MicroZine Digital Issue 1

Volume I (2024)

Jul 31, 2024

A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

Hello and welcome to the first digital issue of MicroZine. Just a reminder that our first “build-it-yourself” MicroZine issue will make its debut in October 2024. In the meantime, we’ll open for submissions a few more times before then. If you’re a writer, you’ll want to make sure you submit a microfiction story during those open submission windows! The stories going in the first print issue of MicroZine will only come from the digital issues. For now, we plan on releasing a digital issue monthly. Here are 5 bite-sized stories for you to sink your teeth into. Let us know what you think in the comments!
— Erica Drayton (EiC)

100-WORD STORIES

Arrêt by Sharron Bassano

He stands high above the water now, looking down, his hands in the wooly pockets of his coat.

The ice on the St-Lawrence is beginning to break in tortured creaks and groans. The river begins to run freely under the Champlain bridge, moving once again toward the sea. He breathes in frozen moonlight, his body is cold steel. Her last words to him were keen as a razor.

“Get out,” she’d hissed.

He didn’t need to ask her why. He knew why.

He stands high above the water now, looking down, his hands in the wooly pockets of his coat.

Moved On by John Sheirer

“Tanya?”

Tanya turned to the man on the subway platform.

“Tanya! So good to see you!” He stepped close.

“I’m sorry,” Tanya said, easing backward. “I don’t know you.”

“It’s me!” he said. “Desmond.”

Tanya shrugged. “Still don’t know you.”

“Tanya,” Desmond said softly. “Don’t do this.”

“I have to go,” Tanya strode into the nearest car without another glance. Desmond stared, his mouth an open oval.

Tanya found a seat, put her head in her hands, stifled a sob. It had taken a year, but she’d recovered from the heartbreak a decade ago. She wouldn’t let herself go back.

251 to 500-WORD STORIES

My Back Rooms by The Crazy Cat Lady Writes (aka Kim Hayes)

[492 words]

I am being chased. I’m in a large sort of city office complex. It’s a tall building in the middle of a large urban area. The building is part shopping mall, part office space. I cannot leave. I search for a way out. I don't know what follows me.

I do not know how I entered this building. I can't remember when I arrived or how long I've been there. I look for a place to rest, but nothing is open when I need it to be. Or it changes as I arrive.

Every floor is different, and the floors change scenes, even when I try to go back to find a place I think I can hide, long enough to get my bearings and plan on where to go next to find an exit.

Sometimes the people in the building know who I am or that I’m ‘wanted’ but they don’t threaten to ‘rat me out’. It feels more like they are trying to warn me. Some of them tell me I’m close to being caught. Some people give me hints on how to exit the building.

I must keep moving. I have tricked a few people who know who is chasing me. I lost one by pushing him down an old elevator shaft. I made sure he had something to grab onto. He was friendly right until I pushed him. I left him screaming as he held on to a red ribbon that was tied to a hook in the shaft doorway.

Offices vary across floors, even as I walk. Décor transforms, scenes shift, people vanish, new faces appear right in front of me. It all melds together, sometimes fast, sometimes slow.

Sometimes I feel I’m almost caught, that whatever or whoever is looking for me is just around the next corner. That’s when I run. Running down a hallway that changes as I run or walking down a flight of stairs, the stairway changes right in front of me.

There is a large area with sunlight coming in from a large window in the ceiling. Am I on the top floor of the building? I can’t tell. There are shops I dart in and out of, but as I walk and explore the shops, it all changes again.

Customers in these shops either cannot see me at all or give me stern looks. Two people gave me the signal to be quiet. I am making too much noise as I move through the shopping area.

All I want to do is leave. I do not feel like I’m in grave danger. I know someone wants me for a reason I won’t like. I have no idea what I have done to have someone, or something search me out. I must keep moving to keep from being caught. I lean up against a wall to catch my breath.

I hear a noise, a movement behind me. I have been found.

A Day Late and a Dollar Short by E.P. Lande

[294 words]

When Enrico, our stable manager, took a week off — for which we paid him his full salary, even though he had been working for us barely five months — and didn’t return — nor texted to say he wouldn’t be back — José was thoroughly disgusted.

“Even if he asks for his job back, I wouldn’t hire him; we’ll do it ourselves.”

Not only did we have seven horses — meaning, seven stalls in two stables and seven pastures to clean — but we had twenty-two chickens, four roosters, five guinea hens, forty-two pigeons (twenty couples and two widowers), ten ducks, and a goat, all housed in the lower stable divided into six spacious coops.

“I’ll take care of the horses and you’ll clean the coops,” he decided.

Cleaning the coops had been my job, Sunday — Enrico’s day off — but other days, it had been José’s responsibility. I hated cleaning the coops and José knew I did, because every Sunday I would complain. But, as it was only one day a week, I cleaned them as best I could. And every Sunday José would inspect the coops and criticize. My efforts were rarely praised.

As José is Cuban, it goes without saying that he cleans better than gringos like me. Even Enrico, who was an illegal immigrant from Nicaragua, though Latino, didn’t measure up to José’s standards. Not only does José clean better than anyone else, he’s also faster. Perhaps I’m slower because I hate cleaning the coops. Whatever, every day since Enrico left, José finishes cleaning the horse stalls before I finish cleaning the coops.

And every day, as I am just about finished the last of the six coops, I hear José calling from the stairs leading from the horse stalls above,

“Do you need any help?”

AN UNDER 200-WORD STORY

Antonia in the Night by Brian Mihok

[156 words]

In the night blue of three o’clock Antonia lay awake, not having slept through a night in two weeks. At first she would calmly open her eyes, as if a sleep cycle had completed and she was free like the peoples of old to rise and do some repetitive task to occupy her mind in the middle of the night. She was reminded of American colonists in the fledgling nation, creeping out of bed, lighting a candle, and reading a pamphlet or sipping something warm, their thoughts on their uneasy lives, pondering solutions to long held problems. But since those first nights the moment at which she wakes has grown earlier and more intense. A week from now it will be two am. A week after that, one. She will have no explanation to offer friends with questions of why. Sometimes, she thinks but does not say, things happen and that’s all we’re permitted to know.

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