The Last Laugh

by M. Lea Gray | Aug 5, 2024 | flash fiction, publications

The lingering perfume of a million flowers is so thick in the funeral home showroom that invisible rose petals plaster the inside of my mouth. Navy curtains hang heavy and block out the daylight because it really is easier to mourn in controlled lighting without the distraction of bikes and buses and joggers living, fully living the way people do under the big bright yellow sun.

A salesman in the funeral home stands over Mom and me. He’s very sorry for our loss. He understands how difficult these decisions are, but does he actually understand? Has he ever watched someone die piece by piece, one day at a time, or is he like mostly everyone else who backs away because watching someone dissolve taints the memories, so friends and family, every single goddamn fucking person who said, Whatever you need, call, I’m here for you, is just a bag of hot air who I bet will show up at the funeral and mumble how they wish they could have done more. The salesman bows his head, so his shoulders swallow his chin, and in a short, sharp whisper, he calls the urn. Mom is holding a luxury vehicle like it’s some kind of exotic ship. The urn is stainless steel. It’s got that cold bluish tint, so it looks sterile. The salesman has a practiced sombre mask, and he knows exactly how long to keep a string of serious silence hanging between all three of us before he asks if we’re interested in knowing how much?

Mom’s laughter starts breezy and light, fluttering through the hushed whispers rising out of the clusters of people choosing between casket and cremation. Her laughter grows out of some mutated clump of cells the size of an orange pushing against her brain. Her laughter swells from breezy into a thundering boom that levels the funeral home showroom like a shock wave, and a woman pawing through swatches of silky casket linings staggers as if some invisible hand pushed her from behind. The woman clings to a man next to her, cowering from the invisible assault. The salesman chokes on a gasp, but he recovers his solemn seriousness and tries to redirect Mom and me back to the luxury vessel’s quality craftsmanship. He doesn’t miss a beat as he launches into reassuring us that the remains will be totally secure once the urn is sealed. The remains. The sealed remains. Mom’s laughter tapers off into a dry, hacking cough. Automatically, I pull a Kleenex out of my pocket in case her eyes start leaking, but it’s not her eyes this time and by the time I get the Kleenex twisted into bullets and pushed into Mom’s nostrils, three drops of blood are streaking down the potbelly of the luxury vessel. The salesman breaks his sombre mask and recoils at the sight of Mom’s blood. It’s probably more life than he’s used to.

A fresh round of hiccupping chuckles is building, and in a minute, hysterics will have Mom doubled over, clawing for air.

The clusters of people in the showroom slap their hands over their mouths. So appalled. So outraged, and my god, we should know better. We should know better! They can’t believe we’d steal their grief. They can’t comprehend this cruel invasion into their very private, very difficult, deeply personal moment, and what kind of people are we? We have no decency. And maybe we don’t have decency because that was one of the first things to go when the mutated clump of cells started pressing buttons in Mom’s brain, and pee dribbles turned to soaked pants and humiliation in the supermarket checkout line while she stood in a yellow puddle, when every single son of a bitch holding their jugs of milk and bags of potatoes, who sit at tables in her diner, her fucking diner!, and know her name and ask about the family, the kids, Any summer vacation plans?, backed away from us like they’d catch whatever she had. I’ll say it again, I bet they all show up at the funeral and mumble about how they wish they could have done more.

Mom flips open the urn, so her airy giggle rings through its hollow belly. She closes the lid and traps her voice like a songbird. I hope the luxury vessel seals her voice forever so I can press my ear to its stainless-steel body and listen to her laugh forever. Soon enough, Mom won’t bother anybody. Soon enough, Mom will be just a collection of fading memories.

“Is there a better time?” The salesman avoids looking at Mom. He pleads with eyes that beg me to get Mom out of the showroom because this is a place for the dead. Can’t I see that?

Mom’s laughter splinters, warbles, and swells into a lump she clears out of her throat like phlegm. “What’s the return policy?” Mom asks.

