Reasons to Be Cheerful

by G. Ochsner | Feb 19, 2024 | flash fiction

One morning, as I stood at the bus stop waiting for the 7:05, my neighbor, Horowitz, drove over my left foot with his butter-colored Volvo. I shouted. I shook my fist. Then I limped home to show my wife, Myrna.

I’ve had a long history of bearing tread marks, so my mishap didn’t come as a huge surprise to Myrna. She put down the obituaries, took off her reading glasses, and bent over for a closer look.

“What was it,” Myrna asked, “a truck?”

“No—Horowitz,” I said, pulling off my left shoe and studying the upper. “The nerve,” she said.

That morning, I went back out to the bus stop to catch the 7:35 and wondered if there was something wrong with Horowitz’s vision. But when he drove over my foot the following morning, at 7:05, and again the morning after that, I began to think Horowitz might be terribly maladjusted. Maybe he had an oddly developed sense of humor.

Maybe he didn’t know his running over my foot hurt me. Maybe the Volvo, a sleek GL sedan, just needed realignment. And for those first weeks, I thought about asking Horowitz to stop. I thought about reporting him to the authorities. But then I realized that his driving over my left foot every day was the natural and likely culmination of a life full of injustices, large and small, and I gave myself over to resignation, that inestimable salve, taking extra comfort in the fact that Horowitz didn’t drive one of those pricey sport utilities.

***

Over these last years, I’ve grown to appreciate Horowitz. I need him the way Myrna needs a smoke the second she rolls out of bed, the way some people need a morning cup of coffee. I tell myself that because of Horowitz, I am doing OK; better than that, in some tiny measure, I am victorious. For there’s no denying my spirits have risen over the months, buoyed, I suppose, by the thought that if I can withstand these daily abuses, then surely, I am stronger for it, stronger than my un-trod upon co-workers.

Good news: though at night I may need to soak my foot, thanks to the lightness of the Volvo’s frame–that sentinel of the best in Swedish design– I’ve never suffered a broken bone. More good news: on some days, I’ve noted, the front end of the Volvo will lurch away from the curb. I may have to lunge for the tire, then, leaping with my left foot extended. But, with a prickling of joy, I’ll see that in the glimmering of a second, when the tread of the tire is about to miss my shoe, the Volvo will right itself and crush my foot.

Sighing deeply with gratitude, I go to work, satisfied, feeling as if I’ve already accomplished something important and essential. 

***

I laugh sometimes when I recall how I used to think Horowitz was rude, his running over my foot with the Volvo in second gear a mark of malice or bad manners.  Now, I consider Horowitz one of my closest friends. We shake hands in the grocery store, never acknowledging our intertwined paths, the sanctity of our ritual. Instead, he asks me about Myrna, and I inquire about his wife.

“Middling, her health is,” he always says, and I picture her soul with boneless pliancy testing the air for flight, hovering in between good health and bad, while her body, below in bed, is not quite sick, but not entirely well either. It has occurred to me that my waiting for the 7:05 has given something to Horowitz as well, and this thought fills me with hope, makes me feel as if I have, at last, found one act of kindness I can perform for a fellow human being. I feel, too, it’s such a small thing, this standing at the corner, a small thing that I can give to Horowitz. And if his driving over my left foot gives me such a charge, I can only guess at the thrill it gives him. 

***

One day, Horowitz didn’t show. My panic–colossal. I learned, after some frantic investigation–several calls to his office and some peeping through his garage windows– that Horowitz was simply on vacation. That was all. But when he came back, he didn’t look well; the skin of his face seemed to grip at his bones like leather over-cured. I sent

him aspirin and cold remedies. “You must take better care of yourself,” I said to him a few days later in the frozen fish aisle. But all that next week, as I waited for my bus, I worried for Horowitz and prayed I’d hear the splutter of his Volvo coughing to life and see the old, familiar pale-yellow frame of his car sidling around the corner. When it did, at precisely 7:05, I’d sighed, unaware that I had been holding my breath. 

