We Are Coming to an End
Dear Writers, Readers, and Friends,
After nearly a decade of storytelling, community building, and celebrating the unique art of microfiction, it is with a heavy heart that I announce the closure of Microfiction Monday Magazine.
This decision was not made lightly. It comes after much contemplation and realization that, due to various circumstances, we can no longer sustain the magazine at the level of quality and dedication it deserves. It’s been a journey filled with incredible tales, inspiring authors, and invaluable lessons. However, all stories, no matter how brief, have their conclusion, and for Microfiction Monday Magazine, that time has come.
Submissions and Feedback:
We understand that many of you have submitted your work and have been waiting for a response. We deeply regret that we won’t be able to proceed with our usual review process. If you have not heard back from us regarding your submission, please assume that it is no longer under consideration. We encourage you to continue sharing your stories elsewhere, as the world always needs more storytellers.
Gratitude:
Our heartfelt thanks go to every writer who trusted us with their stories, every reader who joined us week after week, and everyone who has been part of our journey.
Though the magazine is coming to an end, the spirit of microfiction continues. Keep writing, keep sharing, and keep making every word count. The end of Microfiction Monday Magazine is not the end of your storytelling journey.
While the magazine will no longer publish new content, our website will remain accessible for those who wish to revisit past stories.
In closing, thank you for being an integral part of Microfiction Monday Magazine. Here’s to all the stories that were, and all those yet to be written.
Warmest regards,
Gayle Towell
Founder, Microfiction Monday Magazine
Microfiction Monday – 218th Edition
Inheritance
Dad is cutting Mom in half while I watch. I know it’s an illusion, but from the wings it seems real— the anger in Dad’s eyes as he calmly wields the saw, the fear in Mom’s despite her stage smile. I’m forced to feel both—the seething resentment toward the woman who tied him down, and the agony of legs crammed in the box, of waiting for the blade to fall and finally take away all ability to run.
Gob-Smacked
by Marjan Sierhuis
In the morning, Piper collapses on her living room sofa. She opens one of the business-sized envelopes that she has removed from her front porch.
Ring.
She listens to the automated messaging system. Her heart beats rapidly in her chest, her hands tremble, and the phone slips from her grasp.
Several days later, more envelopes land on her porch.
Ring.
She takes a deep breath, swears into the microphone and then listens to the speaker.
“Sorry, mother. I thought you were someone else.”
Piper decides it is time to move and change her service provider.
How to Happen
by G.J. Williams
Watch him sleep. How he scowls, mumbles, snorts, shudders, frets. I’ve yet to hear him wake with a shriek. But he’s getting there. The odd flail at first light. Bad dreams, he’ll say, nothing more. As ordinary as it gets. Were it not for those dreams he’d be brighteyed and bushytailed, no question. As if. How he sleeps is how it is. Who knows what world he wakes to. Other people’s daylight impossible to bask in. Friends hover, corners darken. He pales, gets paler, flirts with a statue, moons. He’ll continue or he’ll not. He panics: nothing is happening.
Move-In Day
by Cecilia Kennedy
The walls of the house lash out, whispering Mel’s name, telling her they’ve seen her hide some bodies.
An exorcism won’t do, so she calls a therapist instead.
“But do you feel scared?” the therapist asks.
“No—judged, which is worse.”
After her session, she paints over the walls, installs new floors, pushes ghost hands and feet into graves, posts the renovations, while the voices condemn her, but she sells the house and moves into a new one that’s freshly built. She digs her hands in her pockets, her fingers brushing old paint chips: a fine dust, ashes of whispers.
Famous Last Words
by Ina Briar
“It’s fine,” he said, wrapping the oily cloth around his thumb. He rolled back under the car, gripping the flashlight between his teeth.
His six-year-old threw up her hands and marched back to the house. “Mooom!”
Sirens blared, clearing a line through traffic.
“Another do-it-yourselfer,” grumbled the driver.
His wife watched them tow the car away. The service was at eleven. Flats, she decided, since she’d have to walk.
Microfiction Monday – 217th Edition
Lessons On Electricity
by Laurie Kuntz
Who is culpable? The lights left burning when we’re no longer in rooms that we share together or alone. Who left it on? No cat or dog to blame, and our son is long gone to his own lighted place. When admonished for this faux pas, I don’t need the lecture on wattage and currents, or the waste of power. All I need to hear are three words, Lights off please, or maybe those other three words we should be saying more often in our lighted and darkened places.
