After two years of it being vacant, they’d posted the position online.

The one I’d been unofficially performing since 2021 when my responsibilities expanded to cover its duties.

My first warning? They made no announcements. It popped up during my normal Saturday morning ritual of surfing the net—another random add on a website. My trembling hand reached for my mug, but my grip faltered, sending my coffee clattering to the floor. Surrounded by the hum of my laptop, I mopped up the mess.

Once finished, I peered back at the monitor.

I applied that day.

I remember preparing my resume, updating the document with the tasks I’d performed over the past two years. Memories of group huddles, the hours preparing business cases, writing and re-writing recommendations to achieve the business goals.

One week later, I paused before the boiling kettle when heavy footsteps approached. “You’ve done a spectacular job,” a voice said.

I turned to face my manager. “Thanks … and just so you know, I’ve applied for the role.”

“That’s fantastic. I’m sure you’ll do well.”

A fortnight later, the call arrived. I’d secured an interview—Monday at 10.30am.

Monday came. My gut churned, and palms sweated while I dialed into the online meeting.

Following the interview, I buzzed with electricity. In a departure from previous weeks, interactions with my manager took on a collaborative approach. “Lyn, I’d like you to sit in on the finance meeting,” he’d announced.

I began to hope—until Friday at 4:30pm when my next warning arrived via incoming message in Teams.

I guess I should have known things were way too quiet. I clicked on the icon and answered the call.

“I’m glad I caught you before you headed out,” a velvety voice said. Her image filled my screen. “I’m guessing you know what this is for?”

I swallowed. “Yes … I think so.”

“We appreciate your application and congratulate you on an impressive interview. Unfortunately, you’ve been unsuccessful …”

Her lips moved, but my mind drifted back to early starts, navigating frost covered pathways, and the wheezing cough that rattled my bones amid the chill of Melbourne’s winter. I recalled preparing reports, how deep shadows formed under my eyes. Three years of toil—all for nothing.

The call ended, and I sat there, engulfed in silence.

Tears did not come, instead heat coiled within my chest, before igniting into sparks that surged forward to sweep away that passive part of me that accepted less. In contrast to my habits, when five o’clock came, I logged off.

With a deep breath, I opened my resume—the one that hadn’t existed three weeks before.

Lyrics to a feminist anthem pulsed in my head, repeating in a loop while I opened my laptop to the employment website. I smiled, reading the position displayed on my monitor, and my resolve solidified.

Ten minutes later, I clicked send. Let my roar erupt.

Louisa Prince is a self-proclaimed late bloomer, living in Melbourne, Australia who’s writing often focuses on family and health. An active member of The Society of Women Writers Victoria, her work is forthcoming in Certain Age Magazine, appeared in CaféLit Magazine, New Plains Review and was longlisted for SWWV’s Margaret Hazard Short Story Award.

In the beauty of this morning
Let me find You again
Though my sins are many
Let me find You again
Though I’ve been a fool
Let me find You again
Though my darkness is great
Let me find You again
Darkness isn’t dark to you
Let me find You again
In this place that we used to meet
Let me find You again
Under these blue skies, beneath these trees
Let me find You again
Meet with me, your broken child
Let me find You again
Please find me where I am
Please find me again.

Jack Borden a writer and who lives in rural Texas. He enjoys spending time in nature, spending time with his family, and trying to practice the presence of God. He is also the author of a children’s fantasy series.

   
When Wanda tells everyone that she’s going to visit her parents for the weekend, she’ll leave on a Friday morning, but not get to their place, which is only 100 miles away, until a Saturday morning. Six times a year, she has a day to herself, just her and her station wagon in the rolling hills of New York and all the money she’s hoarded for the past two months so she can stay in a motel under the name Alexandra Whetstone. She likes to sit in the hotel room without any sound or chore and listen to the silence while she reads detective novels.

            In October, when she gets back home from her folks’ place, she finds Henry and Charles oddly quiet, oddly distant. Charles, her husband, is always distant, but Henry is usually excited because she brings him liquorice. When she hands him his candy, he doesn’t look at it, doesn’t eat it all in one sitting the way he always has before. “What’s wrong?” she asks.

            Henry frowns at her as though she should now. “Grandpa died,” he says in the whine that 11-year-olds can achieve as though it’s obvious, and the weight of his words backs her up, makes her grasp the kitchen table to keep her from falling. “Dad called you and told you.”

