Cranberry Thyme

by Dan McDermott | Feb 12, 2026 | contest winner, flash fiction

The grandson is put in a cottage near the beach. The ocean. His grandparents told him a grown man has to live somewhere. Somewhere not with them. And twenty-four is grown. The grandfather had been to Korea and back by twenty-four. So the grandson was put in touch with a realtor and the realtor knows a landlord and the landlord rents a cottage for the winter. Rent is cheap in winter. There are no tourists yelling or drinking in the streets. When the temperature drops below twenty, a hypothermic mist slithers above the water, dancing in the whitecaps.

The grandson finds a job making muffins at a bakery. No experience necessary. Baked goods are popular year-round, and there are enough locals to sustain business off-season. Two hundred per day is his quota; that’s how many muffins you can bake in seven hours, minus thirty minutes for lunch. Blueberry, oat, walnut, pumpkin spice. The peppermint hot chocolate muffin, a Christmastime favorite, is the grandson’s invention. 

The grandson used to be a son. His parents were surfers. They would have liked his new place, his new independence. The parents took paddleboards out on a flat, warm day and never came back. The grandson was sixteen when it happened. He stood on the beach and watched his parents shrink into the egg-yolk horizon. There are sharks out there, the grandson knows. And seals with vampire teeth. Sandbars shift with storm tides; rogue waves appear.

At the funeral, the grandmother gave a speech and pointed toward the sky as if the parents—her son-in-law and daughter—were riding a cloud toward biblical Heaven. 

The grandson brings free muffins to the grandparents’ house, a dozen at a time, even though it’s not something the grandparents request.

The grandfather is worried about his blood pressure, his cholesterol. The muffins are high in fat, loaded with butter and processed sugar. But delectable, the grandfather says. A vice he can’t deny. The grandson adds dollops of Crisco to the batter and delivers the muffins twice a week until a stroke leaves the grandfather upright in a hospital bed, making crooked faces before a coronary several days later. But the grandson isn’t sure his muffins did the killing. The grandfather smoked cigars, loved ribeyes, ate blue cheese and chicken wings on Sundays. And the grandson doesn’t think he delivered the muffins with cardiac death in mind. But he can’t be sure about that, either. He gets angry sometimes. There was that afternoon when he was eleven and the grandfather was drunk. The grandson doesn’t like to talk about it.

At the funeral, the grandmother gives a speech to a small, wrinkled crowd, jabs her finger at the cumulus sky. Together now, she says. Father, son-in-law, and daughter.

The grandson keeps delivering muffins until the grandmother tells him to stop. She visits him at the beachfront cottage. They sit and talk in the living room. Grandson, she says, I know about the afternoon when you were eleven. She tells him about another drunken afternoon: the grandfather in tears, admitting what he’d done, clearing his conscience. She walked the grandfather to a cathedral and stuffed him into one half of a two-chamber booth, a clergyman in black filling the other. The grandfather confessed his sins before God. The clergyman was gracious and understanding. A year of Sunday eucharist and ten hours of community outreach distributing prayer books to the homeless. After that, everything was okay.

The grandmother is shaking as she speaks. Veins in her arms and legs are rotten purple against off-white skin.

The grandson tells the grandmother what he’s been telling himself for thirteen years: he doesn’t want to talk about it.

He says the grandmother could use some exercise and squeezes her into one of his old wetsuits, sits her on the nose of his twelve-foot paddle board, steers them out to sea, waits for a wave to knock her off, watches her flail for a second before going under and then rides a swell back to shore—more skilled, better balanced, than his parents. 

The bakery caters the funeral. The grandson unveils a new muffin for the occasion: cranberry thyme. He gives a speech and points his finger four times at the sky. All of them together now, he says, riding the same nimbus puff. Look carefully. Right there. You see it?

Lessons from Birth

by Elana Lavine | Feb 9, 2026 | contest winner, flash fiction

If I had realized that blood rushes out of a Caesarean section incision like a wave at the beach, I would have left my new running shoes at home. All of the obstetricians wore rubber clogs, squeaking slowly to make their rounds and squeaking quickly while running to a Code Blue. But the clogs only seemed to exist in dark green and muddy grey, like the ones that paused in front of me at the nursing station. I’d not wanted to buy anything so dismally ugly.

“I’m doing a C-section,” the obstetrician said. “Come scrub.”

I followed him into the antechamber, putting on a surgical cap and a stiff face mask. We used a foot pump to squirt burnt-orange antiseptic soap onto our hands, made yellow suds in the barn-sized sink. At surgical orientation, I’d been taught to do these things, but wasn’t confident that I could mimic them without an embarrassing mistake, especially this tired.

“Who are you, again?”

“Medical student,” I answered. “Evangeline.”

