March 2026
Ten stories picked by Mizuki Yamamoto
Mizuki Yamamoto is a writer from Japan, currently living in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains with her husband and two very spoiled farm dogs who dig a lot of holes and don’t do much farming. Mizuki’s writing has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Baltimore Review, The Forge, Necessary Fiction, does it have pockets? Lost Balloon, Flash Frog, lit namjooning, The Citron Review, HAD, the Best Microfiction 2026 anthology, and elsewhere. Mizuki’s works have been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, and the Pushcart Prize. Maybe one day, she will write a book.
Website: mizukiwrites.carrd.co
Bluesky: @mizuki-yama.bsky.social
If you aren’t familiar with her work, here’s one of her pieces to start things off:
Beyond the Chattering Flush (Mizuki Yamamoto | Literary Namjooning)
Why I like it (MK): There’s always something so powerfully compelling to pieces that use an imperative form to tell their story. As I read, I feel thoroughly invited in, asked to experience the scenario for myself. In terms of how this piece unfolds on the page, the teacher in me picks out the wonderful variation of approach - different sentence structures, asides, moments of pause, the way the piece is speaking to its reader, everything in service to building the evocation of scenario and those quiet but powerful emotions bubbling away throughout - the whole thing so transportive and beautiful.
(MY) I didn’t set out with a theme, but looking at the list assembled, something became clear: every story here finds a way around the front door. None of them just say what they mean — they come at it sideways, through a recipe, a physics equation, a triptych of strangers, a second-person address to someone who can’t hear it. That indirection is, I think, what lets them hold so much. These are small stories about enormous things.
The Mattress (Kleopatra Olympiou | Swamp Pink)
Why I like it (MY): A woman in a Cypriot village needs to move a mattress. That is, almost literally, the entire plot — and yet it contains a whole world. What I find so devastating about this story is how each failed attempt (the cousin, the grocery store men, the priest who won’t stop to listen) reveals the social architecture surrounding a woman living alone in old age. Olympiou doesn’t editorialize. Instead, she shows us the doors closing, one by one, and the mattress still sitting there. That the person who finally helps is a stranger — a young truck driver who shrugs and does it, while she wonders what a sad old woman she must seem to him — breaks my heart a little every time.
PROMPT: Write a story built entirely around a single practical problem that resists being solved. Use scene breaks to separate each attempt. Let the object or obstacle stay exactly where it is.
Maybe This Is What the End Is Like (Emily Rinkema | Cleaver Magazine)
Why I like it: Two people playing a hypothetical game over dinner — would you eat the dog in a zombie apocalypse? — until it stops being a game. I love how Emily Rinkema makes the pivot feel so inevitable: the list of real horrors that tumbles into the middle of the story (the egg prices, the storms, the children dying, the judges being arrested) lands like cold water. And then the final line, said to the dog, said to herself: We’re okay, baby. Because it’s true, even though it’s not. One of the best endings I’ve read in a long time. And did I already say, Emily Rinkema always creates characters that pop off the page?
Covalent Bonds (Myles Varga | Necessary Fiction)
Why I like it: Three scenes, three strangers, no explanation of what connects them: a woman hunting horseshoe crabs on a beach, a boy watching a pika in a talus field, an old man by a backyard pool waiting to see a fox. What Varga does, through the bracketed italicized lines between each scene, is suggest connection at the atomic level — these lives bonded by nothing more than the fact of being alive and paying attention. I find this story genuinely moving in a way that’s hard to articulate. It trusts the reader completely, and that trust is part of what makes it work.
PROMPT: Write three short scenes featuring three entirely unconnected characters in three different places. Do not explain the connection between them. Trust that the juxtaposition will do the work.
Not What the Living Think (Beth Hahn | JMWW)
Why I like it: I read this story months ago and can’t get it out of my head. A woman dies — not from what she was supposed to die of, but absurdly, while mopping the floor in flip flops — and then just follows her dinner date home, because what else is there for a ghost to do? What I love about this is how Hahn refuses to make being dead either tragic or uncanny. Her narrator is practical, a little wry, full of ordinary longing: she rolls around in his unmade sheets, pretends they’re lovers. She wouldn’t do anything creepy like sit on the edge of his bed and stare at him while he slept. The braiding of the dead woman’s story with the long-dead sculptor’s only becomes fully visible on re-reading, which is the mark of something special.
The Wind Is Waiting (Stefan Alcalá Slater | Orion’s Belt)
Why I like it: A city where the wind takes the shape of whatever would most beautifully destroy your life, and a narrator addressing you — the tourist, the one who came here because they needed change like the scratch of a match — from the far side of their own recklessness. What I enjoy most about this story is how it refuses to be cautionary. Most stories about self-destruction warn you off. This one says: if it breaks you and you survive, this is a wonderful place to start over. Come in. We’ll be here. The author doesn’t name the city (except in their bio), but I lived in Los Angeles for a few years, and this story took me back there instinctively.