Two Elderly Men with Dementia
by Chung-Suk Yu
Charlie and Bob are elderly roommates in a two-person room in the lockdown unit at the nursing home. Neither of them recognizes that they are roommates. At night these two men are trying to protect their shoes. When Charlie goes to sleep, he either hides his shoes under the bed or sleeps with the shoes on the bed. On the other hand, Bob carries his shoes to the living room where he used to sleep. The residents in the unit at the nursing home do not wear shoes but wear socks since they forgot how to put their shoes on.
Icy Heart
by Amber Weinar
You can tell it’s almost winter when it starts to rain, and the water crystalizes on impact. All it takes is one drop expanding. Your heartburn was similar. All it took was the pain to expand before the worrying struck. By then, it was too late. Initially undetectable, The spread was inevitable. Like a sheet of black ice you couldn’t prevent and had to drive over. The doctor asks why you didn’t come sooner. It’s hard to say when you felt fine yesterday. Maybe the doctors were wrong? The heart was overtaken by ice, and yet only my hope remained.
Business as Usual
Dusk in September after a rain. Street lamps spread their white steeples of light around the wooded park. Here is where the flying termites convene, as reckless as early aviators in close quarters combat.
Supper is done. An hour of liberty. Children charge down porches armed with corn brooms. In this vespering hour, they knock all those stars from the sky and pluck out their silver veined wings.
And this is a skill that will come in handy later in life. In the real world. Where the mighty will thrive and the vulnerable will need a bit of a trimming.
Whack
I was too young to attend the funeral, too young to understand grief. I remember watching my older brother through a window. Mark and Andrew, sixteen, had been best friends. After Andrew killed himself, Mark went outside to hit rocks with a wiffle ball bat. He’d scour the ground for the perfect-sized rock, pick it up, and toss it in the air. Then, with all his might, he swung the bat. Over and over again. Scour the ground. Pick up a rock. Toss it in the air. Swing the bat. I remember the sound; it cracked the sky in half.
Microfiction Monday – 216th Edition
Dayenu
by Sara Merkin
Maybe if she could just let him plan a date. If he could plan a date. Maybe if she wasn’t so controlling. If he wasn’t so disorganized. If she could just trust his compliments. If he could learn that ‘your tits are amazing’ wasn’t enough to make her feel attractive. If she had the courage to ask for what she needed. If he didn’t put his needs first. Maybe if she wasn’t so afraid of being abandoned. Maybe If he wasn’t so afraid of commitment. Maybe if this wasn’t true for all the relationships she’d had, she could be happy.
Maria Jumps into a Big Blue Mouth
by Tiffany Farr
She nestled into the corner of the suitcase. Nose tucked under tail, trying to hide within herself. First day home from the rescue and learning her triggers. Who knew dogs could understand the concept of leaving? It’s possible permeance.
The motions of handling my jumbo-sized hard-scuffed suitcase, warmly named Big Blue, were fluid. I found unpacking a suitcase harmless, but the instinct etched into her body said Jump inside! Don’t be left behind!
Consider the body of a newly homed six-pound pup. The shaking and panting, pointed ears that don’t twitch when your mouth forms the words “Maria” and “Home.”
Wentwell
by G.J. Williams
Eyes pink veined, it was Wentwell alright. What formerly loomed now stooped, what had radiated now oozed. He seemed all overcoat. He took his plate of food and sat away from the others. Of all people. Mr Wentwell. Geography. He of the sly cigarette and extracurricular punishments. Keeping his eyes to himself.
The Award
by Johannes Springenseiss
After the committee handed her the Widows of the Revolution plaque and a manilla envelope containing cash that was more money than the annual salary of most of us, we could hardly wait until they left.
It was entirely up to her how to spend the money, after all grandpa had been one of the first martyrs of the uprising, and she herself had worked in various underground hospitals the entire time.
“First we’re going to buy new sturdy suitcases and waterproof boots for us. When the wind changes, we’ll have to get out of here in a jiffy.”
On Watching Lawn Maintenance Videos
by Tom Gadd
There are videos, now, of lawn vigilantes, who knock on the doors of houses where yard grasses are reaching toward fulfillment and tiny furred creatures find solace and insects dip themselves into the pollen of wildflowers and he watches as all that life is hacked and harassed with mowers and edgers and whackers. Watches abundance converted into easy geometry. Watches one lawn maintenance video after the next in his one-bedroom apartment. In the city he grudgingly moved to for work. Where the sight of a thistle hunkered in a sidewalk crack fills him with equal amounts of hope and despair.