“Evangeline?” he repeated. “That’s a mouthful.”

I wasn’t sure how to answer; it depended on whether he was joking.

“My father likes big names,” I said. “Mine means bearer of good news.”

I’d never asked his name. Now, it felt too late.

“Ha,” said Doctor X.  His face was mostly covered by the surgical mask. His glasses shone with water spots that had dried on the lenses. “Look,” he said, “it’s three AM, and there’s a certain candor that one acquires during a night shift.”

This was my first night on-call, but I nodded, finished rinsing. When I looked up, I realized he had been waiting.

“Evangeline,” he said, “Fix your nose. You’ll have a much easier life.”

He backed open the door to the O.R., and a short burst of noise escaped into the antechamber. He paused in transit, hands in the universal surgeon’s stance, elbows bent upright, fingers limply curled in front of his chest, still dripping. “Don’t take it personally,” he told me. “I’m much older than you, and I know how things work. Now, let’s deliver a baby.”

On the operating table, a woman lay sockless, gasping under the massive weight of her pregnant belly. The anesthetist murmured to her and her husband, who sat near the head of the table and looked wan. A short curtain lay across the mother’s collarbones to shield the surgery from view, like a UN barrier between diplomats and the war zone.

“You’ll feel some pressure,” Doctor X told the woman. He quickly washed her belly with brown antiseptic, pressed down to feel the baby’s position. His scalpel moved across her skin, blood rising from under the blade. That was when a wave of fluid gushed over my side of the table, soaking my shoes. His gloved hand plunged and groped.

“A daughter!” he said, holding her theatrically high.

Cutting the umbilical cord, the father seemed white around the mouth. His body tipped sideways.  

“Chair for Daddy!” called Doctor X.

The nurse maneuvered Daddy onto a stool. Doctor X passed the squalling baby, up to the mother, who also began to cry.

“Stay with me, Evangeline,” Doctor X instructed. “Eyes on the surgical field.”

He passed me a pair of forceps, showed me how to position the edges of the cut uterus. “Some people staple it,” he said, “but I stitch. Women are precious vessels.”

My socks were wet. The forceps shook in my hands.

“One of my daughters­,” he went on, “I won’t tell you her name, in case you ever meet—had a cosmetic problem with her ears. Would slow down an airplane if she were seated in the cockpit.”

His gloves kept planting symmetrical stitches across the bloody gash.

“Pull—yes, good. She healed well, is happier now. As you would be.”

He tugged on a piece of suture.

“This,” he said, “is a conversation that could get me in trouble.”

I nodded, eyes on the surgical field.

“But I give honest advice.”

Daddy was panting, green-faced. It was not a heartwarming scene, the way I’d expected any delivery to be, even a Caesarean. Smelling of chemicals and flesh, the baby taken to a warming table, the mother still sobbing. Her own nose, I saw now, was angled and bony. Slightly crooked.

I wondered if this father had considered, beforehand, that their baby would have some version of that nose. But Daddy himself seemed a weak specimen, an odd neck tattoo, a shiftiness that suggested he might eventually flee. I wondered about their coupling, whether this baby would have two parents for long.

The surgeon saw me looking, widened his eyes above the mask.

“Exactly,” he said, knotting a final stitch. “Point made.”

A ballet of hands, a dressing applied to the incision. Doctor X’s gown, a soiled crumple on the floor. He looked down, clocking my bloodied shoes.

“We have disposable foot covers,” he said, frowning. “Or get yourself some rubber clogs.”

###

Later, I went to check the baby, sleeping in an isolette.

“She’s a good girl,” the nurse called over. “Feeding well.”

Reading the chart, I registered what had been at stake, how tenuous this pregnancy had been, after miscarriages. How badly this baby had been wanted. How shallow I truly was, despite efforts to pretend otherwise.

My face would never be my ticket, and I’d long pretended I didn’t care. But having had it declared aloud, I was relieved. Doctor X had instructed me to claim what I already suspected, a better father than the one who shared this nose, who’d only given me good news: reassurance, not truth. You’re beautiful, he’d always said. To me.

Later, at home, when I tried to wash my sneakers, darker outlines stuck to the white. The tenacity of blood: my second lesson from the O.R.

Now, I circled the translucent incubator. Pretending to look carefully at each facet of this new human, but really, there was just one thing I wanted to see. 

