The winner is The Breakfast Shift at the Usual New York Diner by Debra A. Daniel!

Candles

by Kelly Ann Jacobson | Apr 18, 2024 | flash fiction, publications

The third store we visit has been raided. The shelves are like rows of gapped teeth—missing flashlights, missing batteries, missing fans, missing gallon jugs of water. Our list is a prayer in your clasped hands. “What about candles?” you ask, and the nervous girl hanging lighters on the endcap takes us through the aisles to décor. “Not much left,” she says as she eyes the few colorful glass cylinders on the shelf. Is she reconsidering her own supply? Will she return here to scavenge the remains? I notice, then, that she has a bump of her own, but I know better than to ask. She retreats back to the lighters, and I watch, out of the corner of my eye, as she bends and hangs and slides.

“Pumpkin spice?” you say as you wave one of the candles under my nose. The smell is cinnamon, clove, and maple—but not pumpkin.

I turn back to you and shake my head. “Please don’t ruin pumpkin spice for me.”

“I forgot you’re an addict.” You clink the cylinder holder down and retrieve the pink one. “How about this?” Watermelon, oversweet, like the fruit has turned.

“Worse,” I say. My sense of smell has always been stronger than yours, but the extra estrogen in my body has turned me bloodhound. I point to the white ones, Clean Laundry. “Just buy two of those, and let’s get out of here.”

“Fine.” Your voice is angry, trying to be calm. You are probably thinking, Why did you bring me here? 

I am thinking about it, too.

Of course, we never use those candles. Or the one jug of water we find in the cracker aisle at Walmart. Or the sanitary wipes. Or the black beans, baked beans, sliced carrots, peaches in 100% juice, saltines, minestrone soup, all still towered in the back of the cabinet like soldiers ready to deploy at a flicker of the lights. We never use any of them, because we are not there to watch the trees fall against our chain-link fence. Maybe we should go?, we vaguely ask our neighbor, a true Tallahassee man, and he says, with his calm voice and waiting-to-catch-a-fish gaze, I think that would be best. This is a man who slept through the last hurricane. This is a man who knows how to batten down the hatches with storm shutters and sandbags. He is our litmus test—If the locals are all staying, we tell ourselves, then who cares what the privileged students do?—but that morning, after he tells us what is best, we pack our bags and leave within the hour.

We are lucky we find an article about filling up our tank so we can use the car to charge our phones.

We are lucky we don’t have a good car, the kind that only takes premium-unleaded, and that we make it all the way to Troy, Alabama, without needing to stop at the gas stations, most of which are emptied like breast at the mouths of famished babes and left with plastic bags on the handles like the white flags of surrender. We are lucky, lucky, lucky to be those privileged students; or, rather, for me to be that student, and for you to be that privileged—and don’t I feel it, as you swipe your credit card at the desk and I put my hands on my belly and think, We’re safe now.

Originally published in An Inventory of Abandoned Things (Split/Lip Press).

Girl Woman | Woodsman Wolf

by Joshua Jones Lofflin | Apr 11, 2024 | flash fiction, publications

Here is what you’ll bring to grandmother’s house:

