Us big ones rarely left the stall, they fixed it like that, giving out plastic consolation prizes, you know — the kind of crap you couldn’t give away. Anything to keep them quiet for five minutes, they would say. Still, you could see the kids’ faces drop when they realized Daddy wasn’t winning that giant fluffy bear after all.

So it all went pretty much the same way. Holiday weekends were the worst. They’d run about like dogs on heat, begging for another ride, another shot. I’d hear them kicking and screaming as they were dragged away by exhausted parents — and those were the well behaved ones.

Course, every now and then you’d get a proper player. The kind who could play them at their own game — the kind who had seen it all before and knew the inside tricks. That was their biggest fear.

When I was won I knew it was coming. He was one of those scruffy, unwashed types who looked like he’d been reared on fried food and tobacco. As I watched him approach the stall I knew he was a player. Cocky and menacing — exactly the type Panda went to on the first week. They’d stepped up the game since them, said it wasn’t watertight enough, cost them too much to lose us big ones.

This one didn’t even have a kid with him. Probably the type who got off trying to impress strangers, prove himself better than them. He could’ve started with a bar of soap.

So, Scruffy picked up the rifle and bingo. Bang, bang, bang — every shot on bulls-eye. He clenched his fist in the air and took off his baseball cap, revealing this chip-fat greasy hair suck to his scalp. They asked him what prize he wanted and I squirmed as his bony yellow stained finger pointed right at me.

I was tossed into this old beaten up truck and driven to his place, which was unsurprisingly a shitty caravan. It was dirty and brown, full of old takeaway boxes and empty beer cans. I was chucked in the corner next to a stained blanket which reeked of sweat and piss. Just what I’d always dreamt of.

Most of the time he sat around watching television, those shitty daytime shows which make you contemplate suicide as a holiday. He swore a lot to himself and to inanimate objects. He chain-smoked and drank a lot too. He must’ve done some sort of dodgy work ’cause he would disappear for hours at a time and come back, emptying wads of cash onto the table.

It was when I overheard him on the phone I found out he had a kid. He must’ve been on pretty bad terms with the woman ’cause generally his responses were hostile and bitter. From what I figured, he wanted to see the kid but she didn’t want him to. The last phone call had ended with him lobbing the phone towards me, denting my nose and then kicking the old TV with his boot, smashing the screen to pieces. The glass never got swept up, becoming a glamourous addition to the ambient squalor look.

The next few days he seemed grumpier than usual and never left the caravan. One night he got drunk and scowled at me, muttering, “might as well burn that,” and pinged his cigarette into my stuffing. Man, that shit stung.

The night after I heard him on the phone again, standing outside the door. It must’ve been pretty bad as his voice reached a new level of rage. At the end of the call he began stomping around erratically, throwing chairs about, grabbing stuff from the cupboards and smashing it against the walls. He pulled a container out from under the sink and was pouring liquid everywhere, swearing and panting like a rabid dog. Over the sofa, chairs, carpet, over me.

Petrol.

I watched in fear, every movement he made hinting towards a finale, a crescendo of his anger. Then he stopped suddenly, as if he’d just heard something. He looked down.

Somewhere on the carpet, amongst the broken glass, rusty cans and crisp packets — the phone was ringing.

His shaking hand reached down and he answered with a spiteful roar. His face was red, sweat pouring from his head. But as he listened, he became quiet. Whatever was being said seemed to please him and his expression softened as he sat down.

The fumes from the chemicals were making me dizzy, and I stupidly hoped, prayed for a way out. I listened tentatively as his chat became amicable, friendly even. He chatted for a long time, smiling, even laughing before finally hanging up. I’d never seen his spirit so lifted. He reached for his cigarette, and with a satisfied sigh, struck the match to light it.

I was lucky, I guess. Some do-gooder spotted fire tearing through the roof and put it out before the flames reached me. Unlike Scruffy. Just as well he’d put me in the corner furthest away.

After the people came, they took me away, washed me and now I’m back on a shelf in one of those crappy second hand markets. But that’s how it goes. Next life I’m hoping to be one of those high end teddies, the ones rich folks buy and treat real special. Well, a bear’s got to dream, right?

RJ Murray is a writer based in Scotland. She is inspired by the strange and unusual and likes to explore alternate worlds in her stories. She has published a number of short and flash fiction over the years and is currently working on a novel.

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Main Street emptied of business. The shoe store closed first, then the pharmacy, then the diner with the great breakfast and sawdust-tasting meatloaf. Potholes everywhere. People learned to walk gingerly.

Everything came through screens now. Charts nobody understood. Committees explaining delays, shortages, temporary disruptions. Every week a different person in charge, saying the same thing, nobody believed.

Then the agents, men with ladders, arrived.