Kismet

by Claire Guo | Feb 5, 2026 | contest winner, flash fiction

Ma says the beginning of our bad luck was buying a house in a neighborhood owned by stars with no hands. At night, in replacement of wishing upon them, she warns us about the leading cause of death in the United States – half-swallowed ambitions, chewed twice before being ushered from the body and left as roadkill on the cement block of our streets. There are people stupid enough to eat anything, Ma laments, and we know she means the people who steal our plums before they’re ripe and must be chased away with brooms and accents raised as high as telephone poles, who park next to our cars despite blocking the empty space with trash cans. We receive potholes like rain, and other people’s mail with every south-blowing wind. Sometimes we receive packages, Lululemon and fish oil pellets. Ma says this could mean two things: that we are a destination for all things unwanted, or that there is another Chinese family living somewhere among these suburban trees. 

Sometimes Trina and I play find the Chinese family after dinner, when both of us have already finished our homework, although Trina doesn’t fully understand my passion for scavenging feng you jing out of drain pipes. I tell her there are no mosquitoes in Nevada. That 99 Ranch closed down last month, so it must be imported. On good days, we find rabbit candy wrappers on park benches, and haw flakes in restroom stalls, and once, the sound of a rice cooker’s chattering lips against a darkening window. Trina is a white girl, the neighborhood stray I collected dancing on cardboard. She doesn’t find anything, so I try to explain. This is childhood, I say, meaning how the backgrounds of dreams are always populated by shapes instead of names, just blurred enough so you can’t make out details. 

But we never find anything living. Later, Ma says it isn’t the house, it’s us. She knows because the stars followed her on a business trip to LA, where they were especially prominent, because all the stars in LA wore acrylic nails and rhinestones. Still, when she looked outside her hotel room, her stars were naked, fingerless. Ma says she was excited to return home, even though the city still hasn’t fixed the potholes created by vultures and squirrels scavenging sustenance in our failures, fermented underneath our tires. At night, I see her bargaining with the stars, exchanging paper notes, metallic-alloy shopping lists, New Year’s resolutions tacked together by promises to learn better th sounds for her thes and thats, but her stars have no hands and no way to receive requests for wishes.

On Wednesday nights, Ma takes me to the arcade where we practice receiving gifts from claws, how to act, how to smile, how to win the jackpot from the fishing machine. Habits take at least six months to form, she explains, which is why we must practice now. When she isn’t looking, I practice cheating instead, which always returns better results, feeding the machines leftover lao gan ma instead of coins, chasing each shot of spice with sesame oil. By our eleventh visit, the security guards have memorized my name and the shadow of my guilt along the carpet, but I trade their silence for plums, candy wrappers, Trina’s voice, a roll of bundled Chinese words — exotic exports, things they could never find themselves.

After school, Trina comes to find us in the arcade. We are always losing when she arrives, always wearing our losses on our wrists like cufflinks. Ma says Trina is a bad luck charm, but I think it is more that Trina is taking all the good luck with her, leashing it against her ankle like toilet paper. Trina never says anything, only watches us struggle, like this is some kind of zoo, but I don’t mind being seen. When Ma isn’t looking, I show Trina the spot on the floor where I hid vermicelli in the carpet, the mole on my belly that Ma once claimed was a magnet for evil, which is why my periods always hurt more than other girls my age. We tried to have it removed twice – once after Ma lost her first job, and the second time after my father left, but both times the mole returned, a destiny we could not shake. Maybe it’s just a mole, Trina says, but I know better. Fate whispers through earth in tiny pinpricks, like how Trina’s eyes never dull even in arcade lighting, like how her lips bow like cupids in opposition. Maybe they’re just stars.

On good days, when both our mothers are asleep, Trina and I go stargazing in the parking lot of the Arby’s, the only place where the stars don’t trade a portion of their glow for human gossip. I am always too shy to stare directly at their faces, but Trina basks in the glitter of their rings, their singular acrylic nails, like concubines in some historical drama. Trina only watches cdramas because I changed all of her channels one time during a sleepover, which is why she can never be cheated with lao gan ma or other Chinese imports, which is why her house is full of snacks she cannot name and a heritage she can see but not touch – I coil her name between my fist. What do you know about stars? I ask her, our lips both bloodied by Arby’s burger sauce. Enough, she says. Enough to understand why you hate them. Why you can’t look up. But I can look at her, so I do, her eyes two lozenges of brown. I think about Ma, who would never eat processed food because fast food was death^2 – food both cooked and fried. Trina eats plums even after they fall on the ground. Trina enjoys slipping. I wished for this, Trina adds, which is funny because I wished for it too. But the stars don’t listen to me, only to her.

Plaque

by Eliza Gilbert | Feb 2, 2026 | contest winner, flash fiction

The baby is gone for fifteen minutes. Maybe less. 

