Chelsea prose poetry

Subway Surfing by Mizuki Yamamoto

Children throw their bodies into darkness, daring each other, further, surfing steel, blurring through tunnels, daring their bodies, further, further towards somewhere that is nowhere but feels like something, their lives linear, their stories circular, their bodies just a small vantage point in time and space. Beyond their outstretched hands is the beginning of everything else that has ever and will have ever existed, bodies pleading. Adrenaline rushing through their luminous veins. If only someone had told them of still water and brine. How iron rusts and blood is red. Further, further. How alive they feel as the despair for the world swells inside them, their hearts, their chests. How oaths and myths are nothing in the face of death. How joy and grief in their bodies, further, shaking, further, gentle, further was brilliance enough.

Mizuki is a writer from Japan, currently living in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains with her half moon and two very spoiled farm dogs. Her writing has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Flash Frog, Your Impossible Voice, The Citron Review, HAD, and is forthcoming at Does It Have Pockets and other places. Mizuki was the winner of The SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction 2025 and was shortlisted for the 31st Bath Flash Fiction Award. Find her online at mizukiwrites.carrd.co and on BlueSky.

Chelsea flash fiction

The Sunken Kingdom of Atlantis Starts to Make Some Waves by Stephen J. Bush

We’d been off the main route by ourselves in the Conservation and Marine Science Zone, and you’d been saying how we didn’t want to miss it as back at the main tank there’d be the mermaid show soon, but we’d been lucky arriving there as it was quieter and not as appealing to children, and as it happened the aquarium had set aside a pregnant seahorse for monitoring and I’d been lucky again to get to watch it agog, rocking back in the water, pulsing up its young, but you were looking at your watch, saying there’s loads left to see and we’d be busy with the move the next two weeks so let’s just keep going, we should drink this all in, and I was, and about to point out to you the newborns too, like commas scribbled in the water in white, but you rapped on the glass before I could speak and though it got my attention, it got one of their staff’s too, whose should-know-better glower embarrassed me enough we couldn’t stay, so you lifted my wrist and steered us onto the concourse to sit with the six-year-olds and my point is it wasn’t that I saw how you couldn’t conceal your annoyance the mermaid troupe proved all mermen instead, athletic in their tails and tasteful kelp, and it wasn’t that you saw me watching them, hardly agog but as I was there at least into it, and it wasn’t that I saw you staring at the only female performer, the girl on the beach looking lonely along ‘the sea,’ but perhaps instead because you’d said “Corinne, for God’s sake, you’re in a trance again” but maybe I was thinking about the seahorse again then, moved into its tank because the decision was made it was ready, or maybe I was listening to the announcer calling out the story, that the girl and her merman were from two different worlds and it wasn’t meant to be, or maybe I’d just zoned out from that plot.

Stephen J. Bush was born in Bath, England, and lives in Xi’an, China, where he works as a biologist. His fiction can be found or is forthcoming in Bending Genres, BULL, Oyster River Pages, and Panorama.