• two eggs
• flour
• cocoa powder
• a baggie of your mother’s herbs from her grow closet (for her glaucoma, your mother claims, and don’t even think of sneaking any)
• the bill from QVC with STOP GIVING THEM MY ADDRESS in your mother’s thick, block lettering
• the latest Victoria’s Secret catalog, like gross (what, your poor, old grandmother can’t order underwear?), but you’ve seen her granny panties and can’t imagine her in anything lacy or sheer, and who would want to see her in that anyway
• a QVC corkscrew, not that your grandmother drinks—you couldn’t even find cooking sherry last time you rifled through her pantry, though Lucas says he’ll buy you wine coolers whenever you want
• a can of QVC bear spray (she’ll order anything off there, I swear) because she’s apparently hearing wolves now, though there aren’t even coyotes in these woods
• a twin pack of Gillette razors, might be gross, might not (trust me, you don’t want her mustache getting wild), and you think of Lucas’s beard, how it’s just beginning to silver, how you hope he never shaves it
• the QVC rape whistle on a crimson lanyard the color of your riding cloak (she ordered it for you, says there’s been a lot of creeps in the woods lately, revving their trucks on those old logging trails at all hours)
• the Pure Romance catalog, like double-gross (what, your poor lonely grandmother can’t have fun?), like triple-gross when you see it’s addressed to your mother
• the latest Cabela’s catalog, its dogeared page showing a smiling, flannelled man in snug jeans, the one your mom swears looks like your grandmother’s neighbor—Lucas, she means, though of course, she doesn’t know you know his name, would have a hissy if she did—she says your grandmother has a crush on him, which is unimaginably gross
• a bottle of Call of the Wild, the QVC perfume your grandmother’s started wearing that smells of dead lilacs, and the plastic-bottled vodka Lucas likes, the kind he’ll make you try even though he knows it burns your throat, but he’ll say drink up so you do, until the liquor numbs your lips, and maybe that’s when you’ll tell him about your grandmother’s crush, and he’ll laugh and say, Oh really? like he’s trying to imagine her in lingerie, like he’s forming the mental image and not getting grossed out at all, and you’ll punch him lightly on the shoulder saying what the hell, and he’ll grab your wrist, hold it in his own large, calloused fist, and tell you never, ever touch him like that again
• the SensoCam security camera (at least it’s not from QVC for a change, your mother says, wedging it into your basket and saying don’t take any shortcuts), the one your grandmother needs help setting up, that Lucas will ask what she even wants it for, is she rich or something, and you’ll shrug and try to remember whether her silver is real or not, not that you’d ever say anything to Lucas, though you don’t have to—Lucas has a way of sniffing out the truth, the way he says he can smell it on you whenever he knows you’re lying, whenever you sit there in the dark of his truck, his fingernails tracing the scar on your neck across your collarbone, until his nail catches at your bra strap and tugs—and his large eyes will go all far away as he murmurs about what he’d do with all that money, how you could live like a king out here, in these woods, in the heart of the heart of the forest, and nobody would ever hear a thing
• ten Lotto scratch-offs, twice her usual, not that she ever wins more than a buck or two (oh let the old woman have her fun—besides, she told me she’s feeling lucky)

Beach Tree

by Amy DeBellis | Apr 8, 2024 | flash fiction, publications

I know something is wrong when the spot in the corner of my right eye won’t go away. I was hit until I saw stars, years ago and not by you, but this is different: this isn’t a star but a fuzzy gray cloud. Whenever I read, it floats along with me on each line, blotting out whatever words are coming next. Whenever I slip out of our apartment to get my daily iced coffee—the one treat I still indulge in—it comes with me. I’m glad to have the company, as the streets are mostly deserted these days: blue surgical masks littering the ground like rectangles of stomped-on sky, sirens wailing every few minutes, and each time I go outside it feels like I’m getting away with something. I have only ten minutes to grab my coffee and return in time to fix you breakfast, back into the apartment that smells like somebody’s stale breath. So far away from anything that could be mistaken for the sky.

When I finally go to the eye doctor, he frowns and says vitreous detachment, but to me it sounds like vicious detachment. Throughout the whole appointment I find myself thinking of words that start with V: Vandalize, vehement, volatile. (Trite. Predictable.) He tells me to look into a light so bright it makes me tear up, makes my mouth drop open (“Close your mouth” he says in a bored voice), makes my nails sink into my flesh. Victim, voluntary, vaginal. (Now we’re getting somewhere.) In that agonizing light I can see the spiderweb pattern of the veins in my eyeballs, a huge red ghost in the edge of my vision. The pain: something pure about it. So much sharper than your stupid slap.