            And Wanda knows that he must have called Friday. He must have spoken to her folks but gave nothing away because they didn’t even mention the call on Saturday morning. He must have been very good with his words because they didn’t say a word. When Wanda finds Charles in the living room reading the newspaper, a highball glass full of bourbon, he doesn’t even look up. He says, “He was out back with Henry checking that bat house they built, shining a flashlight up into it to see if they had any visitors.”

            “What happened?”

            “Heart attack.” He still doesn’t look up from the Sunday paper.

            “Right in front of Henry?”

            Now, he looks up at her. “Yes.” He takes another sip from his glass. He is not a man to speak to his wife. He’ll get loud with other people, whoop it up at a baseball game or yell at someone driving stupid, but he always speaks to her with his eyes. Now, his eyes are asking a question.

            Up until now, she wasn’t really worried that he’d catch her. It’s easy to fool a drunk man. “I’m not cheating on you. I go to a little motel halfway between here and there just to get a little time for myself.” Charles’s eyes quiet themselves, and he nods, at whatever peace he finds in himself in these years after the war. He came home a hero, a part of Patton’s cavalry, and hasn’t said one word about his time there, at least not to her. “Do you believe me?”

            Now his eyes tell her that he’s confused. “Of course, I believe you.”

            “Would you be angry if I were lying?”

            He puts down the paper and grabs the armrest of his chair. “You wouldn’t lie,” he says. “Not to me about that. If you did, I’d understand.”

            “Why?”

“I’m not the easiest person to live with,” he says. He takes another long sip and goes back to his paper.

In the days ahead, there will be planning and cooking and phone calls and all the million details that go with arranging a funeral, and that will take up her mind and his. There will be time to ponder the meaning of her marriage, and she wonders if he will too. She doesn’t think he will leave though. He did that years ago. He left her for Patton’s war, and she doesn’t think he’ll ever come back.   

John Brantingham is the recipient of a New York State Arts Council grant and was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been in hundreds of magazines and The Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2022. He has twenty-two books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction. Check out his work at johnbrantingham.com.

“Talk about being lost, Frank.”

“What’d you mean?”

“I mean, we must be in the middle of nowhere.”

He didn’t have the strength to say ‘nowheresville’.

Frank pushed himself up from the hot sand.

“We’re crawling in the desert, Ralph. If we don’t get some water soon, I don’t know what’s going to happen to us.”

The Sun was a pitiless furnace in a cloudless sky. A few buzzards circled above.

“The desert? So you mean, we’re in the middle of the desert?”

Their clothes were burnt, tattered shreds.

“Yeah, as far as I can see.”

“No kidding?”

Frank tossed away the empty canteen.

“Thanks for telling me.”

“Huh?”

Ralph looked from the canteen to the endless sand.

“For a moment there, I didn’t think we had any idea where we were, Frank.”

David Sydney is a physician who writes fiction in and out of the EHR (Electronic Health Record).

My mother said, “Honey, try not to think
about it.” In a tiny early poem
called “Cognitive Dissonance” I included
her advice, and ever since, I have hidden
away in my mind, my delicious mind,
my refuge, capable in her mind of just
letting something go. But if I try
to release myself from a fixation
on the opposite of arhant, one
deserving of humanness while the sting
of betrayal still hurts in longhand.
I rehearse distancing and finding mental dance
with the bodhisattva some golden
mean nowhere mean with embedded joy.

Sheila Murphy has been writing for a good deal of time and lives her poetry. She walks prolifically, just as she writes. She writes, “I will spare you the biographical details and emphasize that I’m a kind of jet propulsion engine filled with joie de vivre! :)”

Playwright’s note: “Hot Sox Sex” was originally performed at Manhattan Theatre Source. It starred Michael Nathanson as Dalton and Ryan Metcalf as Henry.

HENRY: (Right sock puppet, in a male British accent) I don’t like this at all. (Left sock puppet, in a female British accent) It’s over. Our marriage. Our love. (Male puppet) Will you at least give me back my English accent? (Female puppet) Bugger that. Just keep the children.

(DALTON enters)

DALTON: Hey, man. (HENRY, embarrassed, hides his puppets) Sorry, were you masturbating?

HENRY: Uh. Yes. Sure….masturbating.

DALTON:  (Sigh.) Were you enacting celebrity breakups with sock puppets? Again?