They came in at dusk on flatbeds with the ladders stacked neat as rifles. Heavy canvas coats, greenish gray under the streetlights. Thick gloves, heavy boots. Always speaking low enough no one could hear them.

They carried coal up three flights for old tenants with bad hips. Fixed dead boilers in flooded basements. When Liz Marecek slipped on the ice, two gray coats showed up in an ambulance within a minute. One sat beside her in the hospital all night with a gloved hand resting over hers.

After they started showing up everywhere.

Things started working again. The streetlights flickered. Freight trains ran through town at night. Heat came back to buildings that had been cold for years.

The town had been exhausted so long people wouldn’t ask questions.

The war memorial in the square had eighteen names on its stone. One Tuesday morning several gray coats leaned ladders against it and started sanding the names away. Werner watched from across the street, hands in pockets, as dust drifted through the air. By evening the stone looked smooth: nobody had ever died in the war at all.

The pamphlets came before dawn. Folded sheets pushed through mail slots. Title: THE TOWN MUST BE RESTORED.

Werner read his sitting at the kitchen table. One line lodged in his head and stayed: A man whose labor has been discarded is not worthless. He has been abandoned.

He went to the address printed at the bottom. An old warehouse, two blocks from him. Inside, several gray coats stood on a platform. Suddenly they began, clamoring about dignity, work, betrayal. And the town they remembered and they were owed.

A large photograph hung behind the gray coats: a middle-aged avuncular man, appearing in deep thought. Werner never heard anyone say his name.

When the meeting ended, they passed around the paper. Werner signed his name.

Soon the grocery shelves filled again, though the packages looked similar. The buses ran exactly on time. The streets got quieter at night.

Then one morning Werner went into the pharmacy and found an agent behind the counter. Next to him lay his coat and a ladder.
Werner asked where the pharmacist had gone.

The gray coat only grimaced.

Werner walked out. Have a nice day.

Werner sees two agents across the street lift a ladder to a second-floor window. One stays down to steady the base, the other climbs. Werner watches the boots rise rung by rung.

J.S. O’Keefe is a trilingual translator and writer. He has published over 500 short stories, creative essays and poems in print and online literary journals.

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They hadn’t eaten since the morning before. Their grandfather’s dog had barked them off the porch the night before that, and it hadn’t felt real yet, being unwanted in the only house either of them remembered — the woman who never once, in nine years, said are you hungry without meaning it, now shouting that they’d eaten what wasn’t theirs to eat and so had lost the right to anything at all. Tobin still didn’t understand what they’d done wrong. A handful of pigeon eggs. He kept turning it over like a stone in his pocket, looking for the sharp edge that had cut them loose from home.

Corwin climbed. He was sixteen and rangy and good at trees, and Tobin waited at the bottom with his arms wrapped around his own ribs, watching his brother’s shape go small against the grey sky.

There were five eggs in the nest, warm still, the mother bird off hunting somewhere over the ridge. Corwin ate four of them standing in the fork of the branch, cracking each one against his teeth, not looking down. He’d meant to save more. He told himself that later, and it was even true. But hunger doesn’t listen to what a person means to do, and by the time he remembered his brother waiting below, there was only the last egg left, and he put it carefully in his shirt pocket and started down.

His boot found the branch wrong. The world tipped. He caught himself against the trunk with both hands, and the egg — he felt it happen before he understood it — the egg slid from his pocket and fell thirty feet and broke open on a root, and something in Corwin broke with it, though it took a moment to show.

He came down the last of the tree slower than he’d gone up, and when his feet touched the ground he was already wrong. Tobin saw it first in the eyes — something flattening out in them, going yellow and hard and strange, the pupil narrowing to a black seed. Then the shoulders, hunching forward like a man carrying an invisible weight. Then the fingers, which curled and would not uncurl, and along the backs of his brother’s hands, where the skin had always been pale and freckled, dark feathers pushed up through the flesh like grass through snow.

Tobin screamed. He grabbed for his brother’s arm and it was not an arm anymore, not entirely, and Corwin — still himself, still enough himself to speak — said, in a voice going rough and low, “Don’t. Don’t touch it, it’ll hurt you too.”

“Fix it,” Tobin said, which was a child’s thing to say, and he knew it even as he said it. “Take it back, put the egg back, I don’t care, I’m not even hungry, take it back—”

“I can’t.” Corwin’s jaw was lengthening now, the words coming out around something that wasn’t quite a mouth anymore. He crouched — it looked less like sitting down and more like folding — and when he spoke again his voice had almost nothing human left in it, just the shape of the words pressed through feather and bone. “I ate what I shouldn’t have taken all of. This is just — this is just what happens. The ridge keeps what’s owed it.”

“I’ll come with you, then.” Tobin was crying so hard he could barely see his brother’s shape anymore, only the color of him, dark against the white sky. “Wherever you have to go. I’ll come.”