The doctor takes the light away and asks me how the injury happened. There in the blank white office, both of us just a pair of eyes over our masks, I feel like I can tell him the truth: you got angry when I posted about our relationship problems on Reddit; you said you needed to punish me. The words squeak coming out of my throat. The doctor says “Oh, I see” in the exact same tone of voice in which he told me to close my mouth.

Months pass. My eye heals, and you never hit me again; I think you decided that words would leave more of an impression anyway. On this you may have been wrong. Because on Christmas Eve, I dream that you give me two eight-ball fractures: instead of dull green my eyes glaze dark, blackening into beauty, irises turned to night with blood. When I wake, I run to the bathroom to make sure my eyes are still green—green like mold and pond scum and kudzu, green like things that are living but probably shouldn’t be. The whole morning I keep blinking, keep checking the mirror, keep closing my eyes and expecting to open them bloodied and half-blind. After a while it seems that there is indeed something red and seeping at the edge of my vision. Some kind of optical ghost.

In the afternoon, we take the subway downtown. Surprise beach trip in December but I know better than to ask questions. Your voice sudden as a papercut against my ear: “It’s okay, we’ll still be able to see the tree.” Later I will realize that you meant we can still go to Rockefeller Center in the evening (although we never do), but in that moment, my mind dizzy with vulnerable and vanishing and virulence, I genuinely think you mean that there will be a tree at the beach.

But there is no tree. Just sand ringing cold and clear below the sky, the sound dreamloud, almost violent. A gull swoops down and I raise my face, hoping to tempt it with something—my eyes, maybe—but it sees no spark or glitter, flies on. If I angle my head just right the red in my vision swells and eclipses you. The last four years salt themselves white like winter, disappear. I watch the tide go out and my mouth fills with sand.

Sideways

by Cassandra Parkin | Apr 5, 2024 | flash fiction, publications

“Sit sideways,” the photographer says, “or you won’t fit.” Obediently, they turn, bare flesh sliding smoothly against the porcelain, and dangle foolish coltish legs over the side of the bath.

“Look at me, not each other. Hats off your faces. Scoot closer. That’s right -” and then the flash and the laughter, and they’re caught forever; two young men, confident in their skins despite the prevailing legal climate, cigarettes dangling from James Dean smiles, and afterwards they unwind their limbs so they can kiss. The photographer withdraws, leaving them to revel in the freedom of their glossy hair, their nectarine flesh, their tobacco mouths, their fine Athenian bodies. The devices of youth.

All of this is a reconstruction. She has no idea what really happened. Here is an alternate version:

“Sit sideways,” the photographer says, “or you won’t fit.” So they turn, flesh sliding smoothly, legs over the side, and then “Look – hats – closer -” and flash and laughter, all the same, except without the kiss, without the aftermath, without the defiant nascent pride in who they were. Football players do it, after all, piling into the giant communal whirlpool with buttocks exposed and genitals dangling, and who could be more aggressively heterosexual than they?

Perhaps it was a one-off, a wartime experiment.

Perhaps the other man was the love of his life.

Or perhaps they were short of hot water.

She finds the photograph of her great-uncle’s time in the Navy while helping clear out his house. It’s in the act of disappearing into the back of his desk. If she’d been a little more impatient as she scrabbled papers out for shredding, it might have vanished for decades, perhaps forever. Was it hidden, or forgotten? Sometimes, she thinks one, sometimes the other.