The new access control system does its job, the Code Amber careening loud and shivery through every intercom, and all in all, the affair is neat and abbreviated—a disappointment to the med school gunners looking for a war story. A relief to everyone else. Security catches the old woman from the telemetry ward hiding in the Morristown Medical Center basement, curled up between two HVAC furnaces, clutching the swaddled infant to her chest like a rugby ball. The old woman from the telemetry ward is not well. Not right, the radiology techs upstairs will whisper. Her teeth are ground down to half-mast; her EKG leads are spaghetti-ing out of her gown. She is sitting in a wide straddle, one that implies creaturely flexibility, and the security guards who find her have to lift their chins and blur their eyes to avoid a tufty staredown with her crotch. 

The baby is alive and not crying. 

The baby, sixteen hours old, unnamed and unmothered, is content to rest its head on the fleshed-over hump of the woman’s pacemaker. It’s staring up at her with eyes that have the gloss and color of motor oil. It’s smiling, some nurses upstairs will whisper. Definitely smiling. Then again, others will rebut; it’s always difficult to tell when their little faces are still so raw and pink and fresh. 

Upstairs, the baby’s father is notified. His name is Paul. His wife is dead. For fifteen minutes, it seemed his baby was just as irretrievably gone. Paul’s U2 tee feels crusted to his chest with sweat that has poured from him, dried up, poured from him, and dried up again. He is the only member of his immediate family who has not been covered in blood today. And yet, in the grand scheme of things, Paul feels as if he’s winning the great game of agony, seeing that his wife is dead and his baby is a baby. 

He is wrong. 

Ten years later, the baby, a child now, Sam now, remains at the Morristown Medical Center. He’s on the third floor—the westmost unit. The unit no one really likes to think about. The one with the rounded edges and the impressive doors. The one that is brought to mind when the supply guy with the boxes of youth-sized ankle monitors rolls through the lobby, and everyone keeps their head down. 

The whole hospital knows Sam. The janitors, the unit clerks, the surgeons. Sam is the baby from the basement, the killing baby. 

Oh, please, scoff the old-school nurses, twirling their keychains, tapping their immaculate white clogs. That’s a nasty fable. 

The mother retained the placenta, bled out in maternity, the new grads whisper to each other later. Then the kid got snatched from the nursery by a heart failure patient. They found the lady in the basement, with the baby, who was all cooey and weird, even for a baby. An hour later ,the lady arrested. Two weeks later, the father had a massive STEMI. The boy lived with his grandmother for three years, and then her heart gave out, too. Well, her lungs, really—emphysema, really—but still. He was with fosters and two of their other kids randomly developed asthma. He’s been here since last year, after he ran away with his fosters’ cat. He only eats red things and only speaks in six-word sentences. He’s not well. Not right. Upstairs, on the unit, Sam is eating lukewarm tomato soup. 

Sam says, to a behavior tech, “Get me a cherry Italian ice.”

The tech, who has a subtle thickening in her left ventricle that won’t cause any problems for another month or so, until it topples her in the Taco-Tastic off Route 3, obliges. Sam wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He eyes the nearest nurse, who is at the other end of the table, distracted by the mean bulimic from Pittsgrove. The nurse is old. She will go down easily. The security guards will be changing shifts in ninety-three seconds. Sam goes over the schematics in his head. 

The maternity ward is right across the floor. 

The cherry Italian ices are buried in the bottom of the freezer. 

Sam stands up. Smiling red. 

There is a baby in the nursery, an hour old, with eyes the color of motor oil.

Miss Piggy on the Dashboard

by Sara Fraser | Jan 30, 2026 | contest winner, flash fiction

We meet at a fifteen-year-old’s birthday party. You’re attractive in an offhand way. Girls dressed as pop stars with weaponized fingernails giggle as you pass.

You catch my eye and smile. We are two in an army of waiters careening under blossoming trees with silver trays held aloft like skewed halos. At the kitchen counter, Chef Lisa lines up canapes and mini tacos. My elbow touches yours as we refill our trays. You say on my fifteenth birthday, we didn’t have a caterer. We had Spam sandwiches. I reply, did you know there is an actual museum? To Spam? You didn’t. I’ve never been, I say. We should go sometime, you say.

I offer napkins to girls who seem ashamed of their sloppiness. I’ve been thinking, you say as you pass. About what? But you are the sudden stamen inside a petal circle of young girls. They point at things on your tray. Some hold pale hands on their stomachs to say, No, I’m too full. You know they’re not full. You get them to eat.

I am by the swimming pool, cucumber slices with crème fraiche and seaweed caviar dotting the doily on my tray. What were you thinking? I ask when you approach, your tray empty. You say, let’s go. I say, where? I follow you to the kitchen. Chef Lisa has her back turned. You grab my wrist and say you have a convertible. I’m awestruck. Who drives a convertible in Providence?

To the Museum!

Yes, yes! I say. Our eyes so wide.

