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.

Pulse

by Bruce Scandling | Feb 17, 2025 | contest winner, flash fiction

We walk cautiously along the trail in leaden morning light, here for the spawning salmon and for a change. That’s how she said it on the phone last week, my daughter: I need a big fucking change of scenery.

The forest is dank, decayed, ripe with torn-open fish carried from the creek by bears. Alders and spruce collect the mist and drip ceaselessly. Leaves of Devil’s Club are yellow and veined with autumnal inevitability. We stop every few minutes, watching the water and listening for whatever is out there in the woods.

She could be from an outdoors catalog, my only child. With her athletic build, a no-nonsense rope of braided black hair, and her eight-weight flyrod. Except her denim is flecked with mud, she wears no makeup, and her skin is scaly. There is a new puffiness around her neck and under her jawline. She does not smile.

We talk only haltingly along the trail. I want to announce our presence in the forest, to avoid surprises downstream. And I want to understand. I know only that the other woman, her once-declared partner-for-life, walked away after my daughter’s second failed pregnancy. The partner had said she was tired of all the disappointment.

The word my daughter used was empty. She had flown back to Alaska for a long weekend away from her work and her suddenly quiet townhouse. When I picked her up along the airport curb, the first words I managed to say were, “How are you feeling?”

Empty, she told me, what else would you expect?

Her mother has been gone three years now, and I am not good at this. I don’t believe I was disengaged, yet as our daughter grew into a young woman, it was the two of them who would sit for hours laughing, crying, and apparently making sense of the cosmos. Last boyfriend. First girlfriend. Cut from the swim team. Poor decisions at weekend parties. When our daughter announced she was sick of the president and his misogynistic bullshit, her mother convinced her not to drop out of college and move to Australia to work on a fishing boat.

Then there was the crash, my wife’s tires sliding on black ice, the truck off the bank and into the ocean, her body finally recovered amidst a school of wintering salmon. My daughter shouldered our loss like a mountain guide, carrying her own burdensome sorrow while propping me up. She was sturdy and dependable, at least around me. Her girlfriend – the forever partner – must have seen the rest.

And now, along our trail, she seems adrift. We find a promising stretch of water and clamber down the bank. It is a short wade across to a sandbar. Beyond, the creek foams around rocks, swirls under rotting deadfall, and eases into deepening pools. We distance ourselves and cast, hopeful. These fish have returned from years at sea, some laden with eggs and searching, miraculously, to give birth and die in the exact gravel beds where they hatched.

Finally, she yells as a coho erupts in chrome fury. The salmon zings line from her reel, rushes upstream, and bursts from the water again. My daughter carefully follows the fish, begins to win the tug-of-war. Eventually, she pulls her catch into the slack water at her feet. She backs away from the creek, her rod curled into an arc under the strain. She slides the fish onto the sand. It is gleaming, exhausted. Its gills pulse, gasp. I anticipate oily filets and finger the knife sheathed at my side.

My daughter kneels over the salmon. With a twist of her wrist, she removes the fluorescent green fly. She cups the fish, one hand under its belly, the other grasping the tapered body just in front of the tail. She bends and kisses it on the head, prepared to return it to the water. She hesitates and kisses it again. Then a third time.

Finally, she eases it back into the creek, where it pauses to recuperate as its gills filter oxygen from the cool, unsullied, innocent water. In an instant,t the salmon darts into the current and is gone.

She turns to me and shrugs. Then, she takes off her boots and wades into the pool.

I drop my gear and run towards her as she leans forward and gently slips under the surface. I can see the red of her checked plaid shirt as she is pulled downstream by the current. She comes up for air in a wide green pool and rolls gently onto her back. She looks at me and raises her hand as if waving a slow, calm goodbye.

She turns away and rhythmically kicks her feet, headed towards the ocean.

