by Madeline Anthes | Dec 9, 2024 | micro
One day, there will be a podcast episode about your disappearance, and a woman driving to work will skip it because you’ve never been found, and the woman likes closure. One day, your body will dissolve, the dye in your clothes fading into a muted gray before disintegrating, your teeth you hated and wished were straighter, the only thing left to identify you. But for now, you’re in the woods, a deer eyeing you while eating leaves nearby, the dirt and blood wet and sticky under your cooling skin. For now, your last thought is, “Finally, time to rest.”
by Fractured Lit | Dec 6, 2024 | news
Guest Judge Maurice Carlos Ruffin has chosen his grand prize winner and the 16 finalists! We’re excited to publish all sixteen of these stories starting in January 2025!
Grand Prize Winner: One Minute Thirty-Five Seconds by Caleb Ludwick
Guest Judge Maurice Carlos Ruffin said, “Deftly captures a relationship in the aftermath of a life-changing moment when feelings are too big to describe. With astonishing metaphor and symbolism, this breathtaking story is grounded in true-to-life details and realistic characters. Much more than just a meditation on grief, I’ll be thinking about “One Minute Thirty-Five Seconds” for a very long time. This is what short stories are meant to do.”
- Dead Things I Gave Birth To by Michelle R. Brady
- Snow by Mary Elizabeth Dubois
- In the Path of Totality by Stephen D. Gibson
- Reel by Diane Glancy
- White Trash by Emily Hampson
- The Hunt by Kristin Jensen
- The Uranium Bird by Dennis Michael
- The Touch Forecast by Claudia Monpere
- Heartbeat by Jisun Park
- Sugar Highs & Lows by Rachana Pathak
- Sixty, Fifty-Nine, Fifty-Eight by Emily Rinkema
- Pulse by Bruce Scandling
- Gizzard by Kristen Skovsgärd
- Blood-Related by Vanessa Tamm
- Lines Left by Katie Ten Hagen
by Sarp Sozdinler | Dec 5, 2024 | flash fiction
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. •
by Francine Witte | Dec 2, 2024 | micro
Not in the mirror. Not in between his uncle’s years-ago fingers. Not running all over town like Gogol. Just something he could hold in his hands for once in his life.
He tried last month to see his heart. After so many years, he wanted to see the actual scars on it, the ones that were put there by bad love and poor choices. Looley slipped a rusty Gillette down his hairy chest but couldn’t make it through. Besides, Louise was making pork chops for dinner.
Looley wants to see his nose because frankly, he doesn’t trust the mirror anymore. How it has sunk him sudden into an old man. These days all the mirror shows him is a tinsel of whiskers and a nose that has grown longer, wider.
Looley can’t help but wince when he sees this. Is it possible for a nose to grow this much in the few short years since childhood? Louise’s nose has also grown, but he understands because his wife is an old lady. He appreciates her wisdom when she says, “You don’t want to have your five-year-old nose your whole life, do you?”
But he needs to see the nose for himself, and this is the morning he is going to do it. He will look into that liar of a mirror. Maybe, I will let the razor slip. Maybe, I will hold my nose in my own hand. Maybe I will not worry anymore about my own death coming for me.
by Avitus B. Carle | Nov 25, 2024 | micro
Stepmother locks Daughter in the basement, chain keeping her prisoner to the furnace. Daughter tries to reach the window where Mother might be, watching, waiting for a kiss.
Mother is there until she isn’t. Until Stepmother pulls them apart. Until the policeman takes Mother away.
In the window, there is Mother, lips pressed to the glass, blowing Daughter a kiss.
At a gas station, Daughter cries into a bag of Doritos and tells the adult behind the counter she’s lost. He asks where’s your mother? And she gives him the only number she knows.
*
A knock at the door.
Mother in the window, a kiss left on the glass.
Daughter wants to run.
Not Mother sucks her teeth, tells daughter not to worry.
