The Pebble and the Witch

by Emma Li | Jul 1, 2024 | flash fiction, publications

Transformation magic is easy. Gold into straw, carriages into pumpkins: the witch had done it a thousand times before. The man knew this. Or, perhaps more accurately, the pebble knows this.

The pebble sits in her pocket. Its companions are a dirty, wadded up tissue and a piece of strawberry wrapped candy. It has been in her pocket for a while now. It would not be there, had the man not wronged the witch.

They first met at the village tavern. She caught his eye, and they started talking. That night, he walked her home, and that morning, she walked him home. They began seeing each other regularly after that. They went on walks in the forest and talked and laughed for hours.

When they got hungry she would snap her fingers and transform leaves and twigs into fruits and cheeses, and they would go on talking. They soon spent all their time together.

In the mornings, before he left for work, he would make her breakfast and her favorite cold coffee with cream. In the evenings, after dinner, she would snap her fingers and transform water into whiskey or whatever he felt like that night. They fell into a quiet rhythm: one that the witch had always wanted and one that the man hadn’t realized he didn’t want. Sometimes, he tried to talk about it, but most of the time, they both ignored it.

The man started to have doubts. He began spending more and more time at work. The witch felt him pulling away and latched on harder. The man responded by staying away for days at a time. The witch caught him with a coworker.

They argued. Night fell. They argued. Dawn broke. They both said things they could never take back.

After he left, the witch sat at her table seething through tears. She thought about what she could do to him.

She could go with one of the classics and transform him into a tree. She’d heard of someone else, a warlock, who’d done that and chopped the guy up into firewood after. That wasn’t enough though, so he’d sent the logs to the guy’s family to keep them warm through winter. He even carved a branch into a toy for the guy’s children.

The witch considered her other options. She could turn him into a centipede— he was basically vermin already, after all — and she could keep him in a little glass terrarium, his legs scuttering away against glass too smooth to find purchase. He would never be able to leave her then. He wouldn’t be able to survive without her. He would be absolutely at her mercy.

Or what if she transformed him into marble and chipped him away bit by bit, slowly forcing him into a form of her choosing? She could carve him eyes but no mouth and force him to watch all their arguments, over and over again, so he would know that she was right and was wrong. She could do it. She could grind him into dust if she really wanted to. It’d be easy.

But that’s not when the man became the pebble. It isn’t as simple as that.

###

The man didn’t come back. She waited for him for days. A neighbor told her the man shacked up with the coworker. Of course, no surprise; he’d always been a rake. One day, the coworker had the gall to come and ask for the man’s stuff. The witch spat in her face and handed over a box full of ash.

Months passed. The witch’s rage simmered down into a bitterness thick enough to coat her tongue. She poured it into a cork-stoppered bottle but couldn’t stop herself from tasting it from time to time.

Years passed, and she partook of the bottle less and less. Eventually, it got pushed behind all the other jars of cumin and oregano, newt eyes, and frog toes. One spring morning, she found the bottle again while looking for a packet of strawberry candy. It was sticky with dust. She tasted it and found that the syrup had lost much of its bitterness, even developing delicate, floral notes.

She thought of the man for the first time in a while, and wondered how he was doing. A quick spell gave her the answer: a sailboat, a storm, followed by a memorial service.

###

The grass above the grave had shriveled into wilt. Rain left dark, dirty streaks over the headstone. Weeds had grown over the base.

The witch looked down and didn’t know what to feel, so she laced her fingers into the weeds and ripped. Dust shook loose from the roots. She tore at the dirt, leaving angry bald patches, followed by more meticulous plucking. Soon, the grave was neat and tidy. She pulled a wadded-up tissue from her pocket and wiped at the granite as best she could, clearing out the dirt that had settled into his name. With a snap, she transformed the dead grass into a bouquet of lilies and propped it against the stone.

For a long time, the witch stood at the foot of the grave. She didn’t try to think about anything in particular. Too much time had passed to remember all the details, and this emptiness filled her with the vague feeling like finding out a favorite perfume had evaporated into resin. She couldn’t remember what his voice sounded like or what his skin smelled like or even what his eyes looked like. Instead, all she could think about was how that glass of cold coffee looked on the counter, with leisurely swirls of cream mixing into the bottom.

