Micros Archives

GOTH TACOS by Paul Stinson

January 21, 2026 · Micros

Tom wore black jeans, black Bauhaus t-shirt, no makeup. Three al pastor on corn, no onions. Clayre wore the long black lace skirt, black and yellow zebra top, black lipstick. Two barbacoa on flour. Tom was a lab assistant, Clayre a speech therapist. Funny, Tom had a daughter named Claire, with an i, a fourth grade sweetheart whom he saw on weekends. Funny, Clayre had a brother named Tom, a Grade-A turd who did real estate in Phoenix. Was Tom the coolest, best looking guy at Goth Tacos that Wednesday? Nope. But was he kind enough and safe-seeming enough to…

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EARTHBOUND by Uma Payne

December 4, 2025 · Fiction, Micros

No one ever found him. Worms turned his whole body into the nutrient shit that plants need to grow. The plastic that had shared space with his flesh stayed. It sat still or traveled elsewhere. Where he had long since become indiscernible, it remained itself. It was outside of natural time, being that nature had exiled. Plastic was what had been severed from life, transmuted into another phase of existence beyond the metabolic processes that meant living. The accreting mass of plastic was nature’s obliterative tendency beginning to outweigh its reproductive one. Nature was poisoned by its own urges. Asphyxiated…

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AGES by Sarah Chin

November 12, 2025 · Micros

Thirteen was the year I discovered spite. Fourteen, eyeliner. Fifteen, seduction in a slow blink. At sixteen, I mailed seventeen birthday cards to myself, all unsigned. My mother asked who loved me that much. I said: someone who knows the value of quantity over quality. She looked proud, as if I’d finally become a woman. I looked away, counting the candles, calculating how many more years until I could vanish without anyone noticing.

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BABY PHONES by Elena Zhang

September 4, 2025 · Micros

The babies are all born with phones in their hands. It hadn’t always been this way, but the babies needed a way to call poison control at their own leisure. At night, we hear the babies babble into their phones as we weep into our empty hands, while the soothing tones of the poison control operator tell them how to save themselves.

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LATE TO WORK by Benjamin Drevlow

August 28, 2025 · Micros

This morning I’m hauling ass across the intersection across from the Krispy Kreme opposite the Kum & Go so I don’t get steamrolled by one of the yokels in their jacked-up pickups when some old lady in a jacked-up pickup swerves across oncoming traffic, throws open her passenger door, calls me honey and hollers for me to get in. I’m thinking she’s about to say she’s from the FBI and somebody has a hit out on me. But then she just says, You late to work, honey? I’m jogging in sweatpants, a sweatshirt, and winter hat. I tell her no…

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FORREST GUMP 3 by Julián Martinez

August 13, 2025 · Micros

There was a billboard along the highway that read, FG3: ONE LAST RUN, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright profile to profile, stars and stripes behind them. The bottom text dictated: WATCH NOW ON AMERICAPLUS, so I opened my week’s ration of AmericaPlus and swallowed the last tab of blotter paper. It wasn’t enough to hallucinate, but my microdose made rush hour on the highway seem warm and tingly with sunset and my fellow commuters as carefree and wealthy as I briefly was.

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CAUSE AND EFFECT by Claire Hanlon

July 31, 2025 · Micros

When the birds burst up and out from the sidewalk grass in front of my car as I’m driving home from the store on Mother’s Day, and I think: how beautiful! as the unexpected blue of their wings flash before me, and then: oh no! did I hit them?—it’s a near thing, a miracle: I miss them, just. Because the birds live, when I arrive home and honk to let my family know I’m back, let’s go, and my husband emerges, he does not stare perplexedly at the bumper of our newly-purchased SUV. And, because the birds are both still…

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THE BALLOON by Kiddo Cunningham

July 22, 2025 · Micros

During my dissertation on the history of traveling theatrical acts, I came across a grainy old black-and-white piece of footage from a fair. In the silent reel, too few people hold the ropes of a hot air balloon, intending to keep it grounded. As the balloon takes off, four people continue holding their ropes, lifted off the ground. One by one they release, dropping to the safety of Earth below. Except for one person who holds tight. I was born with a condition of isolation. Drinking didn’t give me a sense of belonging, but it made the affliction tolerable. It…

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SLUMBER PARTY AT THE END OF THE WORLD by Robert Helfst

July 10, 2025 · Micros

We’re nearly there now – lids grow heavy as the sun sets on our species. It’s bittersweet, sleep’s surrender, a warm blanket wrapping around our aching bodies. It’s better this way, a relief to embrace our conclusion without a coda, to no longer carry on. In the end it wasn’t cancer or rising oceans or mass extinctions or other self-inflicted harms but a deep fatigue that hollowed us until there was nothing left to do but rest, finally, now and forever. One last shared sigh, releasing the weight of our communal sins, and then the comfort of an unending slumber.

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NO NAME AND COOL PARTY by Erin Satterthwaite

July 9, 2025 · Fiction, Micros

No Name I looked at her picture to see if she was more attractive than me. I looked up her family’s ancestry to see if they had ever owned slaves. They hadn’t; they were quakers. I looked at the picture of my boyfriend and her when they were in Italy together. I had never even been to Italy and he knew this. Yet there he was four years ago eating gelato with her with his eyes closed and a big grin. He probably wouldn’t take me to Italy because I was dull and uncultured. She worked in academia at a…

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