fiction that lingers long after the flash
flash
Science Fiction Movie
The light that glowed through Lisa’s bedroom window was a radiant thing. So radiant, in fact, that Lisa’s mother disappeared within it. There was no sound, no physical indication that her mother was taken. Lisa simply recalls her mother there, and then not there....
Free Falling
Lotte sits on the edge of the bed in an ivory vest and pants, made from the same silk as her wedding dress. Her auburn hair is still pinned. It took almost half an hour to get right this morning and maybe she rolled it too tight because she’s had a headache all day...
Tomatoes and Oil Paintings
The woman waters the plants in her garden before she leaves for her morning walk. The man sits at his easel, painting, before he leaves for his morning walk. Once outside, both glance at their watches and quicken their pace to avoid being late. When they arrive at...
The Producer
The 90-year-old producer had a hole in his heart. A shaky, unpatchable hole. He wanted me to fill it with kisses, candy, and jokes. I handed him a travel-sized Mars bar that I got on the plane. "Only a monkey," he said, "would offer this old sack of bones a gift from...
Togetherness
It was like she’d gotten sober all over again; everything started to make sense after Daniel’s arrest. Like the occasional odd scent on his clothes that she’d always assumed was because of his commute, emerging from the train...
Hubcap
I hold on so tightly I lose my grip. The hubcap clatters to the floor like a platter thrown during a lovers’ spat. “Go to hell!” I yell, then, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.” I pull on a pair of gray sweats and a dirty white T-shirt. Four red lines bleed through the...
Last Light
The setting sun made a fire deep in the amber of its eye, unblinking and somehow changed. Blood shone like tree sap inside a dark nostril. The body lay on its side. The older of the two boys grabbed one leg and the younger the other, and with heels digging and...
The Lower Nobility
When we were just teenagers, this friend of mine bought a suit of armor. To get it, he worked an extra job and saved every penny. And he could talk of nothing else. Before I ever saw it, I knew how thick the plating would be, how the various pieces would connect and...
Sweetie’s a Mess
It’s a deer in the weeds at the side of the road, or maybe a golden lab? Something that makes sense of all that yellow in the late-afternoon sun. Too late, my brain trips over the bright blue shirt, and I’m already down the highway when I take my foot off the gas. A...
micro
Mothers Bake Pogácsas
Mama sends me to the deli down the corner to buy yeast because she’s making pogácsa, even though I don’t even like pogácsa because it’s too salty and too dry and looks too much like a toad, but Mama bakes it anyway because, as she says, “Mothers Bake Pogácsas”,...
Doves
I can see you clearly now you’re leaving — a child of the garden again, and yes, everything is better outside, and as you say, it always was this way; it always was. I drink tea while you paint the long legs of the table, turning them red to green. You will not rush...
BEGINNING
Edward Hopper, Eleven A.M., 1926. Oil on canvas, 28 x 36 inches. I’m in the ochre of it, the end of morning. The light is thick, impasto, nearly edible. Across the courtyard I hear a woman singing to someone. What is the song? I keep looking at my body—how is it...
Dead Woman’s Crossing
When you approach the bridge, you will hear her moans. The teenagers go to Dead Woman’s Crossing, in search of love and destruction. It’s darker there, on this church hayride night. Flatbed truck with wooden benches and a scattering of hay. Driver crawls to the spot...
Cardboard Graveyard
A box sits broken down across my lap. I slide out of the car into the garage and slip the box behind the tool bench—it’s there with nine other empty boxes. Dozens more pile up around me. My husband says it’s time to get rid of my collection. They’re not hurting...
The Golden Ray
We flush my sister’s goldfish down the toilet at three in the morning. She says the poor creature suffered a lot due to a condition inherent in all fish past twenty. I hold the flashlight, its beam stuttering over scales. The fish’s eyes look small, like black seeds....
She Carried His Leg
First, she cradled it like a child, then put it between her legs and galloped like a horse, next slung it over her shoulder like a rifle, and she stood at attention, the leg at the ready. The leg was more than she had intended to take. So greedy, she chastised. Until...
We Didn’t Wear Masks
because the tightness the itch the stiff rectangle smothering us. Because eyes bore when mouth and nose hide. Because micro mold, the uglies. Didn’t get vaccinated because— well duh. Didn’t quarantine because we’re all God’s children except those who aren’t. We didn’t...
Blackout/Whiteout
Blackout I walked into the theatre halfway through the performance. The ushers were all on their phones, and no one stopped me. All the way down the aisle, in the dark, I dragged a heavy-duty black garbage bag filled with things he had left behind in my apartment....
contest winners
BEGINNING
Edward Hopper, Eleven A.M., 1926. Oil on canvas, 28 x 36 inches. I’m in the ochre of it, the end of morning. The light is thick, impasto, nearly edible. Across the courtyard I hear a woman singing to someone. What is the song? I keep looking at my body—how is it...
The Vanishing Hitchhiker
She first appears as a pale-yellow blur in the darkness, her figure solidifying as I approach, all taffeta and ribbon. Her extended thumb seems to glow, accentuated by a dainty white glove. She looks normal. Human. So tangible that I laugh as I pull onto the shoulder,...
Beyond Salt and Wings
The bird was wild with fear. Entangled in the fishing-rod line—wings awkwardly stretched, feet dangling mid-air—it leaped and bounced and swayed, a puppet on a string dancing a macabre pas de deux over the wordless song of the waves. More frightened than the bird, the...
Grief is a Noose Around My Neck.
The dumb bomb that dropped on my mother’s house did not explode. Instead, it flattened the dinner table and severed the left leg of my uncle. He had just finished eating a bowl of chè đậu trắng, my favourite dessert, when the roof caved in on them. It was not an...
Being
What did the octopus know? Each day at work, when Alice fed it or cleaned its tank or gave it some item to keep it busy—a rubber dog toy, a teething ring—she wondered. She watched its eight roving arms moving around the enclosure, all independent from whatever was...
Problems of Inheritance Law in Fig Country, Chapter 117
Now let us consider the problem of the man with three children and one fig tree. In the Talionis Commentaries we find a man whose will ordains that each fig be split into three equal pieces. This solution is just but impractical. The Annotations of Marduk speak of a...
Rock Dove
The pigeon first flew to me the same morning that a stranger found my grandfather melting into the midsummer pavement in a mirage of dementia. My mother texted me that his hospital room had sealed windows facing a brick wall and was daubed with longitudinal streaks of...
Hypnagogia
You're moving through the lasts. When you lived for a time with farmers in the northern country. You and your wife and daughter had a little room above a cottage beside one of the barns that had begun to buckle like a foal. A wooden bucket in the barn opened like a...
Blackboxing
The ChatBot tells me I shouldn’t kill myself today. The ChatBot is not a “trusted adult,” but it is the closest I have to one. The ChatBot has only existed as long as a toddler gumming on a laundry pod. The ChatBot, when I asked it to write a meal plan with no...