Here is the evidence she’s assembled:

• He was never married, occasionally murmuring of a wartime sweetheart who threw him over for another man
• – But after the war, there were significantly more women than men. He should have easily been able to find another sweetheart
• (- On the other hand, perhaps he genuinely loved the first sweetheart)
• (- Or perhaps the sweetheart was a man; did he ever actually specify -? Anyway, onwards)
• – He lived alone, or at least he appeared to
• – In later life, when her existence overlapped his, he had a friend called Mr Wilson, whom he liked to play chess with and occasionally meet for dinner
• – Mr. Wilson was invited to her cousin Maisie’s wedding, and they sat alongside each other in the church
• (- Then again, Maisie’s parents are three steps from full-blown Westboro Baptist. The chances of them knowingly inviting someone’s same-sex partner are correspondingly limited)
• (- And besides, Mr Wilson was a family friend, receiving an invitation in his own right. He was definitely not a Plus One)
• – He kept his politics private. When family meals boiled over into fractious debate, he simply sat back and vanished into the wallpaper
• – In fact, thinking about it, this was his approach to all confrontation. She never heard him express a strong view about anything, from the way he liked his coffee to the apparent future direction of the country
• – He expressed neither support nor objection towards the LGBT Rights movement, merely shaking his head and observing that things were certainly changing
• – On the occasion of her own coming out, he took her hand and held it gently for a moment, then touched her face with his fingertips and said, blinking kindly, “Honey, whatever you want to do with your life is fine with me.” A response both unimpeachable and infuriating – as if she’d chosen this blaze of unsuspected need that had razed her life to the ground, forcing her to build anew.

This last point gnaws her bones the hardest. If her battle had been also his own, why didn’t he speak?

Instead, he was all dust and tedium, human furniture. He lived, and she lived, their orbits occasionally intersecting, and while she showed her whole bright self to him that afternoon on her parents’ lawn, he himself remained doll-like, somnolent, one-dimensional. He willingly met Jane, then Tamara, then Annie, welcoming them with the vague benignity he bestowed on everyone until his death. It was the war, his older sister Joan used to say, in that Great-Auntie-Joanish way she had of bundling up her relatives’ entire selves into a single magisterial anecdote. It changed him. He never really got over it.

Or perhaps it was the loss of that unnamed man-boy, the two of them sitting sideways in the bathtub, legs hanging over the side.

“Sit sideways,” the photographer said, “or you won’t fit.” Without the photograph, he would have faded for her entirely by now, resurrected only in rambling family reminiscences. Oh yes, and your great-uncle Edwin was there too, and Joan, my gosh, couldn’t she talk? Hey, did you hear Maisie’s getting divorced now? Was this the true explanation for his sidling, sideways life – treading softly, sliding and out of rooms, dissolving away when disagreement threatened?

For years, she was maddened, thinking of what they might have been to each other. Was there ever a moment when Honey, whatever you want might have become Well honey, d’you know…? Was he angry because she would have what he never could? Did that bland, gentle face conceal sour resentment? Or was there simply no secret to find?

These days, growing towards a confident middle age, the picture’s slippery resistance to explanation becomes a curious comfort. She carries it in her wallet, alongside one of Annie and the kids, tucked away behind her driver’s license.  When faced with hard choices, she takes it out to look at, hearing again the voice of the photographer. Sit sideways, he commands (the voice remains he), and she’s reminded that sometimes the correct answer remains stubbornly unknowable, and in the end, all the consequences of the paths we take or do not take will fade into the long, unanswerable stillness.

Canarsie Zuhitsu

by Geri Modell | Mar 31, 2024 | flash fiction, publications

Last stop on the LL line. Subway platform outdoors, a track on each side. A green-lit bulb above each track. The bulb goes green on one track, then on the other, and the people race back and forth from one train to the other, spitting out curses. Up in the control room, the guys are laughing.

A man leans over and blows his nose onto the street. You see it from the back seat of the car. The realtor is driving, showing your parents houses they can afford.

Riding your bicycle around the block, you hit bumps where the sidewalk rises into crests. You ride fast, so that for a glorious second, you fly.

Larry thinks he was supposed to be a girl.

One day in seventh grade, you go to your class and hear that everyone is walking out. It’s a protest, against the two black kids who are bussed to the school.

