Month: June 2026

The Void is Right There by Yasmine Yu

On By steve cIn flash fictionLeave a comment

The hole was bottomless, the hole in the girl’s yard, the hole encircled by coins. The girl reassured me that one day I would stop asking questions. Have you tried to drop a rock? YES. A rope? YES. Do you personally know anyone who has fallen in? She refused to answer. Has anything ever come up from the hole? THANKFULLY NO. What is something I should know about the hole? IT HUMS AT NIGHT. Ten years of wandering to suddenly meet a girl, her home a dusky tent flapping like a sail beside a bottomless hole. As I’d neared, I recognized the smell of damp soil as if it had been freshly dug out, but there were no signs of excavation. Only a cavity in the topography of the earth, where once a forest had been, guarded by a girl who dropped coins and twigs as she circumnavigated its edge. Lush, dark moss crept down the sides of the hole where sunlight could touch. The girl told me further down there were caves and cliffs where she’d descend to leave offerings of fruit and flower. The girl recalled, once a pilgrim went so deep he’d seen a soaring white temple carved into the wall, filled with frozen stone creatures. When he returned to the surface he was singing in a tongue she’d never heard before. But how’d he get the songs? I STOPPED ASKING QUESTIONS LONG AGO.

And yet, all I had were questions. How far down? Did it get easier to carry on? And where to now?

Seven holes I have seen in my life and none have answered me. There was one hole in the mountains where hawks swooped in and out, rodents dangling from their beaks. There were twin holes by the sea, and at high tide, water filled close to the brim, and bobbing at the surface were kelp, plastic bottles, driftwood, a small wooden boat. A sight that had brought me to my knees. There was the hole by the school. Another hole by the black church, on a cliff, in snow. Seven holes I have seen in my life and this was the only one where I’ve found another, like me. The girl wanted to know if I’d brought a coin. THE HOLE APPRECIATES VISITORS. Few of us were left. Now I counted three: me, the girl, and s’pose the pilgrim with the songs way back ago. How had we borne the holes, in time? 

In the ten years that I’ve skittered across the pitted land, I’ve been reckoning with loss which in other words means trying to live in a place where all the words for home have been lost. The soil of the earth could not fill these holes. They were cavernous and bottomless, where the drop of a coin never makes a sound. Maybe the things that fell still lingered somewhere down, like old books or my beloved white cat or the smell of burnt coffee, floating in a darkness that glimmers with worms. This could be the hole where someday I’d venture in, come back with songs of my own. For when a chasm appears, one after another, all that’s left to do is make home. I tossed my coin into the wound and turned to the girl. Why didn’t we fall when everything else did? At the edge of the void, the girl took my hand in hers. SHHH. In her yard, the yard with a bottomless hole, a coin fell and the hole began to hum. 

Yasmine Yu is an excellent guest. Her work has appeared in Lost Balloon, The Cincinnati Review, and Best Small Fictions 2024 & 2025. She currently writes from Los Angeles.

How an Adoptee Reads Literary Rejection Letters: a lost and found poem by Danna Schmidt

On By okaydonkey7In poetry2 Comments
Preview of the poem, showing its visual layout. Full text is available in the linked PDF.

Link to PDF: How an Adoptee Reads Literary Rejection Letters: a lost and found poem by Danna Schmidt

DANNA SCHMIDT is an adoptee and ceremonialist whose poetry and prose has appeared in The Sun and Severance magazines, Raven Chronicles, Bending Genres, Adoptee Voices, and the forthcoming anthology, Relative Strangers: Inheritance, Identity, and the Meaning of Kinship. Danna lives in the PNW with her husband Curt and their two cats, Buddy Guy and Willie Dixon. She’s working on her speculative memoir about family secrets and the prices we pay to keep them.

Four Stories by Tim Frank

On By steve cIn flash fictionLeave a comment

Another Breakdown

The T is missing from the front sign of the shop across the street from my flat. The asymmetry is a killer and it’s breaking my heart. I talk to the owner but he just devours a peach, juggles some change, and ignores me. He’s always been hostile and I wonder if he removed the letter just to make me suffer. One time I heard him whisper about me on his hands-free. “The freak is here again,” he said, “getting some more cheese puffs for his dead mother, no doubt.”

Anyway, I sit in my flat and think about the missing letter, while watching YouTube reels about serial killers. Sometimes I think my dad could be the Zodiac killer. But I doubt it. Maybe he just likes to polish his knives and play the daily jumble. It would be nice to believe he achieved something in his life. It goes on like this for days. I can’t sleep. I begin to notice strange arrangements of letters everywhere. The labels on my frozen package meals are missing some vowels. My threadbare T-shirts have faded capital letters. I feel distinctly unwell—my stomach is throbbing like a heart, my tinnitus is singing frail songs, and I think about checking myself into hospital. Instead, I paint a giant T upon my forehead and jump into my car. I sit for an hour and pump the theme music to 2001: A Space Odyssey. I throw my arms around like an orchestra conductor. All tearful and snotty, I drive into the front window of the shop with the missing letter, taking out the fruit stand. I call out, “I’ll take those fucking cheese puffs now!” then walk the short journey home, bleeding from my knees. I look forward to cooking a ready meal three years out of date, and then I’ll call my daughter to discuss her warlike demeanour. She claims I’m trying to freeze all her assets. She’s nine.

The Healer, the Guru, and the Patient

“He’s with us now — in this room,” says the healer, with a subtle smile, “of course, only I can see him.” 

The patient, perched upon a stool, looks around the kitchen. All she sees are shadows.

“He’s lurking by the window,” says the healer, “ranting at the sink. That’s just the way he is, the afterlife is tough. He says, yes, you’re dying, so join him, and smash your lucid prison.”

“I knew it,” said the patient, falling into tears. She grabs a metal toaster and hurls it at the guru, as he emerges from the gloom.

Beyond

The land Beyond is a thing of abstract beauty. There’s cracked LED lightbulbs, glowing like distant suns. There’s a blushing coral ocean, healing septic sores. Flowers flourish in gentle winds, humming Spanish jazz, stirring swollen soil. Yet the land Beyond is helpless — it’s haunted by the dead, those fiends in haute couture, drooling and refined. They climb the padded walls, and laugh with schizoid thunder.

Kaleidoscope

The newspaper’s a kaleidoscopic whirlpool, a new world on every page. Combat drones, the ozone layer, and trashy network films. But you just read to sleepwalk through the day, and mask your stillborn moods. As your kids dance through the fire, chewing white-hot coals, madness clogs their veins.

Tim Frank’s work has been published in Bending Genres, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Maudlin House, Hobart, The Forge Literary Magazine, New World Writing and elsewhere. He has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and 3x Best of the Net. His debut chapbook is, An Advert Can Be Beautiful in the Right Shade of Death (C22 Press ’24) His sophomore effort is, Delusions to Live By (Alien Buddha Press ’25)