Microfiction Monday – 215th Edition
Really
by Laura Shell
Your name is Really because it was all I could think to say as you marched across my lawn. Your pitted, black scorpion body. Your gray wolf head with drooling smile. Your stinger tail you swivel in all directions and snap like a bullwhip. I filmed you on my phone that day, and then I said, “Really?” The video went ultra viral. You stand by my front door—an alien sentinel. Do you have a crush? You let me stroke the gray hair on your wolf face. Just below your ear. If you were a cat, you would have purred.
Problem Child
Dolly knew only the rules of her game and did not notice the other games being played. She thought she had a home, an annoying little sister, parents who could sometimes be persuaded and who sometimes must be obeyed.
But her parents were divorcing. The court would decide with whom she would live. The market assigned a portion of the asking price to what had been her bedroom. District boundaries led to a new school and no friends. The clinic determined a diagnosis and prescribed a medication.
Years later, newly sober, she confessed she’d made some bad life choices.
Restless
by Sara Merkin
Is it creepy to stare at him while he sleeps? You’re not sure. Still, you lay there, counting each blackhead-filled pore on his crooked nose. Fourteen–wait–seventeen on the tip. His breath smells like bourbon, but you were the only one that drank. Up the bridge makes twenty-two. Was he still mad? No, his sleeping body was too still, too relaxed for anger. Thirty-eight. You mimic his breathing, an attempt to drift off. Forty-seven total. At least he kissed you goodnight. Your eyes shut but your mind doesn’t. He might still be mad. Damn, pores are a sorry replacement for sheep.
During an Overdue Oil Change
by Tom Gadd
The undercarriage of the car floats in the oil pan. Breaks into ever expanding circles. Reforms and breaks again. Like our lives, he thinks beneath the car they bought together that he visits now only when she phones about a strange ticking sound or another stall that made their child late for school.
And here are her feet. Just her feet. Toenails flaking pink paint. The daisy chain tattoo circling her ankle. And an opened beer she’s placed on the garage floor.
How does it look?
Looks like heaven, he wants to answer but he says good. It’s all good.
Marital Gratitude
by Sam Anders
In winter he makes soup for my dinner while he’s working at the restaurant. The eggplant creaminess is dark, satiny, subtle, and surprising, like my husband. He might flirt with butternut squash risotto or seduce with the aroma of roast duck. On the day of our son’s birth, I arrived home to feast on his gift of gratitude: lemony sautéed soft-shell crab. I am more fluent in words than in actions, but he understands how much I love him when I make his tea or walk the dog on a cold night, though it’s his turn.
Microfiction Monday – 214th Edition
German Trains
First it was the beer. Uncorrupted beer. The commandment: Water, barley and hops. Simplicity.
Second came these ingredients, nailed to the church door: Sola Gratia, Sola Fide, Sola Scriptura.
Third was that spud, Philosophy, pared down to Pure Reason.
Fourth, the Reich and those immaculate weapons. Purgation and flames.
And now, a hair shirt and a stringent orthodoxy. A secular temple to correct thought, correct action. Perfectly sorted trash.
Why is it that every time we board a train for Jerusalem, we end up in Munich?
Bye-Over
Benny and Jenny float back to the start like defeated, sputtering balloons. What now? Benny says, and Jenny shrugs. What now? Jenny says, and Benny shrugs. Together, with sordid reluctance, they shrug their way through seasons they never expected to see. Benny’s azaleas bloom, and Jenny gets promoted. Rain runs rogue from willing gutters, forms a puddle in their yard that soon becomes a lake. Neighbors call out the obvious, hey, you’re still here, feign cheap ignorance. Benny and Jenny kiss each other’s hesitant lips because duty calls, and moths fly toward the light, igniting death like paper and match.
Dine and Dash
by Char Rennes
You never know when someone will fuck your whole day. They came five minutes to closing, ordered a lot and ate slow – thanks, dudes. Can’t close, guess I’ll scroll my phone and get high. When they split you wouldn’t believe how fast I locked up. But I was frickin high cause I didn’t see them behind the counter with their guns but I was done. “You couldn’t, like, do this when you walked in?! You know what? I quit.” I stomped out, drove home and told Dad I lost my job and sat through his bullshit all night.