*
Daughter belongs to Stepmother now.
Father doesn’t come home.
His addictions, Stepmother says.
*
Daughter is addicted to gambling. With the tooth fairy. She tells Father over lunch. Because of Not Mother, she says. You two should divorce.
We’re getting married, says Father. Says Not Mother coming in from the kitchen with
homemade muffins from ShopRite.
*
Mother retreats into the street, as she looks towards Daughter’s window. As she blows daughter a kiss.
Daughter watches her from her bedroom window.
Mother asks Father if he’s sober.
Daughter doesn’t understand.
Father says “abuse” and “divorce.”
There’s so little Daughter understands.
Mother is at the front door, screaming.
The same fist Mother used to break Father’s nose now gives the door a heartbeat.
by Miles Parnegg | Nov 19, 2024 | micro
They left the couch, a show about child prodigies gone insane in their twenties, and in her room he pulled loose her knotted drawstrings. Outside, snow. Frost clinging to power lines like cake piping, a blizzard fooling everyone and, for once, lingering. She breathed in and nodded, the hair under his palm short and prickly as iron shavings. Through the afternoon they touched each other, trading off—stopping now and then to make quesadillas, blush as they came out of the bathroom. He’d reach for Kleenex but she’d push up onto her knees and say, Let me, and bend her head to his abdomen, the way she did over a microscope in chem lab, curling her hair behind her ears, tucking the pendant on its chain into her shirt. Webs of ice spread from the corners of brittle windows, and the stuffed elephant on her bed—did he have a name?—was missing a marble eye, caught in a wink.
Wednesday came. Thursday. He drove down Edith with the heater on high, a beanie, a parka, ski mittens. His breath pluming in front of him as he waited for her to answer the door, the tongue of the lock licked slowly back in its bolt. They didn’t talk. They kissed and napped and felt their bare thighs pressed under sheets printed with royal corgis.
The last morning, as the thawing began, he hit black ice and floated into a ditch. He missed the telephone pole, and a neighbor in Carharts pulled him out with a cable and winch. He explained to her why he was late, pointing to the dented fender, the icy brush wedged in the radiator, the fan of mud up the left side—proof of gallantry—and they stood in the cold on her porch looking at the car, like it contained some answer, or a metaphor they’d draw on later. Inside’s heat moved out around their ankles and dissipated, and they stood on the frozen brick looking, afraid to move, as if they would dissolve if they drew their skin away and went back to what they could feel.
by Sarah Lynn Hurd | Nov 14, 2024 | flash fiction
I felt like television static that year—glossy-eyed afternoons at The Bitter End with a magazine straddling my lap, ears straining to dissect the waves: people chattering, milk steaming, door opening and closing—I was shimmery around the edges.
Most evenings, I drifted home through unexplored stretches of the city, somehow landing on the sidewalk outside my building. My roommate, Jolly, sat folded knees-to-chest, smoking a Montclair on the bottom step.
“Did you pass that accident?” She asked.
“Accident?”
“Don’t you usually take Jefferson? I read on Twitter that it was pretty gruesome.” I didn’t say anything. “Maybe accident’s the wrong word,” she said, stubbing out her cigarette. “They said the scene was active and graphic.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Apparently, someone had threatened to jump off the parking garage near the museum and then done it. Jolly talked about it for ten minutes—or maybe thirty.
She stared at me.
“Sorry, did you ask something?”
“You just don’t seem very present.”
“I don’t feel very present.”
“Maybe we should talk about something else,” she said.
I shrugged.
“You know Cora’s seeing a new girl?” She asked. “She’s always making this dumb face.” She raised her brows and pursed her lips.
“You don’t have to say that,” I said. “I’m honestly happy for Cora and her new girl.”
Cora and I were never a good match. We met when it was too hot out for logic or good sense. Humid twilights in August, sprawled on damp grass after the sprinklers ran in the public park, sucking on cherry pits and stained fingers. I’d trace along each bump of her knuckles, her hand in a loose fist on my stomach.
