It’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for: the inaugural edition of Microfiction Monday Magazine! Five incredible stories by five incredible writers. Special thanks to Marc Corbier and Jessica Standifird for their assistance in making some tough choices. Artwork by Marylea Madiman. Enjoy!

Now is the Winter
by Dan Coxon

Outside, the blizzard ebbs and moans. In here it’s simply cold. My nose is numb, my eyeballs ache. I can’t recall the last time I felt the purple ghosts of my feet. I read somewhere that your blood is the last thing to freeze. The heart never stops trying to warm its sticky reservoirs. Like tea. Like a million rivulets of mulled wine. I peel off my gloves and start cutting.

Truth is a Bearded Lady
by Stephen Graham Jones

My husband has two hearts. He told me. When he was a kid, sideshow people were always lurking around to kidnap him into the carnival. But he got away each time, just barely. If he hadn’t, we wouldn’t be together right now. But he only tells me about his second heart. His other wife thinks he’s like everybody else. She thinks he just has one heart, can just love one woman. I know the truth, though. He trusts me with all his secrets. If either of his hearts is bigger, then it’s the one he’s given me.

Romania 1989
by Angela Maracle

The Americans run from crib to crib, looking for children with the whitest skin. I pick up a dark-haired baby, flick away flies.
“No good, he is Gypsy,” my interpreter says.
There are no colors, no toys in the orphanage. Bottles are propped against pillows.
“I want this baby,” I say, clutching him, even though I came for a girl.
I can’t take all of them. Some of them grab my skirt through the bars. We step over broken glass, and a stray dog passes by in the corridor.
The baby twists away from me and cries.

Train
by Jon Gluckman

My uncle took me into the basement to show-off his train set. As he pulled a chain hung from the rafters, a sickly yellow light dissolved the darkness and silenced the crickets, illuminating a world in miniature. He had created hell on a sheet of plywood, where tiny houses on fire simultaneously populated and depopulated tiny towns. When he pushed a small black button screwed in beneath the table, a recording of people screaming began to loop. Bloody half stumps of commuters crawled from a multitude of car accidents toward a lake slicked with oil where they would surely drown.

Darla’s Notebook
by Bob Thurber

After my sister ran away forever, Mom found a notebook filled with crazy drawings and gloomy poems. One poem was titled FUCK and went on pretty much like that for several pages. Another told the story of Red Riding Hood being raped not by the wolf but the woodcutter, and another listed eleven ways you can kill a man so that he will die agonizingly slow. My mother showed the notebook to her boyfriend Carl who tossed it in the washing machine, added bleach, and set the machine on Heavy Load.