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. 

We Mistakenly Think It Keeps Growing

by Marilyn Hope | Jan 25, 2024 | flash fiction

#

Freddie goes missing overnight on a Sunday. That week is a blur of search parties and candlelight vigils, porch lights on in such abundance that the nights are as bright as day. We rake the cornfields in regiments of two dozen, flattening the farmland. Deputies Mullen and Mullen ask us questions about the people in Freddie’s life. Did he spend time around adults with hungry smiles? Did he have many friends?

“Just us,” we tell him. Freddie stolen in Comfort’s easy night, casual as a peach from a produce corral. “There’s only us.”

#

We’re the boys of Comfort County. We love tire swings and ten-speed Huffies. We stay out past eight o’clock on long summer evenings, hoarding the dusk, knowing exactly how the light loves us. The six of us represented one-third of Miss Kriebell’s fifth-grade class the year she grouped us together for a landscaping contest, and we won with a rock garden and twelve fringes of bleeding hearts. Fairvale Elementary’s frontage still boasts our efforts, which teems fuchsia with poison every spring. The flowers grew in red this year, though.

We’re older, now. Stronger. We’re mostly out of our braces, and when we walk together in town, folks pause to watch us. We are romantic in a way that Comfort aches for—something of the city, we think, like boys who look stylish in big sunglasses or Prom Kings strolling in step. We are a way out in some small, derivative way.

We watch movies at the twins’ house, sitting too close together. Humid Thursday. Our shins stick together when we shift. Mrs. Kingsley listens to the radio in the kitchen as Knox yells, “Run!” at the television. “Fuck’s sake. She’s dead now. They never run!”

“They’re scared,” Hassan signs. “Their legs are jelly.”

“Their brains are jelly,” says Knox.

“I couldn’t do it,” says Sam Kingsley. “Run, I mean.”

Sam has a way of winding Knox down. Knox sighs, sucking on the end of an unlit cigarette. “I’m not saying I wouldn’t die there, too.”

Mrs. Kinsgley is a vivid, attractive, look-at-me woman. When she steps in front of the TV, we mute it. On the kitchen counter, the radio is frizzing on words like missing and murder that we only hear now that Marion Crane has stopped screaming.

“They found something,” Mrs. Kingsley whispers. “They think it’s him.”

#

We bike to Palos Lake in time to see the police fish the body upright. Porcelain Someone, hair trimmed down to the tenth inch, but still a whisper of blond. Sam cries out when he sees, and the sound splits the summer because the rest of us are silent. “Boys, get back,” John Mullen says, waist-deep in his waders, and we retreat because there’s nothing of Freddie left for us here. Someone stole the dormant man in him, his love of ladybugs, 16.6 percent of us. The sixteen, we’ll never be together.

Freddie was the best of us. We have to reevaluate who we are without him. Michael catches Knox before he faints, but just barely, and for a long time, we are too tired to carry him back home.

#

“They’re wicked,” whispers Deputy Rick Mullen, when he thinks we can’t hear him. “Kids, but wicked.”

It makes Noah smirk from the front desk, where Clara, the dispatcher, is sneaking him sips from her hip flask while she profiles him. Kingsley, she writes, Noah Thomas. Age: 14. Hair: Black. She puzzles over the color of his eyes before penning Gray on the line, a rarity that gives us an edge, which we use like a scalpel. Noah flickers his eyes like new nickels whenever we want something. Today is the Friday after the funeral, and we are raging for answers, so we ask Clara if she will take our mugshots.

“I’ll find some film,” she says, disappearing into the back room. The door taps shut behind her.

We slip off our chairs and spread out through the station. “Obituaries, photos, police reports,” says Noah, fanning a stack of files across the desk. “Quick. Anything you can find.”

A boy in Pocket went missing two days ago. No one will talk to us about it, but the Pocket PD has been in and out of Comfort ever since, taking notes over diner breakfasts of coffee and cherry pie.

Hassan raps the desk twice to get our attention. Underneath our profiles—Name: McMannus, Hassan; Height: Room to grow—he has found a newspaper clipping from the Pocket Pioneer.