Mom
by Laura Shell
Mom had stopped bathing, had developed a rash beneath her right breast that looked like measles. She’d stopped curling her hair and wore perpetual bedhead like a hat. Her makeup bag remained at the bottom of a bathroom drawer instead of on the bathroom counter. No more dressing up, just the same three outfits, all pajamas, usually inside out and backwards. No more healthy meals, only fast food burgers via delivery, and bedtime snacks of cookies and gummies hidden in her nightstand drawer with her Oxycodone.
Did she know the end was near?
Why didn’t she tell me about it?
Poughkeepsie/Persephone
by Matthew Schultz
Slow steam rises from a perfect circle carved into crumbling asphalt beneath blinking yellow traffic lights that flash staccato warnings like the beacon of a north shore lighthouse shouting madly through the brume. The heavy steel water works cover has been removed and set to the side as if the moon about to slide before the sun. Traffic lights blink a brief solar eclipse and she appears ascending from beneath the avenue wearing a reflective safety vest and a golden helmet. She holds a wrench and ratchet like a queen brandishing sword and scepter, like Parmenides returning from the underworld.
Microfiction Monday – 213th Edition
The Not So Merry Men
by David Sydney
“We’ve got problems.”
“What’d you mean?”
“It’s not working.” Little John explained that the men weren’t merry.
First, they robbed from the rich, as Robin had instructed. They gave to the poor. But, then, they robbed from the newly-rich to give to the poor who formally were well-off. It was not only repetitively confusing but also exhausting after a while. It was too much.
Robin was at a loss. He turned from Little John to the Friar.
“What’d you think, Tuck?”
“I’d use the religious solution.”
“You mean?”
“We have one last robbery. And, then, keep everything for ourselves.”
“Exactly.”
Transitional Pains
by Adam Snider
On a park bench, he wallows in boredom. Three weeks after the bar exam, the immediate unshackling freedom dissipated, he sits in a hole dug with obsessive studying, refusing calls, and ignoring texts. For months, he hadn’t watched a movie, checked social media, or listened to music.
He absentmindedly watches a child wind up a toy robot and let it run. Her mother calls, and she abandons it. Its key slows and stops, and it falls over. Its eyes point at him. They stare at each other. Motionless.
He blinks, winds himself up, and speeds off to apply for jobs.
Mansion at the Beach or Cabin at the Lake
by Brandy Reinke
Eight years before me a person convinced you your insides should not show on the outside.
You agreed. When you tell me I think of your shoulders so broad, so beautiful how they curve, how precisely they fit under my palms. I thought you made them so I could anchor myself to you. I guess in a way they did. When you tell me ‘No, in fact, they were made out of survival,’ I no longer want to drape myself across them. They no longer seem like they can bear my weight.
Mutations
by Becky Neher
“You do not have cancer,” she said.
My heart sank.
She had been my biggest supporter for twenty years. Down-to-earth, whip smart, kind-hearted. Lately, though, diseases were “states of mind” stemming from “modern culture’s toxicity.” Remedies were only a juice cleanse and several ImmuNature pills away.
I exhaled, wondering how I’d cope through the chemo.
Philosophy
by John Szamosi
The past is only what’s in our recollection; what we’ve forgotten might as well have never happened. The part of future that’s predictable is only a continuation of the present, and the rest is complete surprise, delightful or devastating. The present is happening to us, that is, it’s not our doing, and by the time we understand what’s going on, it’s too late. Another opportunity missed, another error made.
There’s always confusion.
That’s why people, especially in big cities and in Alaska, keep muttering to themselves.
Holiday Break
Microfiction Monday Magazine is on a short break over the holidays. Feel free to keep reading and submitting – we will be back with a new edition on January 8th, 2024!
Microfiction Monday – 212th Edition
There Is No Pirate Treasure in Indiana
by Zebulon Huset
They knew it wasn’t likely that pirates had made their way as far inland as Indiana, but they still couldn’t wait to find some sort of buried treasure in their back woods. It was in all of the movies. It wasn’t until the girls found a third human femur in the way of their treasure hunting that the police cordoned off the woods, ending their adventures for good—and sparking a lifelong interest in forensics for one sister, and something darker in the second which laid dormant for years until she found a local mentor, years before the police would.
