The City of Los Angeles is on Tactical Alert

by Alison Powell

This is our daughter’s first step. This is a preliminary step. This is her on her feet. This is proactive. This is freedom. This is working to tackle the issues. This is transitional. This is a special force. This is our daughter standing unaided. This is a team trained to handle situations beyond the capabilities of ordinary law enforcement. This is pivotal. This is a high level of violence. This is crucial. This is the controlled redistribution of on-duty personnel. This is finding balance. This is an obstacle in the way. This is a glance for confirmation that yes, she has found her vertical. This is a response to a major incident. This is me grabbing your wrist and urging you to: Look! This is city wide. This is you locked into your screen. This is a result of low-staffing. This is our daughter smiling. This is due to disruption. This is you not responding. This is in response to a protest. This is in response to her unaided standing. This is a response to anticipated looting. This raised voice is my response to your lack of response. This is a heightened level of response. This is your glance in the wrong direction. This is a response where officers can be kept on past their shift end time. This is inattention to what is important. This is a force being moved around between divisions. This is your daughter falling. This is a precursor to a mobilization. This is you missing the moment. This is intervening in high-risk situations. This is our daughter crying. This is a stun grenade. This is violence. This is tear gas. This is too much. This is suspicion of assault. This is a protest. This is a protest. This is all of us on tactical alert.

About the Author

Alison Powell is a writer and teacher who believes the world is a better place when we allow ourselves to create. Her fiction has been long- and short-listed in numerous contests (Mslexia, Writer’s HQ, Reflex and TSS amongst others) won the local author prize in the Bath Short Story Award and runner-up places in Flash 500 and the Bridport Prize. She co-edited the 2018 National Flash Fiction Day anthology and has been published in a growing pile of anthologies, magazines and online publications. She runs writing workshops through her venture WriteClub and supports a global community of writers. Find her on Insta/FB: @hellowriteclub or via www.alisonpowell.co.uk

Psalm (After the Animals)

by Joseph Randolph

The dog’s been gone ten winters, bone-vanished, creek-gnawed, myth by now—and still she calls it, not namewise, but gutward, where grief nests in a pit of salt. Not loud. Just in the throat, just enough to reopen the place where language scabs.

She descends the hillpath in hush rhythm, soles clagged with rainrot. Cedar tongues peel back from bark like old liturgy. The girl—not girl, not since the orchard wound her dress to thorn, not since the thigh-bloom and afterward hush—walks with the gait of someone who remembers too well how her body once believed it was chosen.

In her hand: rotwood, soft as marrow. In her mouth: the silence after a name is unsaid.

The boy—who laughed into her thigh, who said stay like a psalm cracked sideways—did not stay. He unbecame. Became ash-tray name, pubside rumor, verse in a cousin’s wedding toast.

Now she counts mushrooms like relics. Haloed under bark, pale as skin under first frost. Each one a failed gospel. Each one waiting.

A hawk calls overhead, the cry sounding like punctuation to a sentence she never finishes. She does not look up. The sky has become impassable.

She kneels by the old stump, dog-shaped in memory, ringed with moss that glows like bruised saints. Her palms find the wet wood. Her lips open.

Not prayer. Not name. Older than that. What came before names. What Orpheus forgot to sing.

She presses her forehead to the stump and waits.

Waits.

Waits for the wound to reopen. For the hill to remember. For the dog to come limping back through rainlight, tongue wild, eyes full of god.

About the Author

Joseph Randolph is a writer and artist from the Midwest working in prose, poetry, painting, and experimental music. His books include Vacua Vita, Sum: A Lyric Parody, and The End of Thinking. His debut novel, Genius & Irrelevance< is out for publication. Music is streaming; paintings are on Instagram @jtrndph.

Revelation, 1859

by Sharon Telfer

All night the roof rattling like Old Nick himself’s dancing hobnailed cross the tiles, thunder crashing loud as doomsday, but us clammed safe in our beds, thanking the good Lord for sending such a storm at Eastertide, the cobles hauled up on the strand, trussed tight as chickens, each man counted, ganseys steaming by the last of the Saturday stove, my boys in their steady bunks, my Frank’s arms lashed fast around me not wrestling lines in some gale blasting the deep.

And morning comes, still as milk. We busy ourselves to the harbour, turned out neat and ready for hymns and hallelujahs and ‘He is risen’, the waves right where they should be, no surge up the slipway, the floor bone-dry in the Anchor, the well drawing sweet, all smiling and blesseds and handshakes, when Braithwaite’s lad, him that’s too simple to handle the nets but who can no more lie than he can tie a knot, staggers panting up the beach, sand-speckled as a pollock, yelling to shift ourselves for the Beast were risen out of the sea and the days of Revelation were upon us.