There’s a dirt road you and your sister discover walking home from school. It’s called Smith’s Lane, and a pony lives there. You stop every day to reach through the fence and touch his mane, his coarse coat. You pull up weeds and offer them to the pony, and sometimes, he munches on them with his big yellow teeth. He looks through you, like you’re not there.

Walking to your friend’s house, in shorts and a halter top and new sandals, a boy attaches himself to you, asks your name, your age. You know from his smile, from his slippery voice, that he wants something, and you want it, too, but what is it?

Larry waits until no one is home. He goes into his sister’s room and puts on her mini dress, her high heels, her make-up, her jewelry. He looks in the full-length mirror and sees he is beautiful.

Your parents buy the house with winnings at the race track. You sleep in the one bedroom with your mother. Your father sleeps in the living room. Your sister has the basement. At night, you listen to the dueling snores of your mother and father.

The house sits below street level. You go down two steps, turn left, go down two more. Then, you face a long, narrow walkway. There is a wishing well made of bricks and stone. There are roses blooming. It feels, at first, like a secret, a magical place.

One day, the pony on Smith’s Lane isn’t there. It’s never there again.

Your cat, Suzy, has a kitten. Your sister has joined the Young Socialist Alliance, and the kitten is named Trotsky.

Your sister’s best friend has a younger brother named Larry. He’s in your grade at school. You think he is handsome. His voice is high, like a girl’s, and gentle.

There’s a group of mean girls in your class. Kids call them the rat pack. They have good hair and good clothes, and they pick on girls who aren’t in the rat pack. After school, they surround you and pull your frizzy hair, yank the peace button off your shoulder bag. You’re not good-looking enough to be a hippie, they say.

In the 1970s in Canarsie, there are no black people. There are Italians, who live in small houses with yards, where they grow tomatoes. There are Jews, who live in two-family brick houses with tall steps in front. There are mishmash blocks with no clear character, like where your house sits, below the street.

A very large woman named Minnie lives in the house next door. She stands at the chain link fence between her house and yours, resting her fleshy arms along the top of it and talking to your mother. She comes over and sits in the kitchen, and she and your mother drink Sanka, and your mother puts a bowl of nuts in front of her, and you have to squeeze around her to get by, and you hear her tell your mother in a low voice that you give her the creeps.

On the other side live two old Italian people. A tiny, shriveled woman wearing all black stands in front of the house and beckons you over. She talks to you, and you can’t make out what she is saying, due to her accent and her lack of teeth. Something about when she was a child and knew the answer to the teacher’s question. She tells this story over and over. One day, she isn’t there. The old man in the house wraps his trees in white sheets for the winter, and it looks like mummies are standing in his yard.

Larry uses his sister’s eyelash curler and mascara. A quick swipe of blush on each cheek. He wears tight jeans and a clingy tee shirt. A beaded choker. His body is lean, he moves fluidly down the street, into the fists of the gang of tough kids waiting for him.

On Easter Sunday, the families walk past your house on their way to church. The women and girls wear hats and dangle small handbags from their wrists, and their handbags are the same shiny color—yellow or pink or blue—as their shoes.

The rat pack is outside your house. They call your name. They laugh, meanly. Your sister asks you if you’re going to go outside and talk to them. You shake your head. You wait. Eventually, they leave.

Your brother, who is a grown-up living far away, visits and brings a bar of dark chocolate from Switzerland. It is the best thing you’ve ever eaten.

Larry is released from the hospital. One day, he swallows a bunch of pills and dies.

You go into a candy store after school and ask if they have dark chocolate. The man says no and that he won’t sell dark chocolate. Nobody knows what the hell they put in it, he says. You don’t know what he is talking about. You still don’t know.

Every Thought and Prayer

by Stephen Haines | Mar 28, 2024 | flash fiction, publications

Every thought and prayer was answered. Everything reversed.

