All and Sundry

by Candace Leigh Coulombe | Mar 13, 2025 | contest winner, flash fiction

Do not let your children stand in the shopping cart. Do not let them ride in the bottom of the cart, where pigtails or small hands could get trapped in the filthy wheels. And never — never — leave them unattended in the store.

You will linger while looking for the price of party-size packs of gummy bears or thumbing through a book on string theory, and then she will be gone. She was just right here, you’ll say, or just one aisle over. It will feel like less than 30 terrestrial seconds have passed. You’ll call her name, check around corners, look for a helpful employee in a hyper-spectral blue vest. But soon, your hopes will be crushed by the vastness of the shopping megaverse.

To hold all that you could ever want, OmegaMart extends from the outskirts of the suburbs to the edge of the exoplanet sphere. Good luck remembering where you parked. You will be exhausted just by walking from the garden center to the plane that contains comfy flip-flops and replacement cyborg feet. You will need to stop for a bright blue slushie and soft pretzel.

The thing is, OmegaMart has everything. All the things you need. The things that you don’t need but your neighbors have so you think you do. The things that you’ll break and the things to replace them. The things that you’ll lose and the things that will make you forget about them. All of your hopes and dreams and regrets and untapped potential – all at very low prices.

You will not forget your child, but at some point you will concede that she will not be found. At least not by you. And perhaps she will have even toddled into the aisle with the isekai boxes and have been transported to a realm more happy and enchanting than your own.

Actually, you will momentarily forget and fill your cart with economy-value boxes of training pants and applesauce pouches, and then have to put it all back.

You will cross things off your shopping list. You will try to concatenate the logic of the store layout. Will the biological things on your list be near the produce aisles? Why is it so hard to find gin?

By improbable happenstance or a slushie-fueled fever dream, you will find aisles X1 – X137: a plane of companions.

There are boyfriend-shaped body pillows and boyfriend-shaped boyfriends. There are androids spanning the whole uncanny valley, depending on your preference and price range. There are girlfriends, too. One aisle over, there are iridescent betta fish in individual bowls and robotic dog and seal pups to comfort seniors with dementia. One aisle past that, you will hear the ma-mama chorus of shelves of babies.

There are babies that eat and pee and coo and even cry real tears. Like the dimpled dollies you’d played with as a child, there are chubby babies of every hairdo and hue — all with official certificates and extra jammies packed in their portable vivaria. There will be one with freckles just like yours.

There are also faceless baby-shaped magneto-active solid-liquid phase transitional machines. Those will conveniently re-form to fit any car seat or carrier. They have the weight and heartbeat of newborns without the mess.

And there are xeno-biological babies with the softest fur you can imagine. They smell like soap, fresh bread and milk.

You will spend an inordinate number of terrestrial minutes making your choice. It should be a good one this time, one that will last even if it costs a little more. If you chose a nice enough baby, you could finance it with no interest for the first two astronomical seasons.

Then, you need to rearrange the cart, so the baby box doesn’t get crushed. And get another slushie. And then, of course, you will need to backtrack to the aisle of diapers and food pouches and mommy-and-me matching outfits to get all of the accessories.

You will need a playpen. A strong one. Graphene, maybe, if you can finance it as well?

Those things are always such a pain in the ass to assemble. But if you’re making the investment in a good baby, you simply can’t lose it again. It requires a pen in time and space that’s safe, happy and near you almost always. And it should be escape-proof for the times you need a break.

When you finally find the checkout line, things will add up fast. You’ll look over the baby one more time to make sure it’s a good one before you tap to pay. You’ll keep the paper receipt in your left hand and push the extraordinarily heavy cart with your right.

While you wait by the exit for a vested employee to check your receipt, you may hear a faint cry. Mama, mama, mama. Soft and tearful at first, then louder — Mama! — then gone. It could be coming from inside the box. It could be for another of the many mothers in the vastness of the OmegaMart. It could be a cry from a freckled toddler who has, against inconceivable odds, found her way almost to you.