Sugar Highs & Lows

by Rachana Pathak | Feb 10, 2025 | contest winner, flash fiction

The teenagers on the subway were giddy as they downed their Starbursts, shrieking and giggling, trading yellows, reds, and oranges. Reeya remembered those days of sugar highs and how they had whispered about who did what or did not do what. And how she and her sister had walked, arms linked, behind their father on the congested Kathmandu street until they saw the candy man who was wiry, dark-skinned, and scraggly-bearded but carried a coveted stick. This upright stick was adorned with sugar treats, cotton puffs, and metallic pinwheels, which drew her in. She begged her father to buy something, anything, just one, please, please. He succumbed, not due to her begging, but because it enabled him to indulge in a packet of paan, addictive and carcinogenic. The candy man handed them their treats, baring his scary, red-stained teeth against his mournful but kind eyes. The brightly colored wrappers later appeared strewn all over the city, a place with no infrastructure, sewage system, or garbage bins, and a poor, downtrodden soul picked up the littered wrappers, one by one manually, an actual living street sweeper whose labor never ended, nor was rewarded. People flung debris in his direction, and mothers warned their kids that they would end up like the street sweeper if they did not study—a further slight on his wretched existence. Reeya downed the entire candy pack on the street in one go, mimicking her father, who downed his cancer-causing paan, and they both got high, grinning at their complicity before they reached home, where her mother would scold them. Her sister, in contrast, savored her packet, selecting one pellet at a time, letting the piece dissolve entirely in her mouth without biting or cheating, and storing the rest for later, allowing for a nighttime indulgence, more forward-thinking and refined than Reeya. This was the era of pre-diabetes, pre-adulthood, and pre-responsibility.

Now, Reeya lived in a different country, older and besieged with responsibility. The subway stopped, and she dashed up the stairs, maintaining pace with the rush-hour equilibrium, but she slowed once she approached street level and found herself inside a chain drugstore, where the candy selection filled two entire aisles, not just a mere stick. She splurged on a pack of Starbursts like the carefree subway kids, tapping her credit card without speaking or making eye contact with the clerk, who was preoccupied with her cell phone—a transaction in the strictest sense. Reeya left the rectangular cement building, walked several blocks, and stood outside her office, checking her watch as she picked out the red squares and peeled the wrappers off in the eight precious minutes before her start time. There was no father to conspire with, nor a sister to compete against, nor a candy man with his fanciful packets of sugar, nor a manual street sweeper to pick up the litter. Reeya threw her torn wrappers into the garbage bin on the corner, and she did not have to see or think about the landfill they would end up in this civilized nation. And with that slight sugar rush, she stepped into her office.

Heartbeat

by Jisun Park | Feb 6, 2025 | contest winner, flash fiction

I trace a line from the top of her forehead to the tip of her nose, a peachy pink so delicate it has the silken texture of a rose petal at the peak of its bloom. Her tiny lips pucker, and her fingers flex open, revealing a hand in its most miniature form, more doll than human. I marvel at this creature, so untouched and unbruised that she seems unearthly. “Are you of this world?” I whisper. And so small. So, so small. I watch her, lying on the bed, and I go over the notes from my pre-natal baby care class in my head. 

Make sure she eats every two to three hours, or she won’t put on weight and may die. 

Make sure she is peeing four to six times a day; if not, she isn’t getting enough to eat and may die. 

Make sure to wash your hands before you touch her; she could get sick from harmful bacteria and die.

Make sure she doesn’t put anything too small in her mouth; she could choke on it and die.

Make sure she sleeps on her back with nothing in the crib, or she could stop breathing and die.

It occurs to me that there are an infinite number of ways that my baby could die, and it is up to me, an untrained civilian with no prior experience whatsoever, to anticipate them all. They say babies, children, people are hardy. “Stronger than you think!” But only the parents of those who have already mastered living say that.

I think of the ways that I could kill my baby: I could drop her, roll onto her in my sleep, sit on her, feed her something that chokes her.

I think of the ways that others could kill my baby: she could get hit by a car; she could be in a car that gets hit by another car; she could get kidnapped and murdered; she could be shot at school.

I think of the ways that my baby’s own body could kill her: cancer, that could be growing inside of her in the dark even now, in her bones or in her blood.

I think of how my baby could just die on her own for no reason at all. Her heart could just stop beating. She could just stop breathing. And that would be it.

And none of this is close to an exhaustive list.

I watch the news and see pictures of children in their posed photos, gap-toothed and shiny-eyed, the last school photos they got to take before they died, and the faces of those children morph into the face of my own child. I wonder about the mothers of those children. How do they survive it? How do they go on? It seems impossible. It seems absurd. I think that if it happened to me, if my baby died, I would just collapse on the spot and fold into the dirt and not ever want to move again. But having lived on this earth for a while, I know that’s not what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to keep going. You’re supposed to live on. People sympathize for a while, but after too long of a time, they get annoyed. If I continued to lie in the dirt, that would be attention-seeking and melodramatic. People only have so much patience for grief.