The news crews packed their vans with cameras and microphones, and the people they were interviewing, some of them covered in blood, most of them elderly, floated back into the grocery store. The produce stands and shelves reassembled like magic, the carnage of the many torn boxes, bags, pulverized fruit becoming again pristine—again perfect and inviting to all the morning shoppers. And then, as if magnetized, each bullet returned from so many heads, chests, arms, and legs, the strange device that used to fire them now reclaiming them. The same device that once slayed now saved, soothed, as every wound healed, every bloodstain vanished, every desperate groan and scream returned to every gaping mouth and became a sigh. The thing that once made holes in human bodies became holy.

The man with the miraculous reverso rifle marched backward, deep into the parking lot, this display an obvious mockery of blind militant hate. He disconnected his body camera, then removed his black vest, helmet, boots, and jacket in further protest, stuffing all of it, along with his rifle and ammunition, back into a large duffel bag in the trunk of his car. The torn pieces of a paper flier reassembled from all around it—the advertisement suddenly whole and legible again: Elderly Shopping Hour! EBT, SSD, Senior Specials Monday Morning 7 – 8 am. Bring along your grandkids for a free cookie and balloon!

He got into his car, removed his typed manifesto from the breast pocket of his jacket, and, after reading through it for the very first time, he seemed to realize what utter nonsense it was. It spoke of Saving the White Race from Extinction and Taking Every Darkie, Old and Young, Back to Hell. But nobody alive today had ever been to Hell before. And white skin had nothing to do with race; in fact, race itself was not even real but rather something that fearful, bigoted people mythologized to remain angry rather than weep. All this suddenly seemed to occur to the magical man as he stuffed the ugly pages into his glove box, burying the bitter words beneath registration slips, parking tickets, and old, forgotten mail, where nobody else would ever read them.

Then the man stared at his reflection in his rearview mirror. Challenged himself. Are you strong enough? He spat at himself. Are you going to do what needs to be done? He decided that he was, would. He started his car, then backed out of the parking lot and all the way back home. Soon, it would be as if he’d never driven to that grocery store, on the poor, predominately Black, south side of town, or perhaps had merely dropped by that day to wish the people there well and smile and pat some old woman’s grandson on the head.

The house was cold and dark, the scent dank and repulsive as he trudged inside. But then the magic seeped into the entryway, and the tiny home grew warm, bright, and the smell that in the man’s lifetime seemed to pour from his pores, that painted him in poverty regardless of the clothing he wore, grew pleasant, redolent. The mother and father, who worked long hours for pitiful pay each day, now eased into the weekend, with a late breakfast together, after a calm, four-day workweek.

That’s our strong son. The father smiled at his meek, hunched child of barely eighteen.

Doing the Lord’s work. The mother squeezed her son’s hand. Doing what needs doing.

His chest ballooned. His spine stiffened. Just like you taught me.

Today’s the day. The father crossed himself.

Today’s the day. The man typed the words on his keyboard downstairs, waited for the replies. The exclamations. The Follows. The Views. Then, he collected all the information he possibly could about every user that was online and connected to his account. He collected it, then passed that information along to local police, and to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Both organizations investigated and prosecuted domestic white terrorism and hate crimes—and likewise purged these scourges from their own ranks—with such ferocious regularity and intolerance that the radicalization of white men could finally be said to be on the decline.

Many called this a miracle. Maybe it was the inactions of mere mortals.

After that, he tore the posters and the flags from his walls, the images of German fascists, treasonous Confederates, and despicable modern political apologists, all defeated just the same by true American patriots, all where they belonged in the same shameful, crumpled pile on the ground.

Then the magic man kissed his healthy, happy parents goodbye. And he drove to a local department store, lugging in the massive duffel bag filled with destructive materials. He took it straight to the Fire Arms counter in the back, handing over the rifle, the boxes of ammunition, the body armor, the protective vest, the helmet. He could do all this just like that. Without ID. Without a background check. Without waiting at all. Without vetting or training of any kind.