You will take your receipt and push the cart forward into the boundless parking lot. You will look into the void with fear, fatigue, hope and wonder.

You won’t return to the megaverse store until you need to replace something lost or something broken. It will be sooner than you think.

Sweetie Come Brush Me

by Leesa Fenderson | Mar 10, 2025 | contest winner, flash fiction

1.

I jump on my bicycle and keep my head straight when I see the girls a grade ahead of me who have boyfriends at sixteen—like that’s gonna last. They wave. I don’t. I’m heading to Pumpkin Circle to see what’s selling, last week it was crayfish and false hope. I’ll deal with the teenage-love-affairs when and where I decide. I pedal faster when I see Ma Eunice’s market truck take the corner. She sees me see her. My belly sinks in the fear that one of these mediumly able minds might know of me more than I can stomach.

2.

It was always Ma Eunice from the Pumpkin Circle that I thought might be the most observant. She remembers everything about everyone’s business. Thing is, to see is one thing. To understand quite another issue of cognitive ability. Because with an associative mind, A is cracked open and parsed and its applicable component parts are multiplied by Bs applicable component parts. Thing is, if you can’t understand A, how can the mind associate? So, scratch Pumpkin Circle Eunice off the list. She can’t understand shit. There’s also Mr. Maurice, he can add and subtract thousands of dollars but only sells last week’s crayfish. And he only sees himself. There’s an inverse ratio between the extent to which a person can decipher subliminal, or obvious for that matter, calls for emotional support and that person’s current personal hellfire. Which of course Ma Eunice reported to everyone the morning Ms. Idolene dash weh Mr. Maurice’s baby.

3.

You’re probably wondering how I know. I collect rumors and how tos. How to get a fishbone out of your throat? How to peel a mango? How to ride a bike downhill? Bend your knees and bend your back. Head and neck sinks between shoulders, tuck your lips in so the wind whipping up from town doesn’t split your lip. Both hands on handlebars with a tight grip. Because if you don’t hold on, you get knocked. It happened to Tru Juice, he was sailing down like a kite. When we bust the corner, Tru Juice’s loose hands were all we saw fly up and then a cloud of smoke from his clothes, shredded. Ms. Idolene was seen cascading down past Pumpkin Circle on her banana seat Schwinn, head bent, knees a K. Her lip already split because her father knocked her into next week for getting knocked up by a big head wotless Labor Rights who sells last week’s crayfish in Pumpkin Circle and who told her she could avoid getting pregnant by syncing up her cycle with the phases of the moon. She stopped taking birth control and when she didn’t see her period, she visited Mrs. Myrtl who gave her roots that made her nauseous. Her father saw her leaving the root’s lady holding her belly. He backhanded her, but she didn’t have time to explain she needed to get down the hill so she could wash out what was coming out between her legs in Yallahs pond.

4.

How to peel a mango? Choose a mango that is going to turn tomorrow. Ms. Idolene has seven mango trees, all of them the same type, my favorite. Ms Idolene’s mom named them sweetie, come brush me. Usually, you peel back the skin with your teeth, but that is for someone else. Your ego will have you cry over a closed door with nothing behind it, Ma Eunice told Mr. Maurice. So, you palm it and press the knife into the long side, feeling for the seed. Once it hits, tilt the knife up and slice the top off. She did this, offering Mr. Maurice a sliver. The knife is sharp, so a bit of seed comes off the top. He bites into the mango. It’s equally too sweet and too sour. Dummy. We accept the love we think we deserve.

5.

That’s what one of the mother’s told a teenage-love-affair who claimed to be crying about the shortage of sweetie come brush me mangoes but was really crying over a girl, with no shame, right in the middle of Pumpkin Circle.

