We are pleased to present our annual flashglass anthology! Comprised of all flash works originally published online at rowanglassworks.org in 2025, this anthology is available for online viewing and for purchase in print. ​

They told me not to go alone. The locals at the diner leaned in when I asked about the trail. Old woods, they said. Best left quiet.

But I am not a believer in ghost stories, and my grief needed silence. My sister had loved hiking—she died in a hospital bed, sterile and still. I wanted to give her something better. I brought her ashes in a tin and took the path marked by stone and moss.

The forest greeted me with stillness, and for a while, that was enough. My boots softened into the dirt, birds muttered in the canopy, and I whispered my sister's name as I scattered ashes beneath a red pine that looked a thousand years old.

Then I turned to leave.

And the path was gone.

Not overgrown. Gone. The stones I would step over—vanished. The way I came curled behind me like a fern folding into itself. The sun was dipping fast, and the trees had shifted. Taller now. Closer.

I did not panic. I had a compass. I had done this before.

But the compass spun. The needle twitched like it was afraid to choose. My phone flickered dead in my hand.

When I started walking, the forest seemed to inhale. Every step deeper felt like sinking. The birds no longer muttered, and the pines stopped rustling. There was a sound behind me, soft as fur, quick as breath, but when I turned, nothing moved.

That night, I made camp without fire.

I dreamed of my sister. Only her skin was bark, and her eyes were hollow knots, and said, I am still here, you know. I never left.
​
When I woke, pine needles were on my pillow that had not been there before.

On the second day, I tried to mark my trail. I carved notches into trunks, broke small branches, and laid out stones. But the forest closed them behind me. Trees stood whole again when I looked back. My trail was being swallowed.

The sound returned that night—closer. I stayed awake, listening to my breath and the sound of something else breathing.

By the third day, my mind was cracking. I could not tell if the whispers were wind or voices. I saw faces in the bark. I heard my name in the crunch of leaves. Leila, they said: my sister's voice. Leila, stay.

When I ran, the forest ran with me. Trees blurred. The light filtered strangely, like through stained glass. I tripped. Cut my knee. When I stood, I was back at the red pine.

The ashes were gone.

In their place was a hollow in the earth, pulsing gently—like a heartbeat.

I understood then.

The forest remembered her. It had taken her. It was offering me the same mercy.

I knelt. The earth was warm.

I do not remember lying down, only the softness of moss and the weight of pine needles falling like snow. I felt bark bloom along my skin, roots threading through my veins. I felt her beside me in soil, in sap, in song.

We are quiet now, but we are not gone.

We listen when you enter. We bend the trees. We hide your path. And if your grief hums like ours once did, we might call you closer.

We are what the pines remember.​

Sons, the grandfather who didn't live long enough to meet you asks me in Winston 100 smoke-rings whisper what you're like. He's sitting in his powder blue recliner - the one where he watches the News at 10 & then The Benny Hill Show before the orange smolder of his cigarette butt fades to a flicker in the black plastic ashtray that rests on a folding table by his left arm. His smoke circles like an oasis & disappears & he falls asleep doing this routine each night of the week. I struggle for adjectives & adverbs to describe you guys as I blink through tears & IVs hearing my dad, gone 30-plus years, question me in a fog of words & discordant machines emitting metronome noises over the air conditioner's hum. My old man's only son describing his sons to a ghost in a blue post office button down short sleeve work shirt, thick bifocals in tortoise shell frames & all I want to tell him is how I've been & what I've done & that I'm ok. But we'll catch up soon, Dad. Knowing we'll grab a bagel & instant coffee somewhere soothes me as the nurses recycle in symphonic movements, adjusting my drips, checking off charts at the foot of my bed. I may be crying. This room may be raining. What's left of my eyes dances between you three, my sons now guardians, as you look to the nurses & then back to me & the monitors & back at me & my eyes flutter like shutters in summer storms, my lips like a vacant orbit, a vapor whisper.
Dad.

~

~

~

When my grandmother’s hands hurt too much to play the piano, she lost her will to live. She began to forget. In the middle of duets, her hands dropped off the keyboard. Notes transformed themselves to dots, melodies to monotone. We kept turning the pages to try something else. We never made it to the end.

She forgot the way downstairs to the pool, and whether she’d washed the strawberries. She forgot where the cabinets were, and the refrigerator, the names of the cards when we tried to play gin rummy. The air in her apartment grew dank. She wouldn’t open the door to the balcony. The ocean humidity might hurt the Steinway. 

My daughter now sits at the piano, yelling at fingers that will not hit the right notes—her eyes, my eyes, daggers as we struggle through duets. She will not wait for the right time to come in, and sometimes, neither will I. She yells at the piano, at me, at her hands, strawberry red and raw from winter. My daughter complains that the keys on our piano buzz, stick, reverberate. I tell her to tune it out, the way I tuned out my grandmother’s hands, her pained fingers falling into the wrong places. When my daughter was little, she used to sit on my grandmother’s lap, her chubby hands slapping at the Steinway. My grandmother would follow her as she toddled around the edge of the pool in a dark green dress that barely covered the edge of her diaper, the two of them sporting the same opened-mouth smile. “I always wanted a girl,” she said.

It took my grandmother over a year to die, several months to forget her words—one note, one phrase at a time until all was silent. No notes. No words. Only once after weeks of empty measures did she utter a lilt of syllables, my daughter’s name. Clear and in tune, I could see them again, the day they disappeared into the bedroom like sisters and came back in silver party hats. My grandmother yelled, “March,” and somewhere on the Steinway, I found some chords, a march rhythm, 1-2-3-4 all the way to the balcony, where beyond the pool, the ocean was so perfectly blue, she even agreed to open the door. Just a crack. Just for a moment.