“You can’t fly,” Corwin said, and it might have been a joke, once, the kind of thing he’d have said to make Tobin laugh even in the middle of something terrible, and for one second his eyes went brown and human again, just his brother looking out of that strange new face. “Walk east till you hit the widow Anders’s field. Tell her I sent you, tell her — tell her you’re a hard worker, it isn’t even a lie. She’ll take you in. She’s got no one either.”

“Corwin—”

“I’m not gone,” his brother said, though they both understood he was already going, the last of the shape settling into wings, into a body built for the sky and not for staying. “I’m just going to be the kind of thing that watches from up high now. I’ll see you. I won’t be able to say so, but I’ll see you.”

And then there was no more brother in it at all, only a broad dark bird lifting heavy off the ground, circling once over the dead sycamore and the broken egg and the boy standing alone beneath it, and then rising higher, smaller, gone east over the ridge before Tobin could even finish saying his name.

He walked until dusk. He found the widow’s field exactly where his brother had said it would be, and camped at its edge, and did not sleep, and in the morning there was a hawk circling far off over the tree line, too far to be sure of anything, and Tobin lifted his hand anyway, in case.

KY-oh Rangi is a scientist and writer based in Australia. He writes tragicomic stories about the gap between who we imagine ourselves to be and who we actually are, often exploring themes of cultural identity and the immigrant experience.

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The good thing about me being a prisoner in my own pictures is that I always drew better than everybody else. It could look much worse if I was one of those who place the triangular sun in the upper right corner or draw a person as a combination of sticks.

I can’t leave this place, no matter which road I take. The town of my own looks almost real. I live in a simple country house with a disabled dog, surrounded by many trees. It was one of my latest pictures. The town center is pretty dull. I made it back at school, before I started my BA. Being short on budget back then, I only used charcoal and cheap sets of pencils, the number of colors in which never exceeded sixteen. That’s not the best place to be in, so I rarely go there.

Far beyond the river there are fields with tulips and acid-green meadows that are a home of geometric animals with disproportionate body parts and bushes of unusual size. These are my childhood drawings. I was surprised when I saw them here, as I had already forgotten about their existence.

It’s not so bad in here as you can imagine. The town has a museum, a zoo and a circus. There is even a Noah’s Ark, which our elementary school teacher once assigned us to draw as homework. On weekends, I go to an ice cream shop. This is the brightest place here, drawn with crayons.

It’s quite calm down here and it never rains. Crime level equals zero. Everything is almost the way I wanted it to be, besides the fact that I have no one to talk to. I’m used to the fact that the residents are faceless. They communicate with each other in their own peculiar way, without words. It was strange at first, but I just accepted it as a fact.

Sometimes it’s even good they are faceless. The day I got here, which was the day I died, I appeared here naked. That’s probably because I died naked. I drowned swimming in the lake after my leg cramped. From this perspective, I am even lucky they don’t have eyes. Otherwise, I would feel uncomfortable. None of them but my dog. But that’s fine. She knows me better than anyone.

I do not know how long I have been here for and for how long I will stay, but if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that you have to try really hard at everything you do, because your purgatory could look like anything you create. And if you don’t think so, then you are just as crazy as I once was.

Yuliia Vereta (she/her) is a Polish writer of Ukrainian origin who is now living her third life in Katowice, where she works as a translator. She is a poet on a good day and a disaster-maker on a bad one. Her speculative works have been published in print and online, among others in Star*Line, Dreams and Nightmares, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Utopia Science Fiction, Penumbric, Kaleidotrope, and ParSec. She is a 2022 Best of the Net Nominee. When she isn’t working, writing or cooking, she tries to remake her stationary time machine into a smaller portable model, since the one she currently owns does not fit into the elevator and constantly becomes the source of strange questions at airport customs.

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The air smelled like radiator steam and pan-fried American failure. The July sun bleached every brick of Crown Heights into the color of singed flesh, and the sidewalks pulsated and vibrated, as if some bastard angel beneath the pavement was trying to claw its way up and remind you what hell was.

Frank, or the man who would be Frank for the next few hours, leaned on the buzzer with a crooked finger and no small amount of shame. The name hadn’t arrived yet — that came later, in the apartment, after the woman asked and he looked to the wall and saw a pale, screaming face in oil — Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X — and told her, “Frank.”

She said nothing, just blinked. Clarissa Greene.

Sixty-eight years old, with a face like rusted sheet metal and a voice that had been dipped in ash and wrapped around too many Parliaments. She wore a threadbare lilac housecoat that gave off a smell like talcum powder and gin, and her hair — steel-grey and brittle — floated around her scalp in a disheveled aura of absence.

