MER Featured Fiction Death of the Water Bug by Lore Segal Lucinella wrote to Bridget: ‘We never outlive a shy, uncomfortable shame before asking a friend, especially another writer, to give us the time and attention to read…
James Callan An Otherwise Quiet Space Beneath the sheets, my four-year-old kneads my thighs with his feet. In his sleep, or semi-sleep, the many long minutes leading up to it, he grips my leg hairs with his impossibly hot,…
Mike Gray The Stoic Birds are starting outside already, somewhere in the languid cool. My arms stretch overhead, body sleeved in fatigue, tired skin luxuriating beneath the sheets. A good day to silence the alarm. Burrow and nestle. Be…
Margo Griffin How to Signal a Ceasefire During War I slipped my feet into the warm, pink, fuzzy slippers my daughter Maura bought me three Christmases ago, before our war began and back when she liked me. The gift…
Tiffany Sciacca P.F. 1982 10 was a reasonable age. Old enough to appreciate the glow of a firefly in the dark cup of your best friend’s hands. Wishing through her fingers for longer summers, longer legs, less pain. Behind…
Join us for the February Flash Challenge! #febflash is a chance for writers to establish or nurture a daily writing practice by focusing on short, flash pieces throughout this, the shortest month. Participants set the goal of writing one piece…
Jennifer Dickinson No One’s Darling Etta puts on her pink dress with the slit up the skirt. Lipstick. Powder. Mascara. Rhinestone earrings. Her fur coat. If she’s going to have an audience, she has to look her best. The blonde…
Breena Clarke Mama Ascended I have communicated with those who would know. Mama and Papa and Harold and Alice were welcomed in the afterlife, following their harrowing deaths. Their souls were luminous. They said that Mama ascended in the…
Melissa Coss Aquino Visions of the Mother We Need (excerpt from the novel Carmen and Grace) We put the holy water on our foreheads in the sign of the cross from the small marble basin at the entrance, as if…
Naomi J. Williams No Doors When they had been stuck indoors for a very long time, the children asked if they could play outside, just for a little while, and the mother relented because she wanted to be alone for…
Muriel’s Cyclone Kathy Fish It begins with a snowman who catches Muriel’s eye. It begins with Muriel standing at the drawing room window of her tiny home. The winter cyclones, once rare, are now common, fierce as lions. But…
The Return Tara Laskowski Our child was there, and then she wasn’t. A reverse birth, if you will. She was there, and then she went back inside, back to the lava-lamp-like existence, floating, warm, head upside down and skin…
Sparrow Mary McLaughlin Slechta Juanetta passed the abandoned house every year since third grade and paid it no mind. She didn’t pass close because now she was in high school, she walked in the street. But one afternoon, when…
Giving Up on the Professor Julia Strayer Most of us live underground now, which is fine by me. Under the city, under the streets, because that’s the only place safe for now. Scorching temps and fast fires left…
When Words Clung to Paper Dawn Raffel The water rose slowly at first and then in a rush. This had happened so often that now we evacuated quickly, with maximum efficiency: children in hand, the papers stating our identity,…
Honesty Sherrie Flick The steam rises, it’s a choir rubbing up my fat belly, then swirling to a hallelujah at the ceiling. Thirty-six weeks. I’m an island of flesh in this clawfoot tub. The water laps at me each…
Feral Things Rosie Forrest When the siren first sounds, I am grateful to be settled in the basement, or perhaps the siren sent us to the basement during dinner. It smells like lavender dryer sheets, and my tongue works…
My Mother in Corners Claudia Smith I believed my mother was water, my father fire. Swarthy, salty-sweat, flash-fires she soothed and tempered. She scrubbed the hardened soap from the corners of sinks and counters, the pee from the grout around the…
What the River Knows Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello People tell me I am good with babies. Children like me, they say, this little so-and-so doesn’t smile for just anybody, that little such-and-such who never talks to strangers must be pried…
Assumption Emma Bolden The snow stopped before I was born, but I was a girl before the rain started. That was when I had a different body, all baby fat and fast flashes of motion that stilled into sleep.…
Curated by Tara Lynn Masih Riding the Dangerous Wind I’m so very glad I was finally able to take up Marjorie’s standing invitation to edit a flash fiction portfolio for the Mom Egg. Marjorie is one of those…
Dorothy Rice HOME MOVIES Grace arrived home and lingered in the darkened hallway, unnoticed. Her nineteen-year-old daughter, Lucy, home from college for the weekend, sat cross-legged on the floor, too close to the TV, hands in her lap,…
Jacqueline Doyle CHEATED When Dina arrives at the Social Security office at 9:15 am, clutching the envelope stamped URGENT, there’s already a long line at the door and no seats left inside. The waiting area looks more like…
TWO HYBRIDS FROM PEG ALFORD PURSELL GLORY, CLOUD, AND EGG The cloud holds some amount of the sea. All of the eggs of her daughter had been cradled within her too, the mother vessel. It’s just science. In…
Sarah stopped rocking; a branch broke off in the wind, rolling down the roof, or did the lights flicker? She shuddered; she had a childhood fear of wind, of things unseen. How long until the power goes out? The book…
Max sat on the floor of the den putting the finishing touches on his Lego castle while he listened to his mother clanging pots and pans in the kitchen. Today was Topsy Turvy day. On Topsy Turvy days Max’s father…
“Mommy!” “Don’t step in the paint!” “Mommy, look – look!” “Shhhh. I’m working.” …. right in the middle… Lost the line, color’s mud. “Alright, what?” Ow, too sharp! “Never mind.” “Whoa. OK. Where’s Margie, isn’t she taking care of you?…
The thought of dragging herself and her baby to the store rubbed against her nerves all morning. But the leaking faucet in the kitchen sink made the trip to the giant box a necessity today. And the longer she put…
Once, a few years ago – I think I was around eight at the time – I was in this foster home and the woman there – Barb was her name – promised to read me the entire set of…
Mama needed a ride home from work so I went for her. As I was pulling out of the lot behind the grocery store where she was a clerk in the deli, I said, “We gotta stop somewhere; Ray wants…