Forgive Me Martha

by Jay McKenzie

Forgive me Martha, for I have not trimmed. It has been six months since my last haircut and I have used the GHDs with abandon. I home dyed and forgot to Vaseline my hairline. I went on holiday and let sunscreen grease and the bitter tang of chlorine strip my hair of moisture. I squeezed raw lemon juice on my head and baked under a relentless sun, I singed the ends with a drunken cigarette. I let a postman from Ross-on-Wye tangle his fat sausage-fingers in it, didn’t cry too hard when he pulled some out. Oh Martha, forgive me for the way I took to the split ends, pinching the forked tails with bitten fingernails and split them apart like conjoined twin surgery. Back when I stopped getting out of bed, I didn’t brush or wash it for a month. When I eventually bathed, thick spider legs of hair lay inert across the greying surface of the water and I wondered how red my blood would look mixing with the soap scum. Since my boyfriend left, I have yanked no fewer than seven fat greasy locks from random spots on my head to send him in the post and all I got in return was a community police officer warning. O my God, I am heartily sorry for having wrecked my halo, and I detest all my transgressions because I dread the loss of the thing I hide behind to give the appearance of beauty and the pains of potentially having to show the world my bare and unhidable face. I have offended you, my stylist, my listener, whose work is art, whose ears are always open. I firmly resolve, with the help of thy healing hands, to do penance, and to amend my ways. Amend.

About the Author

Jay McKenzie’s work appears in Maudlin House, The Hooghly Review, Fahmidan Journal, Fictive Dream and others. She has been recognised in prizes such as Exeter Story Prize, The Henshaw Prize, Quiet Man Dave, Edinburgh Story Award, Oxford Flash Fiction Prize, Exeter Novel Prize, The Alpine Fellowship, Bath Short Story Award, Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, The Bridport Prize, Fish Short Story Prize, The Wenlock Olympian Prize and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Her novel, Mim and Wiggy’s Grand Adventure (Serenade, 2023), will be followed by How to Lose the Lottery (Harper Fiction, 2026).

Like Dynamite

by Sara Hills

The time Ben and Mark jumped their BMX bikes off Pullman Street bridge; the time they jammed bricks in their pockets and tried to baptize themselves in Snake River; the time they shot BBs at each other’s bare calves and blotted the blood with their t-shirts; the time they huffed turpentine; the time they huffed rubber cement; the time they huffed Mark’s ma’s bleach and Ben’s ma’s oven cleaner and the hollow belly of an old gas can warmed in the sun; the time they compared their dads’ Sunday night beatings to their mas’ squalls of disappointment; the time they vowed they’d try harder to fit in; the time they swore they’d fuck Jenny Jamison if they got the chance; the time they each got the chance and chickened out; the time they joked they’d rather suck Jesus off the cross than even kiss a skank like Jenny Jamison; the time they snuck out of church after call to worship; the time they snuck out of church during Lord’s Prayer; the time they sprinted clean past the parking lot and on down Rutger Road in their Miami Vice jackets and Sunday ties and darted into the woods, pines gianting around them while Ben pulled a plastic bag from his pocket and his church tie from his neck and begged Mark to hold him down, eyes wide, Ben’s open mouth like a fish, pulsing against the plastic, thrashing, kicking up the sweet rot of earth and again, a perfect hum engining under their collective ribs, both of them hard as pylons, as bridge railings, lit like dynamite, their mouths fogging the taut plastic between them.

About the Author

Sara Hills is the author of TThe Evolution of Birds (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2021), winner of the 2022 Saboteur Award for Best Short Story Collection. She has won or placed in the Smokelong Mikey, 2023, QuietManDave Prize for flash nonfiction, the Retreat West quarterly prize, National Flash Fiction Day’s micro competition, Bath Flash Fiction Award, and The Welkin Prize. Sara’s work has been selected for the Wigleaf Top 50, The Best Small Fictions, and the BIFFY 50, as well as nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfictions, and Best of the Net.