Her apartment was the sort of place where furniture went to die — dusty ottomans with one leg too short, sagging floral couches that had sucked in decades of spilled grief. A bulb dangled from a bare fixture in the ceiling, glowing like a jaundiced eye.

Frank was here to sell a dream. A whisper of silicon salvation.
That’s what the briefcase was for.

Inside: the guts of a dozen junked computers, rearranged and spray-painted and given fake serial numbers. “QuantumFire” was the name of the model. A made-up brand, complete with a stolen logo from some Taiwanese fan club’s website. He never sold to kids. Never to anyone under fifty. It was always the elderly, the grieving, the slow-moving, and the over-trusting.

Clarissa opened the door not with suspicion, but with a kind of exhausted tolerance. She let him in before he said a word.

She motioned toward the table. Sat. Lit a cigarette with the practiced click-flick-drag of a woman who’d survived the better part of the twentieth century and had nothing left to prove.

“So,” she said. “Show me your miracle machine.”

Frank opened the briefcase. He launched into the pitch. Pentium-class processor, Windows XP Professional, WiFi ready. She nodded without listening. Smoked without blinking. Her eyes were not on him but on the window behind his head.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

He blinked. Looked at the wall. Saw the Pope.
Bacon’s violence, the ribcage of color, and the scream trapped in its frame like a soul vacuum-sealed in paint.
“Frank.”

She nodded again.

He noticed the egg halfway through the performance.

It sat on a shelf behind her, gleaming in the dusty sun like something that didn’t belong in this world. A Fabergé. Real. There was no mistaking it — blue enamel with golden webbing. Tiny silver doves mounted on hinges along the base. It was worth more than the entire apartment. More than Frank had ever held in his hands in one place.

She noticed him noticing.

“That was Alfred’s,” she said. “My husband.”

Frank said nothing.

“He used to say, if the world ended, we’d still have that egg to trade with the angels.”

There was a moment then — a stillness.

The type you don’t get in the city unless somebody’s died.

Clarissa stubbed the cigarette into an overflowing tray and looked him dead in the eyes.

“I had a son,” she said. “His name was Aaron. He worked at Cantor Fitzgerald.”

The words landed with the weight of concrete.

“I had him until September.”

She didn’t say “eleventh.” She didn’t have to. The date was unnecessary.

Frank’s hands were still on the fake machine. They were trembling.

He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

“I… I can show you how it works,” he said lamely.

She leaned back, smiled without warmth.

“You know it’s a scam,” she said, not accusingly, but like someone saying the weather was humid. “I know it. You know it. Doesn’t matter.”

Then she got up, crossed the room, and took the egg from its perch.

Held it like it was alive.

“Here.”

Frank blinked.

She pushed it into his hands. Her palms were soft and cold.

“Why are you giving me this?”

“Because I don’t need it anymore,” she said. “I’m going to Switzerland.”

That made him pause.

The phrase echoed strangely in his mind.

He’d heard it once, years ago — maybe in a diner, maybe on a train — spoken low and sideways by a man in a coat too clean for his teeth. Switzerland is not a place for skiing or chocolate, but for leaving. People with the means, or the nerve, or the grief.

He didn’t ask for clarity.
Didn’t want it.

Instead, he placed the egg carefully on the table.

“I’m not going to take it,” he said.

She nodded.

“I’m not going to sell you this computer either,” he added.

Another nod.

He sat there a long time, breathing in her smoke and her grief. She lit another cigarette. Offered him one. He declined.

Outside, a garbage truck rumbled past, howling.

When he finally stood to leave, he looked at her one last time. There was something in her eyes — not gratitude, not sadness, but a kind of grim, tired peace.

He didn’t shake her hand. Didn’t hug her. Just gave a slight, respectful nod — the kind you give a soldier, or a priest, or someone about to do something courageous.

Then he left.

The July heat swallowed him as he descended the stairs. His shirt stuck to his back. The pavement burned.

The egg stayed on the table.
The Pope kept screaming.
Clarissa kept smoking.
And somewhere, high above the skyline, a plane curved gently over Manhattan, disappearing into the blue.
Switzerland was oceans away, and yet right there.

J Christopher Motta: Jibril ibn Kristufar is a lifelong reader and writer whose work blends literary fiction, horror, and philosophical inquiry. A graduate of SUNY Ulster with a degree in liberal arts, he draws on a deep well of literature, theology, and American decay to craft that are at once intimate and mythic.

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Time is an illusion known only by humans. Here, there is no such thing. I didn’t get all the answers, however. I still don’t know when or where I exist, but I do. I am very much aware. The best way I could describe it is like being in a sensory deprivation tank. I don’t know where I end and the rest of reality begins. It’s dark, perpetually. Which makes sense because eyes are just mechanisms of the body and my body is now nonfunctioning. But my consciousness has gone nowhere.