The salesman’s eyes crisscross from the question, but he tries again to regain control of the sale before the commission on this top-of-the-line urn slips out of his hands. He picks right up where he left off, and the cracks in his sombre mask smooth over, so once again, he understands how difficult this is for us, but “All sales are final.”

Bloody bullets of Kleenex hang from Mom’s nostrils, and no one in the showroom is even pretending not to stare. The woman from the earlier assault forgets her grief, forgets her weak state of mourning, and she rears up like a snake about to strike. The woman dares Mom to snicker just one more time, and she wags the swatches of silky casket linings like she’s threatening a bratty child who could use a good wallop to put them in their place.

Mom holds the urn up to her face, huffs hot breath onto her distorted reflection, and wipes away the streaks of blood with the cuff of her sweater. “Well, I can’t try it on,” she says.

True Story

by L Mari Harris | Jul 31, 2024 | flash fiction, publications

I watch her pocket two Snickers bars while I’m ringing up the guy who always buys a can of Skoal and a tallboy.

His name is Billy. Nice guy, friendly. Works at the tire factory or the auto shop, I can’t remember which.

He’s watching the girl, too, as she heads to the front doors, the afternoon sun glaring on the cases of water bottles and the rack of sunglasses.

Billy says to the girl, “Hey, I saw what you did. Put them back.”

I wave Billy off and give her a look like I’m sorry we interrupted her day.

“It’s okay. Go,” I tell her.

Billy shoots me a look like, What the hell? I thought you were one of the good guys.

“She looks hungry,” I offer in the way of explanation.

“But stealing’s not right,” Billy says. “You should call the cops.”

By now, the girl has slipped through the doors, and we watch her walking along the grassy median that separates the highway. Semis and $80,000 Dodge Rams whiz by, spraying her with water that hasn’t drained off from last night’s storms.

I can feel Billy watching me watch her. “I’ve seen her before. Nothing good’s coming from the way she’s living,” he says.

“And we’re doing any better?” I say, somewhere between dead serious and a joke.

Billy shrugs, slaps a twenty down, tells me to keep the change. Tells me work’s been picking up lately, that it’s a good time in his life and he’s not messing it up again.

In this version, Billy shows up with some girl tagging after him.

Her hair and clothes are damp, like they’d been parked down by the river and out of nowhere she decided to jump in for a quick swim. Maybe they just met and she was trying to impress him. Maybe she slipped on a rock. Probably Billy told her, “Do this and I’ll love you forever.” Billy seems like that kind of guy.

Or maybe she’s his wife. She looks a lot younger than Billy, but what do I know? People can surprise you. They surprise me all the time. Like that woman who comes in wearing a business suit and heels, hair in one of those fancy chignons, and buys one pack of Swisher Sweets Minis, grape flavor, that she tucks into the bottom of her purse. You’d never guess it looking at her, fancy corporate woman like that, smoking cheap cigarillos on the sly.

Billy sees me looking at the girl’s wet hair and clothes. You’d think he’d offer up some kind of explanation, but he just tells her to go grab them a couple of candy bars, whatever looks good, while he points at the Skoal cans behind me.

He asks me if I’ve heard about the couple going around robbing convenience stores—In broad daylight. Can you believe the balls?—and I tell him the liquor store a few blocks over got hit last night.

“No shit?” Billy says. “Changing up their MO. That’s smart.”

The girl shows back up and puts two Snickers bars down on the counter.

Billy pulls a twenty out of his shirt pocket. “Yep. Keep them guessing. That’s real smart.”            He asks the girl, “Hey, don’t you think that’s smart?”

“I guess,” she says, not taking her eyes off the Snickers bars.

“You guess?” Billy looks at me like he can’t believe he’s having this conversation. “You guess? Smart and sly’s where it’s at. How many times I gotta go over this with you?”

This is the version I tell the cops:

He pulled a gun on me, not the other way around. I lunged over the counter when I saw that gun pointed in my face, grabbed his arm and we wrestled over it, because I wasn’t about to die making $12 an hour where people are always shoplifting shit anyway, and besides, who am I to know what someone’s going through, why they feel the need to steal candy bars or tallboys, maybe they’re hungry, or maybe they had a bad day at their own shitty job.