And here comes Ma Eunice hopping off her market truck to cosign this with a basket of too sweet too sour mangoes on her hip. Dem sexual urges be stronger than your self-respect, that’s why y’all be at the clinic or on Mrs. Myrtl’s front stoop crying and begging. Begging? Mr. Maurice repeated shelling slimy crayfish with 31 sweetie come brush mes rotting behind him. He mouthed ‘begging’ again wanting ever so much to convince himself that he prefers too sweet too sour mangoes and not the sweetie come brush mes that we all want but can’t get any more since he stopped talking to Ms. Idolene because although she was barely weeks pregnant, he pictures what their big head baby might look like face down in Yallahs Pond.

This is not the first broken heart Pumpkin Circle has seen. After planting the seven mango trees, Ms. Idolene’s mother took sick. Ms. Idolene’s father spit at the root of each tree, a fury of spite when death took his wife. The trees bore more mangoes than Jesus. He hated them, each mango, seed, skin. The sweet, sticky juice that ran down the corner of his mouth—he hated the most.  But they fed his daughter, so the spite grew because what’s worse than needing the thing you hate?

Ask Ms. Idolene.

Ms. Idolene, who has been outside Pumpkin Circle begging Maurice to forgive her every day for a full moon cycle, barely pedals and doesn’t tuck her lips when she rides off on the thirty-first day. She takes her last haul of sweetie come brush me seeds to Yallahs Pond. She walks slowly into the center. She looks over her shoulder, a sad hope, she sees no one coming to stop her. Water covers her waist and moistness creeps up as she up ends the crocus bag and drowns each seed.

6.

Look at how we break our own hearts.

The Ox and the Magpies

by Suqi Karen Sims | Mar 6, 2025 | contest winner, flash fiction

The yellow, lazy heat trickles onto the rice patties still humid with promise. It soaks into the straw hat of a young cowherd and pools onto the shoulders of his favorite black ox, named Ox. They’re sauntering to their favorite creek, where Ox can have a drink, and where the boy can have a bath. It’s their precious creek–not even the village elders know about it.

Ox walks by the boy’s side, bobbing his massive head to his steps, an unnatural rhythm for his bovine body. From the sky, a common green magpie lands on Ox’s wide back. She picks at her pretty feathers. Her red eyes, rimmed in black, gleam in the afternoon like ink for a chop, ready to notarize the day. She watches everything, intently. Ox doesn’t mind her and the cowherd doesn’t notice. The boy’s feet touch the cracked clay, but his thoughts are elsewhere.

The cowherd’s mother has been pressuring him to marry, but every girl she suggests is either a neighbor or his cousin. They are all too close to love. Perhaps he could marry a girl from the village over, someone with a different accent, with different patterns on her tunics, an unfamiliar stitch on the collar. He’d heard of an old man whose five wives were from five different tribes, and he would travel to see them in rotation. The boy wouldn’t mind being a traveling husband, even for just one wife.

The boy ponders, and the cowherd and Ox arrive at their favorite creek, but they are shocked to find that someone is there first. A beautiful girl in the water, a snapping, wooden contraption at her feet. The layers of her silk hanfu soak through to skin. When the drying light hits her face, it reflects like the moon: she is a goddess, the youngest of the Jade Emperor’s seven fairy daughters. Each celestial princess has been given a trade to perfect, to decorate the Jade Palace in magical artifacts. This girl was given a loom. She is a weaver.

Squatting in the grass, the cowherd watches the weaver’s fingers lift the water into the air and into her loom, pulling and pushing liquid into reflective silk. The young goddess weaves the humble into the divine, water into silver, rice husks into gold. She once wove the blood of soldiers into a breastplate of rubies. The uglier the yarn, the more beautiful the cloth.

From his hiding spot, the cowherd’s eyes transfix on the girl’s focused face and diligent fingers, while the wet silhouette of her figure rings at the back of his mind. Witnessing perfection feels much like panic. She is too far to love, but it is worth it to be pulled into her orbit. He would travel the universe, just to watch her work. Just to let her moon face pull him like the tide.