Everyone is here, but not in the ‘party in heaven’ sort of way. I can’t see them. If I try really hard, I can sometimes hear them. But I can certainly feel them. The way you feel someone’s presence when they walk up behind you. It’s a comforting feeling, just to know I’m not alone. It’s funny, when I was alive, I spent so much time worrying about what comes next. Yet, now that I’m dead, I still wonder what comes next.

Devin Staurbringer is a writer and activist living in Ohio. His children’s book, Hope the Hopeful Piglet, won silver medal in the Nautilus Book Awards. His first novella is called Tides of Revelation. He has a graphic novel, The Ballad of Aloneness, that was published in January. And coming soon, he has a collection of short stories, and a nonfiction being published this year. He enjoys writing, reading, yoga, rock climbing, hiking, biking, and cooking. He is an activist for the animals, people, and the planet. He hopes to travel the world and impact people through his writing.

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The oven clicked. The coil glowed red. Heat filled the room, and she stood still in the center of the kitchen, a cold casserole dish in one hand and a dishrag in the other. Her voice seemed to echo faintly, like the room had been waiting for her to speak.

She had moved in three days earlier. The rental was small and crooked, with a sagging porch and a faucet that didn’t stop dripping. The wallpaper was peeling at the seams. The fridge hummed like it had something to prove. Nothing in the place worked quite right, including the oven, which had stayed cold no matter how many times she turned the dial. She had left a voicemail for the property manager and heard nothing back.

But now, after one sentence, the burner was hot enough to cook. That night, she sat at the kitchen table and ate alone. The casserole was bland, but warm. The heat stayed steady as long as she let it.

The next morning, she tried again. She turned the dial and said, “I was scared of the way he closed doors.” The oven responded with a soft click and lit again.

Soon it became a pattern. She discovered that the oven only worked when she spoke a truth aloud. Not just any words would do. She tested silence, small talk, even lies. None of it triggered the burner. Only honesty did, and only when the truth was personal and difficult.

She told it things she had never said aloud before. “I stopped liking how I looked when I was with him.” “I hid money in a vitamin bottle.” “I told my boss I had food poisoning, but I was just waiting for him to leave.” Each time, the flame responded.

She began cooking again. She made roasted vegetables and baked frozen pizza. She bought real groceries. She hadn’t bought butter in years, but she did now. She even started brewing tea by holding the kettle over the burner. The oven gave her warmth, but it demanded something in return.

She never said his name. Timothy Carl Gardner. Not once. She didn’t know if the oven would require that kind of truth, and she wasn’t ready to offer it.

Instead, she kept talking. “I lied about the bruises.” “I was relieved when he stopped touching me.” “I thought leaving would feel like a moment. It just felt like laundry.”

The oven didn’t judge. It just worked.

After two weeks, the truths became harder to find. She sat on the floor with a bag of groceries still by the door, unable to bring herself to speak. Nothing came. The oven remained cold. She pressed her fingers to the burner and felt only the smooth chill of metal.

She tried anyway. “I never loved him.” The oven didn’t respond. “I wanted it to be my fault so I could fix it.” Still nothing. The kitchen felt smaller. The silence seemed to press in around her.

She waited three days before trying again. During that time, she didn’t cook. She ate crackers and peanut butter and drank water straight from the faucet. She read labels on cleaning products just to fill her eyes with words. At night, she turned on the porch light even though there was no one to look for.

On the fourth evening, she placed a pan on the oven rack and stood with her hands on the counter. She closed her eyes. When she spoke, her voice barely rose above a whisper. “I was too small to fight back.” This time, the burner glowed.

She turned away from the stove and sat down in the corner of the room. She didn’t eat that night. She just watched the coil pulsing under the pan. It filled the kitchen with a soft, even heat. The oven remained on, waiting for her to decide what to do next.

The next morning, she made eggs. She let them burn a little. She toasted bread and spread butter too thick. She looked out the window while she ate. The porch light was still on.

By the end of the week, she had spoken enough to feed herself properly. She bought onions and garlic and olive oil. She replaced the sponge and swept the kitchen floor. She no longer stood hunched over the counter. She began to think of meals she had once enjoyed, meals she could cook again.

That night, she stood in front of the oven for a long time before speaking. She wasn’t sure what the truth was until it left her mouth. “I am still hurting.”    

The oven warmed. She placed the dish inside and let it bake.

Kristina Warlen is a literary and speculative writer whose work explores memory, impermanence, emotional thresholds, and the quiet fractures that shift a life’s direction. Her stories often linger in liminal spaces—between grief and connection, childhood and change, silence and revelation. She writes flash, micro, and short fiction that blends the ordinary with the uncanny. Her work has appeared on the TWLOHA blog, in 50-Word Stories, and is forthcoming in Eunoia Review and Corporeal Lit Mag.