Dusk brought a chill in the air. She began to walk away but paused with a sudden thought. She snapped her fingers and picked up a pebble from the grave. She tucked it into her pocket, where it sat next to a dirty, wadded-up tissue and a piece of strawberry-wrapped candy.

The Desert Sound

by Mikhaela Woodward | Jun 26, 2024 | flash fiction, publications

When I meet her, I say all the wrong things first.

Wind the beautiful.

Hair is yours.

Meet me nice.

Name I have.

All this to say: I will save the right things for last.

I recognize her from the wanted posters in the city where we are no longer allowed to speak. She is the woman in the pictures in every way and none.

A pleasure, she says.

Pleased, I say.

The desert howls grain into our ears. She finger-taps the top of her wooden staff, shakes a bracelet, hums an off-key tune. It’s hard to make a noise back, especially in front of her: the

sound thief. Alleged thefts: laughter, birdsong, the plush biting of fruit. They tell us to keep our sounds close to our chest, lest she find us in a dark street singing and take our music forever. You’re a bit quiet for an outlaw, she says.

Forgive me, I say. I am still learning to scream.

She smiles, and the glimmer of it looks so much like a fast-moving river that I want to run my fingers through her teeth. I step toward her. It is said if you speak into the sound thief’s mouth so closely that your lips are touching, you may steal it all back.

My canteen is empty, I say. Spare any water?

She obliges. She has to tilt her canteen very far to begin pouring into mine. Her eyes stir the blank horizons around us, and in the high noon sun, it is almost stunning how regular she is. How person. How me. How she curls a fist behind her back so I will not see her ripping at a hangnail.

The reward for her capture: a long and peaceful life of lemons and water.

You are wanted in the city, I say.

I am not sure why I tell her this. I am suddenly thinking very hard about the old blood crusted on my own worried nailbeds.

The sound thief spits froth into the cracked pale earth and says, I am glad. Who calls? The governor, I say.

That choke-worthy toe, she says. He acts as if I could steal whole sounds off the face of the earth. Imagine.

It is said the sound thief is not a woman of company. It is said the sound thief never quiets, fumbles, or breaks. It is said many things. I suspect most of them are not true.

When my father commanded her capture, I told him no. He reminded me of my duty as the cleverest of three sons. I reminded him that I do not care about thieves because I do not believe in property, to which my father smacked me hard on the back and growled into my ear: was I a man who wished to see his own father die of thirst or scurvy? Was I deranged, disobedient, suicidal?

I will give you the truth because lying is boring. I am not in the desert because I am stable in the head, obedient, or wish strongly to live. I am in the desert because I am a widower. I imagine the laughter of billions stacked neatly inside the sound thief’s chest like coins, besides other things that have gone: swallows, pomegranates, comedians. Those horrible comedy shows on the underground strip my wife loved so much. The smug smiles on the performers’ faces as they forced glee from our chests. Her hand hit the table when she laughed, bumping the ice cubes in my glass.

If I am so wanted, the sound thief says, why on earth am I dying in the desert? They are cowards, I say.

And you are not?

I am beyond fear.

Is that so?

The sound thief steps closer, scuffing the sand with her boots. For a second, I think I recognize her expression, how it lifts the skin above her wrinkles and winks at the sun above. The wide pores on her face grinning like little specks of moon.

It is, I say.

You must want, she says.

I do.

Name it.

I don’t remember.

Try.

I make a shuddering with my lungs. It sounds all wrong, like a bunch of bats banging into each other. I remember I have hidden the right words beneath my ribcage, for safekeeping. But they are so far deep, their shape unknown, like the name of my wife or the seed of a melon: small things wielding the threat of something colossally bigger. Seeds I used to swallow at mealtimes just to witness my wife’s deep superstitious concern for the guaranteed continuation of my life. You’ll explode, she’d say. You’ll grow into fruit. You’ll die. You’ll leave me behind. Please, just humor me.

She believed in a lot of things I didn’t understand. But here in the desert, I would gladly die by her slippery wives’ tale watermelon explosion if it meant remembering for one moment the exact way her laugh ricocheted across pools or her name: not what it was, but the way she said it when she said, Hi, my name is.

In the distance, the city is quiet.