We drop our trays and run to the parking lot, looking behind us like two escaped prisoners, leaving others to finish and clean up.

The roads shake out into straight lines. I am committed to the adventure, but you are still a stranger. At my knees, a stranger’s glove box. I can’t offer money for gas, but I buy you a Pez while you pump. When the candy is finished, you mount Miss Piggy on a base of chewed gum on the dashboard.

How lucky that we arrive on a Tuesday, the only day of the week the museum opens. Maybe not luck, I think. Maybe a smiling universe. The universe loves love, encourages it. We are twenty-two! I have enough to pay the admission fee for us both. You thank me with a stranger’s kiss.

Before we have seen all the exhibits, lights flicker and dim.

It is my idea to hide atop two toilets until the museum empties and closes.

Spam, Spam, Spam! we sing in Monty Python accents, huddled together behind the empty cash register. We wonder why Monty’s last name is a snake, our shoulders touching, your hand halfway under my thigh. The sun setting blood orange through the plate glass window and we nibble at each other like grazing animals, but with more curiosity, more intention.

Later, we are surprised that the front door cannot open from the inside. You throw yourself at it in a drama of claustrophobia. I hold your head to my chest and calm you, remind you there is soda, there is Spam. There are sporks. We will survive! You won’t say out loud that it is my fault. It was my idea.

I have seen something you didn’t want me to see. Are you ashamed to be the one who worried?

The next days are a cycle of moods, some retaliatory, some born of honest weakness.

Day after day, you sleep on a red upholstered bench in the Spam Shack while I take in exhibits for the hundredth time: the Spam Can race cars and handwritten letters from World War II praising Spam as indispensable to the fight against fascism. Surrendering to insomnia, I settle on a bench near you and hum to the rhythm of your snoring. When you wake, we lie together in silence, our bodies reaching for each other despite everything. We tumble onto the floor from the narrow bench and laugh.

It is eerie how much we’re starting to resemble what we’re eating. We gaze at ourselves and each other in the women’s room mirror. It’s true. We are pink, though maybe we started that way from the drive in the sun with the top down. I say, you are what you— and you raise a hand to hush me. Rule number one, you say. Did you forget? We are anti-adage.

You grab a pen from behind the register and make a list of the rules. No adages. No past. No future. No whistling. We’d agreed on them before, but you need to remind me. To put our pact on paper. This paper gives you some kind of protection, though I’m not sure what from.

On Friday, I dare to ask about your family, despite the rules. Where did you get a convertible? I see longing in your eyes, but you turn away, disappointed, and spend several hours locked alone behind a piggie diorama.

Our bodies have their own ideas, and you emerge, take me in silence, our eyes closed. I bring you tins of Spam, and you sit up, eat. But you don’t like i,t and your tongue moves around your mouth with resigned anger.

By Tuesday, even my body rejects you, and we sit on separate benches, waiting to be set free.

When the door is unlocked, we limp, pink and withered, past the confused face of the man with the keys. You go to your car and wait for me. I see you there, but I look in the other direction, consider my options. 

Sometimes Grief is a Moonrise

by Allison Field Bell | Jan 26, 2026 | contest winner, flash fiction

They are standing on the woman’s porch. The woman and her friend. They stare at the road in front of them. Empty. And beyond the road, an apple orchard. And beyond that: sky. Night sky. Stars, and a hint of moonrise.

The woman is smoking a cigarette. She doesn’t usually, but the occasion calls for it. She takes a long, deep inhale. She coughs out the smoke.

The woman’s friend also doesn’t smoke. She takes the cigarette to her lips, coughs. “That is disgusting,” she says.

“It’s relaxing,” the woman says.

“It’s toxic,” the friend says.

Then there’s silence. What the woman could say: I truly didn’t want it. Or: I don’t ever want one. Or: thank you. Beneath the cigarette smoke, her body aches. That hollow feeling. Like a shell. Like she was never more than just a container.

The friend says, “You’re so quiet.” And then, softly: “You’re scaring me.”

The woman sighs. The friend drove her, and now she won’t leave. There’s something to the idea of being alone right now. But the woman could never say it. The thing didn’t just happen to her, to her body. The friend was there, holding her hand, shielding her from the cardboard signs. The vicious face of one man in particular: he spat at them. Not on them but at them. So much anger in one body.

“I’m tired,” the woman finally says.

“Of course you are,” says the friend. “You should lie down.”

“Yes,” the woman says.

But neither woman moves. In front of them: the empty road, the apple orchard. They watch the night grow. The barn owl who lives next door swoops over the trees, hunting, elegant.

The woman says, “I don’t know why this is hard.”

The friend says, “Of course it’s hard. Your body.”

The woman says, “My body.”

The friend says, “It’s a loss. A loss you get to choose. But a loss all the same.”