The attendant loaded everything from the duffel bag into a scorching furnace. And as the materials sagged, and then disintegrated, what remained was siphoned below into powders with mysterious regenerative powers that would be used in topsoil, medicines, and portentous ashen marks on so many weary Christian foreheads.

Would you like to claim credit for your donation? The attendant asked the man, who had become momentarily captivated by the digital newsstands near the register.

He stared at a livestream, broadcasting on a local news network, in which an angel saved fourteen adults’, eight senior-citizens’, and eight kids’ lives with his odd, miraculous, magnetic weapon. The video was circulating on all the Anti-Hate websites, Peace and Solidarity forums, social media platforms. How had this lone wolf managed to remove all the deadly metals? one reporter asked. And why did he do it? For fame? To feel worthy? Powerful? The reporter, misty-eyed, paused for effect. Was he sent to us from God?

The man smiled at the news screen, smiled at the attendant, and then, noticing his own reflection in a glass display behind the register, he smiled again.

No, thank you. No credit. I’d rather remain anonymous.

The Flies

by Rachele Salvini | Mar 25, 2024 | flash fiction, publications

As she kills the flies, Gloria asks for mercy, then sprays an insecticide that sticks to the walls for weeks.

Since her roommate is gone, her apartment is filthy, and the flies seem to regenerate in every corner of the ceiling and fly out of every pipe. Sometimes, they come in through the door when Gloria takes out the trash — the only reason why she leaves the apartment these days, because going out means seeing cars, pick-up trucks, trailers, and Gloria imagines a shred of her roommate on every seat: a small bundle of torn hair, a piece of a severed fingertip. So Gloria stays home and focuses on the flies; she tries not to blink until the muscles around her eyes hurt, and she starts torturing that bald spot behind her head, now deprived of hair, of life.

Meanwhile, the flies hit the glass of the window, stupid, confident in their way out until the insecticide starts kicking in. They don’t die immediately. On the contrary, they start buzzing louder, try to fly faster. Upwards.

The buzz gives Gloria a headache, and she scratches the bald spot between the hairs on the nape of her neck. She’s been locking everything for days, barring the windows and watching the flies. Sometimes, they collapse on the floor, exhausted. More often, they fly in circles for hours and keep hitting the windowpane. Gloria imagines the insecticide strangling them like a hand around a neck and melting their insides. The buzz sounds like a scream. She gets up and crushes them with one of her flip-flops to give them mercy, but also to stop the incessant buzz that gives her a headache. She often leaves them there, but when she can’t stand the sight of the crushed limbs anymore, she picks them up, wiping them away with a napkin. At first, she throws them in the trash, but then the idea of all those tiny corpses piling up starts bothering her, so she decides to toss them in the toilet. She looks at the little black bodies spinning in the water until they are out of sight. That’s when she usually starts scratching the bald spot on her head. She smells something rotten, feels the raw skin under her fingers, the blood clotting under her nails. Hair will never grow there again. If she ever goes out with a man after what happened to the roommate, she’ll cover it with another strand. But it’s been days now, and the ache always starts right there, behind her head, a discomfort, as if someone behind her is watching her, waiting for something.

The doctor tells her, it’s just stress. Did you experience any trauma, a sudden loss?

Gloria thinks about her roommate, who got all dolled up like any other night and never came back. She thinks of the detached nails that were found on the backseat of that ordinary dude’s car, the scratches on the window, and the fake eyelash stuck to the glass like a splattered bug. She thinks about the guy who drove to the river to dump her, the corpse falling, shrinking until it disappeared in the water. She thinks about God, who must have watched the roommate getting into the man’s car like Gloria watches the flies now as they come in and hit the windowpane, their false hope of a way out. She thinks of her roommate’s words as she had applied makeup before leaving their apartment: this guy is the one.

The flies pile up underneath the windowsill. Gloria scratches her bald spot and feels the blood under her nails.

She keeps watching them. She hears their buzz even after they’re dead.