***

Several weeks later, on a Tuesday, Horowitz didn’t show again. His Volvo sat cold and covered in his driveway under its blue tarp. Relax, I told myself, he’s on another vacation. Get a hold of yourself. But after four days without Horowitz and two boxes of antacid remedies, I had to acknowledge my worst fears. I went home on that fourth day, intending to call in sick to work, for I was just that, sick in the heart, down to every last capillary, sure that something dreadful had happened to Horowitz. 

Myrna met me at the door with the newspaper opened to the obituaries, Horowitz’s name highlighted with her lime green pen.

“I’m sorry, Mort. I really am,” Myrna said, handing me the paper.

They say we’re born twice, and I believe this to be true. For I felt with Horowitz’s passing that I had died, once for each of us. I couldn’t bear to look at my closet full of crushed left shoes nor Horowitz’s Volvo sitting in his driveway, offering all the hope of a broken-down telephone booth, the last one on a long, long highway. Each day, I stand out at the bus stop, lunging with my left foot toward the tires of passing cars and even trucks. But the motorists, perhaps more alert and wary of a lawsuit than Horowitz had been, artfully dodge my best attempts, and I have never been so depressed in all my life.

It is sad, a little pathetic, even, to think that this was what I had been living for, my life having been ground down to such a minor moment. But the importance of a thing comes from the weight it bears upon the bones and later, much later, in the spirit.  I still wait for the 7:05, but now it is with a terrible fear cribbed between my lowest ribs and an ache of nostalgia thrumming through my metatarsals. What will I do without Horowitz’s butter-colored Volvo muscling over me, an oiled mammal given the music of a bad muffler? Please, I whisper, wringing my hands. I need that weight, the press of gravity reminding me that I am alive. In a world like this one, it is all I have.

PIEL MUERTA / DEAD SKIN

by Gabriella Navas | Feb 15, 2024 | flash fiction

She begins each morning by peeling the dead skin off her lips.

Sometimes, she feels like she is shucking corn and other times, she feels like she is unwrapping a present, but mostly, she enjoys the aloneness that allows her this ritual, this tiny indelicacy. She enjoys death in small doses, which she tells herself is not the same thing as enjoying death itself, the same way a person who collects miniatures knows they aren’t collecting the real version of whatever has been miniaturized: everything is just an imitation of something else, a shrunken homage, flattened flattery.

In dreams, she imagines building a hutch and filling it with all the little deaths she acquires throughout her day: piles of dead skin; clumps of tangled hair snaked from the drain in her shower; the edibles that slow her heart rate so much that she can no longer feel her pulse when she presses two fingers against the inside of her wrist—arranged into a sticky, glistening pyramid; orgasms by her own hand, bottled or pickled.

She dreams of painting the hutch red and installing tracks of LED lights, the color-changing kind, on each shelf so she never gets bored. (She knows herself well enough to know that she will get bored, though, and that once she does, it will be incurable.) In these dreams, she makes acrylic plaques by hand and engraves them with witty titles for each item, as if they were pieces of art too obscure and profound for the average person to understand when, really, they couldn’t be more self-explanatory. She always makes a plaque for herself, too, but rarely engraves it. Once, all she could think to write was WOMAN, but halfway through, she ran out of space and wrote WOMB instead.

Sometimes, the dreams end with her attempting to drill the plaques into the wood and accidentally drilling a hole through the center of her hand instead, and other times, the dreams end with the entire hutch falling on her as she tries to push it as close to the wall as possible.