The missing boy’s name is Maxwell Munn. He is luminously blond, like Freddie and Knox, has grinning eyes, a gap between his front teeth. Pocket-charming, we decide. A certain crude charisma about him, small-town but substantiating. If he lived in Comfort, we’d let him be our friend.

“It’s light hair, then,” says Noah.

Knox’s pale bangs quiver as he laughs. “You don’t know shit. You’re no safer than I am.”

“Least I’m not next.”

Hassan sees shadows under the door and flicks two fingers outward on each hand: hurry. We rush the folders back into stacks. Noah folds the article three times and slips it up one sleeve. We’re in our seats again by the time John and Rick open the door.

“Sorry, boys,” says John. “No new news. Run along.”

Clara backs out of the supply room, opening a box of film. “Wait,” she says, words slurred. “Let me do this.”

She photographs us one at a time with the station’s black-and-white instant camera. There’s an accidental brilliance in her lighting, the shakiness of her inebriated grip. We are overexposed. More than ourselves. Clara pins our Polaroids to the town map, and we laugh at this dangerous new geography: take a left at Michael’s eyelashes, then straight on until you reach the end of Sam’s smile. We are your landmarks now. We’ll find you when you’re lost.

#

Freddie, we promise you this much: retribution. Home. Rest. Memories. Blood. Bereavement. Hair.

If we name it Mittens, can we please keep the food delivery bot, please?

by Moisés R. Delgado | Jan 22, 2024 | flash fiction

That July, all our dreams were bones. T-rex bones, kneecap bones, bones larger than our house, bones of a dinosaur yet to be discovered that we’d name banopolis peelopolis so we could laugh when archeologists said it on the Discovery Channel. We were ravenous for treasure. Emily down the street had brought a shark tooth home from her trip to Florida, and we hated Emily. Shark tooth this, shark tooth that, shark tooth around her wrist, shark tooth around her neck, shark tooth in a ponytail, shark tooth, shark tooth, shark tooth. We dug a hole in our backyard. If we found some bones, then we could rub them in her face. We could sell them to a museum. Become millionaires. Leave Nebraska for some place, any place, like our mom sometimes still wanted. But all we unearthed was dirt and worms and more dirt. We could have given up, but Ruby and I were again sort of, kind of praying. Our mom had brought Jesus home, two years after our dad’s death. Not Jesus on the cross, but Jesus from Guadalajara. He was a bald man, but he made our mom happy, and if our mom was happy, then we had faith. And faith or luck or both sent us a food delivery bot. We woke up to its front wheels skirting and whirling but failing to escape the hole we had dug. It was splattered in mud. So, we hosed it down and prayed it wouldn’t short circuit and light our backyard ablaze. And thank the Lord, or maybe good engineering, there was no fire, just a shiny bot that Ruby and I put a leash on and paraded up and down the street. It wasn’t a bone fit for a big red dog, or a bone that would land us a three-story home off on some coast, but it did ruin Emily’s day. Her shark tooth was a dirt-caked, face-down penny on the sidewalk. We were the talk of the neighborhood. Our pet didn’t shit on the carpet. Our pet had a boxy body and large boxy LED lights that blinked and could lead us back home in the darkest of nights. Our pet could travel at an impressive 7 mph. Our pet didn’t bark or bite. Our pet beeped and booped. Our pet liked jolts of electricity for breakfast and dinner. Our pet would live in the backyard in a small wooden doghouse, if our mom allowed us to keep it that is. And we hoped she would. But while we tried to convince our mom to let us keep the food delivery bot, it wandered off. Ruby blamed me, and I blamed her. If only we hadn’t hosed it down, then we could’ve chased after muddy tracks. But it was gone. And Ruby was to blame. And I was to blame. And the bot was off in Colorado, skiing down the highest and snowiest mountains. Or the bot was down in Kansas City doing whatever people in Kansas do. Or further south, in Mexico. Because bots don’t need passports. Bots don’t need to worry about their tongues being all thorned when speaking Spanish. Or it was further, further south, swimming with Emily’s sharks. Or further, waddling with penguins. Or further and further and further, eventually circling back, deciding Nebraska was home after all.