The sound thief stands taller, with the posture of a battered lighthouse, and laughs darkly over her shoulder. I watch the direction the sound takes into the sky and feel it wing something open inside of me.

Our Lady of Clean Kitchens

by Joseph Hernandez | Jun 24, 2024 | flash fiction, publications

On the morning of her last day alive, Tía Reina awoke with a halo of bright pink aligning her forehead.

“A fever,” she told us. “It will pass.”

What she didn’t know then was that she had become a saint overnight (this we learned posthumously, after consulting a couple of priests, a friend of a relative’s Sunday school teacher, and after almost getting in touch with the Vatican). There had been a hitch, we deduced, in the saintmarking process, and Reina had been appointed before her passing when normally this happened after death, in the bodyless limbo of Judgment.

To ease the pain, we offered her Aspirin and ice, but she wouldn’t take anything. She even declined any homemade remedies that would usually do the trick.

“It will go away,” she said. “I feel fine.” Then she went to the closet, pulled out a bucket and a mop, and started to clean around the whole house.

Towards the end of her life, Reina had had three main priorities: her faith, her home, and her family. Despite constant pressure from her mother, she never married or had any children of her own. Her life had become a perpetual cycle of cooking, cleaning, and praying.

“I am happy with what I do,” she’d explain, amid our badgering at family get-togethers. “I am at peace when I can think and breathe in a clean, white room.”

The church she attended was all white, too, both inside and outside, with the exception of the wooden pews and the kaleidoscope of colors from the stained-glass windows. We’d even joked that her house was more spotless than the holy house, much to her objection.

By late morning, a soft glow had adorned her long, brown hair, so that it looked reddish in the light. She had always been marveled at for her fairer complexion, while many of us had darker features, so this new luminosity rendered her all the more outstanding.

When covering her head in a scarf did nothing to subdue her hairlight, she clicked on all the house lamps despite the early hour.

“My old eyes need to see better,” she said as she filled a large plastic bowl with water from the kitchen sink.

After this, she began her alchemy of disinfection, hunched over the bowl as if it were a neon-colored cauldron. This was a science only she knew – how many droplets of green soap; whether to add baking soda or bleach, vinegar or lemon juice. She would stir the contents, humming quietly to herself, until the whole of the kitchen smelled sterile (we sometimes wondered if the fumes alone could erase grime). Next, she would soak rags of old t-shirts in the mixture and use these to wipe countertops, windowsills, and tables alike. A bowlful of this concoction usually lasted half a week, by which point the surfaces of Reina’s home were immaculate enough to turn tap water holy.        

When Tía Reina’s ritual of cleaning was finally finished for the day, she sat to eat dinner. Though she normally cooked for all of us, even after all her labor, today she moved more slowly.

“Don’t strain yourself,” we told her. “Let us cook for you.”

We supped at a small table, plastic and round. One of the legs was shorter than the others so that the table wobbled every time someone moved a plate of carne or a bowl of frijoles. Later, we’d remember this as Reina’s last time enjoying carne, frijoles, and tortillas. She ate everything with great fervor, and when she was finished, she didn’t belch as she normally did. Instead, she bowed her head and said another round of grace.

After dinner, she went to her bedroom to rest. As she stood to leave the table, she swayed, gripping the rungs of a wooden chair for support. When she found it difficult to take a step, she called for one of us to help her. By now, her entire body had been dressed in brightness, setting the kitchen aglow as if touched by sunlight.

“The fever,” she said. “Too hot.” Her eyes were closed as she said this. We guided her to her room and laid her on her bed as gently as a sacrament, then kissed her searing forehead and left her for the night.

We found her the next morning, well past the mopping hour. On any other day of her life, her floors would be glistening with wet by now, her hands smelling strongly of detergent and lemons. She lay on her bed, unmoving. All light had left her now. We bent low over her, touched her upon the brow, and said some prayers.

In time, the Heads of Church came and marked the house as a Holy Sight, the Church’s devout equivalent of a crime scene. Where cautionary tape would be stretched across the outside fences; instead, a perimeter of holy water was sprinkled around the yard.

