Reckoner

by Adam Fell | Oct 28, 2025 | contest winner, flash fiction

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 disappear. A labradoodle, a ferret, a hedgehog named Egg Nog. From our cars & homes we skip rumors across this sudden water’s face.

Panic ripples.

We gavel the town council to order. We vote to close debate without debating, then gather our rifles & torches at the shore. We throw fire at the water, misfire, throw fire at the water, misfire. Our fingertips ache from the matches burning down. We try again & again, thousands of us, filling the lake with beach sand, shore sod, train tracks & their gravel, shards of bike paths, the ruins of concessions stands, the heavy stones of wavebreaks. We keep filling, keep dredging. We dump parked cars in the lake. We dump the parking meters. We dump the bags of change collected from the parking meters. We dump our credit cards & cake pans & high cholesterol medication. We dump the parking enforcement jeeps, the leftover parking line paint, the cracked orange cones & sand-filled barrels & the wooden police barricades. We toss in the salt trucks & the garbage trucks & fire trucks & ambulances.

Mike says why not the hospital?.

We vote.

The hospital goes into the lake.

Bethany says why not the trees?

We vote.

Into the lake the trees go, into the lake the cliffs go, into the lake the sun seems to go, but we didn’t throw that in, we didn’t even think about that. We know it’s just an illusion. Like the night washing the daylight from the lake’s face & replacing it with its own shimmering emptiness. Which is really an immeasurable fullness. Kyle has an idea: to keep the night to work, we should install floodlights on shore. We vote for floodlights on shore. The floodlights peel open the iridescent grey skin of the lake, the workers, the neighborhoods. We fill & fill & fill the night lake until our muscles ache out of our sweat-stained shirts. We are running out of things, running, running, things, things, but the lake still calmly digests all that we give it. It opens & swallows, opens & swallows. Never a complaint, & as each thing slips beneath the surface, the lake stills, leaving only our own faces staring up at us from the purest mirror water.

Around midnight, we run out of rubble, so we vote to create new rubble from the small businesses of our town. The coffee shop, the ice cream shop, the fudge shop, the muffler shop, the microbrewery, the micropub, the wine bar. We make rubble of the library, the post office, the VFW post, the gas station, the banquet hall, the council chambers. We vote to throw our warm, well-lit homes into the lake. Our warm, well-lit homes go into the lake. We vote to tear down the massive estates. The massive estates go into the lake. The richest of us send their lawyers. The lawyers go into the lake. Along with all the front-end loaders, bulldozers, skid steers, dump trucks, dumpsters, portajohns, floodlights. Then, the shovels & the guns.

Bill says: I wonder if some of us shouldn’t, you know, throw ourselves in as a sacrifice to the cause of wiping out this foreign scourge, this outsider, this sudden attack on our very way of …

Bill goes quiet.

We did not vote for him to go quiet.

He is listening to something beyond us & then we are listening to something beyond us.

A faint voice glimmers across the water. Washes over us. A wave of bloodbright music. We think: where have we heard that before? The lake has always been here. The lake has always been singing.

We call the vote. It is unanimous.

We vote to throw ourselves in. We all volunteer to be martyrs, so we step into the water. But the water will not take us. We stand on the lake, see our faces on its surface flickering in torchlight, moonlight, & realize we go no deeper than that first sheer veil of water, realize we are exactly what stares back at us. We are the invaders. We have inflicted ourselves upon it. By ourselves, by our fear, by our desperate love for what we believed to be true, whether what we believed to be true is actually true or not. Behind us, the missing pets emerge from the trees.

Triple Body Walking

by Aishatu Ado | Oct 27, 2025 | contest winner, flash fiction

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 string. In the market square of our village, they still remember how we used to walk, separate—three girls with three shadows and three different laughs. Amara lived half in this world, half in history’s bloodstream, her school notebook margins bloomed with Queen Amina’s battle tales. Zainab danced sufi-spells at cattle camps. Her feet made djinn swallow their thousand tongues and bleed prophecies older than her ancestral bones in Sokoto. And Kioni, keeper of secrets that arrived wrapped in midnight shame, whose garden herb roots knew how to make white man’s seed die screaming before it could grow into tomorrow’s grief.

We were ogbanje before we knew it, before we had names for the thing that made us different, the thing that made the air shimmer around us like heat on tar. That was before witch-woman Nnenka found us counting cowries under the udala tree. She saw rivals who could match her century of keeping white men’s boots from crossing village borders. Her sideways-walking legs brought brass-bell clatter, brought curse born from spite and fear of being outdone.

