Select three apples to replicate the flavours of your friend. A Braeburn for her crisp elegance, a Gala for sweetness, a Granny Smith for ta...

Each day at slack water she scours the tideline. Some days the sea gifts her glass – blue, green, brown or white – milky and opaque like the eyes of the sailors claimed by the ocean. Sometimes she finds bleached, knobbly finger bones of coral, and shells as small and pink as babies' thumbnails or convoluted like a man's ear. Each day she examines her treasures for signs of her lover, breathes a sigh of relief, and takes the pieces back to her shack among the dunes where she caches them carefully in an ebony chest. Today the sea honours her with a piece of driftwood, knotted and gnarled like the skeleton of some ancient sea creature, burred and burnished by salt and sand. On the horizon beneath scudding clouds, ships' sails billow, waiting for the high tide to carry her lover back to her. At the shack she takes out her treasures, washes each one with her tears for the sweethearts whose men inhabit the kelp forests beneath the waves, then suspends each frosted stone, polished pebble and pearly shell by a silver thread from the sea-sculpted branch. She hangs the makeshift chandelier on the veranda, where it twists in the wind, casting shards of refracted moonlight across the dunes, a beacon to guide her lover home. She takes him to her bed, and after, when he is sleeping like the dead, she removes the heart from his chest and hangs it from the driftwood, ruby droplets phosphorescent in the night. Surf thunders onto the beach, pounds the sand in frustration, but he is hers for eternity; the sea can never claim him now.   --- Hilary Ayshford is based in rural Kent in the UK. She writes flash fiction and short stories and is currently working on her first novel. She prefers music in a minor key and has a penchant for the darker side of human nature.

Orla had done her bit, had her three children in her twenties, smug at the ease with which they’d been conceived, while friends had struggled with fertility problems and fickle boyfriends and increasing panic. The births had been straightforward too, until the last. So much blood, a butcher’s stink, and the midwife had whispered in her ear afterwards, Don’t have another, so quietly it could’ve been a dream. After that she’d been careful. Until now. But accidents were for teenagers, not 45-year-old women. “Can’t you make an exception?” she asked the doctor. “I’ve had my three.” He steepled his hands. “Three’s the minimum, not a target.” “But...” She looked at the charts on his desk, alarming spikes peppered with red words. He smiled, like he wasn’t handing down a death sentence. “I’m sure repopulation is your top priority. Hmm?” The rules hadn’t seemed so bad when it was other women, the sluts and rebels, but now the unfairness crushed Orla. She wept, ashamed at her womanly weakness but unable to stop herself. In the waiting room her husband made soothing noises, but could provide no solution except trusting God’s will. She couldn’t talk to her friends; they were all gone.  --- Madeleine won the Hammond House international short story prize in 2023, and has been published by Flash Fiction Magazine, The Hooghly Review, LISP, Moonflake, Trash Cat Lit, Underbelly Press, Waffle Fried and WestWord. Twitter/X @Madeleine_write; Bluesky @madeleinewrite.bsky.social

* Be dead to the moment as you go outside, noticing nothing, not the pulsating rainbow of garden greens, malachite apples, pistachio shadows, moist mossy crevices. * Breathe through your mouth so the sickening whiff of sweet-rotten windfalls doesn’t catch in your throat.  * Find an optimum spot where the fruit is low hanging, and don’t focus on the foul sappy mounds beneath your wellies or the monsters that lurk in their rotten insides. * Never imagine mouthparts, or mandibular sharpness, or side-to-side shearing or abdominal pincers. * Think in facts because facts dispel fear. Earwig, name derived from old English wicga, which means beetle, and ēare, which means, well… ear which entomologists suggest refers to the appearance of hindwings which when unfolded resemble a human ear. Absolutely nothing to do with crawling into human ears then, to feast on the sweet-rotten pap of windfallen brains. * Pick three hard-green fruits and if a breath of wind rustles the leaves above your head, do not imagine bristly bodies landing in your leaf-litter hair. * Tear back inside to the clean not-green kitchen and stare at the TV which you left on for its bluescreen light. Stare into that light, at the bright orange face on the rolling news. * Watch the tangerine man spit poison from his tight little mouth and feel a deeper fear immerge. Find yourself instinctively filling your head with an army of facts, but the power of information only makes matters worse, this isn’t irrational fear of something that can do you no harm, but reasonable fear based on adult understanding. * See the tiny hairs on your naked forearms itch themselves upright in logical loathing, in sentient terror. * Feel the earwig fear recede into the background for the first time in over forty years.    --- Jan Kaneen writes flash and short stories and her new collection of both, Hostile Environments is available to pre-order here, from at Northodox Press.

Ma shrugs, it’s how he was – intrusive, shaming . To me, the stippled mucosa telescoping into view is like veined marble, unknowable beauty....

In the grand scheme of things we are sitting on a giant sphere of ice swirling in space, cold steam flowing off, speed slowing by degrees. In the less grand scheme of things we are sitting next to one another in your front room, holding hands, because I have just asked you the question. We have done well to ignore the outside world these last few weeks. We have remained calm while the heated clamouring and desperation around us hastened the freeze. Hoarding by the hordes; nature busy snow-furring and rime-coating; birds dropping from the skies; the world turning eyeball white; the air full of a trillion last gasped goodbyes... We play at hibernation, pretending that when the Great Thaw comes and we drip back into consciousness, shaking ourselves warm like bears ready for spring, we will carry on laughing, working, sleeping, marrying as if only a second has passed. ...forests crisped, gas guzzled, houses cracking, windows shattering, frost patterns creeping across sleeping faces, and the slowing of breath by degrees... My nerves puff out in cold spats as I wait for your answer. You laugh and I do too – the in-breaths grazing our throats. You hiss yesss, the suspiration crystallising and dropping into hundreds of diamond chips. ...the Sun turning from blazing to blasé; kids fed up of forever winters; cold searing their skins hotter than hell. The last minute to do something long gone... After the promised melts, after our heart-beats retune, after we crack free, preserved and perfect from icy casts, I will withdraw the box from my pocket, remove the engagement ring from its cushion and slip it on your warming finger. And you will laugh and say again that I leave everything to the last minute.   --- First published online by Retreat West in March 2022.  Sharon loves almond croissants but shudders at pretzels. Her short stories and flash have been published in Fictive Dream, Bath Anthology and The Phare. She's flies through Bluesky @sharon54.bsky.social.

Six short fictions