Bernie’s Buyin’
He shouldn’t, but he’s doin’ it anyway.
Bernie can’t afford to sit here, the one bar in this half-horse town, buying the rest of us codgers rounds. I ‘spect we’re drinking grocery money.
“Anything ya like,” Bernie repeats, saluting us, his pals, with a Coors that’s surely gone warm.
Wives’ll soon be after us.
I wonder if this has to do with Annie’s recent passing. They never had kids. It’s just him and that mutt in the trailer out on the prairie.
“You like dogs, don’tcha, Lou?” Bernie asks, an imploring look in his eye. “You like old Buddy, dont’cha?”
Friends With Guns
by F.D. Jackson
The circumstances have suddenly changed; Will had been pounding Caleb in the face. Caleb has the upper hand now, pulling Will across the yard by his dislocated arm, Will howling in pain. Caleb slams Will’s head against the 47 Chevy’s wheel well.
A shot reverberates through the trees. Caleb leans over Will with his head resting on Will’s left shoulder. A hole the size of a child’s hand is just over the spot where Caleb’s heart would have been.
Will is wide-eyed, holding his breath, blood and tissue smattered on his face and in his hair. “I’m sorry,” he whispers.
Manchild
by G.J. Williams
In another life she’s on her way upstairs, her feet bare, the carpet deep. No one’ll say nothing doing. She’ll climb. She’ll run a bath, go for aromatic and take her time, knowing there’s no man sitting on the bottom step. The stairs are clear. Music is a distinct possibility.
This is Why She Never Gets Anything Accomplished
She deftly placed some curves in her sketchbook until the vague shape of an elephant sitting on an overturned classroom wastebasket appeared. She erased the back and redrew, adding skin folds. After she finished water coloring, she signed the piece. That’s when a foot lifted off the page. The other feet followed suit, and the trunk wrapped around her pencil, so she reluctantly released it. The elephant erased itself, letting the colors float out the window.
Microfiction Monday – 211th Edition
Eyebrow
by Brandy Reinke
Blanket around our shoulders, ankles crossed, mine crossed again over the top of yours. The rubber soles of my slippers do not stop the rain that drips off the edge of the roof from seeping through to my feet. The smell of it- wood and wet-is why we are outside. The snick of the lighter in my hand is loud. You watch me bring the cigarette to my mouth.
I hate when you do that.
I hate when you do that, I say back, grateful for the edge of my right eyebrow, how I can make it arch up.
Unbelievable
by Joseph Howse
I mean, who are you gonna believe, the ones in the kitchen or the ones in the dining room? There’s a flambé to light and a grandfather in ashes. He was a yachtsman and a sportsman and a man, oh, man! Quite a businessman. And how many times he shoved her down the stairs. And if she divorced him he’d get the kid.
Endless Grays
by Roman Albertson
Those I met in the other place speak only of gray.
I first sought the ferryman’s advice, and he told me colors were signs of madness. I thanked him, two gold pieces poorer, and wandered from the bank. I followed her voice, fading into my amnesia.
Then you, the mirror, revealed to me my forgotten truth:
I met my end by the venom of love. I rushed to her side, but she moved no more. I drank deeply of poison, and began my search for her. Now I search, trapped in memory, my endless grays traded for love’s taunting ruby.
Practice
by Scott Burnam
Cassie’s always one-third done her tea when she reaches for her Taoist to-do book. She opens to today’s reading with a heading numbered forty-six. There are no page numbers. She never remembers if her bookmark, a piece of red construction site danger tape, is for the left page or the right one. Or maybe, and likely, she never turned the last page.
Uncaring (some review or preview never hurts), she sips, ponders, then puts the danger tape back. She closes the book on her peaceful space to ready for traffic, work, and whatever else she has not yet figured out.
Short Shrift
by F.D. Jackson
The sheriff, needing chest x-rays, arrives at the county hospital. He doesn’t recognize the radiology tech’s face. Eli’s daughter, Frances, sizes him up, arms folded over her chest. She fits him with the shortest hospital gown she can find.
Standing in the doorway, chewing on a sucker, Frances watches the sheriff walk down the hallway. A sad smile forms at the corners of her mouth.
Despite his best efforts, the sheriff’s privates dangle out from under his gown. A small indignity compared to the one that he visited upon Frances’ father–the night Eli died in his jail cell.
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