The Syntax of Silk

by Lindsey Godfrey Eccles | Jan 6, 2025 | flash fiction, publications

In the small hours of the morning, I forage, taking care to nibble leaves both fibrous and tender, for the stories of a world are woven not only from what is young, what is hopeful, or what is easy. When the sun is high, and the air is thick and hot with blossoms, I retreat to my well-camouflaged habitat and extrude. My clumsy fingers, far less dexterous than the inhabitants’ claws, work the lustrous strand and experiment with braids and knots.

My colleagues are correct. The task is impossible. But why not this world? Why not this people? Strangeness is no reason to stand aside and let them be forgotten. I know I’ve poisoned myself; I may be as doomed as they are. But every night, I choose to stay, and on no cloudless, perfumed morning do I regret it. Never before have I encountered a world where wisdom resides in youth.

***

My first day on this planet I came across what I knew in my soul were books, each of them tucked into a tree bole or the crotch of a branch. But I failed to see them for all that they were. Instead, I confused these enormous, multicolored egg-shaped arrangements of fibers for mere artifacts and, investigating, soon found I’d opened a cocoon before its time. An adult so large it could not have fit inside my ship alighted beside me and folded its wings, mesmerizingly patterned in brown and grey, but instead of putting me to the end I deserved, stood by and watched as a half-formed thing emerged, flightless, an abomination. Together, we bore witness until it died.

After that, I tried to keep my distance from the larvae, but before long, curiosity got the better of me. I sat and watched the monstrous segmented worm-children, imitated the clicks of their mandibles. They showed neither fear nor interest. I cannot say I was free from fear myself, but I watched the larvae spin and weave their lives’ work. Adults cast wide shadows from the spaces in-between the higher branches, but despite my one terrible mistake, they let me be. It was difficult not to touch the larvae’s iridescent strands of violet, fiery red, and sunset pink, but by then, I knew better.

***

Imagine my surprise when the first thread dripped from my rectum. Extrusion is less uncomfortable than you might think, not unlike excretion, which can, of course, be welcome. My threads are not as strong or smooth as the threads of my young mentors; they are certainly less beautiful. But no copy is ever perfect, and I will spin the story of this place as best I can.

I will not weave my own cocoon on stem or branch but on the cold contours of my ship’s interior. And when I emerge from my masterwork on the world that is my home, I will not be the creature I am now. Will I crawl forth, unfurling wet wings stamped with the unblinking eyes of my deepest fear? Perhaps. For now, I extrude, and I meditate on what I know, which is that the people of this world have shown me a grace I do not deserve. And I will give them everything I have, in memory of the child whose strand I broke.

Originally published in the Librarian Card Catalog project from Air and Nothingness Press.

Blessed

by Laura Leigh Morris | Dec 12, 2024 | flash fiction, publications

The priest still has a mouth full of cake, crumbs stuck to his lips, when the mom presents a doll with clumps of hair missing, a book with crayon scribbled across the cover, a blanket still warm from the girl’s grip and says, “Bless them?” The girl cries for her stolen blankie, but the mom ignores her and shoves the items at him. The cake lodges in the priest’s throat, and he coughs as he makes his way through the roomful of parishioners to his car where he’s stored his Bible and a vial of holy water and blessed oil for situations like these. And when he returns, the mom has created a pile on the couch: two more dolls, four stuffed animals, a pacifier, six hats the mother uses to hide the bony protrusions on her daughter’s head. He has already laid hands on the protrusions, prayed over them, made the sign of the cross on them, and today he has baptized the little girl the woman has named Mathilde but calls Lilith, a joke, she says, from when the doctor pointed out the protrusions on the ultrasound and the parents called them horns. The mom smiled when she said this, but the priest saw her hug herself, her gaze drifting to the floor, and knows she hasn’t told anyone else about the vestigial tail they had removed after the girl’s birth. The priest touches each of the items, sprinkles holy water on them, murmurs a prayer, but as he completes the task, the mother arrives with more—a rainbow hairbrush, a pillow, a green ball. The girl, wearing a bonnet and droopy diaper, runs through the room, face smeared with icing, hands clutching lumps of cake. No one stops her. The other parishioners part as the mom returns, arms laden with more offerings: hair bows and a stack of dresses and a framed picture of Winnie the Pooh. The pile grows, and the parishioners whisper behind cupped hands as they watch the mother move more quickly, her arms piled higher each time she returns: picture books and bottles and a toothbrush and a toy car. The little girl snatches the blessed hairbrush from the couch, waves it above her head as she darts between legs and out of the room. The items waiting to be blessed spill onto the floor as the mom heaves a dollhouse atop the pile, and the room is silent, except for the priest’s murmuring. Until he steps away from the offerings and toward the mom who is weighed down with a wooden rocking horse and a toy kitchen, and he takes them from her arms and says, “Enough,” but she shakes her head, points to the coat rack, the couch, a used wine glass, says, “Bless them,” grabs his arm and pulls him into the girl’s room, gestures toward the rainbow curtains, the cross hanging above the crib, the yellow carpet, says, “Bless them,” pulls him farther down the hall, into her own bedroom, points to the unmade bed, a half-filled glass of water on the nightstand, a pile of dirty clothes on the floor, and says, “Bless. Bless. Bless,” tears in her eyes, nails digging into his arm, and the priest wants to say no but can’t, and so he blesses everything: the bathroom trashcan, the unopened mail on the counter, the parishioners who are now slipping out the front door without making eye contact, and the mom who reaches for her daughter, grabs her under her armpits, holds her out to the priest, and he blesses all of them, the mother, the daughter, the horns, the bonnet, the droopy diaper, but he spends extra time blessing the touch between mother and daughter, the mother’s fingers that grip the girl’s armpits, the outstretched arms that maintain distance between their bodies, the girl’s legs that dangle, already moving, as though running, and as soon as her mother releases her, the girl will sprint far from her mom and the priest and his water and his oil, and so he says, “Blessed be. Blessed be. Blessed be,” and watches as the girl squirms free and is gone.

