I wonder if it’s snowing at home.
It was a random thought, born out of schadenfreude as much as curiosity. The white stuff had been falling steadily when they left and Lyssa had taken much joy in the fact that she wouldn’t have to shovel for a week.
Category: Flash fiction.
Why My Pot Pie is on Fire in the Toaster Oven by Victoria Wraight
It’s been a week since the chasm opened, and I’m getting sick of scraping moss off my shampoo bottles.
The crater is as big as my cat Meatball, and smells like sulfur and honey and the perfume my Aunt Janet stopped wearing when Grandma told her she smelled like a floozy. Meatball bats a jingly toy mouse into the chasm, and the pit widens further with a burst of fresh yellow spores that cling to my armchair like fleas. It’ll be gone by nightfall. The spores eat, the moss spreads, and the vines steal.
Open Your Mind by Ramona Gore
Annette was dreaming. She was dreaming of roaring waterfalls, a green landscape, and streams of sunlight warming her skin. Clad only in a simple sundress, Annette tread carefully over mossy ground and protruding roots. She shivered, reaching out for the large dog by her side. He gave her a gentle nudge and Annette continued her journey through the vast forest.
She stopped at the brink, balancing on the rocky edge as the water flowed rapidly before her. The sound of the waterfall was thundering, obscuring all other sounds and leaving her in trepidation. Annette could almost feel the cool breeze, but she knew it was all in her head.
Life: Reviewed by JJ Courtney
Money 
This product offered guaranteed happiness and a solution to all of my problems, which I now suspect is nothing more than a marketing ploy. In large quantities it frequently had the opposite effect, and I’d recommend medium serving sizes.
I also struggled with the order process – it seemed to all revolve around stock – and when adding the item to my basket I had a strange desire to post irritating motivational quotes on Instagram.
Worth All That by Sarah Otts
The most imperfect queer in the world stands in line outside a U-Haul depot, holding an empty mason jar. This is not a clichéd joke about queers and premature cohabitation enabled by rental moving van companies, nor even a study of the mason jar as an object in queer history, emblematic of Sandor Katz’s culinary contributions to the art of fermentation in the wake of his diagnosis with HIV. Rather, this is the story of our protagonist, and only of our protagonist — if they even consent to that title — who mostly wears navy blue button-down shirts and has never made a rash decision (or a sourdough starter) in their life.
The Great Tadhia by Charles Prelle
I watch her reel against the crowd toward the edge of the bridge. She leans over the steel barrier, eyes hypnotised by the river below. No one seems to notice her, their faces fixed to illuminated screens. She raises a high heel onto the railing, then another.
*
Portalis Infernus by Bridger Cummings
Name’s Logan. I was a truck driver doing a long haul across Nebraska when the first portals opened. Seemingly random across the entire planet, fiery chasms tore rifts across the land, and demons of all sorts flooded out.
I listened to it all unfolding on the radio in my big rig. I kept thinking it must have been some War of the Worlds broadcast. Not an April Fool’s joke, but some convincing tale. But it was the same “story” on every station. I neared Omaha, and there was heavy traffic going the opposite direction I was. The horizon glowed red in the twilight. Omaha was ablaze.
Land of the Free & Five-Dollar Firewood by September Woods Garland
We spent the anniversary of our son’s suicide tending a fire deep in the wild of the North Cascades, the sound of the Skagit River rushing by a constant reminder of the persistent truth of impermanence.
My husband’s boy scout training emerged in the form of confidence and a methodical approach to fire-making. We stacked logs in formation, two at a time. Poked the burning cuts of wood with a charred stick. Taming the coals and teasing out their heat.
Compost by Thomas Kent West
In the summer I started a compost. It stood at the back of the lot, out past the trees and the grass on the edge of the wood. It was a good spot because it was half sun, half shade, and the smell didn’t reach the house.
In the compost I put the dead grass that dried up in the sun. I put sticks and twigs and dried leaves. I put dandelions and logs and whole fallen branches, and soon I had a great heap of dead things.