Ox is watching, too. He sees how the boy’s pupils swallow the girl, how they hold her like a pearl. He knows he has lost his companion forever, but he’s not much upset. He is a simple ox, from a simple village, and he agrees with the cowherd’s mother. It’s time for the boy to grow up. Ox nudges his friend out of the grass and into the water. On his back, the magpie flutters and resettles herself. Ox wishes there was a better way to say goodbye, but this’ll do.

The weaver gasps, the unwoven water falling to the creek in sheets of rain. Wet, flustered, and apologetic, the cowherd begs for forgiveness. He didn’t mean to spy on her, he was too struck to move, this being his first brush with the divine. He clutches at the hem of her skirt, drowning himself in a deep bow. Gods do not take well to mortal interruptions. This is surely the end of him, although it’s a lovely way to go.

But the weaver is curious, and she considers the boy. She finds this strange, ugly creature fascinating, so fragile and alive, unlike the hard, gemstone faces of her fellow gods. He is so much more touchable, caressable, possibly the most imperfect thing she has ever seen. Her instinct is to weave him a tunic of light, something warm for this quivering candle flick of a man. She wants to protect him, keep him like a secret stone in her hair, warm and safe and hers alone. With an unexpected fury, she realizes that for him, she would break the world.

She does not report him to the Jade Emperor, because in truth, she wasn’t supposed to leave the heavenly palace in the first place. What better way to escape punishment than to do something so much worse? She kneels down and takes the cowherd’s hand, pulls him up out of the water and to her. Ox wades quietly into the reeds for a drink.

***

When the Jade Emperor finds out, as all-knowing gods are wont to do, the Cowherd and the Weaver are banished to the skies. They are sentenced to two stars, Vega and Altair, where they shine as twin lights on opposite sides of the universe, glimmering, untouched and untouchable, for the world to see. A warning to lovers: It’s not worth it.

But remember the magpie? Go back and find her; she’s there. She was always there. Ox is a simple Ox, but the magpie knew better. She rolled her eyes when the weaver held out her hand. She knew this wouldn’t end well. She could see their cursed future rippling in the water, lovely and inevitable.

Still, when she saw the lovers cursed to the skies, she took pity on them. What did boys and goddesses know about love, anyway? They didn’t know better, the poor pets. She cannot reverse their sentence, but she can ease their suffering, at least for a while. She knows that magpies are jaded, but soft-hearted, and she convinces the others to help. She gathers them, her sisters and brothers, of all colors and sizes, and on the seventh night of the seventh month, they fly into the dark. This night is hot enough to soften the glue between time and space, enough to pry open a space for diligent, clever birds. Together, they build a bridge with their bodies, spanning the galaxy. They fly so hard they churned the space between the lovers into the Milky Way, a stairway between two stars. It’s a temporary bridge, just for the night; the birds have other things to do, after all. But in the middle of the magpie bridge, once a year, the cowherd and the weaver meet as one.

Lines Left

by Katie ten Hagen | Feb 26, 2025 | contest winner, flash fiction

My dad mowed the lawn every Saturday morning—weather permitting—for seventy-two years. Vacations were scheduled around it, plans turned down, brunches skipped, because that lawn wasn’t gonna mow itself. When his heart started acting up, and I said maybe he could think about getting someone else to do it, maybe he could take a break, enjoy retirement, he looked at me like I’d suggested he take a bath with some morays, just for the thrill.

So, in retrospect, I don’t know why I expected death to be the thing that stopped him.

He’s shimmering like dew in the early morning light, pushing that old mower as if his funeral hadn’t been the day before, as if we hadn’t all wiped our tears and said our goodbyes and started planning how to move forward with our lives. You can finally do something with that damn yard, I’d said to my mom, somewhere between laughing and crying. Native flowers, vegetables, fescues, trees. I’d needled my dad about it for years, but he’d always shaken his head: but it’s such a nice-looking monoculture. 