What? Yeah, I’ve seen him in here before, he comes in a lot, maybe he’s been casing the place; sometimes he comes in with a girl who always looks like she just rushed out of the shower, sometimes not, guy’s always friendly.

Yeah, could be. Now that I think about it, maybe too friendly. And she never talks, but today she kept yelling Don’t you hurt him! and I’m thinking what a weird thing to say, he pulled a gun on me. And then I notice they both have the exact same hazel eyes, and it hits me, who the hell brings their kid along to a robbery, and then I feel this pain shoot up my arm, all the way to the shoulder, and I see his mouth moving, but I can’t hear him, and then my ears pop and I hear screaming, and he’s looking down at the floor, up at me, down at the floor, up at me, then he’s running out the doors, then you guys show up and all I can do is point toward the highway, and I can’t remember the girl running after him, you’d think he wouldn’t leave her behind, right? His own daughter?

No, sir, never have. Nothing good comes from having one around. Only one time I’ve ever held a gun. Thrust in my hand by my dad, uncle, one of Dad’s friends? I can’t remember anymore. Only thing I remember is how cold and heavy it was, how it wasn’t at all like I’d expected, how surprised I was. It felt just like that.

Newfoundland

by Phillip Grady | Jul 29, 2024 | flash fiction, publications

We put our seed in the ground and buried a body, but the land gave us nothing in return for the price we paid for it, for the weight of the earth that we piled onto someone who was our own. And after such a loss, what else did we expect? We wandered through our own house. Front door impossible, backyard a stranger. Attempted to communicate with others in a language we no longer spoke. The ache inside us was no surprise, especially when it bled out into our everyday lives, venting through cracks and fractures. We pretended we had nothing left to lose, although we were wrong about that, of course. I lost you in the wet heat outside Atlanta, stuck in traffic, while you fussed with the air conditioner. We were both scorched and empty, like a kettle screaming on a burner as the water boils off into steam. You were sorry, and I was sorry, and I said goodbye so I didn’t have to feel sorry all the time.

I rode trains north, carried along as if on a fast river. Seven hundred miles with a paperback thriller someone had forgotten, interrupted only by the announcements of miscellaneous towns. I abandoned the train in Washington, and I hurried down the National Mall, ignoring monuments dedicated to wars and wars and murder. Things were better in Baltimore, with pit beef on a kaiser and greasy fingers, a calm looseness blooming in my head. The nights were becoming easier. I was sleeping past dawn again. In Philadelphia, I looked five years younger, and although I wasn’t the person I used to be, I pretended to be that person, if only for a minute.

I was content with life in motion, suspended halfway between leaving and arriving. In Manhattan, I waded through trapped heat to Penn Station. I was excited by the idea of Providence, something that was absent from me and that I longed for. At Providence Station, I asked about beaches and how to get there, and I swam in chest-high surf. Rolling waves, one after another, the water full of stringy, rust-colored seaweed that reminded me of swimming in hair. The forest in Maine was silent in October, the floor cushioned with spent pine needles. A woman warned me about bears, and when to run, and when to puff up and yell. Sprays of steam from a teakettle on a cabin stove in thin, cold air. A reoccurring dream of Atlanta shook me from my stupor. I missed you constantly. How far away could I get from you? Where was the opposite of you? The road was the arrow of a compass pointing north.

Whenever people asked questions, I’d gesture behind me and make something up. Any other past was preferable to my own. I had a degree in history, so I was a professional. I could invent any past that I wanted. Where was I from? What work did I do? Phoenician trader, Mesopotamian brewer, goat herding on the steppe. But not from here. From anywhere, everywhere else.

I started walking. Sometimes, I dropped off the road and slept in a ditch—days of sore feet and police with questions. I bought boots and winter clothes in Augusta. Miles of blisters. Frost on gravel shoulders. Loaves of sandwich bread smeared with peanut butter. Instant noodles cooked with hot tap water. The life of economy, with each step creating a debt inside myself that I had no means of repaying. I was spending the part of me that I couldn’t hope to earn back. Poorer after every next minute, but always another mile, and a mile after that.