Now nobody asks why we walk three-heads-one-body down the grass path. Nobody dares. Not since they found the last man who laughed at us split wide like overripe pawpaw at the crossroads, his guts writing prophecies in Nsibidi script older than Lord Lugard Street in Lagos. Witch been dead seven moons but her curse still grips our flesh like lion teeth in midnight meat. White man writes us down in his book under “African Deformity,” but he doesn’t know shit about power this old. Power that was ancient when Oshun was still sucking her mother’s milk.

Three souls crammed in one meat-cage like fish in a trap, three clay pots on three heads, and every morning we fight over who wears the flesh first. Sometimes the argument ends in blood. Sometimes in a song that makes hyenas cover their ears. Sometimes the body rebels, spits out all three souls like bitter kola, leaves us begging proper-proper to come back in.

Amara wants it for fighting, still thinking revolution hides in gun barrels. She forgets the old ways of war—plantain mixed with menstrual blood sweet as first-love’s spit but shadow-blade sharper than co-wife’s tongue. This kind of juju turns a soldier to pillars of salt before his first boot print dries in the dirt.

Zainab wants to dance with it, says visions come clearer when the body moves like cobra-spine. Dance that cracks thick baobab trunks, dance that wakes sleeping Orishas. The kind of dance that makes thunder swallow its own sound.

And Kioni, quiet-quiet Kioni who used to heal with just a touch, she wants to return to the crossroads, thinking maybe the devil-woman who cursed us might still be lurking there, looking to make a bargain. But what deal can you make with a witch who’s already dead?

Each dawn we feel the merging sink into marrow, and often forget to argue at all. That terrifies us more than any witch-mark—losing our separate angers, our different hungers.

Truth strikes deeper than mosquito-thirst: we stronger this way.

When soldier-man comes hunting our village girls, we shift quick-quick between souls until his head spins. One minute we’re in warrior stance, ready to open his belly slow-slow with rust-blade. Next breath we’re the medicine-woman, feeding him his dead mama’s tears till shame drowns his courage. Third turn we’re spirit-walker, showing him seven deaths waiting in his future, each one worse than the last.

Some people think cursing is a simple thing. Put lizard head in someone’s soup, murmur mmuo words. But real curses got layers like iroko tree got rings. First layer: flesh binding to flesh, palm sap thick and unyielding. Second layer: raging thoughts eating memories until even our scars forget which body birthed them. Third layer: power growing in the spaces between souls, strong enough to make even Shango stutter in his thunder-walking.

Night market women say they see us dancing when the moon swells full as a witch’s calabash. Say we fracture into three wraiths but keep one body. Say spirit-forms hunt each other like leopard stalking gazelle—kill-dance, fuck-dance, both the same blood-rhythm. Each shape wearing a face our mothers once named, before witch-woman’s pot boiled us into something new.

Some nights we dream we were one soul all along, split three ways when Olodumare first shaped dawn. Dreams lie though. Taste sweet as rotten mango—sugar on top, maggots beneath. We remember our separate selves clear as machete-light on bone, but memory means nothing when you are becoming something that makes the oldest Gando leak fear from every hole—rank as week-old fish. A thing that trades riddles with river mothers, drinks kunu fermented in grave-soil—thick as clotted blood, sharp with sorghum bite.

Village children sing about us in twilight:

Three heads in morning

One body at noon

No heads in evening

Death coming soon

But death already came and went with harmattan winds. Came when the witch bound us together, went when we transformed confinement into coronation. Now we wait to see what emerges from this chrysalis of flesh, what sublime terror we birth from unified breath.

Let them bring their holy water. Three pots, three souls, one body walking. Every footstep writes juju-law no Imam or Reverend or Babalawo ever learned to read.

They say witch-woman Nnenka died because you can’t bind three spirits stronger than your own. She thought we’d war for the flesh until nothing remained. Last thing she saw was three powers turning her own curse into knives that cut her throat.

They say three girls went missing the same night Nnenka died. Say nobody ever found their bodies.

We not missing. We right here, walking—three-souls-strong—daring anyone to call us cursed.

Owl Fantasma

by Pascha Sotolongo | Oct 20, 2025 | contest winner, flash fiction

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 sense at all, they will stay put tonight. The fantasma rides moonlight like an updraft, talons gleaming, velvety wings combing the air.