If you want to keep EDF around, Patreon is the answer.

“Maud, he’s at it again. The new neighbour. He’s doing it doggy style in the garden.”

“What!?”

“Doggy Style. Just like yesterday.”

“Downward dog, Idris. It’s called downward dog.”

“Well, whatever it is, it’s obscene, shaking his arse around while I’m trying to watch the birds. He’ll be scaring the starlings, bothering the blue tits, stressing the…”

“Idris, give it a rest. Let the poor man do his yoga in peace without you leering from the window like a peeping Tom.”

“I’m watching the birds.”

“The birds, or Mr. Goodwin’s bum?”

Idris Evans stepped away from the window, mumbling his way downstairs and out into the garden. The fence stood tall between them, five feet of weathered timber. All at once Idris regretted not making it six feet.

“Good morning, Idris.” 

“Alright, Blodwyn Godwin?”

“Goodwin, but never mind. Just checking on that rake, is it? Did you mean to leave it out?”

“What? Oh, yes.”

“Oh, fair enough, it’s due to rain later, see. I wouldn’t want it rusting.”

“Yes, well, anyway you just carrying on your yogurt and I’ll worry about my rake.”

Idris turned his back on the neighbour and crossed the lawn. Fiddling with the rake until he was sure Blodwyn had turned away, before hooking it back inside the shed.

Tuesday

The tea was just right. Cool spring mornings were his favourite. A cuppa, two digestive biscuits, and the sweet sound of birdsong. Soon he would take a fresh cup upstairs to Maud, knocking gently at their bedroom door just like he had for the last forty years.

The creak of a backdoor pierced the silence.

Idris closed his eyes.

Blodwyn coming out for his morning dogging, or whatever it was Maud called it.

“Morning neighbour.”

Idris turned, to see two cloudy eyes and a bald head peering over his fence.

“Lovely day for it.”

For what? Idris wanted to reply, but he was learning silence was his best armour.

“Just checking, that gnome of yours. Is there any chance he could face another way?”

“What?”

“It’s just that he stares at me when I’m doing the washing up. I know it’s silly, but it just feels like he’s watching me. It’s a little unnerving.”

Idris slowly, purposefully, turned his head, before getting to his feet and crossing his lawn.

He picked up the gnome and turned him thirty degrees.

“Much appreciated,” the neighbour replied, as Idris made his way back into the house, morning officially disturbed.

Wednesday

Idris had been caught again, at midday this time, and he now sat stewing on the neighbour’s latest ‘just checking’.

His aggravated thoughts were disturbed by the sound of a thud upstairs, and then a sickening silence.

“Maud?”

Idris pushed himself up from his armchair, bones creaking as he made his way to the foot of the stairs. He lumbered into their room, finding his wife on the floor, a wound to her forehead bleeding into the plush carpet. His shaking hands fumbled in his pocket for his phone, as he clumsily stabbed the numbers, nine, nine, nine.

“It’s alright, my love. It’ll be okay.”

Thursday

The morning broke and the birds sang, the cup of tea remained perfectly fine, and yet nothing seemed right.

The house was too barren without Maud, too still.

Last night had been anything but still, blue lights illuminating the street, the fence, the shed. Paramedics making their way through the house, cannulas inserted, I.V. drips hung above Maud’s battered brow.

Idris had followed behind in his Daihatsu Sirion, driving slowly, no longer trusting his reactions when driving in the dark.

When had they become so fragile?

Maud had been kept in overnight for observations and a CT scan. Worry lingered over Idris’ every thought; his phone sat heavy in his pocket, its ringtone a dreaded warning.

History had shown him that hospitals had a horrible way of keeping people.

As if his thoughts hadn’t darkened enough, he heard the dreaded creak of his neighbour’s back door.

He felt his jaw tighten. If that man utters that phrase one more time…

“Morning, neighbour, just checking…”

Idris spun his head towards the fence, and lumbered to his feet, his mind fighting to keep expletives behind his lips, until he saw that Blodwyn was holding a large dish, wrapped in a tea towel.

“Just checking, if you needed someone to talk to?”

Idris stopped in his tracks, his eyes settling on the neighbour.

“I couldn’t help but see the ambulance. I hope Maud is okay. I just thought, when my wife got taken into hospital, well, I barely ate the entire time. So, I got up early to make you a shepherd’s pie.”

“Oh, uh. I don’t believe I’ve met your wife.”

“No, you wouldn’t have. She passed away last year. That’s why I moved. It’s just me now.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“No, it’s quite alright. It just, well, it gets very lonely. Anyway, enough about me, how are you?”

Idris took the still warm dish from his neighbour’s hands and placed it on the garden bench. He mumbled his thanks and felt his mouth water at the smell that lingered in the air between them. For a brief moment, he allowed himself to think of his own needs.