But they always end, is the point, and she wakes up, her lips chapped, cracked like unwatered soil, pieces of dead skin like seedlings. If she peels them slowly—which is how she prefers to do it—she bleeds, and the blood briefly wets her lips, staining them with a color so rich that she wishes she could conjure someone out of thin air just to kiss them stupid and share it with them. But because she can’t, and because she doesn’t want another person to see her bleed, she has begun to leave lip marks for herself all over her apartment: on her pillows, on her ironing board, on the walls, on the hood above her stove. Her favorite place to leave them is on the pendulum of the grandfather clock she keeps in her office; her second favorite is on a wooden rolling pin she doesn’t remember buying.

My Mother, the Water Monster

by Aeriel Merillat | Feb 8, 2024 | flash fiction

I drove to the county hospital to pick up my mother. She was not as I suspected.

They handed her to me in a Tupperware bowl, her spotted tail flicking behind her.

“I think there’s been a misunderstanding,” I said to the bored nurse in glasses behind the desk.

“There’s been no misunderstanding, ma’am,” she pointed to the wristband that was taped to the lid. My mother’s name and birthdate were printed in thick black letters.

The creature splashed under my arm as I put her on the passenger seat and considered her new form. She wasn’t quite a fish, not quite a lizard. Her face round and bloated, her skin a pale translucent pink. A spinely collar wrapped around her neck, dragon-like.

“What are you?” I pressed my nose on the plastic lid and looked down at this creature, no bigger than my hand. She looked both nothing and everything like my mother.

I knew I wasn’t equipped to keep this creature alive. I drove to the closest exotic pet store.

Ralph’s AquaWorld was nestled between a dry cleaner and a nail salon in a half-empty strip mall thirty minutes outside the city.

Hundreds of tanks lined its narrow aisles, glowing under the flickering fluorescents. Transparent jellyfish, multi-colored crustaceans, a melancholic octopus, and a large tank in the back filled with baby alligators.

No one was around. I thought about leaving my mother right there in the middle of Ralph’s and driving away.

When I was ten, my mother took me to Wal-Mart to buy a spotted goldfish. Exactly a week after we brought it home in a plastic bag, I was flushing its limp body down the toilet.

The pink monster floated there, helpless. I cried into the Tupperware, and my mother absorbed my salty tears. How was I supposed to take care of a thing I couldn’t even name?

Five days ago, my mother was placed on a psychiatric hold in the Chattahoochee County Hospital. Before that, I hadn’t spoken to her for months.

I got a call from the grocery store she worked at, a tired woman shouting at me that she hadn’t shown up to work in a week and they were short staffed.

I found her lying in bed with Real Housewives reruns playing on a loop. She was surrounded by five empty orange pill bottles. Red wine soaked her crisp duvet crimson like a Renaissance painting.

I followed the ambulance to the emergency room. The doctors spoke to me like I wasn’t there. No, I couldn’t see her. No, she wouldn’t be released. Yes, it was true she didn’t want to be alive anymore. No, there was nothing for me to do but wait.

The sea horses bounced up and down in their tank, and I thought they looked content. Ralph, a balding man approaching middle age, appeared next to me.

“The legend goes,” he said quietly, “that Xolotl, the god of fire and death, turned himself into a water monster to bury his shame from the other gods.”

The only time I remember my mother happy was on our annual trip to the aquarium. Both of us were fascinated by the creatures that lived in the deep. Every year, we sat on a hard bench and watched bulbous jellyfish float above us. “Did you know humans understand more about space than the ocean?”

She was always trying to find answers to things that had none.

The ocean was dark and endless but also full of magic. This is how I learned that a thing, a person, can hold two truths at once.

I’m not surprised my mother’s depression turned her into a water monster. I’m only shocked it took this long. She had always been unknowable to me, and this new creature that I could not access felt like a befitting form.

I set up the tank Ralph recommended to me, spending hours placing the fake plants in a perfect line and making sure the temperature was exactly sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. My mother was particular like that and I still felt a panic at the thought of disappointing her.

When I was done, she sat on her styrofoam rock and watched the latest episodes of her favorite reality show. With the end of my pinky finger, I let small drops of Diet Coke fall into the tank.

