The Last Present

by Stanley Nesbitt | Dec 15, 2025 | flash fiction

The wind keened in the birches as the door swung behind Claire and the house took her in. Ice climbed the windowpanes in delicate ribs. On the mantel, three birthday cards leaned like little doors; all of them were blank inside.

“Do you like the house?” Aunt Maureen asked by the fire. She didn’t turn. Her hands were clasped—too tight, as if pinning something shut.

“It’s quiet,” Claire said. She kept her coat on. The couch still wore roses from another decade. The coffee table had a new scar in the veneer and, centered on it, a box in pale pink paper. No ribbon. A warped tag: To Claire – Happy Birthday.

She hadn’t told anyone.

“It’s polite to open a present when it’s given,” Maureen said, voice syruped, not sweet.

“I can open it after dinner.” Claire’s stomach answered with a small, hard knot. She had come for a key, for the letters Maureen said were “left behind.” She had promised herself she would not leave again without them.

“After dinner,” Maureen echoed. The fire crackled and flinched. “Go on, then.”

Claire sat. The paper was damp under her fingers. The tag’s ink looked wet, as if it had just remembered her name.

She worked a fingernail under the seam. The paper parted with a sound like a quiet sob. Maureen’s bare feet whispered on the rug behind her and stopped. Lavender. And meat.

“No ribbon,” Claire said, to have something small to say.

“Ribbons are for show,” Maureen said. “This is for keeps.”

The paper sloughed away in slow strips. Underneath: a wooden box, old and blackened at the edges as though it had been warmed too close to a fire. No hinges—only a fine line like a healed scar.

“Where did you—” Claire touched the seam. Cold bled through the wood. It hummed faintly, as if a fly were trapped inside. “What’s in it?”

“What’s yours?” Maureen’s gaze fixed somewhere above Claire’s shoulder. “What your mother and father never let me give you. Go on, if you don’t accept it, it won’t keep.”

“You said they—”

“I said what I said. And now, all you must do— is accept.”

Claire pressed her thumb to the lid and levered upward. The box creaked open. Darkness first, then the pale oval of a face nested in torn velvet. Brown hair matted to a skull. Eyes wide and glassed. Mouth slack with dried blood tracking the chin.

Maureen’s face.

Claire did not breathe, nor blink.

Behind her, Maureen whispered—right behind her—though the air had not moved. “Well?”

The head’s lips twitched. A twitch that softened into a smile with too many teeth. “What did you get?” the voice asked, silk dragged over broken glass.

Claire’s tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. The house sat silent— patient.

“You don’t want to hurt my feelings,” Maureen breathed, closer now. A hand hovered near Claire’s shoulder, yet did not touch. “It’s polite to say.”

The tag lay on the coffee table where it had fallen, a curl of pink with her name fat and black. The ink shimmered, waiting.

Claire stared into the box. She thought of her mother’s handwriting on hospital forms, her father’s careful squares on grocery lists. She thought of the key she had not yet asked for. If she named it, it would be hers. If it were hers, it would never leave.

She shut her mouth on the word the head wanted.

“What did you get?” the head asked again, smiling wider, as the tag’s letters began to crawl.

Claire picked up the tag. It tried to stick to her fingers like a tongue. She turned it over. The back was clean, pale, patient. She lifted the pen from Maureen’s dead-silent mantel, shook it once, and bent close to the box until her reflection bent with her in the head’s dull eyes.

“I—” she began, and felt the breath behind her lean in, hungry as a drain.

“I deny thee,” she whispered.

The house let go of its stagnant breath, and the warmth from the fire—found her. The tag took the ink and would not let it go, though it smeared beneath her fingertip. Claire pressed it to the wood.

When she looked up, the chair—and the room— were empty. On the table, the seam in the box knit neatly shut like a freshly sewn wound.

Outside, the wind forgot how to keen. On the mantel, two cards leaned. The third had fallen open. Inside, one last message in her mother’s handwriting: Do not open.

Heels and Faces

by Molly Weisgrau | Dec 11, 2025 | flash fiction

My momma is a professional wrestler. At night, I hear her practicing in her bedroom, stomping around in her sparkly red boots. When I can’t sleep, or all the bumping and grumbling wakes me up, I lie in bed and imagine the matches. In my head, she always wins – jumps into a diving bulldog, then pulls a double-knee armbreaker, and finishes them off with an atomic drop.

