The Silence of the Leaves

Isabelle Hichens

They look at my painting and see so much in it. Their voices fill the room with vacant clichés. Their eyes are gleaming, they’re holding the truth, they know me. In the soft rounded teeth of the edges, they say they see the fragility of the lives I carried inside me. They say that the two shapes are hugging,united forever. They say the colours are so telling. The yellowing tones, the blemished hues show untimely decay. In those yellow strokes, they hear my tears. Yet, the shades of green show youth. They say I’ll be ok because green is the colour of hope. They say painting that picture was therapeutic for me. And then, there are the grey, broken contorted stalks. They say those show how they were cut off from me. They think the dark red pot is my womb, that place that was not good enough for my baby twins to grow. They think they see so much. But I just wanted to paint the portrait of two leaves in a pot. 


This story won First Prize in the February 2024 Monthly Micro contest.

Author: Isabelle lives in Oxfordshire with her husband and three children. She teaches French and Spanish in a lovely school. She loves stories, reading them and writing them.

Image by Jinali Parikh from Pixabay

In this version…

Fiona Dignan

The ashes gust together, gathering into the urn. My hands clutch back the children’s grasp. We walk back through the formalities; hymns choke down our throats. You unburn. We get back into the car, go back into the house, where I shed black clothes like snake’s skin. The children crumple back to foetal positions in their beds.

Two weeks follow, like the blankness of snow.  Interspersed with implosions of grief. That still must happen, even in this version. But grief is only love with no place to go. In this version, the love is poured back in. Tears crawl up to our eyes. Our cheeks’ riverbeds evaporate. I hand back casseroles to our neighbours. The well-wishers eat their words.

The policewoman dribbles her tea into the cup. Her pitying face transforms to poker, as she returns to the doorstep. Knocks absorb into her knuckles. And you backpedal. Backpedal. Please Backpedal. Come back through the door. Peel off your cycling gloves. Suck a kiss from my lips. Swallow your vow of going for a quick ride.


This story won Second Prize and the People’s Prize in the February 2024 Monthly Micro contest.

Author: Fi Dignan writes short stories, poetry, flash and microfiction inspired by her experience of motherhood, place and identity. She won The London Society poetry prize (2023), the Plaza Prize for Sudden Fiction (2023) and was a finalist in the London Independent Story Prize (2023).

Six Encyclopaedic Facts About Black Holes

Fiona Dignan

  • Black holes form at the end of stars’ lives.

Her life was 2 days 6 hours 46 minutes and 7 seconds. 

  • Gravity near the core of a black hole approaches infinity. This theoretically suggests infinite curvature of spacetime.

If I continue to refine her lifespan into milliseconds, nanoseconds etc, I could divide time infinitely. Does this theoretically suggest I could keep her alive indefinitely?

  • Black holes are huge concentrations of matter packed into tiny spaces.

Like a premature baby. Like the baby-shaped hole she leaves.

  • The gravitational influence of a black hole distorts spacetime. The closer you get to a black hole, reality as we know it, breaks down.

[See entry for grief]

  • Although black holes are theoretically infinite, quantum physics propose they emit thermal radiation and thus eventually shrink over astronomical timescales.

Time can be a healer, and this is both true and untrue. (Another quantum paradox?)

  • Black holes are among the most mysterious cosmic objects, much studied but not fully understood.

[See entries for love, grief, motherhood]


Author: Fi Dignan writes short stories, poetry, flash and microfiction inspired by her experience of motherhood, place and identity. She won The London Society poetry prize (2023), the Plaza Prize for Sudden Fiction (2023) and was a finalist in the London Independent Story Prize (2023).

How We Will Leave

Anne Howkins

We will depart in triumphant glory, revelling in our bronzed age, soaring away like the horse-chestnut leaves and sycamore seeds blowing down the street, leaving the deep-rooted security of constancy for the unknown.

We will be scattered by our grandchildren chasing errant Labradors through the park-keepers crisp piles of gold and red and brown, 

We will evaporate in next door’s bonfire, blazing under rimy starlight, our glowing embers fading into the night. 

We will disappear in a gentle rotting away, our fabric absorbed by our resting place.

Whichever way we leave, remember us. 


Author: Anne relishes the challenge of writing very short stories and has started writing again after a two year break. Her stories have appeared in print and online, at Retreat West, Flash 500, Reflex Fiction, Flash Fiction Magazine, National Flash Fiction Day, Lunate, Strands International and Bath Flash Fiction Anthology 2020.

All The Things He Left

Emma Phillips

His cup, which stains the sideboard with concentric circles that she doesn’t want to wipe in case she never hears the clatter of his spoon again. White, two sugars.

Spare keys. Dropped into the bowl beside the door, the one she’d thought too fancy for loose change and the odds and sods she still plucks from the sofa back and cupboards. 

His laugh. The way it explodes at the things she says and lingers in the air like the silence which follows the click of the door.His face. The way his smile slid and fell, half of him the same and the other dragged from the wreckage. 

His touch. The dent beside her on the mattress where he’d shroud himself. Like a crime scene, she’d joke, when she poked him awake, before the sirens were for him. She searches her body for fingerprints.


Author: Emma Phillips grew up next to the M5 in Devon, which lured her to cities and airports in search of adventure before she landed back home in 2013. Her flash collection Not Visiting the SS Great Britain is out now on Alien Buddha Press.

Image by cromaconceptovisual from Pixabay

Into the Wardrobe

Emma Phillips

Where the stale sweat in the fabric of your mother’s dress pulls your shoulders back and you feel her corset like grip to your throat. Sit still, she’d hiss as you stretched yourself mannequin straight at the thought of what would happen if you didn’t. It stinks of piss in here. Her winter coat pools at your thighs. Sometimes she brings visitors; you hear them puff like trains, the clink of their keys, their breath lingering on windowpanes with a damp sock smell of disappointment. 

Never look, your brother said, before he passed you a tenner and left. You close your eyes, slipping your feet into her fancy shoes, imagining a love that could hold you tall in kitten heels that purr like the nine lives she didn’t choose. She used to paint your nails. Hers are chewed and chipped. You feel for the varnish as you push against the wardrobe back. When you climb out, you’ll colour them Vixen.


Author: Emma Phillips grew up next to the M5 in Devon, which lured her to cities and airports in search of adventure before she landed back home in 2013. Her flash collection Not Visiting the SS Great Britain is out now on Alien Buddha Press.