And though Tía Reina was gone, her kitchen retained its immaculacy. The room was so white it glowed, and what was believed to be a divine layer of bleach and supermarket-grade cleaning products prevented any filth from ever appearing on the walls and floors. Eventually, it was converted into a shrine to commemorate the Patron Lady of Soap and Water and was named ‘The Church of Our Lady of Clean Kitchens.’ Mothers and grandmothers from different counties would bring their children and surround the sanctuary with biblical simulacra wrapped neatly in saran; babies were brought to be baptized in the sink; the oven was used to make sacramental bread. We held services once a week, only on Sundays, to propagate the teachings of Santa Reina. Throughout, our hymns and voices echoed like the sound of running water spilling from a faucet.

The Astronaut Shops

by Dustin M. Hoffman | Jun 10, 2024 | flash fiction, publications

The astronaut pushes a wire cart through the supermarket. Their body is obscured beneath the thick, radiation-proof fabric. Their face hides behind the mirrored shield opaque enough to block the sun. We decide to assume the astronaut is a she, for women make better astronauts.

The astronaut is squeezing avocados. She is counting bananas. She is weighing envy apples on a chromium scale. She holds a zucchini up to her reflective visor, as if sniffing. The mirrored surface doubles the zucchini. We encounter her again near the deli, and we nod and smile, but she’s busy trying to gain the butcher’s attention. Two salmon filets, she signals to the butcher by tapping a pointer finger on the glass at the ruby flesh and then making a V shape with her fingers.

So she’s shopping for a partner. Space is lonely without a lover. We are pleased for her to have company.

Her cart blocks our path in the cereal aisle, where the astronaut is selecting a box of bran flakes—practical and efficient. We wait patiently, try not to ogle. She pulls a box of Lucky Charms, turns the box to read the side, and despite so many inscrutable ingredients she places the box in her cart. Should we warn her about the article we read identifying potentially carcinogenic dyes? We do not, for we need a box of Lucky Charms to take home to our own children. It’s all they’ll eat most mornings. We’ll take potential doom over starvation. We’ll risk spoiling over withering.

And what of the astronaut’s progeny? We must follow her into the next aisle, where she buzzes past the diapers. Her own undergarments, we know, must be the same as all astronauts wear, briefs regulated by NASA, designed to capture all biological waste. We know this, but not what purchase comes next. No diaper cream for her. No formula. No baby shampoo. So why even bother here? But, then she reaches the deodorant, and we pretend to busy ourselves examining diaper boxes, though our children are teenagers now. We’re not fooling anyone into mistaking us for new parents with our plentiful gray hairs. The astronaut seems enraptured by the deodorant choices, each plastic container shaped like a rocket, helmeted with a transparent shell. A dizzying row of mini astronauts awaits her selection. She lifts them to her visor, taps them against her glass. Old Spice, Secret, Degree, Teen Spirit. She might spend all day deciding, we think, before she tosses a stain-reducing Arm and Hammer into her cart.

We imagine an astronaut’s body as a work of art, a stringent discipline of muscled perfection and grace. There should be no business in the junk food aisle. Yet the astronaut fills the cart with Doritos, one bag of each flavor, including the new pickle one that no one could possibly enjoy. Oreo cookies with triple stuff pass through her gloved fingers. She’s going for all the name-brand products, no knock-offs, and we’re pleased our American space heroes are compensated handsomely. Then we remember NASA is funded by our tax dollars, as we select a small box of store-brand oatmeal cookies. Resentment bristles within us, and we unaccidentally bump her cart as we pass.

She bows her head in apology. Draws fingers to her visor, where her lips would be.

We feel our face burning red with shame and wish for our own helmets and opaque visors that we pay for but shall never own.

Onward, we go to our separate shopping paths.

But, of course, we meet again in the next aisle. It can’t really be avoided. We’re all victims to the supermarket design, its maze of human traffic like arteries, and we are helpless blood cells rushing through the current of life, ships passing in the night. One awkward encounter leads to another and another. We loyal consumers begin the cycle again, from produce to frozen, again and again, amen.

We wave as we pass the astronaut beside the frozen dinners. She waves back. We wonder how many millions of tax dollars just one astronaut glove costs. We inquire into the tiny screens of our smartphones. One hundred million dollars, on average, per suit in the 1970s. Today’s suits edge toward one billion. We choke on our chewing gum. We briefly consider a minor assault in the parking lot, nabbing just one piece of the suit. We’d pay off our mortgage with one garment. But what good is a suit missing even just the left glove’s pinky finger? The hermetic seal kept against space is as essential as our beef flank’s cellophane.  