“I’m fine, yes. Maud will be fine too, I’m sure.”

“I’m sure she will. Anyway, I won’t take up anymore of your time.”

Idris couldn’t help but detect a hint of sorrow in his neighbour’s voice. He wanted to speak and yet didn’t quite have the words.

“If you ever want to pop around. For a cup of tea, you’re more than welcome.”

The neighbour startled and smiled gently.

“I would like that, very much.”

The two men nodded, and that was that.

“I could even teach you a bit of yoga?”

“Now, now, let’s not be hasty, ey?”

Later that morning the fence stood as tall as ever, but carried the weight of two mugs as two stubborn men became friends.

Matt Roberts is a nurse from South Wales and has recently been published in the New Croton Review and Writing Magazine UK. He is currently working on his first novel and can be found over on Instagram at @mattrobertsauthor.

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Luna’s body rises up from the East River when she’s twenty-four and I’m twenty-two, and it’s Aunt Maisy who calls me to ask about the funeral arrangements. Her voice is perched in my ear as I hold the cell phone in one hand and throw clothes into my suitcase in the other. What kinda cake should we have, Maisy asks, what kinda flowers do you want me to order? My sister has been missing for three months. Now the autopsy says she’s been dead for four. We gotta have a good wake, Maisy’s telling me, so she gets into heaven. Vanilla, I say. Sunflowers. I click the phone shut before she can ask me another question.

Nobody at school says my sister jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge but everyone saw the grainy picture that the NYPD detective shared with me and Dad that we posted on Facebook and asked everyone to like and share. So everyone must know what she did. But no one knows why, no matter how many hearts and comments appear on the post Dad makes about Luna’s passing. I scroll through them for an answer as to why she went there instead of coming home for New Year’s Eve.

I have to catch a train to Jersey in the morning but Colt goes with me to this bar in Soho where all the DJ plays is Usher. I drink until the street lights glow like planets collapsing and I can feel Colt holding my hand as he guides me through Washington Square. I make him stop by the fountain and it’s still drained but I tell him about how cold the water was at the beach the summer I was four and how I remember Aunt Maisy telling me my mother was going to be fine and how she said the same thing when Luna didn’t answer her phone on January 1st. Colt hugs me so tight, his lips pressing into the space between my eyebrows. I whisper that I love him into the lettering on his sweatshirt. I know I’m in love with him the next morning when I find him asleep on my floor using his arm as a pillow.

The sun is rising outside my window on the train and this woman sits down next to me and asks if this train is going to Summit. Her shoulders tremble like her insides are contracting and she tells me in fractured exhales that it’s the first time she’s ever been out of the city and she hates her daughter for moving away. But she doesn’t believe me that I know when her stop isn’t coming next because she says I look too young and I tell her I was actually born a week late. I see her standing on the brick platform at the Maplewood stop as the train pulls away, pressing her phone to her ear, her lips shaping around the words to tell someone that she thinks she’s home.

Ever since they found her body, all I can imagine is Luna hurtling towards dark water, it’s this image that’s consuming me like a flesh-eating virus. I see my sister, her indigo black hair flying up, her toes pointing, her fingers interlocked over her head. If I let it, this is going to consume me. If I let it consume me, will it bring her back?

I’m still scrolling through Facebook at the funeral when Aunt Maisy places a slice of cake in front of me. I got it made with a lemon filling, she says, you both used to like lemon. I dig out the filling and stick the spoon in my mouth. The flavor makes my teeth sink back into my gums. For a second, my sister is six and I am four and we grin at each other over the bag of lemon cough drops in the cool darkness of my aunt’s basement, grinning because we think we’re sucking on stolen candy, because we’re in this secret moment together. I thought we would always be together.

Your eyes are watering, baby, Aunt Maisy’s got her hand on my shoulder, is it too sweet?

The hearts keep appearing one after the other on the Facebook post about Luna’s passing. They’re not going to stop. She’s not coming back. I can taste it now. I can’t not taste it now. Does it taste good, Aunt Maisy’s asking, does it taste okay? Are you okay? I sit there, the custard filling still in my mouth, so sweet that my teeth ache, that all of me aches, and I force myself to swallow.

Sydney Quinn is an emerging literary fiction writer. She has a degree in English Literature and a Masters in Teaching from Drew University. She writes and lives in New Jersey.

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The drawer was pulled open exactly six inches. Just enough.

She touched the metal edge — cool, undisturbed dust along the runner. The bird lay wedged between folders labeled Petersen, Harold – Deceased and Quinn, Ellen – Deceased, its wing bent at an angle that suggested impact. But impact with what? The drawer’s interior showed no signs of struggle, no scattered papers, no disturbed order.