There was a sickness that got in me as I continued north. I began to slow down. Christmas Eve in a coffee shop, eavesdropping on two elderly men. Years spent together, their families raised as neighbors, each of them planted in the soil of their community eighty years earlier. As they talked, I was missing my own roots, which were gone. Then the old shits made racist comments about our server after she refilled the coffee cups. I fortified my coffee with cream and sugar for the extra calories, savored the hot nectar, and I was jealous. They had somewhere to go. People waiting for them.

Put a body in the ground, walk to Canada and find myself still on the same earth, as if on a treadmill, no further than where I started from.

I dreamed of you in a park with our girl, and a wind that thrashed the branches overhead and whipped your hair around. Maybe it would rain, or maybe not. “Should we go?” That’s what you asked me.

I couldn’t see our girl because you were in the way.

I was in a motel room in the middle of nowhere, flossing my teeth. I had a look in the mirror, and I thought: Goddamn, aren’t you a mess? You look terrible.

But I was flossing my teeth. I was trying. The awful parts of me were trying to become better again.

Along the coast of Nova Scotia, waves pounded the beach and raked tumbling, small stones out on the recede. I was sitting cross-legged, hands tucked in my pockets, my head churning and busy. My heart no longer hard, but heavy, living in the pit of my stomach. New Brunswick to Quebec, over the St. Lawrence and north to Newfoundland. I liked the sound of Newfoundland.

In the dead weeks before real spring, I was raw and hungry. Lips and fingertips chapped and cracked. My boots sank in mud and I worried about my feet, trying to look after them with pairs of hand-washed socks while I begged the sun overhead for warmth.

Cold mornings. Foggy, shrouding, unwelcome icy rains.

All the way to the horizon if we can, if we let ourselves, if we’re doing it right, and then we turn around.

Act As If

by Miriam Gershow | Jul 25, 2024 | flash fiction, publications

In the bottom of Zadie’s purse, as she sits in a lightly upholstered chair at the DMV to get her license reinstated, everyone packed in side by side by side, Zadie number 23 with number 72 currently being served:

1. A half-wrapped mint filched from the bowl on the hostess stand at the Mexican restaurant Phil drove them to last Wednesday, the mints there for the taking, but Zadie with the feeling she was stealing, Zadie always with the feeling of being caught, the unwrapped half tacky to the touch, gathering lint;
2. Lint from wadded up tissues for nagging allergies and occasional (if no longer frequent) crying jags;
3. One useless tampon still in its crinkly wrapper, hearkening a bygone era, testament to Zadie’s wont toward accumulation, everything gathering and taking permanent root;
4. Nicorette gum 15-pack, four pieces left, 11 hollows in the plastic packaging big enough for the tip of her ring finger to fit in and out of, like playing hidden harmonica, good for keeping her hands busy;
5. Red chip that replaced first Zadie’s beginner’s-luck green chip, then later, her claw-her-way-back, mouth-full-of-hot-spit-day-after-day silver chip;
6. Auto insurance card with a quarterly premium that could buy instead a halfway decent used couch off Craigslist, three credits at the nearest community college for training in auto maintenance or graphic design, ten bottles of single barrel straight bourbon;
7. The flip phone she’d replaced her smartphone with, so she’d have one less thing calling out every second of every day for wanting;
8. The signed Certificate of Completion from Tonya, the hippy (as in pear-shaped, not as in pot-smoking) teacher who lectured about response times and legal definition of impaired and classifications of drugs to a roomful of students that should have made Zadie feel camaraderie, though mostly she was distracted by the yellow-haired girl who picked each week at the badly healing tattoo of everyone’s favorite cartoon rabbit on her inner arm;
9. Empty pack of Marlboro Reds, the insides still smelling of free fall and possibility in a way that was supposed to repel Zadie but did not;
10. Bent-to-hell photo of her father (dead) holding Zadie and Phil’s infant son (grown and gone) gazing at each other in a manner which neither gazed at her so far as she could remember;
11. Dumb piece of paper with dumb three-word aphorism written on it that she’d referred to a startling number of times during the days and hours of her mouth full of hot spit and now just had to rub between her thumb and finger to remember its dumbness, its dumbness sometimes helping, so dumb;
12. Key ring with her house key and her car key that she’d kept on this whole time, a carrot or a stick, she was not sure; a taunt of encouragement: Come on, you asshole;
13. Empty Altoids tin, cool in her fist till she warmed it, a feeling of power in warming it. There she was. She was there. Here. Here she was;
14. The number 23 tab she’d pulled from the dispenser after the Uber dropped her in front of the DMV, her thinking without thinking, My lucky number, even if Zadie had never been one to believe in such a thing—too whimsical—though 23 would be from here on out, lucky, even if she did not recognize it as such, a nameless warmth when she spotted 23 on a mile marker or in the license plate ahead of her on the back of a pickup, she misunderstanding luck as random anointment, not of her sweat, her effort, her own hourly, daily making and remaking.