Instead of assault and theft, we observe the astronaut loading single frozen dinners into her cart by the armful. One of each. One of every single dinner from the ultra-organic vegan selections all the way down to the slums of the Banquet Salisbury steak. She will try them all, each one. These meals seem proof against partner—the frozen dinner standing as the quintessential purchase of solitude. Our envy slides away, like sloughing off the heaviest suit of lead-lined Kevlar. Space is lonely darkness. A single hydrogen atom floats per cubic meter in deep space. There exist countless galaxies of emptiness to traverse, enough time to sample every meal that’s ever been frozen, every Doritos flavor that has and will ever be invented.

We have no need for frozen meals. We work from home. We cook for our partner some nights, and other nights they cook for us. Our feet never leave the floor, always married to gravity, rooted in its grip.

If our nosiness couldn’t be misinterpreted, we’d gift the astronaut all our coupons. We’d wish them well. We’d take great pleasure when the cashier flirts, joking about freezer space as massive as the ISS. Both astronaut and cashier might chuckle, both locking eyes through the visor, a blush blooming for one to see and one to hope.

Chaos

by Patricia Q. Bidar | Jun 6, 2024 | flash fiction, publications

1.

The fourth-grade mothers learn that one of the fourth-grade girls, Jade, is missing. Their sons and daughters announce this at the dinner tables. The children are reluctant to provide the news. Nothing like this has happened before, and they don’t know how the mothers—who the children are old enough to be mortified by—will react.

The fourth-grade mothers are all in. It is summer and there is plenty of light. They will take the school playground and its adjoining toddler yard. They will take the library parking lot. The area around the Veteran’s Building; the middle school track. Filled with mission and flanked by their jacketed children. Their fourth-grade children call out too softly for anyone but the mothers to hear them. Their babies babble and point.

None of them know this child, this family. Her parents are lithe and smiling runners who show up in their office clothes to every PTA meeting. One or the other of them always offers themselves for any new committee. The best of them, even though they can’t think of this couple as “of them,” at least not yet.

2.

At the PTA meetings, the wifely eyes slide over to this husband, whose Facebook handle is SurferDan. They sometimes pore over his page when their husbands are asleep but none of them braves a friend request. On PTA nights, the fathers pack the kids into their trucks for the pizza parlor with the cartoons and the cheap pitchers. Their husbands at the annual motel pool wear bucket hats and dark t shirts.

The mothers see this husband and wife in the early mornings, running like deer in the dim streets before work. No, none of them know this elegant family with its single child and desertscaped yard. Their kids are not even friends with this now glamorous, glittering girl.

Because their kids are all connected by their smartphones, the fourth-grade mothers learn that Jade had a fight with her mother! Wears thong underpants! Ran out in the night, in her sweats and socks!

Now, the mothers’ smartphones start to buzz. The missing girl is so grown, they text. One of the very few fourth-grade girls to need a bra. Sneaks out at night. Got her period early. Suddenly, the mothers need to get back to cooled sinks of sudsy dishes. To baths and the choosing of outfits for the next day. They haven’t weaned the last of the babies yet, haven’t fully returned to their bodies.

It’s bedtime. A few minutes of reading. One or two of the mothers stretch tentative fingertips to their husband’s chests, shoulders, hips. In their sleep, their torn-off acrylic nails become lost in the sheets.

3.

Morning. Their husbands have left for their cubicles and jobsites, so the houses, the kids, belong to the moms. Who run to hug their flat-chested daughters and compliant sons. The fourth graders have already forgotten last night’s search. So the mothers have to ask them how far the girl got and the children say Jade is home; she’s fine. The mothers hedge their advantage by pushing extra granola bars and Rice Krispie Treats into brown sacks. They’re for Jade, give them to Jade.

Who has terrorized the fourth-grade mothers. They don’t know what to do with their husbands, their children, the other PTA mothers, whom they realize now they hate. They haven’t been visited by chaos. But now they know it is only a matter of time, that chaos will extend its slim fingers for them all.