I asked her questions about what it was like to be a water monster. I’m an anthropologist, a marine biologist, a scared daughter. I wrote down anything that I thought was an answer, a twitch of a finger, a swish of her tail. I needed to know, in case this happened to me too.

Two weeks went by, and I started to feel guilty that her whole world had been reduced to a four-foot tank. After work, I came home and scooped her up in the Tupperware bowl. I drove us to the aquarium, and when I asked the person selling tickets if I needed to buy one for my mother, she laughed nervously and gave me a discount.

We sat on the hard bench together and watched the jellyfish. “Did you know humans understand more about space than the ocean?” I asked her. She blinked and looked away.

Every day, she seemed less like my mother and more like an amphibian.

In the aquarium parking lot, there was a storm drain that read, “No dumping, drains to waterways.”

I opened the Tupperware and bent down on the concrete. She looked at me, her eyes wide. Her soft pink belly slid into the dark hole in the sidewalk. I waited for her to come back, to poke her head out to say goodbye.

In All The Loveless Places

by Jennifer McMahon | Feb 5, 2024 | flash fiction

The pretty cowgirl’s mouth is wild with tameless laughter, and the tassels on her calfskin miniskirt and waistcoat dance to her every move. Standing astride the centre line between four traffic lanes, gun belt and holsters sparkling in the car lights, she aims her pearl-handled pistols high and pow-pows at the fragile moon. When motorists blast their horns and yell abuse at her, she laughs all the wilder and jiggles her hips. Sometimes, she twirls her guns on her trigger fingers, and brings them to bear on faces contorted by frustration. I think she’s the happiest person I’ve ever seen in Cork City, like she’s found just where she belongs in the world.

It’s late evening on the Grand Parade. The Shandon bells curl across the city, syncopated by the more sonorous clangs from nearby Holy Trinity. Over the old stone wall behind me, the River Lee is in full flow, with a bitter wind striking along it. The chill from the steel bench has soaked into me. I should go home. I should wait. On our last call, Peter told me he’d been delayed but promised he wouldn’t be much longer. If I go now and he comes looking for me, he’ll be annoyed. I’m playing mind games, he’ll say, wasting his time. So, I wait, and envy Cowgirl her freedom.

A man walks past me with a burger stuffed into his gaping mouth and a white slime trail of mayo drooling down his chin. My mouth waters at the smell from the chipper down the street, but Peter’s bound to come the minute I go to get something to eat. An old man in a mangy black coat and flaky cap shuffles up to me. An open bottle pokes its head from the brown bag in his left hand. His right snakes towards me, palm up. He mumbles a few words. ‘Any change, love?’ or something like that. I delve into the pocket of my coat, but before I can give him anything, he wanders off, to stand at the edge of the pavement. He’s still for a few moments, watching Cowgirl, then he throws back his head and lets loose a sinister cackle. ‘Look at the mad eejit,’ he roars. ‘Lord, save us,’ then he shakes his head and trudges away.

Cowgirl dances, and the more the pedestrians point and laugh at her, the more the motorists fume, the raunchier her routine becomes. She swings her arms wide, kicks a carefree leg in the air, then the other one, turning, turning. A car narrowly misses her, but she’s undeterred. She cavorts like a lap dancer, hips gyrating, ass wagging. She radiates beauty. She radiates love.

Pow-pow.

Invisible bullets strike cars, buildings, pedestrians.

Pow-pow.

