Micros Archives

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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THE ROOSTER THAT SCREAMS by Laura Shell

July 3, 2025 · Micros

So there is one rooster in the neighborhood that sounds normal, emmits the typical cock-a-doodle-doo cry in the wee hours of the morning. Then there is the other rooster, the one that submits a scream like someone is holding a hand around its throat. It’s like an “Ehhhhhhh,” sound. And it’s much louder than the other rooster’s call. So every morning, I hear the rooster that screams and wish I knew where it lived so I could find out exactly why it screams. *** The rooster belts out its usual “Ehhhhhhh,” sound, then scratches at the scar on its throat.

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SORDID LITTLE WORLD by Gerri Brightwell

June 19, 2025 · Micros

You reach your forties and your life’s nothing but bus rides to work, and long hours in the lab, and a sandwich for lunch because with a mortgage and a spouse and two nearly-grown sons your pay doesn’t go far, and every day it’s rinse-and-repeat, your life fading away in this windowless room with its unsparing fluorescent lights, its stink of solvents and reagents, and then one day you mix compound A with solution B and what you’ve made is a substance so viscous and black you can scarcely believe it, you tip it out and it’s like you’ve poured…

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I SEE THE BEAUTY by Diego Lama, Translated from Italian by Rose Facchini

June 10, 2025 · Micros

Behind the dune of plastics, hidden among the clumps of charred O-Rings and heaps of shapeless garbage, there is a large tank. In the tank are cockroaches. Every day, I climb onto the metal cover and contemplate the gray dawn that creeps through the hills of waste. Then I defecate inside the tank through the top hatch. Every day, my feces nourish thousands of hungry cockroaches. In the morning, I take my net and fish. The smell of the tank does not bother me. On the contrary. Sometimes I climb inside and catch the biggest cockroaches that hide at the…

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LOOKING AND HURTING by Alice Rowena Wilson

June 5, 2025 · Micros

In the bar, she stares at him constantly, which is embarrassing in and of itself, but also because she cannot seem to physically control it, and she knows his friends will notice (she somehow does not count herself in this body of people, although that is where she belongs; within this crowd, her desire isolates her, carves out a space of hot, silent shame), and she knows that they, his friends, will murmur to each other, that they will note her desperate, pathetic, puppy-dog presence, but she seems to have a physical impediment that means she can’t stop staring, and…

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MIKE TOPP by Mike Topp

May 27, 2025 · Micros

TODAY Today a bully from my high school is coming by to beat me up one last time (he has cancer). AMERIKKKA Of course Amerikkka leads the league in serial killers. There are a great many serial killers in town right now—because of NYC’s favorable tax laws and enterprise zones and the big serial killer parade we have every year, and because in a lot of our restaurants serial killers eat free. A JOINER Here’s something you might not have known about me: I was a joiner in high school. Carbona Club, Whip-Its Society, Nutmeg Club, Friends of…

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ALL THE NAMES WE HAVE TO HAVE FOR LOVE by Lei Wang

April 22, 2025 · Micros

Someone saw some clouds once upon a time. So what? I can see them, too —a haiku But better to have seen them a thousand years ago. I am not being sentimental. I like plumbing as much as anyone, and I know the more pollution, the more brilliant sunsets. But the first poems, you could write about anything. Day turning into night a real phenomenon, a mouth and another mouth. The first poems had no metaphors because nothing was like anything else yet. The kiss was a courting ritual involving, what else, food. A capybara feeding…

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FISHING FOR KAT by Wendy BooydeGraaff

April 11, 2025 · Micros

He flies into town, late, rents a room in the neighbourhood, meets her first thing in the morning, holds her, remembers how her mother looked, same dark eyes, same dark curl on the top of her head. Every six months, he catches milestones: crawling, walking, first words, kindergarten, high school. Same room, same turquoise couch, same breakfast snacks. Years. Back and forth. He becomes an intermittent constant. At home, he cleans out the extra room, installs a Murphy Bed, hangs her favorite poster. He investigates the local university, uses it as a lure she won’t resist.

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JAKOB, I DO! UNTIL I DON’T! by Ali Mckenzie-Murdoch

April 10, 2025 · Micros

We drank Prosecco on the number 31, escaping the confetti blizzard, the plastic champagne flute cheap between my lips but the ring heavy on my finger, while my parents returned to their hotel and we continued on the early bus—Who gets married at eight in the morning?—and some passengers clucked and said Cheers, but most looked out to the felt-clad streets where stony-faced bankers marched to the rain, then we chugged up a small mountain on a train, and still in my wedding dress with the matching red patent shoes, I whispered footsteps in snow strewn with autumn leaves, and…

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