So over the breakwater we clamber, never minding our Sunday best, fret spitting in our eyes, until we are stopped, gawping: the great slab fallen, the tall rowan toppled to anemone, roots grasping at air, the shale still skittering, the monstrous marvel of it, that dreadful tail and dragonish claw, grin long as a flagpole, teeth big as bairns, crawling from what ancient darkness?, and Frank’s hand cannot warm the doubt chilling my spine, even the wheeling kittiwakes dumbfounded to silence, and nothing to hear but the shush of a tide going out and the chapel bell stuttering at the top of the torn and barefaced cliff.

About the Author

Sharon Telfer’s flash fiction has won prizes including the Bath Flash Fiction Award (twice) and the Reflex Fiction Prize. Her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions and Best Microfiction. Her flash fiction collection, The Map Waits, is published by Reflex Press and was longlisted for the 2022 Edgehill Short Story Prize. She lives in the Yorkshire Wolds, in the north of England.

Negative

by Michelle Wright

Seven months after Mum’s death, Dad bought a 1968 Leica and turned their ensuite into a darkroom.

“A positive sign,” said my brother.

Until then, during our weekly visits Dad would slump in his recliner, speaking in monosyllables; mostly sitting in silence. Now he locked himself away, developing black and white images of the strangers he photographed on suburban streets. He hung the strips of negatives from clothes lines strung across his bedroom. They formed long bars of faces, like a curtain we could see through but couldn’t cross; like the plastic strips hung in doorways to keep out flies.

Before we left each Sunday evening, we’d stand in the hallway to say goodbye. He wouldn’t answer, but we’d see his face behind the negatives, his eyes straining through the black and silver shapes. We weren’t sure if he even printed the photographs. We never saw them anyway.

His death,unlike Mum’s, was sudden. A heart attack. We waited a month before touching the undeveloped roll of film sitting by the bathroom sink. We studied the instructions, assembled all the equipment and, in total darkness, transferred the film to the developing tank. With the lights back on we poured the liquids in, one after the other, waiting until the process was complete.

When the film was ready, we wiped the excess moisture from the long, thin strip and pegged it up to dry. We didn’t recognise the faces straight away. It’s harder than you think on a negative. It was my brother who said, “That’s us.” Thirty-six exposures, taken from a distance; from across the hall, through the half-open ensuite door. Some of us together. Some just my brother or me. Sitting. Standing. Staring into space. Missing Mum. Silently waiting for Dad to emerge from the dark

About the Author

Michelle Wright lives in Melbourne, Australia. Her short stories and flash fiction have won and been shortlisted in numerous awards, including The Age Short Story Award, V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize and Bridport Prize. They have been published in Australia and internationally. Her short story collection, Fine, was published in 2016. Her first novel, Small Acts of Defiance, was published in Australia in 2021 and US in 2022. Her second novel, Good Boy, will be out in April 2026.

Awakening

by Christine H Chen

Ah Ma came back from the overnight stay at the hospital in April, leaning on Ba’s shoulder, eyes vacant. Ba shushed us away. Ma went to lay down, didn’t come out from the bedroom for a week. When she emerged in her pajamas, hair tangled like a ball of strings, she went to the fridge, pulled out a box of frozen shrimp Siu Mai, and stared out at the kitchen window until water dripped from the box. We microwaved soggy pieces of dim sum. Ma took a look at the winkled dumplings on her plate, dropped her chopsticks, ran back to her room. For weeks, Ba picked us up from school with bags of Burger King and French fries, sometimes tubs of Moo Shu pork and egg noodle. We chewed as quietly as possible, not daring to break the silence. We stuck our ears to their bedroom door. Ba talking to Ma in a soft voice that rose higher and higher. “What about them? Your other kids, our daughters?” Early morning, a month later, we heard Ma’s old Honda pulling out of the driveway. We spent summer looking for Ma in the supermarkets, running through the aisles, craning our necks to stare at women with a shopping cart, while Ba was busy arguing with the butcher, agonizing over which brand of rice to get. The day our maple tree turned crimson, we heard keys jangling in our front door. Ma stood at the threshold, thinner and older. We squealed. She embraced us. Later that night, she lit up a fire in the backyard, gave us each a piece of a baby garment to throw in the fire. The smoke stung our eyes, the smell caught in our throat. We burned paper money. The fire leapt. Flames jumped. A soul sparked.

About the Author

Christine H. Chen was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Madagascar before settling in Boston where she worked as a research chemist. Her fiction has appeared or forthcoming in Cleaver, SmokeLong Quarterly, Time & Space Magazine, and Best Microfiction 2024, 2025, Best Small Fictions 2024, 2025 anthologies. She is a recipient of the 2022 Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship and the co-translator from French of the hybrid novel My Lemon Tree (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023). Her stories can be found at www.christinehchen.com