Desert Religions (Zoe Flavin | Wigleaf)
Why I like it: Two women in a rideshare, then a bright new cantina with wax paper on the inside of the quesadilla, talking about politics and desert religions and whether the world’s violence comes down to scarcity. I loved how the story embodies this kind of conversation — the kind that sounds like nothing and is actually everything. The final image, a parent holding their child violence and all on the school run, is one of those endings that keeps opening up the longer you sit with it. This flash piece really makes you think about way more than what it says on the page. It’s the kind of story I wish I could write.
Train Man (Patience Mackarness | New Flash Fiction Review)
Why I like it: A story addressed directly to someone who can’t hear it — a man who chose the accountant’s life, the redbrick house, the model railway in the attic, and is now losing himself to dementia amid its wreckage. The there is a you who anaphora is heart-breaking in the best way, conjuring all the selves that weren’t chosen. But what makes this stay with me is the narrator’s own what if running alongside his like a parallel track — the life they might have shared, the trains they didn’t ride together. Mackarness earns every word of the final paragraph, which imagines the road not taken with such aching specificity.
The Fourth Law of Motion (Jo Gatford | matchbook)
Why I like it: A woman on a 6am hotel breakfast shift. The smell of rendering bacon. The manager’s creeping smile. And then: the walk-in fridge, the wire shelving, the frozen desserts arranged in perfect triangle portions. Jo Gatford never tells us what this woman is carrying, only how it moves through her — inertia, then equal and opposite reaction. What I find remarkable is that this story apparently sat on Gatford’s hard drive for years until the word inertia arrived and unlocked it. That feels like a reminder I find worth holding onto: some stories are on their own timeline until something unlocks them.
A Recipe for Sapodilla Milkshakes (Amelia Badri | PINCH)
Why I like it: This one’s technically labelled a prose poem, but I think it’s doing exactly what flash does best. Badri uses a recipe as scaffolding for a piece about grief, diaspora, and food-memory — a Guyanese-American family in Miami, a father with a Dairy Queen heart, a grandmother whose mind was going but who could still spoon the back of her brain to recreate a long-lost meal. The italicized ingredients interrupt the prose like instructions you can’t quite follow, or don’t want to finish. The form is the feeling: a recipe for something that can never be fully replicated, for a life and a family that keep shifting under your hands.
PROMPT: Write a story in two simultaneous registers — one factual or instructional, one emotional or associative — woven together on the page. Let the factual layer keep interrupting or anchoring the other, without either one explaining the other.
Hope Street (Ari Koontz | Tiny Molecules)
Why I like it: An astronomy club described entirely in the language of faith — tithes, pilgrimage, confessions, sanctuary. Tuesday evenings as Sunday mornings. The night after a disaster when they showed up anyway, and someone said this world’s too far gone and someone else said we’ve got billions of years left. Koontz sustains this metaphor across the whole piece without a single false note, and the ending earns every bit of the feeling it reaches for. I think about this story a lot, especially the lunar eclipse — how they spread out on the lawn with blankets and hot cocoa, and how they stayed past when anyone else could keep their eyes open, then helped each other up and made sure nobody left their blankets behind. It’s one of the most quietly hopeful things I’ve read lately.
What did you think of these choices? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments - have you found a new favourite piece? Did you try out one of the prompts?
Next month’s selection will be chosen by Cole Beauchamp and will be appearing (fingers crossed) on the 21st April.
The Yorkshire Writing Retreat: with Matt Kendrick and Ruth Brandt
Monday 14th - Sunday 20th September 2026 in Thurlstone (Holme Valley)
***JUST FOUR PLACES LEFT**
Join us in the idyllic landscape of the Holme Valley for a six-night writing retreat where you’ll learn from two widely experienced creative writing teachers through a series of workshops, feedback sessions and one-to-one chats. You’ll also have plenty of unstructured time dedicated to putting new words on the page.
The Editorial Funnel PART 1
1st - 21st June 2026
***BRAND NEW COURSE / JUST FIVE PLACES LEFT***
My brand new course is all about editing and is a journey through the “editorial funnel” from out to in. In this first part, we’ll be pondering how we edit for narrative focus, narrative structure, originality, emotional build and structural form. Participants will get the chance to hone their editorial approach to both their own work and the work of others, playing around with a variety of techniques that take in everything from mindfulness and colouring to constructing trainlines and baking stories into cakes. This is part 1. Part 2 (which will focus on the nittier-grittier stuff like words and sentences) will follow at a later date. The course is designed for any fiction writer whether their focus is on short fiction, novels or something more bespoke.