fiction that lingers long after the flash
flash
Sick Day
Ma keeps Nabh home again because he’s still fatigued, and she says he has such heavy bags under his eyes he could go for a month-long trip to India. No fever, though. He’s well enough to be bored. And … he’s going to miss the fire drill today. No big...
True Story 1-10
True story (1) In the midst of war, she thinks about her plants. True story (2) Her friend phones to say she’s arrived safely at her elder sister’s apartment, which, unlike her younger sister’s, is far enough from Tehran. The bombs drop somewhere between “safely” and...
Gun Song (We Went to Iceland)
It was the year we went to Iceland. Not everyone, mind you. A few were happy with what was going on at home. Who needed a passport when you could have a gun? We went to Iceland because it was ice and fire, and we felt like both. It was cheap and closer than anyone...
Fear
The word victim is designed to slide right between your ribs. It’s a slender blade of a word, and it excels at gutting you, at hollowing you out. What it’s not designed to do is break you. It assumes you’re already broken. The morning of the verdict, we stand across...
What the Bones Remember
She wore her bones like silk. Not with shame, but with memory. Each rib a prayer. Each vertebra a vow. They had once dressed her in red silk and called her divine. They used to carve her name into temple stone. Midwives and mourners and those who bled for too long...
China Plate
God lived in the cheek-pink etching of a china plate, and He was shaped like fire. He roosted in the glass cabinet year-round, but on special occasions like this, Jenna got to bury Him in mashed potatoes and scrape her fork over the bush. Today was Easter Sunday. She...
Reckoner
Overnight, the lake reveals itself. We wake to the sudden beating of its body against our properties. The sudden beating. The sudden beating. At first, we ignore it. We see it but pretend not to. Like we often do with our neighbors. But then our pets begin to...
Triple Body Walking
We had always been many-in-one, even before witch-woman Nnenka's curse made it flesh. Our mothers stood at different cooking fires, our fathers prayed to different ancestors, yet destiny pulled us together like scattered beads finding their way back to a single...
Owl Fantasma
Between Abuela's mobile home and mine, a white sand path interweaves the moonlit scrub pine. Sometimes it is ribboned with the tracks of sidewinders, so we watch our step, especially near the Spanish bayonets beneath which they like to coil. If the snakes have any...
micro
Green to Gray
Let’s say dad didn’t beat you because you back-chatted and wore your skirt too short, and you didn’t sneak out to meet Peter, then peck like a bird at our bedroom window at midnight smelling of cask wine and boy. Imagine — you hadn’t woken up lamenting you’d ever been...
First, They Fall
Kathy Morris must have been half-bat, half-opossum because no human could hang upside down for so long and not feel funny about it after. She’d flip herself over the monkey bars and chase us back into school like it was no big deal she’d just hung there with her hair...
Companion Wanted
Seeking a companion. Need not be romantic; platonic is fine. Just someone to wake up to for that morning breath that feels stale with closed-mouth soft snores, and those eyes holding long, floating eyelashes that I want to touch but won’t. Just someone who will empty...
One Day in December, My Trapezius Decided to Write A Short Epic Poem
during a 50-minute massage. The grading, the emails, the sunken cold: my mid-back balled into a walnut. At Hand and Stone, a blind masseuse named Homer leads me to a room with prancing emerald lights: hospital sink, mirror from Marshall’s—a franchised underworld....
Cappuccino
Capuchin monkeys are named after the monks who are named after the drink or something like that, could be the other way around, so when Sam says that Olivia’s voice is like cappuccino we nod but we don’t really know what it means because none of us have tasted...
Everything Is Fine On Planet Jell-O
The brother, Paleo, and I are doing inventory when it begins raining. Acid. It’s Acid Rain. The one that strictly arrives on the first Saturday of every month, to burn away the soil nutrients and kill the grass that has grown since the last acid washing. It’s a very...
Coyote, Bones, Howl
CoyoteThe house slept while I stayed up stretching, trying to fit my body into this world, knowingsomething ancient lives inside me and needs to ease into sleep. It worms its way through mybloodstream. A howl, released with a stretch to hide its strangeness. It is all...
A Perfect Pair
My husband has this idea to marry a laundromat and a bowling alley. “A perfect pair,” he says. “Like us.” He’s an idiot. Who’d want that? “Think about it. Now they wait for free, but we could clean up.” I roll my eyes. “Maybe some video games or an air hockey table...
Boys in Boxes
The men are dying. We’re the boys who see them. In tabloids, on news bulletins. Faces pocked with purple lesions, bodies ravaged by weight loss. Their abandoned eyes, their hollowed-out stares, hold us. We’re told it’s a plague of our own making. Our fathers—both Holy...
contest winners
Sick Day
Ma keeps Nabh home again because he’s still fatigued, and she says he has such heavy bags under his eyes he could go for a month-long trip to India. No fever, though. He’s well enough to be bored. And … he’s going to miss the fire drill today. No big...
What the Bones Remember
She wore her bones like silk. Not with shame, but with memory. Each rib a prayer. Each vertebra a vow. They had once dressed her in red silk and called her divine. They used to carve her name into temple stone. Midwives and mourners and those who bled for too long...
Reckoner
Overnight, the lake reveals itself. We wake to the sudden beating of its body against our properties. The sudden beating. The sudden beating. At first, we ignore it. We see it but pretend not to. Like we often do with our neighbors. But then our pets begin to...
Triple Body Walking
We had always been many-in-one, even before witch-woman Nnenka's curse made it flesh. Our mothers stood at different cooking fires, our fathers prayed to different ancestors, yet destiny pulled us together like scattered beads finding their way back to a single...
Owl Fantasma
Between Abuela's mobile home and mine, a white sand path interweaves the moonlit scrub pine. Sometimes it is ribboned with the tracks of sidewinders, so we watch our step, especially near the Spanish bayonets beneath which they like to coil. If the snakes have any...
One Day in December, My Trapezius Decided to Write A Short Epic Poem
during a 50-minute massage. The grading, the emails, the sunken cold: my mid-back balled into a walnut. At Hand and Stone, a blind masseuse named Homer leads me to a room with prancing emerald lights: hospital sink, mirror from Marshall’s—a franchised underworld....
Hands
I’m at a wedding in the Languedoc. It’s the last weekend of September. I’m relieved the hot, cruel summer is almost over. There’s a woman on the table next to mine with bleached hair and a magenta mouth. She looks like an eighties rock star. I can’t take my eyes off...
Didn’t We Realize We Were Drowning?
In those days, we woke with bedheads and foggy eyes and boggy brains, comfy in our slept-in yoga pants as we headed to the kitchen to make our pot of coffee, our go-to prop for endless hours of video conferences with others, also at home, also in yoga pants they’d...
Empty Bottle
She takes the empty urinal bottle from the nightstand and sets it aside quietly in a corner of the room. It was there for him to use when he couldn’t make it to the bathroom. The floor creaks beneath her as she bends over to pick up the package of adult diapers she...