HENRY: (Bringing the socks out, sheepish) Uh, hello? It’s called foreplay!

DALTON: Foreplay is for girls. Next you’ll be buying your cock dinner.

HENRY: With any luck I’ll buy it dinner and then it’ll go home with someone else.

DALTON: Dude, only you would get cock-olded by your own cock.

HENRY: I may enact celebrity break-ups with sock puppets for my own purposes of entertainment, but at least I don’t stoop so low as to engage in penis-punnery. That’s the basest form of both penis and pun!

DALTON: But in cockney rhyming slang, cock and sock are interchangeable. Boy I bet that leads to some awkward laundry room prostitute situations.

HENRY: Well we’re not in sockney/cockney, are we?

DALTON: Sockney/cockney? Don’t mock me! Aw, you’re right, I’m so lame! I feel like punching myself! (Walking around, nervously)

HENRY: (Coming up to DALTON, he removes and hands him the sock from his right hand) Here, use this. It’ll soften the blow.

DALTON: (Putting the sock on his right hand) Thanks! (He punches himself in the stomach). Ow! That hurt! Great, now I feel like punching myself for other reasons. (He raises his fist as if to punch himself)

HENRY: (Grabbing DALTON’s wrist) Break the vicious cycle now!

DALTON: (Looking at his raised puppet-clad hand, which HENRY holds at the wrist) Huh. I worried your sock would be gross and crunchy. It’s actually pretty soft. Like a woman’s cheek, properly moisturized.

HENRY: Well of course. I bathe my babies between breakups.

DALTON: (Breaking his hand away) You have got to get a girlfriend.

HENRY: She might take away from my D D D and D time!

DALTON: At least one of those d’s has got to stand for “dorkiness.”

HENRY: Two of them. Dungeons & Dragons, drinking and drugs.

DALTON: You combine booze and drugs, two of the best things ever, with role-playing games? Not cool!

HENRY: But to my credit it’s even less cool sober.

DALTON: Jesus. I’m gonna teach you how to talk to women. We’ll do some role-playing, but not the gay-ass D&D kind. We’ll use the sock puppets.

HENRY: Sure, I mean we’re already wearing them, why waste it?

DALTON: And I’ll be the man, it’s less of a stretch.

HENRY: Do you really have to insult my manhood? It’s not just mean, it’s redundant.

DALTON: (Philosophically) Does anyone really have to do anything? Or are well all just victims of mechanism?

HENRY: You can have the free-will argument with yourself in the shower. Or when you make love to a fat chick.

DALTON: (Wistfully) Arissa? She never returns my calls.

HENRY: The point is, we can discuss cosmic predestination later. But for now we’re trying to get ME laid.

DALTON: Right. (The sock puppet) “Hello, Danielle.”

HENRY: (British accent)”Hello, Bartholemew.”

DALTON: OK see there’s the problem. Why is your sock puppet British?

HENRY: (genuinely curious) I…I don’t know. She just feels Liverpudlian in my hand.

DALTON: Well I’ll tell you, you’re never gonna score with a British chick. British chicks are either classy and way out of your league, or else they’re too skanky for you to handle. There’s no such thing as a mid-level British chick!

HENRY: Now you tell me! Where were you when I was taking European history?

DALTON: Where was I? Behind the science building getting stoned. With the stoners, and the science teachers. That reminds me I should call Roy.

HENRY: Let’s try this again. (sadly) Though without a British accent I am no longer sexually attracted to my own sock puppet.

DALTON: Yeah, life is full of minor tragedy. There is no one single cathartic event.

HENRY: My sock puppet seems to put you in a philosophical mood.

DALTON: You got your causality wrong. I smoked a bowl in the bathroom.(pause) Where were we?

HENRY: (female, non-British)”Hello, Bartholemew.”

DALTON: “Hey. Danielle. What would you like to do today?”

HENRY: “Nothing that involves Dungeons & Dragons, that’s for sure.”

DALTON: “You’ve just described 99% of the sex I’ve ever had! I am so turned on!” (The sock puppets start making out)

HENRY: I had no idea women were so easy. I totally get them now.

DALTON: From a lump of nerd-clay, I have made a man. I feel like a god.

HENRY: You are the best teacher ever! And my kindergarten teacher used to give us pot brownies, until she was arrested for other crimes.

DALTON: I feel like a god, and yet I am but a pawn in God’s idealized structure.