But all throughout winter, we were sullen, ladling our melancholy into each other until we both overflowed. Wine-tinged mouths dripping passive-aggressive remarks or nothing at all for days. It’s a wonder we made it six months each year, cyclically parting from March to July.
As the days grew long and sticky, we inevitably fell back together like mice into a bowl of oil, climbing atop each other to catch our breath. I don’t know if we kept the cycle up for the routine or because we couldn’t fully wash the oil off during our months apart. Our last split, Cora had told me, would be the final one.
“There’s nothing I can say that will make you feel better,” she said, boxes stacked in the hallway behind her. I wanted to ask, how about ‘never mind, I still love you?’ but her phone rang before I could open my mouth.
“This is Cora,” she answered, a plastic bag stuffed with dirty clothes and half-empty shampoo bottles digging into her soft inner elbow. She struggled to pull the apartment door open with her flexed foot. “I can talk—I was just wrapping something up,” she said into the phone.
By late September, she was with another, and I was taking a lot of long walks.
I’d been thinking about death that day when a stranger leapt from the parking garage near the museum, but I hadn’t been thinking about it like that. I’d been thinking about the first time you try to recall an inane detail about an ex and realize you can’t find it. What was her first dog’s name again? I had former lovers who could be dead by that metric—but like an oil stain, some people are impossible to completely wash away.
“Wanna grab something from Leo’s?” Jolly unraveled, standing.
“I’m not hungry,” I lied. “I’m gonna call it an early night.”
I climbed the three curving staircases to our attic apartment. With each floor, the stairwell grew darker, the air thicker. Even during the day, the hallway to our door felt like wading through black velvet, only the blue light of a phone screen to guide the way.
In my dimly lit kitchen, denouements swirled like fog, and I found myself rinsing lentils in a sieve over the sink. I used to sort the lentils while Cora peeled the garlic—I hated the paper-thin skin beneath my nails, perfumed oil seeping into my fingerprints. Even when we weren’t talking, she peeled the alliums. One night toward the end, we stood hip-to-hip in silence, Cora peeling, me dicing. She placed a naked yellow onion in my hand; I took it without a word. At some point, as I hacked into the celluloid-like rings, I realized she’d stopped moving.
“Do you need something else to do?” I asked without looking up.
Silence. I turned, and she stared straight ahead, eyes welling. “Cor, you can’t just be upset without telling me why.”
“Nothing,” she shook her head. “No, it’s just the onions,” she managed to choke on a laugh. I laughed with her, but I knew it wasn’t the onions. It was forgetting to return her texts when I went out with friends and lying about what I’d eaten all day. It was sneaking away to the bathroom after each meal and ignoring her for a week if she talked to other girls at the bar, even though I’d been the one to kiss someone else.
On my own, I overcooked the lentils—burnt yet soggy. Squatting on a stool beside the compost bin, I spooned them into my mouth anyway. My therapist said I should build a ritual around eating—set the table, use my favorite hand-thrown bowls, tuck my phone away—she said it would help me stay present, find my body’s cues.
But I didn’t want to feel my heart’s rapid jostling—a reminder that my body was soft, weak, and filled with blood—that it would burst on contact with pavement from a few stories up. I was tired of months seeping between my fingers as I lolled fully clothed atop the comforter for a time-lapse of seasons. Was it a kind of death? Those last few flickering scenes before sleep, like rainbow-gray waves collapsing across a television screen, sometimes felt like falling.