So I practice the hard thing that I don’t think I can do so that I can do it one day if I have to. I imagine that my baby has died. I imagine the cold shock of the news. I imagine the disorienting nausea, the ringing in my ears, my tears. The prickling sweat on the soles of my feet that only comes when something incredibly terrible happens. It’s difficult, but I can do it. Then I imagine the funeral. The people who come with their gray faces. This is very difficult. There is something about having your grief mirrored in someone else’s face that magnifies it. And when I get to the burial, a small box suspended over a hole of the same size in the ground, that is when I lose it. I know I can’t let them put her down there. My heart is on fire, and I can’t let them do it because she would be alone and scared, and it is so so dark in the earth, in that box, and if I let them put her in the ground, she would really be dead and I lied when I said I could do the part where I found out she died because I don’t think I can and I might not ever stop crying and I might just drown in my own tears. But that might be okay if that means I could go with her. We could be in the box together and in the ground together and neither of us would be alone or scared. We would just be. Together.

At this point, I am heaving with sobs, congested with snot, and I have to shake myself out of it. What am I doing? Stop being an idiot and thinking these stupid and crazy things. Take a breath. And another. And another. I lie down next to her, the summer sunlight reflecting off the white walls and wrapping us in gold, her quick, soft breath cooling the dampness on my face. I watch the tick-tock of her chest, the silent metronome of her beating heart. I slide my finger under hers and she grasps it, curling her fingers around mine, her grip surprisingly strong and tenacious. No one told me about this, that love could be so stricken, that it could make my own life feel so precarious. That love could tie my pulse to another’s. We’ll just have to keep each other alive, I tell her. Your life is in my hands, but now my life is in yours, too. 

The Touch Forecast

by Claudia Monpere | Feb 3, 2025 | contest winner, flash fiction

Your best friend, Meg, is scared for you. She wants to accompany you to the lake, but you need to be alone, so you drive there and wander the aspen grove, leaves trembling in the light wind. You touch the smooth, greenish-white bark, the rough, eye-shaped branch scars. You hold your hand among the leaves, feeling them flicker in the light wind. You touch the coarse granite boulders. You walk along the shore to your favorite granite slab, remove your clothes, and feel its polished surface on your cheek, tummy, arms, and legs. You dive into the water, welcoming its chill, and then you drive home, where your ex-boyfriend, who still has a key, surprises you.

He wants to make love one last time, and although you hate him now—you’d begun feeling this way even before he reported you— he’s a man with influence who could make things worse for you, and maybe, just maybe, his touch will be tender, and linger in the dismal time ahead. But his eyes are glacial as he touches your neck. You apologize and say this was a mistake, completely your fault. You ask him to please leave, apologizing again and again.

After he leaves, you touch your body. You have no interest in an orgasm. You realize how much of your body you’ve never touched with intention: the satiny inside of your arms, your knuckles’ bony hills– Why did you never notice how irregular they are?– the helix of your ear, the smooth fleshy texture of your mouth’s soft palate, the firm ridges of the hard palate. You pluck a hair and marvel. Only one hair, yet you can feel its silky texture.

Meg comes over and cooks for you: snapper ceviche with jicama, lime, and toasted pumpkin seeds; fresh chickpeas with feta and roasted red pepper sauce; scallops with parsnip puree, fruit tart. Tender, crumbly, crunchy, buttery, creamy, crispy, velvety. You eat and weep at the glorious textures. You and Meg hug throughout dinner. She’s stopped coaxing you to flee. You both know what happens to women who are caught. After dinner, Meg massages your feet with lotion. You object, but she tells you this is what best friends do.

The car pulls up at exactly 7:30 pm, and some official and his driver take you to the hospital, where you change and are led to the chapel, lit with candles, packed with journalists, politicians, and people waving signs. The senator stands at the pulpit in a halo of light. He commands silence. You stand in your hospital gown, facing him.  “Touch,” says the senator, “is the first sense felt in the womb. Even before sight and hearing.” He pauses, looking directly at you, then continues. “Your baby will never feel your loving arms holding her. You’ll never feel her petal soft cheeks. You took her life as she bloomed in your womb.” Silence. Then he roars, accompanied by others in the chapel, chanting: “Your pleasure in touch will be no more. The culture of death—you opened that door.”

Flanked by two doctors, you leave the chapel and walk toward the operating room. You’ll be able to feel pain after the surgery. Heat. No other sensation of touch. Ever. The idea is suffering, not death. The nurse prepping you explains the steps of the operation in a gentle, halting voice. Her eyes tear up when she tells you what to expect after. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I’m new here.” Just before inserting the IV that will put you under, she asks if you’d like to touch her hair. “I used my best conditioner, so it feels extra soft.” “No, thank you,” you say. You raise your palms to your face and stroke your cheeks. You blink rapidly a few times, feeling your lids go down and up, down and up. You kiss every other finger, slowly, then close your eyes.