Pack

by Dawn Miller

We prowl through corridors as she scuttles away, shoulder knocking metal lockers. Baggy sweater, lank hair, a zit on her chin—there’s too much to make fun of—and so we snap gum in her ear, snap her bra strap in science, snap photos of her eating homemade pickle-and-cheese sandwiches in the library, then post them online with tags like loser, creep, waste of space.

We are fifteen and glorious, light-filled and honey-limbed. Boys seep through our gel-tipped fingers like the inches of gin, whiskey, and vodka we steal from our parents’ liquor cabinets and funnel into thermoses, then anoint with packets of purple Kool-Aid and call the mixture Jesus Juice.

We lord over hallways as the girl with the zit—Rebecca or Rachel or Rochelle—morphs smaller and smaller, then growl pig, lizard, rat, as she scurries by, the bite of syllables making us lick our lips, hungry for more.

Under black-blossom clouds, we link arms for selfies and tip noses to catch bubble-gum scents in the breeze, scavenge communion wafers in chapel and spit them into our hands. We cross fingers in confession and kiss broad-shouldered boys with our purpled tongues, tangy and sweet. We nuzzle, teeth sharpened, eyes always open.

We wait, shifting like shadows, until Rebecca or Rachel or Rochelle’s spot on the bus sits empty, and classmates offer heart emojis and candlelight vigils, our power a warning, a thirst, a howl echoing in the sky.

At night, cell phones clasped to our chests, we stroke tuffs of down, thick as cream along our ears and throats—then make crosses in the air because we’re not stupid girls, not silly girls, we know about survival of the fittest, the wild terror of existence, and the appetite for flesh that’ll rise again tomorrow.

About the Author

Dawn Miller

Dawn Miller is the winner of the 2024 Forge Literary Magazine Flash Fiction Contest, 2024 winner of the Toronto Star Short Story Contest, and Best Microfiction 2024 and 2025. Nominated for Best Small Fictions and The Pushcart Prize, her stories can be found in many journals and anthologies. She is the proud recipient of a 2024 SmokeLong Quarterly Fellowship for Emerging Writers. She lives and writes in Picton, Ontario, Canada. Find her online at www.dawnmillerwriter.com

Eloise Writes as the World Burns

by Erin Bondo

As rockets fall like rain on the southern counties – it is safe, for now, in the North – she drops a bomb on the fictional McElroy farmhouse. A necessary evil, they said. She strikes necessary from the page. It is too early for line edits, but evil is evil, she thinks, as the timbers crack and give.

*

When she wants to scream, she puts them on the lips of Mae MacEwan, who screamed as the soldiers ripped her son from her arms. But she must give these screams to the present, for this is where her own grief keens, day after night after day. Mae MacEwan is screaming as her world rends in two.

*

The radio sputters with news of renewed ground activity and she tears down the walls of Avignon, as if she can force the onslaught away, rake the invading troops eastward across the war room table with her words. She wonders if they are using paper maps now that the grid is compromised, because then they are not so different: both playing God on paper.

*

At the Episcopal church two streets over, the congregation is mid-recitation when an unnamed antagonist firebombs the nave. Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. As the flames consume the altar, she plucks the Browns’ youngest from her pew – she cannot bear the girl’s burning flesh on the page. She sends more ambulances, more fire brigades, more volunteers, but the city still burns and burns.

*

Each night, she gathers them – the Browns, the MacEwans, the McElroys – hides them in cramped cellars and heaving underground stations, hopes her family will benefit somehow from this authorial benevolence. If they make it through the night, so do we. She repeats it like a mantra until she is written in past tense.

About the Author

Erin Bondo grew up in rural Ontario, Canada on the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Anishinabek and now lives in Scotland. She has been longlisted for the Welkin Mini prize and has work forthcoming in the BFFA and Flash Fiction Festival anthologies. Find her on Bluesky @erinbondo.com