The woman takes another drag from the cigarette. She had insisted they buy them on the way home. The yellow box. They had to buy a lighter, too. She wonders now what the man at the gas station thought. Cigarettes and a lighter: what kind of meaning there. Not a regular smoker, just a circumstantial one. Maybe he imagined a scenario for them. A boyfriend cheated. A relative passed. Or maybe sisters, and they had to put down the family dog.

The woman considers living inside of one of those scenarios. The rightful grief she could feel. This isn’t the same. This isn’t a kind of wishing a being back to life or wishing a different decision had been made. This is a kind of loss that is an extraordinary relief. Gratitude. Freedom. And the horror that someone else a few states away can’t. How to explain that.

The cigarette is a stub now, mostly filter. The friend takes it from the woman and crushes it beneath her foot.

“Come on,” she says. “Let’s go inside. It’s getting cold out here.”

The woman notices the cold abruptly. She’s shivering. Still, she says, “Give me a minute.”

The friend looks skeptical at first. Then she nods and moves through the door into the house.

The woman is alone on the porch. The apple orchard dips into darkness, and she hears the owl, imagines her flapping her wings. The woman pulls another cigarette from the box, but doesn’t light it. She chews the filter, watches the sky. The moon rises just as the orchard vanishes from view. Slowly, the outlines of trees reappear, cast in silver. So much beauty. Such a small body to carry it.  

The Weight of Jade

by Deborah J. Chinn | Jan 23, 2026 | contest winner, flash fiction

First came the click of the front door lock, then the thud of his heavy American shoes dropping to the wooden floor. My silence and sleep were interrupted. I rubbed my eyes and checked the time. Garbage trucks were starting their rounds.

3 a.m.—fourth late night in a row. Just like his father.

Come morning, I peeked into my son Bing Kuen’s bedroom. He lay uncovered in his street clothes, softly snoring. His father gave him a bag of marbles for his eighth birthday—forgotten for years on the dresser. I picked his empty wallet off the floor and placed it on his nightstand. I pushed a stray lock of hair out of his face.

As I pulled his blanket up, he stirred and mumbled, “Leave me alone. I’ll pay it back, Ma,” waving me away before closing his eyes again.  I caught a whiff of the sickly-sweet scent of opium he carried. For years, it had seeped into the curtains, the furniture, the walls—leaving a sticky, unclean film on my skin. I rubbed my hands as if I could wash it away.

Drawn by the familiar aroma, my husband’s spirit stood beside me, looking in on the boy. The odor intensified, the air thick with his presence. Marbles clicked and clacked when the two played on the floor. Years later, he taught his son to run numbers, keep ledgers, make a profit.

I opened the window, replacing the air in the room.

I went to the kitchen and pulled out the hidden safe. Holding my breath: two clicks left, one right, one full spin. The tumblers aligned; the door swung open. Bing Kuen had been there—just like his father, years ago.

Inside were only a few bills, barely enough to pay the butcher. I let out my breath. Placing the money underneath the stack of overdue bills, I left the safe out, door hanging open.

Lying out my last two jade bracelets on the bed, I held each to the light before slipping the thicker one onto my wrist—a wedding gift. Catching the morning sunlight, the deep green glowed from within. My skin warmed the stone, and I thought of my husband’s smile as he gave it to me.

I walked past a framed family photo from 1903. In it, Bing Kuen sat on my lap, the jade bracelet resting on my arm. I turned away—already running late for the Bay Ferry.

At the busy San Francisco Ferry Building, the streetcar line still runs right into Chinatown. But everything’s been rebuilt since the Great Earthquake and Fire. If I can’t find the shop, I’d have a good excuse to turn back with the bracelet.

The aroma of freshly baked pork bao led me to Eastern Bakery, where customers carried pink dim sum boxes tied in red string. Years before, we visited the shop as a family.

A few doors down, I saw Quong Lee’s shop. I recognized the characters printed across the red awning. Gold necklaces glistened in the window. A bell above the door rang, and Quong Lee emerged from the back.

“Hello, Chin Dong Shee,” he said formally. “It’s been a long time. Sorry to hear about your husband.”

I nodded.

Reaching into my bag, I ran my fingers over the cold, smooth stone one last time. I hesitated before handing it over. He took one look and gave it right back.     

“Eighty dollars. I see a lot of these lately.”

“It cost three times that in Fuyue village.” I placed it firmly in his hand, turning it so the dark green vein caught the light.

Quong Lee’s left eye twitched slightly. He fingered the bangle a second too long, then smiled. He kept it.

“Okay, okay, your husband—good man. His lottery business brought in many customers. Friends for twenty years.” He paused. “Ninety. Final offer.”