by Ciara Alfaro | Nov 11, 2024 | micro
after Meredith Martinez
My husband left me in February. He left with my love in his hands, and I walked to the pharmacy for a carton of eggs. The eggs were carried home in my dirty tote bag like a promise kept. I did not swing them, jerk them, or threaten to jostle them excessively. I walked past the K-Mart and the spinal specialist. The sky was pregnant gray, but passing the shops, all I could see was red. The thought of brittle shells crawled beneath the skin of my fingers. My hands felt stone cold then, the way a neck crack tastes. Once home, I placed the eggs in the fridge—cleared out a whole shelf for them. It’s not so hard, to make space for a fragile thing. All you have to do is open the cold, hard machine with an oath to move gently inside. That night, I could not sleep, for I could hear the phantom cracking of the eggs inside my ears. I felt them between my teeth. What happens to sadness grinded in the mouth? It never speaks. I hurried through the bodies that furniture makes in the dark, my stomach and pelvis slick with sweat. I kneeled in front of the refrigerator’s chill. Gently, I opened the carton of eggs. I counted them. I pressed my finger to their heads, sighing when I hit a special rocked groove. I rolled them around in my palm until I felt their insides move back. This was how I named them, how I loved them, how I vowed never to leave them first or even second. I bought ninety more cartons until April came. I broke teeth. I saw red. I had a man—a body in my arms—and then, I did not. What happens to an egg that is never eaten? It dries out. It becomes unusable. Spoiled, miscarried. When I say grief, this is what I mean.
by Nora Nadjarian | Nov 4, 2024 | micro
The moonlight-sequinned sea says There’s something I want to tell you. I walk on, pretending not to hear, fling a pebble at her face, then another, as far as they’ll go. The sea says, Listen to me, please. I want to tell her, Shut your waves up, shut your waves up and leave me alone; I just came here to light a cigarette and moon-breathe, not to talk about the past.
Sunburned tourists sit on van Gogh chairs, rest their elbows on checked tablecloths. I almost choke on the ebb of my memories and their flow. The sea says I didn’t mean it; the sea says I’m sorry, repeatedly.
A-long-time-ago returns, not as the calm moon but as a fierce sun, the sequins now on fire, the skin-peeled, salt-stung, sunscreen-polished tourists on their sunbeds, eyes shut under their umbrellas. Nobody saw anything. Not a single person noticed anything wrong with the world here on the spot where two girls stood. Two best friends dressed in matching bikinis, with matching ponytails and chipped nail-varnish toes, wade in, giggling. There’s a whole sea we can hide in, and the sea asks, Where are your parents? And the sea asks Where? The sea asks are? The sea asks your –
by Yejun Chun | Oct 31, 2024 | micro
My lover says that they’ll give me 380 words before saying goodbye forever, and it’s
380 words because she’s going to be dragged back North across the border and I’ll have to be
separated to the South;
she checks her watch and tells me that I have 333 words left, so I grab a white brush
and dip it into ink, and I slowly write in traditional Chinese letters a poem from a Korean scholar
whom she likes very much, who wrote the poem during the colonial period, on her linen shirt
and then tell her of the time she was with me
when my uncle died and when he died, he died with a bullet to his innocent head
because he was wearing the color blood red which is the color of our hearts when we touched
each other’s skin, when we still had the passion and strength and courage to tell jokes to each
other.
We once went on a trip to see fields of rice and barley and we danced in the yellow
fields and it felt like a prayer, a message somewhat divine we were sending to the universe
through our bodily movements in the midst of that rainstorm and our recreation of our long-
lost childhood during which we never once saw the tip of a black gun.
I love you not only because of the small moments we spent together but also because
of the moments we didn’t spend with each other. The stars at night have never been so
bright to me, and the sound of pansori has never felt so sweet to my ears yet teary to my eyes.
Time can move so silently with you.
I have only 93 words now. Such a short time to do anything. It’s almost time to go.
She cries out as if words could last longer than a word count. Here’s an image:
Blue Han river flowing and carrying us on a wooden boat. Clear sky above us, and we
are holding hands: immortal in the moment.
Before she disappears and crosses the border, I kiss her lips, knowing that I have just
drank rice juice with her an hour ago, so she’ll think of my timeless love for her whenever she
drinks her favorite drink.
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