Could Die for Just a Wee Lie-Down

by Elissa Field | Jul 22, 2024 | flash fiction, publications

Beatriz had been insisting since waking that we go to the house at the top of our road, on the rise above the sea. I was barely moving—even a four-year-old should sense something amiss when the full weight of her tugging on each of my limbs has not moved the hull of me off the beached headland of the couch.

The week before Beatriz was born, a whale beached herself down on the strand, all of us from the estate barnacled, staring beneath the dune, hands covering our mouths each time the great maw gasped its epic exhale in exhaustion.

In my mind, I’m telling Beatriz this story. It is half fairy tale: titian glow of dawn gilding the silky sands of that long stretch of beach in the cup of our bay, all magic and hope. It is half cautionary tale, all the fangs and evil trees and ragged wolf pelts and failed miracles of Grimm.

Our neighbor at the top of the road, Lorna, has hung pictures of angry cats in every window of her house to discourage a chaffinch that had been concussing itself in an effort to kill his own reflection in the glass. Beatriz has seen the cats and is sure they are a sign: she had asked for a kitten. We had a cat, but he’d wandered off. Left me alone with this feral energy balled up and demanding: Beatriz tugs me by the fingers, by my elbows, my feet. “Lorna hung them for meeee… We need to goooooooo, go noowwwwww…”

In my head, I am telling her the exact slate blue of the whale, exact slow rotation of her eye. Gorgeous death, sighing sea air—sky pink—there where our children picked shells and bits of slate, piled turrets and moats. Scientists up from the aquarium told us the whale was healthy. Not yet middle-aged. A mother. A ring of boats had garlanded the bay like some tourist postcard, doing their best to herd the whale’s confused calf, not yet sure how to surface and breathe. Let alone feed. “Selfish bitch!” Lorna had hissed at my elbow. Out of habit, I’d muttered, “Sorry,” without the superstition, yet, to worry that I’d hexed myself. Taken on that sorry and longing and broken navigation and overloaded sonar and misplaced mothering skills. I felt Beatriz somersault in the ever-tighter confines that pushed my entrails into crevices beneath my ribs, felt that giddy tickle of her hiccup, that scrape of glitter and hope. “She is still breathing,” the scientist said of the whale, and Lorna had laughed at me, said I was crying when I answered, “Of course she is.”

Finally, I give in—ask Beatriz, “What is it, love?” Not realizing I’m responding not to her question but her absence. My Beatriz. Her badger-dark eyes. The hedgehog-spite of her hair. Her rabbity stillness and sudden movement. The shrillness of her joy.

She has gone out, gone alone up the street to the house on the corner.

I can’t breathe, of a sudden.

The weight, it must have been. Can you imagine? All your life, the utter weight of you buoyed by the crush of ocean around you. And that one time, that one time, just the once, you think, It would be so nice to lie down. To not swim. Not surface to breathe, not breach, not trap clouds of sardine in a blast of spiraled bubbles. Not nudge the baby, over and over, to the surface. Just. Just lie down a bit. That silken beach over yon. The way it warms with the sun. Just a lie-down, just a minute. Just a rest.

