Prose choice
Previous prose
Cheryl Snell
Thoughts in the Time of Collision
I am all hair, glittering with diamond-glass. A forehead streaked with blood, rubies and roses crisscrossing the tangerine flaps of a ripped collar. Ripped skin. The air is blue and then bluer and then green and then black. Black is absence of color, white the sum. When I come to, a mangled fender dangles halfway through the windshield, inches from my face. When he sees it, my brother bursts into big pearly tears. Why is his arm on wrong? He is all geometry. Triangles and spinning circles. Mouth an oblong of cries. He was never the brave type and I don’t know where to look except into my own reflection, bleeding in the overhead mirror. I lift the visor high and watch the patterns of trickle. They fascinate me more than the fantasy of rescue. It’s in the way the tributaries join together at my chin. The way they drip off it like a cliff. How they spill drop by drop into the valley between my breasts.
Cheryl Snell’s books include several poetry collections and novels. Her most recent writing has or will appear in On the Seawall, Midway, Rogue Agent, Blue Unicorn, 100 Word Story, and the Best Microfiction 2025 anthology.
Chaucer Cameron
Cellar Stories: Ash & Elder Sunday afternoon there’s always roast dinner. Then mum and dad go to church. The twins stay and wash dishes. Elder-twin picks up a plastic bag with unused Brussels sprouts inside. The cellar door is open. Elder-twin...
David McVey
First Class ‘It makes a mockery of the whole university!’ said Tam Clark, the Senior Lecturer. He was a bit Old Labour, so this kind of reaction wasn’t unexpected. ‘Oh, no,’ said Jeannie McKay, one of the bright, younger lecturers, ‘it’s an...
Michael Bloor
Fell at the First Fence Liam limped listlessly into the lift. It was empty. He pressed the button for the seventh floor (Safetyseal Export Sales). There was the usual hiatus, while the mechanism seemed to consider his request. Liam weighed LIFE in...
Shelley Roche-Jacques
Removing the Bouquet The Station Team staff room is just behind Lost Property. There’s a doorway, without a door, connecting the two. If someone rings the bell at Lost Property reception when you’re on a tea break you have to make a judgement call...
Jenny Moroney
Part We didn't expect it to snow but look it falls in soft flakes. Alone now, we leave the cottage between white folds and aim at mountains. You walk ahead: a gap, I leave and over your footprints, I press my own. We follow the stream winter has...
Konstantina Sozou-Kyrkou
Chemical Elements and Waste They’re playing card games in the garden. Whenever I shuffle the card pack or sniff their coffee, or shift their keys, they get furious. ‘You have no place here, Spotty’, they point a finger at me. ‘Keep out of the way....
Lucy Smith
Difference The two women cook together in the kitchen with the back door open. They swear and cackle about their boyfriends’ penises. When the sun gets lower in the sky they go out with their steaming plates and sit cross-legged on the tiny lawn...
Steve Haywood
The Winter Coat My fingers flicked across the screen like a concert pianist performing a well-rehearsed and all too familiar musical score: odd numbers, one to thirteen, seventeen and twenty-seven (my lucky numbers), and a small bet on red, just...
Zach Murphy
Why the river? Shannon sat in her tattered recliner chair and scowled at the cheesy infomercials on the television. It’d been exactly four years since the Mississippi River took her son Gus away. Gus was a freshman at the state university where he...