Welcome to this special guest-edited issue, featuring flash recommendations by Patricia Q. Bidar!
Patricia is a longtime friend and a consummate writer, from flash to novelettes. Her collection, Pardon Me for Moonwalking, came out in 2025 (I reviewed it here). If you want a taste of her flash, check out “Science,” in Variant Lit!
She’s one of the kindest people you’ll meet. Huge thanks to Patricia for curating this issue of MicroVerse! I think you’ll love her choices.
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Kate Webster and the Gorgon’s Head
By Lindsey Pharr in Ghost Parachute * 717 words
They had me convinced I was a changeling. Told me the good people had taken their real sister, gobbled her flesh and carved her little girl bones into flutes.
This one deftly balances voice—it’s essentially a monologue—to anchor a ripping yarn, all the while revealing action at a pace that feels natural. Most importantly, it’s a gripping, rewarding story.
By Avitus B. Carle in Vestal Review * 364 Words
Here, I am reminded how small they have become. How large I have grown, and I fear that my growth has stunted them.
I love the way Carle inverts the old “they grow so fast” in this bittersweet micro with the young adult narrator in bed between her parents for comfort during a lightning storm in the middle of a sweltering night. Also note two deft allusions to pregnancy.
By Claire Y. Guo in Flash Frog * 626 Words
Are you having fun? American Boy asks in a way that suggests there is only one right answer, so I thumb my teeth for yes, and of course, and sure, and definitely, biting back the thick fruits of other, less valuable words.
Guo gives us a fish out of water, a Chinese main character with her American boyfriend at a baseball game on the Fourth of July. I love the way the rites, the food, and the vocabulary spool forth, increasingly surreal.
By Sacha Bissonnette in Reckon Review * 999 Words
And you asked me if sometimes my brain ever felt like it was not my own, like it belonged to someone else. And I paused.
A deeply moving depiction of longing. This one, a series of messages to a departed friend, covers a long timespan. I love the way Bichonette conveys grief without resorting to either sentimentality or off-putting emotional distance.
By Georgia Bellas in Centaur Lit * 281 Words
I rocked the secret to sleep in a cradle of birch. I picked the scab on my knee until it bled, until it was pink and new and I could wake up and start again.
I love this deep vibe piece, executed so satisfyingly. Notice how the title both anchors and adds to the narrative.
By Kathryn Kulpa in The Welkin Press * 99 Words
Great-Uncle Merrick ruled that beach once, a silver cocktail shaker his sceptre, tanned body gleaming. Strode with the careless assurance of one whose living depended on work not his own…
When a story as evocative as this clocks in at 99 words, every word pulls its weight. The grandiose “Great-Uncle,” “cocktail shaker,” “sceptre,” “gleaming.” The repetition of “strode.” All give more pathos to what follows, as does the truly resonant title.
By Cole Beauchamp in Thin Skin * 410 Words
We can’t be there tomorrow, on those hard wooden pews, in the church your family chose. But we can be here tonight, with the women you called sisters.
The washing of a beloved friend’s body by those who knew her best. Truly profound, the two worlds, the shared bowl, the repeated words; it’s almost biblical. An astonishing use of 410 words.
Vanya, Vanity, and Betrayal on the Bay
By Jeff Bond and S.M. Strand in The Disappointed Housewife * 999 Words
So I took the shark role. No lines, no depth. Get cranked out of the water, open wide, look dumb. Repeat. Scheider mockingly threw chum at me between takes. The crew kept locking me in storage ‘by accident.’ Eventually, I got to swallow Robert Shaw. He tasted like gin and Efferdent. So, that.
This one is so damn funny and so carefully constructed. I love the audacity. A fabulous example of getting wild with plot AND of collaboration!
By Mamie Pound in Ghost Parachute * 371 Words
We’ll break up because you invited the woman across the street to have beer, because you were jealous that I mentioned another man’s name, a man you perceive to be more my type.
I am in love with the rich sweep of this one—in just 371 words! The ellipses at the end elegantly signal continuity. Pound’s breathtaking micro is one to “go to school to.” I will.
Having Received His Call-Up Papers, Arthur Jenkins Invites You To The Cinema
By Alison Wassell in The Welkin Press * 100 Words
Honeymoon, a single night in Morecambe. Not what you were expecting. Listening to the sea’s roar, trying to think of England.
A scant 100 words, yet this second person delight depicts a world the reader feels she can stand and walk around in. I love the sweet/sad mood, and the masterfully chosen details.
The Centaur Dances the Giddy-Up Buck
By Travis Flatt in Pithead Chapel * 313 Words
On Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at Studs, his taut biceps and pecs oiled, his flanks brushed to a sheen, where he’s got a stable of regular fans—customers, rather—to cheer at his flexing and gyrating, the mist from his mane thick as glitter in the strobe lights as he spins his “Texas Twirl.”
I’m a huge fan of Flatt’s work, and this one canters to the top. Here, the outlandish extended metaphor is both entertaining as hell and also truly moving, with its glimpses of workaday life and wistful yearning for love.
Family Patterns: Cyanocitta cristata
By Ani King in Claudine Literary * 306 Words
… bird stacked on bird stacked on shitting bird, bodies blue like water or summer sky, blue as if Matisse painted them, blue like a uniform, blue like glass bottles and oxford shirts, blue like Dad’s eyes, blue blue blue…
Single sentence stories are a hard sell for me. But King perfectly employs the form here, the weight of family expectation like a single color, like a flock of squawking blue jays breaching the storm doors, like a chorus filling the speaker’s home and head, but for the missing element, a departed loved one.
By Eirene Gentle in Claudine Literary * 206 Words
They kept an old lady in the attic and no one cared except it wasn’t an old lady it was a grown woman and they figured she deserved it except it wasn’t a grown woman it was a young girl and they got flustered but it wasn’t their business…
Yow! An absolute firecracker. I love Gentle’s whimsical singsong that belies the profound message.
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Patricia Q. Bidar is the author of a flash fiction collection, Pardon Me for Moonwalking (Unsolicited Press, 2024) and the novelette, Wild Plums (ELJ Editions, 2023). Her work has appeared in literary journals and magazines including Waxwing, Wigleaf, Pinch, Painted Bride Quarterly, Another Chicago, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Moon City Review, and anthologies including the Wigleaf Top 50, Flash Fiction America (Norton, 2023), Best Microfiction (Pelekinesis, 2023), and Best Small Fictions (Alternating Current, 2023, 2024). Patricia has served as a professional writer for human services nonprofits for 25 years. She also serves as a submissions editor for SmokeLong Quarterly.
Myna Chang 