A young couple, hand in hand, strolled towards the jade showcase. They pointed at a smaller bangle marked at two hundred dollars. Half that amount would buy groceries for months. I closed my eyes and saw the safe. The overdue bills. I asked for water.

“Would you prefer tea?” he asked, pulling out a celadon pot. I smiled. He poured the amber liquid into two small teacups.

“Now, you bought this with Qing dynasty money—before the Revolution. Not so valuable today,” he argued, raising a brow.

“We paid what it was worth then—investing in jade over paper. I expect to get what it’s worth now in American dollars.”

His eyes narrowing, he held the jade in both hands, turning it slightly to catch the light. I waited, tapping my finger on my lap. I imagined our wedding day—my husband’s smile.

My tapping resumed. Finally, Quong Lee raised his chin, clearing his throat.

“Ok, Ninety-eight dollars.” Reaching for the till, he added, “Hard to raise a child alone.”

I slipped the money into my purse before he could close the cash register. Stepping outside—Grant Avenue was busy now as if nothing had changed.

Longing to visit my husband before returning to Oakland, I stopped by Eastern Bakery to pick up an offering. Bing Kuen was just a year old when he tried his first bao. His little hands needed help peeling the paper off the bottom.

Pink box in hand, I caught the train from San Francisco to Colma Cemetery. Today we’d share dim sum again.

A light breeze blew as I stood by his gravestone. I rubbed my forearms, but my wrist remained cold where the warm jade once sat.

I lit joss paper and watched it curl upwards in flames, black smoke slowly spiraling into the cool winter air.

I lit a second paper, remembering him shooting marbles with his son. Without the weight of jade, I raised an arm to the sky and whispered into the trailing smoke:

Protect Bing Kuen. Before your fate becomes his.

The wind picked up the lingering scent of opium from my skin—blowing it into the ether.

What Were You Thinking

by Christina Berke | Jan 20, 2026 | contest winner, flash fiction

You are running late to catch the bus to the train to the plane trying to get to your boyfriend who thinks you’re The One but wants to make sure you’ll start to exercise more first, eat less,  and somehow you think getting lost is because you are fat and now you’ve missed the last train and are stranded, worry slicing your head as you try to balance your luggage and backpack and fears and how fucking disappointing you are to yourself but if you hurry, you could still make it and he will only be mad for a short burst that you are late, yet again, that you made him wait yet again. 

You lost, a man says. It’s not a question. He’s been watching you. 

You tell him you’re just trying to get to the airport, but you’ve taken the wrong train. You went the wrong way. Your instincts are wrong. 

I’ll take you, he says. 

Your body quiets in a strange relief, grateful for a kind stranger, too anxious to still make it on time. You can make it. You can get on that flight, return to your boyfriend, prove that you are not who he thinks you are— lazy and silent and soft. 

Get in, the man says. 

When you sit in his truck, you wonder about the tarp covering the seats. He must have noticed your eyes wandering because he says, construction work. 

He smiles, foot hovering on the gas. 

That suppresses your concerns enough to ignore how your skin sticks to the plastic, how it keeps you stuck in place. Luggage at your feet and lap, you’re pressed close to the passenger door as he makes small talk. Sleepy street lamps bleed past you. 

Maybe you could take a bus, he says, showing you the empty station. It’s closed, though, he says without stopping. 

You can get out here, you think, and reach for some cash to hand over. 

He insists it’s not safe. His house isn’t far away. You can rest there, he says. Catch a flight in the morning. He’ll drive you to make sure you make it on time. A nice nap, he says more to himself than to you. It’ll be good for you. His eyes stay on the dark ahead. 

You say all of the other words for no. Your body stays rigid against the door.  He drives further. You’re on the freeway now. You wonder how much it would hurt if you tuck and roll out of a moving car. How fast could you possibly be going? It’s so late, the roads so clear. Would you take your bags along with you, or leave them? What would hurt worse? What if he came back to find you on the roadside, upset that you tried to leave him? Your palms slick with dread. 

Thank you, you say instead. 

He takes an exit you try to singe into memory. Here’s a great school for you to raise the kids, he says. There’s where I want to start my business, he says. You wouldn’t have to work, he says. 

The truck slows. You are on a tree-lined street, a suburb that could be peaceful.  Wait here, he says and kills the engine. 

You don’t move. You worry he’ll see the glow of your phone and get angry. Instead, you watch him walk around the back. He returns and grabs your bags. 

Thank you, you say again. 

In this house, you sit with a dancer’s posture on the edge of an armchair, upholstered in ugly flowers. The curtains peak open into the oceanic street outside. 

Be right back, he says. 

He returns minutes or seconds or hours later with a bag. You imagine what’s in it: rope and tape and tools or snacks and hot sauce and soda. 