THE MIGRATION OF DEAD BIRDS

by Sarp Sozdinler | Dec 5, 2024 | flash fiction, publications

Elena cried for the sparrow, for how it slipped a squeal before it hit the front window, a sound that awfully resembled fear. I knew even then that Elena saw something in that bird, a part of herself that wanted to be free and alive, free of everything that crippled its wings, and it was all unfortunate, not because the bird was dead, but because it still looked very much alive.

Our house was going through a transformation, shedding its skin like a snake. The door to the front porch was ajar, the bug screen opened all the way out, and a swampy, sticky warmness filled the rooms, filled our lungs. Flies, big or small, crowded around the kitchen area, punishing all the open lids. Elena was seated on the living room couch, a tube wrapped around her left arm. Our cat Oprah circled around her needle-marked feet, in wait for Elena to relinquish the dead bird like a treat.

“Pendejo,” Elena cursed under her breath.

The way she muttered the word must have done the trick, or the way she lunged her foot forward like a laggardly kick, because Oprah gave up on its mission and jumped on the sofa by the TV, its tail coiled into a full circle. The sparrow remained motionless in Elena’s hands, neck bent into an ungainly angle.

“We have to bury her,” she said, looking down, eyes puffy with either sorrow or the first kick of the drug. Or both.

When I was little, I looked after a parakeet that had the name of a dinosaur. Mom had insisted I don’t put it in a cage so Rex had the freedom of flying about in the birch woods to the north of our house all day, every day, leading a life on its own terms. I enjoyed watching Rex come and go as it pleased, until one day, it didn’t return home. For weeks to come, I cried for all the ways Rex could be hurt out in the wild or even dead. I asked Mom what would happen to the animals that strayed far from home, and she fell suspiciously quiet. We left the subject at that, never to resume.

I thought: the asteroid that ended the dinosaurs was probably the one stone that killed most birds in history.

“We have to bury her,” Elena said again, looking up at me. “Give her a sweet farewell.”

My head gave in to a small, courteous nod. I knew we had to go through what was needed to be done, together. I imagined us walking to the backyard, where we kept all the dead, frail bones of nature. I imagined us facing the trees that accommodated many a bird on their branches, their tops rustling with a soothing wind, reminding me of the times I hid in its depths to escape from all the hard truths of my childhood. Today, grounded in the hard earth of adulthood, we would have to face the side of nature we’d had to ignore all this time, all the animals we killed to eat, all the plants and herbs we plucked to enhance the smell.

We have to bury her, give her a sweet farewell.

I walked across the living room to take the dead sparrow from Elena’s hands. Giving it up, her body plopped back on the couch as if a great weight were lifted off her shoulders, setting her free. I carried the bird to the kitchen, covered it with a hand towel. I stalked to the backyard and faced the heat full-on, sans Elena, and the trees stood eerily still against my expectations, greeting me and the bird with their unmoving glare. The birds on the branches chirped their collective song, and I loved to imagine them all migrating away and pursuing their lives elsewhere, in better, more promising places than here, half-eager to move on, half not, certain that everything is going to be all right at the next stop. •