One carves a line straight through my heart.

~~~

Bang. A car glances off Cowgirl. It’s just a tap, but she makes the most of it, clutching her chest and slowly folding to the asphalt. Cars blare. A man gets out and helps her up, then points to the row of benches where I’m sitting. Cowgirl nods. As she limps towards me, he tries to smack her ass, but she twirls and blasts him with her six-shooters.

‘Nerve of that dude,’ she says, as she nears me. ‘Seriously.’ She drops onto the bench beside me and extends a hand. ‘Everyone calls me Sweetie.’

‘Rita,’ I say, taking her hand in mine. Her skin is soft and warmer than I expected.

‘You’ve been sitting here a long time.’

‘You’ve been watching me?’

She nods. ‘Waiting for someone?’

‘Peter. My boyfriend. Are you okay? That car…’

‘I’m fine,’ she says, with a wicked mustang laugh. ‘Why are you waiting for someone who doesn’t want you?’ When I don’t answer, she pats my knee and presses close, to rest her head on my shoulder. ‘You look for what you want in all the loveless places. Believe me, I should know.’

Her words are a bullet-punch in my gut. I want to run, to be away from her unfiltered truth. I want to stay, to savour her unfamiliar warmth. The river gushes past behind us, traffic flows in front. A pub door opens, releasing a violent heartbeat of transient dance fervour. The city rumbles by, ceaseless, uncaring, carrying love and hate and other poisons along its clogged arteries. ‘He’s not coming, is he?’ I say at last.

‘Even if he did, would it be worth it?’

‘Why do you do it? Dance in the traffic?’

She lifts her head, and her amber eyes search mine. ‘Because it must be done.’ And then, she kisses me.

~~~

Someone must’ve called an ambulance because one finds us. The paramedics have no trouble identifying their target. ‘Up to your old tricks, Sweetie?’ one of them asks.

‘Someone has to bring the joy.’

‘No better girl. Come on, we’ll take you in, get you looked over. Off your meds again?’

She stands but ignores the question. ‘Look after my guns for me,’ she says, opening the buckle on her belt. She slips it off and lumps it onto my lap.

‘I’ll get them back to you,’ I promise.

The paramedics support her as she limps to the door of the ambulance. Just before she enters, she turns to me, makes a gun shape with her hands, and fires her last shots. A few moments later, the ambulance strobes blue and pulls away.

I look down at the white of the handles, the cold grey steel, the diamantes on the belt and holsters. When I slip the belt around my waist, it’s heavier than I thought it’d be, but it fits perfectly. I take an uncertain step towards the traffic, then a certain one. The wary moon examines me with its one good eye.

Someone has to bring joy to loveless places.

Pow-pow.

I reckon I’m pretty good at it, too.

Intertidal

by Ali Mckenzie-Murdoch | Feb 1, 2024 | flash fiction

Spirits.

Toria doesn’t speak German, but no language is necessary. Her voice melodious with children or men, she tilts her head and orders our drinks. Gin-tonic, always. Lights sweep the room, shading us ocean-deep. The barman leans in and whispers in her ear.  

Starfish.

Toria is mercurial. “I’ve spent so much money from the divorce. This year’s been a sex sabbatical,” she says, listing the men she has screwed. Reflections from a disco ball dapple her face. ‘They complain that women just lie there,’ she says, rattling the ice cubes in her glass. ‘They call them starfish.’

There’s a hairline crack running through her. One knock in the wrong place, and she will smash into pieces.

“I want to dance. You coming?”

I shake my head. The polished floor gleams, hard as a frozen lake. Toria slips into the heaving bodies peppered with lights.

Mining.

Toria’s father is Cuban. She found a paper on his research into the copper mines in Santiago. She could contact him but prefers her memories: a red ukulele, strummed high on his chest; the gap between his front teeth. Toria doesn’t talk about him, but he’s in her long limbs and sallow skin. Her hair swings and resettles after every spin on the dance floor. At rest she is shop-mannequin-calm, but when she moves, she’s feral. 

White.

In the ultraviolet light, Toria’s teeth are arctic. She pushes her way to our table, her arms outstretched. I resist. Our hands separate. Hers are clammy, mine are cold. She disappears, swallowed into dry ice and the cloying smell of Red Bull. I will go home without her tonight.

Wild.

When I return, Jakob is writing, the crown of his head illuminated by the reading lamp. “Where’s Toria?” he asks.