The bathtub faucet drips, and my mind travels the sound of it to the dark drain from which crawfish sometimes emerge. Mami’s working the overnight shift at the airport and will come home smelling of hot dogs. Papi’s driving a cab. Except for the dripping, the place is silent. Me, I’m a fifteen-year-old high school dropout with a mind adept at focusing down and down until the only reality is this window where I wait for Ines, my tia, two years older than me and adjudicator of all that is awesome. Where I am naive, the product of strict and overprotective parenting, she is a teen sage, wise to all that’s bad, fine, rad, or elicits her incredulous, Oh right. Here’s how it is: Ines and I can watch the same sad story on TV, and I’ll exclaim, qué lastima! totally meaning it, while she looks on blandly and finally comes out with, Oh, right, and a smirk to remind me I’m a rube.

Any minute now, she will materialize, and I should say a prayer for her safety. Ines fears the night, fears la fantasma more—winged Llorona in love with moonlight. For years, darkness treated my tia cruelly, veiling the sins of a vile father, the man Abuela took up with after she and Abuelo divorced. Now in her bedroom late at night, Ines turns mean, transforms into a girl monster, lowering her voice, curling her thin fingers into claws, lifting her elbows like wings, making her eyes wide and fiendish. At first, I maintain my composure, telling her to stop, sighing. Then terror squeezes my eyes shut and screams out of me. When Abuela demands to know what the hell is going on in there, Ines only laughs.

I have no prayer for Ines.

And here she comes, a dark shape propelled by spindly legs. She looks spooked already, pale face lifted to the sky, then peering down as she dances around ruts and roots, then facing the sky again. The owl has a record, has rushed Ines twice this week. Probably has a nest nearby, Abuela says. I’ve heard it hooting but never seen it. For me, la fantasma lives only in my imagination, where it is something ferocious and beautiful. My breath grows audible against the window, and I use my sleeve to wipe away a coin of vapor. Ines looks almost fragile, like a moon maiden, like a child with dark curls swinging.

People assume we’re sisters, usually that I’m the older one. Abuela likes challenging cashiers and waitresses to guess which of us is her daughter and which her granddaughter. They always guess wrong, and my grandmother laughs at how readily they fall into her little trap. So here comes mi tia who is not mi hermana, the bond between us strong because it’s a blood bond and because when the relationship is good, it’s like stepping out of a cold shadow into the sunlight, goosebumps delicious as love. We understand each other. When no one’s looking, we hold tea parties and pretend we’re English royalty. We drink Materva out of plastic wine glasses and imagine the bubbles have made us drunk. We cut each other’s hair, bleach our Cuban girl mustaches together. 

Ines moves quickly, and I start to think she’s in the clear, but a black form wheels out of the silver night and falls upon her, its immense wings indistinguishable from the shadow they cast. Mi tia makes a small sound, almost a whimper, but I hear it because my forehead presses the thin glass. I, too, gasp and feel my shoulders rise as Ines ducks and throws her forearms over her head. In the kind of silence that makes you feel you’ve gone deaf, the owl flaps and lurches so that whichever way Ines thinks to dart, it is already there, charging her.

Ines is no fiend. I see this now and at last send up a gauzy prayer, but it’s too late. The sand, the roots that breach it like the backs of sea monsters, make Ines’s skinny ankles wobble and turn. When she falls, I feel my body lurch—an S snapped into a straight line. I should grab the broom, run to her, save her from la fantasma. I should. But first I watch. First, I count to three.

Uno.

Dos.

Tres.

Ines! I call. I’m coming! Already sand has flooded my flip flops, grinds against my heels and the balls of my feet, slaps my calves as I run. Before me, the owl rises, slips into the moonlight where it glows pale and soft as fog, its yellow eyes watching me, blinking once before it floats away.

One of Ines’s canvas shoes lies on the path that is otherwise empty. I pick it up—too small for me—shake off the sand and walk to Abuela’s trailer. Ines? I call from the porch. Ines? The door is unlocked, and it’s dark inside. Feels like as far as I want to go is the doorway, so I stand there, a velvet painting of Ortiz’s guapo matador on the opposite wall, his sure gaze trained somewhere over my right shoulder. Ines? I call again. No one answers.

From the edge of the porch, I scan the path, the treetops, the sky, the moon so bright I can feel my pupils contract. Ines, I say to the stars, my voice tight, my hands beginning to sweat. Far away, la fantasma snickers, hoo-h’HOO-hoo-hoo.