Beatriz comes back down the road to me. All those fears, but truth is, our calves don’t stray, not even when they should. The bounce of light in her auburn crazed halo, the ludicrous rise of her arms like antennae, reaching for the glitter ball above a dance floor, useless for streamlining her run, useless for maintaining balance, all Woo Woo and celebration. Raises a picture in each hand, her miniature parade banners. My neighbor—god fuck me, if it isn’t Lorna—tight-wrapping her cardigan ’round herself, smug and judgmental in Bea’s wake.

“My told you, my told you!” Beatriz singsong chastises, balloon-burst of noise come back in through the door.

I’m on my “good company” behavior now—I’ve sat up, pushed a hand through my hair. Beatriz is in my lap in an instant, the pictures smashed against my eyes so I could see what I was too stubborn to take her to get. Lorna will move more slowly. So much judging to itemize, moving from the open back door through the kitchen. Stacked sink, open boxes, cups upon cups, heaped laundry, dropped shoes.

“It is a cat,” I tell Bea, “I see that.”

“Noooo,” she corrects me, because again I am wrong. Pushes both pictures against my cheeks, presses hard. I might get it then. “Two cats!”

“You are so clever!” I praise her, because we are supposed to affirm our daughters, feed them positive images for themselves from a young age so they can see the full wide range of chances available in their future. My eyes are tracking Lorna. Sounds come from her that are not words. She is my mother tsk-ing. She is my grans.

“Ninety-one tons,” I say, and my beautiful Bea asks, “Is that a lot? Is that how many cats?”

Ninety-one tons, that whale would have weighed once she’d eased herself out of water and onto land. The crush of it. Just for the sake of a lie-down. And all of them, out there in the bay, bobbing in their bright colored boats, heads turned to murmur, “Selfish bitch!” for what she’d done. For what she’d done to that little pale calf out there, cavorting in the waves.

The Eulogy Competition

by Lisa Ferranti | Jul 18, 2024 | flash fiction, publications

My father tells all three of us to write a eulogy and he’ll decide who gets to deliver theirs at our mother’s funeral in five days. Tom’s jaw sets, determined. Diane nods, eager to please. I narrow my eyes at Dad, resenting the competition he fuels between us, even as adults. I’m the youngest, nicknamed Flaky Suzy, and I will not win. The sweaty-palmed funeral director ushers us to the door. The flowers in the hallway are plastic but I swear I can smell gardenias, Mom’s favorite.

We have our marching orders and go our separate ways. Being the least responsible, I’ve been assigned relatively few duties, so I head to the coffee shop with my notebook and consider what to say about Mom.

Should I tell about the time she won top prize for flower arranging at the state fair? How I’d never seen her smile so wide, not even when Tommy was state swimming champ.

Or about when she was PTA president and planned the best school carnival ever, with a dunking booth. For one dollar we could try to dunk the principal and teachers. But that’s more Tom’s story, since he holds the record from that day.

The story about finding our dog, Lucille, is a good one. Dad was at work and the four of us searched for hours. Tom and Diane pedaled off on their bikes, and I rode in the car with Mom. She drove slowly and I hollered Lucy out the window. Diane is the hero of that tale, though, finding Lucy trapped inside our neighbor’s pool fence and bringing her home just as we pulled into the driveway.

Should I tell about the times Mom let me play hooky from high school? How she would call the office to say I had a cold and would be absent, my face growing hot, not with fever but with excitement that I’d get to spend the day alone with her. How we’d play gin rummy for hours. She smoked while we played, catching ashes in an old coffee can, sometimes letting me smoke too. At the end of the day, we opened windows, sprayed air freshener. Before I’d go to change out of my fake sick-day pajamas, she’d hand me the coffee can, lid on, to hide in my bedroom closet, a place Dad would never venture.