I pour cold coffee from yesterday over ice, stir in cream as I watch him work. He is silver, not filled in, all one color with the mower, a picture flashing against the glass of the window. He could be an after-image, a film negative, the outline of something left behind, and I wait for him to dissipate. But when I step outside, he comes into focus, shining and bright. 

I tiptoe barefoot across the lawn as if my steps might wake the mourners still sleeping in the house behind me. The grass pokes up between my toes and I wiggle them into the damp earth as I wait.

“Dad,” I say, when his next row comes past me. “What are you doing here?”

“Lawn’s not gonna mow itself.” He doesn’t look at me as he says it, doesn’t bother to smile. The mower leaves tracks in the grass, the little green shoots bending and springing up again, not quite cut but not quite ignoring him, either. 

Condensation drips down the sides of my glass, leaving prickling cold rivulets over my fingers. Ice clinks when I swirl it, a sound my brain says I shouldn’t be able to hear. But the ghost-mower is silent.

“We’ll get someone to mow the lawn, Dad.”

“Don’t be silly.” He doesn’t stop, doesn’t seem to find it strange that we can have this conversation at normal volume, that he doesn’t have to pause the gas engine and talk in a cloud of fumes as it idles. “It’s my job.”

“Don’t you have somewhere to be? Isn’t there something…else you should be doing?”

He coughs a laugh, the same raspy sound he always made when I surprised him. “Not before the grass gets mowed, Eloise. You know that.”

I follow him around the lawn, back and forth, watching the grass change into familiar stripes. I wonder if other people can see him or if a neighbor looking out their window will see only me, walking patterns into the lawn, chasing empty air. Will they think it is grief, manifesting in some harmless and pitiful way? Will they turn from the window, eyes full of that specific sort of relief that comes from watching a misfortune not your own, and shake their heads, whisper “so sad” to their partners?

But it’s not sad, I want to tell this probably imaginary watcher. My father lived to be 83. He had a good life and died peacefully. We will be okay. We can mow this lawn, dig it up and plant flowers, make it our own.

The ghost pushing the mower hasn’t gotten that memo yet, though.

He’s on the last row now, and I’ve taken to circling him, sometimes jumping in front of the mower, ducking down to try and see his face, his eyes. He isn’t ignoring me—at least, he isn’t ignoring me to be cruel. He’s just focused on his task. If he’d been alive, he would’ve asked me what in god’s name did I think I was doing, told me to get out of the way, I was going to get someone hurt. But he doesn’t say it.

He comes to the end of the row and spins the mower in a circle, a flourish like a period that always made me roll my eyes. End, stop, finished. But when he looks up, finally looks at me, he is smiling. He wipes invisible sweat from his brow.

“No reward like a job well done,” he says, hands on hips, surveying his work. Then he vanishes.

I don’t stare at the spot where he vanished but at the lawn, at the lines he left that still glisten in the sun. The pattern that is uniquely his, still etched in light and shadow upon the world.

Gizzard

by Kristen Skovsgard | Feb 20, 2025 | contest winner, flash fiction

My uncle showed me a casting from one of his hawks. I asked if it was the same as a pellet, and he said it was, but with hawks you call it a casting. I knew what a pellet was because earlier that year a lady in khakis had come to my classroom and handed out owl pellets for us to dissect with tweezers. She told us about the gizzard and the crop and I asked if I had one. She laughed and said no, because I was a girl, not a bird. I asked my uncle if I had a gizzard. Maybe, he said. Would be a good place to keep all those old bones before you’re through with them. Could get poke-y, though.

That was my first summer with my uncle and his boys at the Bird Ranch. It wasn’t really called the Bird Ranch, there’s no such thing as a Bird Ranch, but at the time that’s all I could think to call it. I said it aloud once and my uncle’s boys laughed. Their names were Joshua and Jonah. My aunt had named them, since she was a proper Christian lady, but Joshua’s middle name was Harley, since she wouldn’t let my uncle have one. She would tolerate the birds, not the bikes.