HENRY: Um…Why are our sock puppets still making out?

DALTON: I believe that when you create a fictional character, it has its own volition beyond you. I put a sock on my right hand and the world keeps on turning.

HENRY: So this doesn’t strike you as, like, super-gay?

DALTON: Of course not, your sock puppet’s a girl. So maybe it’s a little gay for you, but not for me.

HENRY: Oh ok. (He surreptitiously puts his hand in his pants)

DALTON: Dude, we’ve been over this. If you’re gonna spank it in front of me, at least wait until I’m either passed out on booze or I’m too stoned to remember. Which I’m not, quite, so feel free to drug me.

HENRY: I swear, this isn’t weird, I’m not thinking about you. I’m embodying the entirely heterosexual lust of my female sock-character.

DALTON: Maybe it’s the pot talking, but that sounds entirely reasonable. (The sock puppet is turned on)”Oh yeah, Danielle. You’re hotter than pantyhose.”

Alaina Hammond is a poet, playwright, fiction writer, and visual artist. Her poems, plays, short stories, nonfiction, paintings, drawings and photographs have been published both online and in print. Her novelette “Jillian, Formerly Known as Frog Girl” was published by Bottlecap Press. Four of her flash fiction stories (“Jane Passes The Bar Exam,” “To Serve In Retail Hell,” “As Numb As I Am” and “Why I Said What I Said To The Bartender”) were nominated for the Pushcart Prize, all in 2025. Additionally, her microfiction pieces “Muffin Or Something” and “Wigless” are both Best Microfiction 2026 nominees.et, playwright, fiction writer, and visual artist. @alainaheidelberger on Instagram.

Nature is the antidote she
said fill your lungs, empty them
awaken your senses. Take it all in.

I tap my walking stick, stumble
as my shadow dims silica stars
trapped in the asphalt. Spot Stubbs,
tethered, stopping to pee, stops me.
Howls of a neighbor’s dog, low growl
of trucks from the distant interstate,
sun breaking through the pines, finds me.
It’s too much, this moment: Start again.

We round a curve on Pine Lake Road
and I see someone, a night rider perhaps, has
tossed a Bud Light bottle, but I must stay
centered, so I tug on the leash, leave it,

come upon a black plastic bag, damp
with dew, obviously an omen.
So now I have to go back for
the bottle, bag it. There’s another one,
down in the bramble-choked spillway,
a risky descent for an old man,
who knows he cannot save the world.

Kenny Gray is the former Director of the Columbus State University Rankin Photography Center (Columbus, Ga.), where he still lives. His fine art photography has been widely exhibited and is held in private and public collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (Atlanta), and the Columbus State University Archives. Kenny’s recent short and feature-length screenplays placed in international Screenwriting Competitions in 2024. When he grows up, he wants to be a poet.

Rage is a nice woman
Rage is smiling
Rage is good
Rage is a good girl

Alissa Larson is a retired firefighter, motorcycle racer, motorcycle safety instructor, swimming pool cleaner, former model, current writer/artist, who is forever paying off an old and unused law degree. She has a grown daughter, and a dog named Meatball. She thinks a lot about structural injustice for women and many of her poems reflect that theme.

The mare has wide chocolate eyes
too big and too bug-ish
slanted too far toward her sun scabbed nose.
The mare, skewbald and squatty,
sits too low in her pasterns
and walks tip toe over uneven ground.
Her ears are flat and angry.
She will bite me if i let her.
The mare screams loudly beneath me
banshee-like and tense
her stained tail sticking straight up.
Her terrific screech hurtles from barrel belly
up her long neck
and out past large yellowed teeth.
She screams at her fear
and my own.
She could eat the world
if only it fit in that wicked mouth.
The mare carries me
through deep wood and big water.
She often forgets how to love
and be loved.
She often forgets most things
but not treats, 8 AM breakfast,
and how to carve a path through deep woods
with only my shaky hands to guide her.

Addison Krone is a young female poet focused on creating freeform poetry that showcases her life experiences. She often writes while traveling across the country for equestrian work. Most of her art is based around familial relationships and living life on the road.

Men lacking kin or coin or goods to sell
Were set upon them once, with scorn, to earn
Scant alms, and mime the weary trek to hell.
Less grimly now, with cash and more to burn,
Sleek devotees step up to take their turn.

Matthew J. Morris is an attorney. He lives with his wife in Brooklyn.