Good

by Wesley Morris

“Good” meant trying hard and helping out and listening and being a devoted friend. It meant only the best news for my parents and being liked. But goodness as a personal policy is strange for a child to have. It’s for grown-ups; not for kids. Teachers like good kids; some teachers prefer them. The kind of goodness I’m talking about is suspicious to other kids.

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Wesley Morris has won two Pulitzer Prizes for criticism, including in 2021 for a set of essays that explored the intersection of race and pop culture. His six sentences are excerpted from "My Mustache, My Self."

Revenge

by Thomas Baron

There’s a crow in the front yard and I’m pretty sure it hates me. Every time I leave, it caws at me and, if I go too close, it pegs juniper berries from the tree and drops them on me. My wife says I must have done something to upset it, that crows are famously vengeful, but I don’t know what I did to deserve this. Maybe it’s mad at me for cutting down that tree in the spring that was already dead, or for being too loud when I pull into the driveway, or maybe it wants me to feed it and is angry that I don’t. Maybe it saw what happened that night in the parking lot behind the Wendy’s and wants me to know that somebody saw and that somebody knows and that the world will remember even if the people forget. Either way, I don’t think I’ll leave the house today—there are more crows out there now, and I don’t know what it’s telling them.

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Thomas Baron is a British writer living in Northern Colorado.

Coming of Age

by Victoria Melekian

The women in my family grow wings, big and feathery white, hard to hide and hard to manage when sorrow weighs you down and the wings don’t work and you land in faraway places having to think about narwhals and pollywogs, happy things, until you’re light enough to flap back home, ignoring the houses beneath, the people inside with not enough to eat or enough insulin or enough hope to want to wake up in the morning. Soaring above glimmering grids of light is gorgeous, but maintaining a constant cheeriness as the world below churns—well, I understand why Mom and Grandma gave up their wings years ago. It’s difficult to sustain concern for anything other than staying aloft. I assured Grandma I wanted to care. She clipped my wings using her small sewing scissors. It stung, but now I can feel all of it: despair, outrage, grief, delight, the whole earthbound mess.

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Victoria Melekian writes poetry and short fiction. Her poetry collection “The Accidental Courage of Our Lives” is available from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. “Unhoused,” Victoria’s novella-in-flash, won first place in the 2026 Bath Flash Fiction Novella-in-Flash Awards. For more, see her website.