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

by Margaret Adams | Jul 11, 2024 | contest winner, flash fiction

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 | contest winner, flash fiction

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.

The Pebble and the Witch

by Emma Li | Jul 1, 2024 | contest winner, flash fiction

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 | contest winner, flash fiction

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 | contest winner, flash fiction

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.