, The House on the Corner, was published in 2020 by Ad Hoc Fiction and her flash fiction collection, Family Frames, was published in 2021 by V Press.

They announce a two-minute silence for the fallen in Morrisons

and the woman comes out from behind the deli counter and stands ceremoniously in her gilet and polyester shirt and you lower your head and try to look dignified too, though you were in a hurry actually, getting some bits for your son’s pack up, and your eyes meet the heaped dish of snack eggs behind the glass of the deli and would they make a nice change or just anger and confuse him? The egg inside is smooshed with mayo, not the intact egg of the scotch egg. You picture him unpacking them in the community hall with his new-found pals and—this silence must be getting on for halfway through now and you try to concentrate and pay your respects to the fallen of this great country with the solemnity of the deli woman but your thoughts aren’t that obedient and they bleed into wishing your son hadn’t started shimmying lampposts to tie flags or bought paint to decorate the mini-roundabout at the end of the street, though you’ve never seen him this self-confident or passionate, not since he was ever such a little fella, open-faced, swinging your hand. You did find the nerve to ask him what his grandad would have made of it all and felt the wind knocked out of you—how the two of you could arrive at such opposite answers to that question. Anyway at least he’s getting out of the house and you gaze at the platter of snack eggs and imagine a perfect little egg encased inside the darkness of that breaded, sausagey meat, waiting to break out into the light—and the voice on the tannoy announces the end of the silence and the deli woman glides back round behind the counter and asks what she can do for you.

by Shelley Roche-Jacques

About the Author

Shelley Roche-Jacques is a writer, teacher and researcher of short fiction and poetry at Sheffield Hallam University. Her work has appeared in magazines and journals such as Litro, Brevity, Flash: the International short-short story magazine, and The Boston Review. Her collections Ripening Dark and Risk the Pier are comprised of poems in the form of dramatic monologue. Her short fiction has been highly commended in the Bridport Prize and shortlisted for previous Bath Flash Fiction Prizes and the Fish Prize.

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the rabbit hole i fall down at 3.07am

by Letty Butler

What if we’d gone to therapy and seen a calm woman called Charlotte, who listened instead of talked. And we showed her our secrets like a pocket full of worms. What if we’d been brave enough to tell her we felt like siblings and sex felt incestuous but that we loved each other more than anyone else on the planet. And she told us there were ways through it.

What if we’d managed to trace it back to the snag that tore into our happiness like teeth on tights,and discovered that the blame belonged to neither of us. And you’d had the courage to say my depression was an unbearable burden that you somehow bore, despite grappling with your own feelings of despair, feelings you hid from me like sordid pornos. And what if I’d had the courage to squeeze your hand.

What if we’d climbed aboard Charlotte’s ship and sailed back to the early days of shirt-tearing and button-popping. And found ourselves on the doorstep, so consumed by wanting we fucked right there, and afterwards we devoured toast and jam like ravenous beasts, deliciously stunned by our renewed hunger, and remembered that we could be lovers as well as best friends.

What if instead of ripping our lives apart, you got down on one knee and I said yes, and we invited everyone to that little church in Barnes to throw rice and raise flutes. And we had a baby called Pearl, who we liked so much we made more astonishing, tiny people and became proper parents who showed their children how to love.

What if every time the boat rocked, we knocked on Charlotte’s door and she appeared with a compass.

Maybe then I would sleep at night.

About the Author

Letty is a multi-disciplinary writer based in Brighton. She has an MA in Creative Writing from SHU and is represented by Alexander Cochran at Greyhound Literary. Her debut novel will be published by Fleet (Little Brown) in 2027. Awards includes the Fish Short Story Prize, The BPA Pitch Prize, New Writers Flash Award, Mslexia and a Northern Writers Award. She has been shortlisted for The Bridport Prize, The Letter Review Prize, Silver Apples, The Funny Women Awards, The Kay Mellor Fellowship and Reflex International.

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Hestia / Dionysus

by Rachel Curzon

When she gets back from big Tesco, all the lights are on and he’s standing at the front door peering at his car keys. Going out, he manages to say, and slides a leer towards the bags for life she’s put down as a kind of barricade on the step. You’re not, she says. You’re absolutely not, like that. It’s a quiet street, and look, he’s made a disco of it, cranking up the sound and pounding out The Clash, for chrissakes. Suddenly, she’s as furious as she’s meant to be, and making for the stereo, skidding round the doorframe, all elbows. One kind of clamour gives way to another, and she thinks This is no life, and It will last forever. There’s no point getting into how she feels, or why she stays. She puts his keys in the toe of her shoe and goes about her home putting lights off, room by room, while he sits on the bonnet of the Astra, shouting dithyrambs into the voice recorder of his phone.

About the Author

Rachel Curzon is based in North Yorkshire. Her poetry pamphlet is published under the Faber New Poets scheme, and work has appeared in The London Magazine, Poetry Review, The Rialto, and elsewhere. She was a New Northern Poet for 2025.

Low Altitude

by Fiona Lynch

You think you’re doing ok, definitely not over it, but you’re starting to venture out, working, shopping, dropping the kids off to squads for some semblance of normal, when you lock on someone in the pool car park—about the right height, mousey hair, same sartorially disastrous tracksuit—you will him to turn because the profile is uncanny, even flicking his head to redirect a miscreant fringe in a way that’s tattooed on you, and as if he’s heard, he pivots—but the nose is all wrong, hair middle-parted and you feel it in your guts like a plane dropping too fast—a moment you try to conceal because it’s probably nothing and you don’t want to seem like the nervy type, which is odd because if a plane is going down, bogus zen won’t change the outcome—so what if passengers think you’re a panic merchant—and that’s when the eldest of your chlorinated children asks what munchies you brought because they’re always ravenous after clocking laps and you realise you only have puppy snacks for the expensive, untrainable mutt who seems to be an exception to the poodle gene smarts, so you swing into McDonalds for fries to subvert several kilometres of whingeing because you don’t have the stomach for it and may say something regrettable to three kids who are aching for their dad—and fried food (using the term loosely) plus packets of prone-to-explode barbeque sauce seem innocuous compared to thoughts about becoming one of those mums who brews a family-size batch of warm milk and barbiturates, which won’t ever happen, but similar to other options that won’t be exercised, is curiously comforting, like puppy school, or a life jacket with a dinky torch and a two-dollar whistle.

About the Author

Fiona Lynch is an Australian writer who lives by the bay. Fiona won the Fractured Lit Winter Flash Challenge (2023) and her flash has been published in The Waxed Lemon, Reflex Press, and shortlisted in the Bridport Prize and Bath Flash Fiction Prize (2024). Her poetry has appeared in Australian Book Review, Cordite Poetry Review, Heroines Vol 3, Aesthetica Award and Fish Prize anthologies. Fiona was a prize winner in the ACU and Grieve Poetry Awards. She has written television comedy and performed as a stand-up comic at iconically seedy venues in Melbourne. Fiona is working on her first hybrid collection.

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