There are two types of wrestlers: heels and faces. Faces are the good guys, the real fan favorites. Heels are the villains. They wear metal spikes and do illegal moves. Sometimes someone doesn’t even mean to be a heel, but since the audience doesn’t like him, he becomes one. I think momma is a face because the clothes I sometimes see in her hamper are bright colors and look soft like doll clothes. At least I hope momma is a face.

On school days, I get myself up and dressed. I know wrestling is hard work that goes long and late. When I get home, she’s usually still in her pajamas, cooking eggs and toast like it’s breakfast time, even though I’m already stuffed full of science and gym and rectangular pizza by then. Sometimes I see marks and bruises on her neck or legs, but when I ask about them, she just says they’re from kicking the bed frame or bumping the car door. Says she bruises easy. She’s very humble.

Sometimes she has to go away for the night. She says it’s for meetings in the city, but I know it’s for a big match. I want to watch them on TV, but they cost money, and anyway, I don’t know what name she goes by when she’s wrestling. Those are pretty much the only times I see my dad.

Today she left for the whole weekend. My dad came over to the apartment because he mostly lives in the Motel 6 these days, and momma doesn’t want me bit by those bedbugs. He smokes inside even though she doesn’t like it. Maybe because she doesn’t like it.

“Joseph,” he says between puffs,  “you should be a plumber. Plumbers make good money.” He’s always talking about money because he never has any. He’s had a lot of jobs: janitor, cab driver, guitar player, sandwich maker in the airport. None of them stuck, so now he’s a house painter.

Some war movie is on TV.  I have to talk loudly over the sounds of landmines that send soldiers flying. “Does momma make good money?”

“If she did, you wouldn’t live in no place like this,” he says, laughing a little. Seems fresh coming from someone who lives in the Motel 6. He drops the butt of the cigarette into an empty glass on the end table. I don’t think the apartment is so bad. A little noisy from the highway and the bathtub always backs up, but it’s the only place that feels like home to me.

“Why does momma have to be gone so long this time?” I pick at the rubber buttons on the TV clicker.

He lights up another smoke. “She has to see the doctor,” he says through the side of his mouth.

My heart booms along with the movie. “Is she sick?”

He jerks his head around me to see the screen. “She’s sick, alright.”

The tip of my nose starts to tingle, and then I’m crying.

“Jesus, kid,” he says, finally looking me in the face. “She’s gonna be just fine.” He digs around in the leather bag next to the chair and holds out a Slim Jim, grumbling something about her own damn fault.

 One night I asked him about where she goes in the city. He just winked at me and said she’s doin’ tricks. But calling them tricks doesn’t seem fair. Wrestlers aren’t like magicians, who are more like liars, fooling you into thinking they can cut people in two and put them back together again.

When I told the boys at school about momma they said that wrestling is fake, just like magic.

I push the Slim Jim away. My dad opens it and takes big chomps, cigarette still burning between his fingers. “You stay far away from women like your mother when you get older. Ain’t nothin’ but trouble, trust me,” he says, then turns the volume up on the TV.

If my dad were a wrestler, he’d be a heel.

Momma comes home after dark on Sunday night. “You’re up late, Jojo.” She looks at my dad while she says it. Then she drops her bag and starts pushing open the windows in the living room. She’s wearing stretchy pants and a soft black coat that tickles my nose when I wrap my arms around her.

My dad whispers something in her ear on his way out the door, and she gives him a look like she wants to suplex him. She kisses me on the head and hands me the clicker and says to put on anything I want. I put on a cartoon then follow her into the kitchen. Blue-purple spots on the back of her hand shine under the yellow lights when she scoops a spoonful of coffee into a mug of water and warms it up in the microwave. She also warms up a mug of milk for me.

We watch the cartoon together on the couch. She holds her mug against her belly. “Why are you doing that?” I ask.

She smiles. “Tummy ache,” she says. I hold my mug against my belly, too. Soon, the warmth spreads all over. I put my hand on top of hers and shut my eyes. The tricks might not be real, but the bruises sure are.