In one version, you see headlights coming down the inky street, desert throat, vibrating hands, as you bolt out the door, waving spaghetti arms, screeching out I’m here, I’m here, I’m here. You get on a flight in the morning, mind ballooning with what an idiot you are, a fucking  moron, a stupid piece of shit, this mantra playing until your boyfriend, the one who says he loves you, picks you up because he’s feeling generous that day and now all you can think about is how exhausting it is to calculate how much you now owe him. You could have been murdered, he laughs at the idea. What were you thinking? You say, I’m sorry, you say, It won’t happen again,  you say, Thank you, you say, I’m so sorry, but it comes out in a vaporous whisper, curling smaller into itself until it disappears. 

In another version, you eat the chips, sip the soda. 

In another, you will never be able to sleep with the lights off or the bedroom unlocked without springing up slick with sweat, wondering where you are. 

Body Count

by Savera Zachariah | Jan 15, 2026 | contest winner, flash fiction

My father brought home strange things: a crumpled five-rupee note, a nose stud, a baby’s anklet. Things the dead no longer need, my mother muttered while grinding rice for idlis. She steadied the pestle, afraid it might slip and bruise her thigh.

We lived near Canal Road — canal on one side, and houses and shops on the other. My father’s job was to ferry dead bodies from the government hospital to the crematorium at the other end of the road. “Easy job,” he said — hospital to crematorium and back in the vandi. He had to cross the railway tracks before the gate closed and reach the crematorium before dark — as it was inauspicious to cremate after the sun set.

“Appa, can I ride in your vandi?” I asked him. He flicked my ear. “No — you aren’t dead yet!”

Every day, my father staggered home and, like a drunken shaman in a trance, muttered about dead people and their sins. Once the arrack had done its thing, he collapsed onto the broken chair and slept, snoring like a lorry belching smoke down the ghat road.

One evening, I sneaked off to Canal Road, hoping to see the van my father was driving. Children played by the sidewalk. I ducked behind the bus stop, humming a radio jingle.

“Deadman’s coming! Deadman’s coming!” the children shouted as they lined the sidewalk, ready

 to play their favourite guessing game.

 “Quick, quick — Is it a man or a woman?”

The factory siren wailed the end of the shift, and as the sun set, an orange glow enveloped Canal Road like a shroud. In the distance, a man dragging a donkey cart came towards the bus-stop. But I was looking past him, for a big white van.

“My turn today,” shouted a boy. I turned and watched them. The children were pushing each other and passing a small ball around. One boy ran towards the cart as it levelled with him. “It is a woman. I can see toe rings.”

I looked. And froze.

Appa?

Why was he pulling a cart and not driving a van?

Sweat trickled down his torso. His calloused feet shuffled on the scorching asphalt. He pulled the cart forward, his eyes fixed ahead. The humped cart had flapping curtains that barely hid the body. A pair of legs was sticking out of the cart, silver toe rings catching the light. I blinked hard and bit my lip. Won’t cry.

I watched the boy take aim at Appa’s feet and hurl the ball, giggling, as if it were another toy. They wanted him to trip, to make the body slide out. Appa sidestepped and the ball hit the canal wall. He didn’t stop — just kept going as the boys groaned with disappointment and stomped the sidewalk. I ran home as fast as my seven-year-old legs could carry me, my face was wet, and my eyes blurred.

 Some days, he walked alone with the cart. Other days, a group of women followed, ululating and beating their chests, with drummers pounding behind them. The wailing and the tuneless rhythm made my brain feel like it would burst and spill on the road.

People ran out from nearby houses to watch the death parade.

“Look at them crying,” I heard one of the boys say.

“That must be his wife,” another said. “She’s pulling her hair out.”  

Mothers shooed their sons back into their homes. Bad luck, bad luck, they muttered as it was inauspicious to see a dead body.

On some days, I saw my father running with the cart. It seemed light — like empty. The curtains sucked in with the wind. A child. Canal Road went quiet then. On those days, he would come back mumbling a lot more than usual and falling over his broken chair. The air was heavy with the smell of arrack and something burnt — flesh? Maybe. My mother would shake her head and say, that his eyes had dulled with the smoke of a thousand pyres, and she couldn’t look into his eyes anymore. I didn’t understand her words.

On one of those days, he sat bolt upright, calling out to me.

“Kanna… when you meet those boys from Canal Road, tell them about the wailing women. All paid criers only. Only noise. And, when it is my turn, put me in the white vandi and cover my feet.”  And he slumped back to sleep.

All these years later, the cries of the wailing women still echo. Money could buy the dead their mourners. For us, death paid — Appa earned by the body count. When his time came, he finally rode the white vandi. Feet covered.