Marianne stood, circled the cabinet. Checked the window seals — painted shut, the paint yellowed with age. Ran her fingers along the baseboards, looking for gaps. Nothing. The office had been locked since Tuesday; she’d watched the building manager struggle with the keys, two deadbolts that hadn’t been opened in five days. The air inside had that particular stillness of undisturbed space.

Her hands knew the routine of death: the weight of a body in a bag, the particular resistance of dried blood against a scrub brush, the way absence smells different than presence. But this small body, impossibly present. Her hands didn’t know what to do.

She photographed it before she touched it. The flash stark against beige walls.

She’d stopped calling them anomalies after the eighth one.

The first had been a pigeon in a storage unit in March, the kind of death she understood — toxins, disorientation, some explicable failure of the bird’s internal compass. But the unit had been sealed for two years, the owner in hospice, the padlock rusted shut.

Marianne had opened it to find the bird in the center of the concrete floor, wings spread as if mid-flight, as if it had simply forgotten how to stay airborne.

She’d removed it then. Bagged it. Thrown it away.

By May, she’d started carrying her camera.

The starling in the law office break room. The wren in the bank vault. The robin in the apartment on Sweetbriar, dead bolt turned, chain latched from inside. Each one impossibly present. Each one placed, though she couldn’t say by whom or what.

Her supervisor asked once why she was taking so long on jobs.

“Thoroughness,” she’d said.

He didn’t ask again.

She learned their names. Not species—she knew those already from childhood, from a father who’d taught her to identify birds by song alone, but individuals. The pigeon became First. The robin, Sweetbriar. The crow in the shuttered movie theater, found in the projection booth behind a door that hadn’t opened in a decade, became Witness.

She labeled each photograph. Date. Location. Condition of the seal.

At night, she spread them across her kitchen table. Forty-three birds. Forty-three impossible arrivals. She looked for patterns: migration routes, building ages, causes of death. Found none. Or found too many. The pictures began to look like evidence of something she had no language for.

The call came in August.

A house on Marlowe Street. Elderly woman, dead two months before discovery, the house locked tight, windows painted shut decades ago. Standard decomposition clean. Marianne arrived at dawn, the light thin and gray.

The bedroom door required two keys. She felt them turn, the tumblers falling into place with soft clicks that sounded too loud in the silent house. The smell hit her first — not the expected rot, but something underneath it. Something like feathers and dust and the particular musk of a living thing.

The owl sat on the headboard.

Marianne stopped breathing.

It was huge, pale as bone, its face a heart-shaped map of somewhere she’d never been. The room showed all the signs of long death: the stained mattress, the browning of bodily fluids, the scatter of prescription bottles on the nightstand. But the owl was alive.

Its chest rose and fell. Slowly. Deliberately.

She could hear it breathing.

Her camera hung against her sternum, suddenly immense. She’d photographed forty-three dead birds. This was different.
The owl’s head rotated — that unnatural swivel, one hundred and eighty degrees, and its eyes found hers. Tarnished gold. Unblinking. Old.

Marianne’s hand moved without permission, lifting the camera. Through the viewfinder, the owl became composition: the geometry of death and life in a single frame. But her hands shook. The image would be blurred.

She lowered the camera.

The owl didn’t move. Didn’t fly. Didn’t startle. It simply watched, and in that watching Marianne felt something shift — not in the room, but in her understanding of what rooms were. What sealed meant. What impossible meant.

“How did you get in?” she whispered.

The owl blinked. Once. Slow as a closing door.

And she understood — had perhaps always understood — that the birds weren’t trapped.

They were waiting.

For her.

She found the address three days later. An apartment complex on the east side, scheduled for demolition. Unit 4F: previous tenant, cause of death undetermined, premises sealed pending investigation. Assigned to her two weeks ago.

She’d been avoiding it.

Marianne stood outside 4F, camera in one hand, keys in the other. The hallway smelled of rot and settled dust. The door was unmarked, institutional beige, the kind that existed only to be locked.

She knew what she would find inside.

Her hand trembled as she fit the key into the lock. She thought of her father, teaching her the names of things that flew. She thought of her photographs, forty-three now, almost forty-four. She thought of the owl’s eyes — not fear, but recognition.

The lock turned.

Marianne stepped inside and pulled the door shut behind her.

In the silence that followed, there was the sound of wings.

Nivara Lune is a versatile storyteller, writing eBooks, blogs, web novels, and serialized tales across genres including horror, romance, and supernatural fiction. Her work blends creativity, insight, and practical storytelling, inviting readers into worlds where suspense, emotion, and discovery intertwine. She explores themes of love, identity, and self-discovery, often with a queer or supernatural twist. Nivara Lune contributes to platforms like Midnight & Indigo, Selar, Fiverr, Webnovel, and others.

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