Visiting Lenin’s Tomb

by Kathryn Aldridge-Morris

Tiyshe! No talking! The soldiers put fingers purple with cold to their cracked lips. You are here to pay homage! Da zdravstvuyet Leninizm! But this is your ex-husband’s house, not the dim lit mausoleum on Red Square, and those guards, eyes the colour of dill, mouths downturned sickles, your daughters. How they’ve changed but not changed since you were disappeared, and he threatened to section you, should you ever return. Exiled to the end of the Piccadilly Line, sixteen stops away from their entire childhood. Move along! Dvigatsya! You want to slow, to take in the red granite walls, the unfamiliar family photos, the smell of wet overcoat, but a celebrant with cyrillic curls for a moustache tells you to wait outside, it’s for the best, they don’t want a scene, and as you reach Lenin’s tomb —some honeymoon—you don’t yet know you’re shuffling through the few remaining days of Gorbachev’s Russia. You oblige and stand in the snow, but your nerves are in insurrection. How dare this stranger—yet another man—stand between you and your daughters? You grip the letters you’ll give them today, letters to you from their father, letters that prove the mind-games and control; control over what you wore, where you went, who you saw. You were a good mother! You did try to see them! The hearse pulls up, his coffin flanked by the floral tribute he picked out himself: BEST DAD. A crowd swells at the foot of Gorky Street. In weeks a drunk will climb on top of a tank to declare a new era, but for now your daughters turn their backs on you, light Kino cigarettes and leave iron blue contrails that dissipate in the cold Essex air.

About the Author

Kathryn Aldridge-Morris’ flash fiction and essays have appeared in Pithead Chapel, Fractured Lit, Stanchion Magazine, Paris Lit Up, Flash Frog, Splonk, New Flash Fiction Review and elsewhere. She has won several awards, including The Forge’s Flash Nonfiction competition and Manchester Writing School’s QuietManDave Prize, and her work has been selected for the Wigleaf Top 50. She is the recent recipient of an Arts Council England Award to write her novella, and her debut collection of flash fiction, Cold Toast, will be published by Dahlia Publishing in spring 2025.

There You Are

by Alys Hobbs

You wake in the carpark of a long-forgotten Little Chef. In the chain-link there are clumps of things that once had feathers and tails and chickweed is coming up through the cracks in the concrete. You wake in a layby. You wake in a cul-de-sac to a hob-knuckled rapping, but no-one is there when you open the door. You wake in a Stopping Place. You wake at the edge of a bare-plucked field with your neck in a knot, forgetting where you were. Sometimes when you try to sleep among the sweet-sour smell of yourself you pretend it’s not cars rushing by but the ocean rushing in, picking you up, bearing you off. You wake by a reservoir and rain is falling or the trees are shedding their needles in the coming of winter or someone is tapping, tapping on the roof, calling you out. In a drive-thru bin you purge your flotsam; the cans, the tins, the clusters, the clods; the dried-out wet-wipes, the gummed-up noodle cups, the buttons and bones and bottle caps. You wake in the crook of the woods, your fingers working deep under the seat-covers like you’re digging for something buried in the damp. You wake in a Welcome Break and the moon is a hot-white hangnail and you taste salt in the split where your mouth used to be. You wake by a lakeside. You’ve been here before. You wake in the quiet. You’ll go here again. You wake in the thin light to the sound of geese leaving. The windows are so fogged with your own breath that you can’t look out, but you think it must really be something to see.

About the Author

Alys’ writing has featured in anthologies including The Fiends in the Furrows (Volume 2), Egaeus Press’ Unquiet Grove collection, and Kandisha Press’ Under her Black Wings – as well as magazines and journals such as The Ghastling and Popshot. She collects interesting rocks and bones, loves to cook and finds inspiration in folklore and liminal spaces.

There Are Times When We Talk Without Talking

by Samantha Kent
Her nieces arrive first. All three of them, mid-twenties, clad in looping scarves and the guilt of being absent since their mid-teens.

Then her son, his eyes trained on the notices pinned to the walls, on the white rectangle of sky out the window.
His pregnant wife, his pretty daughters, their vitality as sharp and painful as a knife.

Finally her husband, back from pacing the sterile corridors. Knuckles white, eyes red, fingers tobacco yellow.

The room is warm – nauseating – but her feet, she says, are cold.

One by one her visitors ask if she’d like another blanket. One by one they are informed by the others, in jovial tones, that she already has three, ten, a thousand.

Over her dying body – because it is dying, now, the doctors are sure – the visitors draw a line around the thing they can’t face talking about and take a step further back for good measure.

You’re how old? Wow. How’s big school treating you?
That’s frustrating. Do you think your buyers will stick around?
No time off in between jobs, no. If only!
They loved it. They’re definitely cruise people now.
He’s good. Just hungover, or he would have come along too.