The Uranium Bird

by Dennis Michael | Jan 30, 2025 | contest winner, flash fiction

The uranium bird has been picking seeds from my lawn. It’s easy to tell where it’s been; it leaves behind a trail of brown, wilted grass or shriveled tree leaves. It lives somewhere near the end of the road near the brook, I think. I’ve seen it there when I’ve been out jogging, marbled bright orange and pitch black, cooling off in the water. Little puffs of steam float up as it wades in. It’s supposed to be quite dense, uranium, so I don’t know how it is able to fly, but it does. We tried to photograph it once, but the images came out all white and overexposed. 

A local boy tried to steal one of its eggs, but his hand got burned badly and they had to take it off. When the eggs hatch, the babies always come out deformed. One had two beaks for eyes; another was born with a couple of tentacles dangling out of its stomach. It looked like some kind of hybrid octopus-bird creature, or at least so I’ve heard. The babies don’t last long; they usually live just long enough to hop out of the nest, and then they fall apart. Sometimes, you find little piles of uranium bird parts lying around, or even just a single leg or a head. 

I’ve been getting headaches. They start at the back of my head and make their way up to my ears. The doctors don’t help much; they just keep asking me if I grind my teeth at night. I  don’t know, I tell them. They say I should relax. Every spring, I used to wake up an extra 30 minutes early and just lay in bed and meditate, listening to chirping perched birds and the white noise of passing cars outside. A few years ago is when I started hearing the uranium bird; it has a very distinct sound. It starts out very high-pitched but then quickly drops down to bass frequencies. Sweeping the spectrum. It does this in under a second, like an accelerated Doppler effect. How such a low sound can come out of such a small mouth is beyond my understanding  of acoustics. It might be a quantum effect. Anyway, now all I can hear when I wake up is this ungodly sound every few seconds, and I can’t meditate anymore. It’s hard enough to live in this area, having to worry about that little fucker flying around shooting alpha particles at us; moreover, I can’t even sit in bed and relax for a few minutes before I start my day. 

I’m honestly not sure why this bird needs to be eating my seeds. I don’t know why it even needs to eat at all; it should be able to naturally act as its own energy source, just due to the heat generated by radioactive decay. I mean, they make power plants out of the stuff. I need those seeds to grow a full lawn, and in addition to losing the seeds, the little brown patches it leaves behind always need to be fixed. I’ve been thinking of how to get rid of it, but it’s not easy.  I looked up the chemistry of how to dissolve uranium, and now I think I’m on some kind of government watchlist. I hear buzzing in the walls of my house, extra breathing on the phone. I’ve thought of ways to crush the bird, but it’s made of pure metal, harder than steel. You’d need something like titanium or diamond. I’ve thought of ways of trapping it in a box and starving it,  but it has a half-life of 4 billion years. 

I’m sitting on my lawn, reading a book and sipping a cold glass of sangria made with fresh fruit from our garden. Trying to relax. The uranium bird is just across the street in my neighbor’s yard. It seems to notice me and starts to walk towards me. It clinks as its little metal feet walk across the pavement. It pauses as it reaches the middle of the road, daring a car to come by and challenge it. It thinks it owns this whole neighborhood, the little piece of shit. It flies up and perches itself on the top of my fence. It’s just sitting there staring at me, not moving. I take a sip of my sangria and stare back. It hops down onto my lawn. I see the tips of the grass around it start to turn brown and curl. It flies over and pecks me on the shoulder, I bat it away. The sangria goes flying. The bird comes at my head, making its frequency-hopping, unnatural chirping sound as it darts in. I duck, swirl, and smash it to the ground by swinging my hardcover novel at it with both hands. It falls to the ground, and I pick it up with my bare hand. I stick its head into my mouth and bite into it, twisting and tearing as hard as I can. Its head somehow comes off. I try to chew it but I can’t, it’s made of solid metal. It tastes metallic, and I start hearing noises, not in my ears but inside my head. I spit its head out and throw down its lifeless body onto the grass. My head is burning. Everything is spinning, and I fall to the ground. The grass is thick where I am laid out, beautiful and green. The noises in my head stop. I hear the other birds chirping in the distance, naturally. Cars are passing by with their white noise. I close my eyes and relax.