Should I tell about the time she confided to me she wanted a tattoo but couldn’t decide what to get? I’d sketched a rose as a suggestion. “Maybe my initials instead,” she said, and I penned a scripty MS. She smirked, saying we’d have to add her middle initial or it would look like it stood for multiple sclerosis. She never got a tattoo, but I wonder if we breathed life into the idea? If that was the day her body birthed the germ of the disease, marking her on the inside because ink never did bloom on her skin?

Or what about when she showed up at my apartment, braving the sketchy part of town where I lived in an artist loft with five friends, including boys. How we sat on the threadbare sofa, and I jokingly offered her a shot of whiskey. The bottle was on the coffee table from the night before, when we’d toasted my first modest commission from selling a painting. She accepted the shot, and a cold chill ran through me. She came to me because she knew I could help her—that I was maybe the only person who could. I held her hand when she said, “Suzy, can you imagine, at my age?” I didn’t judge when she said, “With you kids grown, I finally have a life again. No offense.” Her finger circled the rim of her glass.

We planned it for when my dad was away on business. I drove her to the clinic and stayed with her for two days at home, the first day telling Dad she was napping when he called.

I didn’t know then how often I would tell my dad half-truths. How it would continue long after Mom’s death. 

Three days before her funeral, in an uncharacteristic act of democracy, Dad tells the three of us to decide who will deliver the eulogy. We determine all of us will speak. It’s only fair.         

At the service, I listen to my brother and sister. To Tom’s precise words, no less meaningful for their razor-sharp exactness. I smile at Diane gushing about Mom being a wonderful grandmother, how happy she is that she (she doesn’t say she alone, but I hear it) was able to give Mom that gift.

I go last, of course, and I tone down my words, leaving only a little of the color everyone expects from me.

I don’t tell that when Lucille was lost all those years ago, Mom and I sat for a long time in the drugstore parking lot, not searching. How she said maybe we should just let the damn dog stay lost, then maybe Dad, who took Lucy hunting on weekends, would pay more attention to her again.

I can tell my family holds their breath, just a little, until I finish. And I enjoy, just a little, my power over them.

I will not tell them that there should be a fourth of us to speak. A boy or girl who would now be twenty-two years old. A younger sibling that never was. I wonder what our brother or sister would say if they could. Would they be angry about Mom’s decision, the one she questioned at times but was still glad she got to choose? Would they add to the unspoken chorus of who loved Mom more? Who loved her best? I know we all loved her best, each in our own way. But I also know there’s no competition, really, because I’m the one who knew her best.

Protocol for What to Do after Hearing Another Rape Story in Exam Room Five

by Margaret Adams | Jul 11, 2024 | flash fiction, publications

1. First: Make sure your patient is safe. Hope that you gave the appropriate caveats when you told them that this visit is confidential, and make sure they don’t have any plans to hurt themselves or others. If they’re a minor, you may have to call Child Protective Services. If you didn’t properly warn them that this could happen if they disclosed this kind of harm, well, you are a huge asshole. Too late now. Let’s just hope you did.
2. Once you’ve made sure they’re safe in an immediate, physical, legal kind of way, start saying the right things. Tell them it’s not their fault. Tell them they’re not alone. Don’t tell them, Hell, yours isn’t even the first rape story I’ve heard TODAY. When you get the urge to say this, lean in hard to the open-ended questions. What do you need? Offer forensics, advocacy, Plan B, antibiotics, therapy, water, tissues. Respect whatever they want. Don’t offer your own thoughts or opinions.
3. After they’ve left, document. In your note, don’t use the word alleges. Don’t put “sexually assaulted” in quotes like you’re not sure. You would not write “patient alleges broken arm,” so don’t let the reflexive doubt of women seep in here. Don’t say simply that they were upset; describe instead the way their face didn’t move when they cried.
4. At this point, even though you’re done, their story is alive in your skin. Your brain is a lurching mammal, the large kind, but the large kind that eats grass and dies easily. Notice this.
5. Look down and realize that your shoes feel funny and that is because you now have hooves.
6. Tell your coworkers you are leaving for the day. See if they notice if you look different. They don’t, or you don’t, it’s unclear.
7. Go outside and lie on the grass. Don’t eat any of it, yet. Feel your limbs press into the ground. Try to loosen, let the earth do the work of holding your bones up. Your face feels furry. It’s hard to tell because your eyes are widely set now.
8. Get up and run around. Run around and around and around. Avoid the road, but also poorly lit areas. It’s hard to do both, but try. The sun will set soon.
9. If you are hit by a car, lie stunned on the side of the road, and know that the worst part is that if you live, you’re going to have to get up and keep going, eat more grass and have fawns and rub your rough fur on the sides of trees and probably, statistically speaking, get hit by another car, because deer are basically the pigeons of suburban America, and modern cars are pretty durable. Because that’s how society has dealt: we’ve made stronger cars.
10. Run home. Your hooves clop on the walkway to your door. Swivel your eyes and hold your keys like a weapon until you put them in the lock.
11. Sleep. Don’t remember how you got into bed. Don’t remember if you did or didn’t watch a few hours of television. Don’t remember if you drank water, or how.
12. Wake up. Pull pants on over your human legs. Pat moisturizer on your cheeks. Go to work. Ask the questions. Say the right things. Follow the protocol.