Every now and then the visitors force themselves to look down at the woman propped up against the pillows, to return her slumped and crooked smile.

It is easy to wonder how she might be feeling, beyond the icy feet and the aching lungs and the wounds from the failed cannula. But it is hard – it is impossible – to ask.

In time, snow begins to fall, and conversation turns to the weather.

About the Author

Samantha Kent is an Associate Creative Director and aspiring novelist (aren’t we all?). She lives with her husband and cat in suburban Berkshire, enjoys hiking and escape rooms, and eats faaar too much chocolate.

GODETIAS

by Gemma Church

Eight letters.
I’d never heard of GODETIAS until I started listening to Countdown. Never watched it neither cos I was at school… or bunking off, if you want the truth.

Anyway, two contestants (complete nerds) pick nine random letters. Then, they’ve got to get the longest word in 30 seconds while the Countdown clock ticks down.

Sounds dumb, right? But I’ve learned loads of new words.

GODETIAS comes up a lot because certain letter combos are more likely.

ASTEROID.

RODENTIA.

ORDINATE.

Eight letters.

Popular and anagrams of each other.

FAVOURITE.

Nine letters.

Claire’s the favourite. She’s smart. Went to uni. Left me with…

RELATIONS.

The most popular niner.

PHYSICIAN.

Nine letters but rare.

They came into my room today, RELATIONS and PHYSICIAN.
I was annoyed cos they turned the TV off.

PHYSICIAN spewed out loads of (nine-plus) words that I couldn’t understand. I stopped listening, cos I was pissed about missing the end of Countdown.

When PHYSICIAN left, RELATIONS started arguing. Again.

The worst thing was, I had to lie here, listening to the same old…

BULLSHIT.

Eight letters.

Countdown allows swear words, if they’re in the dictionary.

VEGETABLE.

Niner. Not popular. What RELATIONS called me.

But they’re wrong. I’m still in here and I’ve found something I’m good at and I’m going to go on Countdown and prove that I’m no…

WASTER.

Six letters. Crap Countdown word. But everyone’s FAVOURITE word to describe me.

Want to know the worst bit about lying here?

Claire hasn’t visited.

That’s hit me hard.

Harder than when Claire blocked me on her socials.

But not as hard as the tree that I drove RELATIONS’ car into.

I just wanted someone to see me.

Now, I’m trapped in my head.

Listening to Countdown.

Praying Claire visits and, maybe, brings me a bunch of GODETIAS.

About the Author

Gemma lives and works in Cambridgeshire with her husband, two sons, and one dog. She loves all things science fact and fiction with two degrees in physics and currently leads content at a quantum computing company. She has an Undergraduate Diploma in Creative Writing from Cambridge University, studied at The Faber Academy and is working on a sci-fi children’s novel with The Golden Egg Academy. Gemma’s SFF short stories appear in numerous publications. She is also a very proud Countdown teapot owner and discovered the word GODETIAS (amongst others) during her spell on the show. Find her @gemmakchurch.

He Owed Me

by Hannah Retallick

When he died the man owed me £35 in petty cash and that was my first thought when I heard about The Accident, a collision between a camper van and lorry on the A55 which proved fatal for both drivers, the lorry man being the one who owed me £35, a twinkly-eyed neighbour, a single forty-something-year-old called Luca who smelt of cigarettes and bacon and always told me he loved my hair like that, like however it happened to be, up down blonde curly red straight black crimped, and we were starting to know each other quite well because he had got into the habit of rushing up to my front door and saying he needed to borrow some change to give as pocket money to his niece or for carpark tickets or for slot machines, so I would do the neighbourly thing and pluck coins from the dusty dish in my hallway, saying, ‘Here, hope that helps’, not knowing if I’d ever get it back but making a mental tally as though I needed to know how grateful he should be to me, and it was the selfishness of my first thought when I heard he’d died that meant I couldn’t bear to go to his funeral, crumbling under the weight of guilt, because £35 doesn’t matter in the face of death, and as the weeks passed I purged those thoughts completely and stopped torturing myself about the petty debt and my own failings and just wished I could ask Luca whether he really did love my hair like that, like however it happened to be, or whether he meant something else

About the Author

Hannah Retallick is from Anglesey, North Wales. She was home educated and then studied with the Open University, graduating with a First-class honours degree, BA in Humanities with Creative Writing and Music, before passing her Creative Writing MA with a Distinction. Hannah has gained recognition in many international competitions, including receiving Highly Commended in the Bridport Flash Fiction Prize 2022 and winning the £2000 Edinburgh Award for Flash Fiction 2024 – the biggest flash prize in the UK. Her debut short story collection, Something Very Human, is being released by Bridge House Publishing in November 2024. https://www.hannahretallick.co.uk/about