Back then Joshua had a kestrel. It was a tiny little thing that fluttered miserably on his gloved hand. He always held the jesses too tight. I knew that the kangaroo leather straps around each bird’s legs were called jesses since I had first referred to them as “bird bracelets”, which got me in a lot of trouble with the boys since bracelets were for girls and hawking was for boys. I knew that the jesses were made from kangaroo leather because the first time I heard it I was alarmed that kangaroos could be leathered. But kangaroo leather isn’t made from kangaroos, and now I call jesses bird bracelets on purpose. Mostly when I’m around the boys. They don’t bother me about it anymore.

That summer my uncle showed Joshua how to toss a lure on a string. It was a fickle art, to snap it midair, to whip the string in a widening gyre, to drag it across the ground after a hit in a clumsy imitation of a wounded animal, the lure’s leather wings embedded with the feathers of some unfortunate sparrow. I wasn’t allowed to hold the kestrel, so I sat beside its perch. Together we watched the lure go up and down, up and down.

I know it’s not real, the kestrel said, but I’ll go after it anyways.

My uncle had lots of birds. Some were his, some weren’t. There was always a Harris’ hawk, a kestrel, one or two red-tails. Nothing quite as noble as a peregrine or an eagle, but that summer, he had a moon-faced barn owl he’d taken in for rehabilitation. One day I asked her how she liked her mews and her Astroturf throne. I asked her if she missed the trees.

In a past life, she told me, I looked a lot like you. I was taller, though.

I asked my uncle if I could hold her. He was surprised. Joshua and Jonah hadn’t asked before. She wasn’t like the others, hatched from heat lamps and revolving incubators, soothed with imping needles and antiacids. My uncle called her wily. She had a scream like all of hell was after her, and she told me that it was.

You can hold her, my uncle said, but first you must prepare her food.  

My uncle led me into the shed. Earlier that day I’d watched him carefully mend a snapped feather on one of the red-tails. He was pointed and slow as he chose a primary from the box of last year’s moult, dipping the imping needle through its hollow spine. Someday I would stand there alone, imping eagle feathers. That day I watched my uncle remove a defrosted Tupperware container from a cupboard. He popped off the lid and a wet, musty smell filled the shed, like the odour of a formerly beloved stuffed animal left in the rain to mould. He removed two corpses. Chicks, no bigger than my palm, Easter-yellow and limp.

Jonah leaned against the door. Joshua stood a few paces back, the kestrel in his gloved hand.

You don’t have to do this, the kestrel said. It’s gross.

You don’t have to if you don’t want to, my uncle echoed. It’s not pleasant.

I want to, I replied.

My uncle demonstrated. First you remove the head, that’s the hardest, so do it first. Then the legs – they should come off easily. Then you squeeze out the insides. The bodies are small, so there’s not much inside. He handed me a chick. It was cool and damp and its head lolled gently against my thumb. Jonah mimed vomiting. Joshua took a step back.

They don’t think you’re gonna do it, the kestrel said.

The head popped off like a cork. I felt light-headed. Ooze trickled between my thumb and forefinger.

Oh god, the kestrel said. Jesus, that’s gross.

But I did it, I said. And I’ll do it again and again. And I did it again and again.

The barn owl didn’t flap or scream. She held the decapitated chick in her talons, but she didn’t reach for a taste. I supposed it couldn’t compare to anything she’d butchered herself. We watched my uncle demonstrate the lure for Joshua. He wasn’t getting it right, but the kestrel went after it nonetheless. Back and forth, back and forth. The owl’s head bobbed, liquid black eyes staring through the lure and onward towards something I couldn’t see.

What was it like, I asked her, when you looked like me?

She turned her head two hundred and four degrees to look me in the eye. 

Different, she said. My gizzard was harder to empty then.