To The Tower

by Skyler Melnick | Jul 8, 2024 | flash fiction, publications

There are six of them. No, seven. They cycle out of the tower and into the night, following their headmistress. Their headmistress wears a habit. The girls wear cloaks, cloaks to hide their hunger.

I cannot tell you where they are going, but I’ll tell you this: they are following a man—a man in a suit, cufflinks, and dress shoes, a man on a bicycle. They trust the man, but the man should not trust them. A pack of young girls is not to be trusted.

But a pack of young girls has to eat. They have not eaten in weeks. Their headmistress is in charge of feeding them, and she has not been diligent.

I don’t like when they have mustaches, one of the girls whispers. The hairs get caught in my teeth.

I’m too starved to care, says another.

This is a farce, says a third. He is old and ugly and drooping in all directions.

The girls cycle to the river. They eat the man, but he is not enough. They eat their headmistress, too. One of the girls coughs up her habit, the fabric damp and clumped and bloodied.

We’re gluttonous, says the girl, tossing the habit into the river.

We ought to drown ourselves, says another. As penance.

She wasn’t our mother.

She was like a mother.

Our real mother is gone.

Gone because we ate her.

The girls think back to their mother, whom they ate. She tasted better than anything they’d ever known. Like moonlight and shadows and cardamom. They’d had to eat her. Because of circumstance. Because of growing up. Because they were so so hungry, and their mother wouldn’t let them out of the tower.

We ate our mother! one of the girls cries. They’re in the river now, all of them, deep in remembrance, letting their bodies float downstream like dead fish.

We ate our father, too, another reminds them. And the baby. And the chef. And our lover.

Our lover was sour.

Our lover was curdled milk.

The baby was an accident!

Mother placed the crib right beside our bed, they remember. The baby practically crawled into our mouths!

Made our mouths taste of childhood, and the ocean, and millions and millions of years––

We had to swallow it.

The girls whimper, snivel, swallow, gulp down river water.

This hunger, they lament. Will it never end?

They sob, tears filling the river, raising it. The current pulls their bodies, down and down, sometimes underneath, but always back to the surface, until the water shallows, and the pack washes up on its shore, hands linked, eyes puffy.

I feel a lot better now.

Yes, they all agree, standing up, arms still linked.

We ought to find our bicycles.

And our shoes.

Our feet are going to be terribly dirty.

We’ll wash them when we get home.

Soon, the girls are skipping, hand in hand, some giggling, cloaks dry and billowing in the

nighttime breeze. They return to the tower and tuck each other into bed.

Was the bed always this small? they ask one another.

Was the tower always this narrow?

The girls clutch their stomachs, which rumble like thunder. They are not satiated. They move their heads side to side, taking each other in—the supple skin, the tender flesh.