I slump on the sofa and rub the sore red line on my feet.

“She picked up some guy.”

Jakob massages the bridge of his nose. “She has something restless. Something wild.”

His eyes catch mine, and he puts on his glasses, rereading what he’s written.

“I can be, too,” I say, biting his neck. He laughs and pulls me onto his lap. I want to sleep, but Jakob’s words flit in the air, trapped birds, feathers scattered, wings beating. She’s wild. Restless. Animal.

Jakob will know how wild I am. How wild I have been.

Intertidal.

A halo of light shudders on the ceiling, and a wisp of frigid air licks my skin, my arms and legs splayed starfish-wide.

Candied Lemon

by Grace Kennedy | Jan 29, 2024 | flash fiction

Kate knew it would not work with Ethan when she watched him remove the thinly sliced circles of candied lemon she had carefully arranged on top of the cake. He piled the peels on the side of his plate, mouth puckered, before driving his fork into the now unadorned mass of sugar, flour, and air. 

There were other reasons, too. He did not like pickles. Or olives. Anything brined, salted, transformed.

She frowned. She had wanted it to work. 

There was an hour until the New Year, and the room was filled with people. She watched from the kitchen, the now decimated cake spilling crumbs onto the counter in front of her, a serrated knife resting in her right hand.

Last year, on New Year’s, she ordered takeout with her friend Charlotte, and they made brownies from a box mix that came out too thin. They watched Scream and didn’t realize it was the New Year until they heard fireworks. They went to the window and waved to a family across the street. Two young boys pressed their bodies to the glass, smiles wide, small red palms leaving handprints on the glass after their parents peeled them away. Down below, a group of four walked along the street, linking arms. Kate watched them laugh, three boys and a girl with a bright red hat. Lingering in the window, Kate asked Charlotte what her biggest fear was and she said, “Forgetting.” 

This year, they decided to throw a party. Kate made cake, and Charlotte bought sparklers, and at midnight, they planned to climb up to the roof with all of their friends, and maybe the boys with their small red hands would see them light sparklers from their window and clap. 

But it was not midnight yet, and right now Kate was standing in the kitchen, contemplating candied lemon. 

She’d met Ethan in April. They went to a Belgian bar and drank ten-dollar beers, and when he kissed her goodnight, he placed his hand on the small of her back, and she thought it was nice. She liked his blonde hair and the way his eyes crinkled at the edges and once they took a trip to the beach and laid on the sand smoking a joint, hiding behind each other’s bodies from the teenage lifeguards roaming up and down the shore. She was high and happy and suntanned. She had wanted that moment to last. 

Four years before, on a different New Year’s, she had stayed up until sunrise on another roof with another boy, and mostly, she remembered the selfie they had taken wrapped up in blankets. She wondered if she still had that picture. She opened her phone to swipe back through the years but remembered she had deleted the photo after she sat across from him in Washington Square Diner for the last time. 

There are too many New Year’s, she thought. 

The day before the party, she smoked a cigarette with Ethan on the fire escape, and he asked her if she’d heard of the ship of Theseus: “If you replace every part of a ship one by one until none of the same parts remain, is it still the same ship?” If you delete every photo on your phone and never see the boys with the small red palms or the girl with the bright red hat, and you keep celebrating every new year and every birthday and time keeps moving, and the people you kiss start to blend together and it does not work out because of lemons or olives or pickles or other reasons like doors slamming in your face — Is it still the same ship? 

Kate closed her phone and picked up her drink, champagne simmering. She found Charlotte’s eyes across the room. Charlotte had eaten the whole cake, and her plate was clear. 

Charlotte walked over and kissed Kate on the cheek, leaving a sticky patch of berry lip balm on her right cheek. “I wonder what this all adds up to,” Kate said. Charlotte shrugged. Kate picked up the dirty cake plate and began washing it in the sink. They smiled.