by Aishatu Ado | Oct 27, 2025 | contest winner, flash fiction
We had always been many-in-one, even before witch-woman Nnenka’s curse made it flesh. Our mothers stood at different cooking fires, our fathers prayed to different ancestors, yet destiny pulled us together like scattered beads finding their way back to a single string. In the market square of our village, they still remember how we used to walk, separate—three girls with three shadows and three different laughs. Amara lived half in this world, half in history’s bloodstream, her school notebook margins bloomed with Queen Amina’s battle tales. Zainab danced sufi-spells at cattle camps. Her feet made djinn swallow their thousand tongues and bleed prophecies older than her ancestral bones in Sokoto. And Kioni, keeper of secrets that arrived wrapped in midnight shame, whose garden herb roots knew how to make white man’s seed die screaming before it could grow into tomorrow’s grief.
We were ogbanje before we knew it, before we had names for the thing that made us different, the thing that made the air shimmer around us like heat on tar. That was before witch-woman Nnenka found us counting cowries under the udala tree. She saw rivals who could match her century of keeping white men’s boots from crossing village borders. Her sideways-walking legs brought brass-bell clatter, brought curse born from spite and fear of being outdone.
Now nobody asks why we walk three-heads-one-body down the grass path. Nobody dares. Not since they found the last man who laughed at us split wide like overripe pawpaw at the crossroads, his guts writing prophecies in Nsibidi script older than Lord Lugard Street in Lagos. Witch been dead seven moons but her curse still grips our flesh like lion teeth in midnight meat. White man writes us down in his book under “African Deformity,” but he doesn’t know shit about power this old. Power that was ancient when Oshun was still sucking her mother’s milk.
Three souls crammed in one meat-cage like fish in a trap, three clay pots on three heads, and every morning we fight over who wears the flesh first. Sometimes the argument ends in blood. Sometimes in a song that makes hyenas cover their ears. Sometimes the body rebels, spits out all three souls like bitter kola, leaves us begging proper-proper to come back in.
Amara wants it for fighting, still thinking revolution hides in gun barrels. She forgets the old ways of war—plantain mixed with menstrual blood sweet as first-love’s spit but shadow-blade sharper than co-wife’s tongue. This kind of juju turns a soldier to pillars of salt before his first boot print dries in the dirt.
Zainab wants to dance with it, says visions come clearer when the body moves like cobra-spine. Dance that cracks thick baobab trunks, dance that wakes sleeping Orishas. The kind of dance that makes thunder swallow its own sound.
And Kioni, quiet-quiet Kioni who used to heal with just a touch, she wants to return to the crossroads, thinking maybe the devil-woman who cursed us might still be lurking there, looking to make a bargain. But what deal can you make with a witch who’s already dead?
Each dawn we feel the merging sink into marrow, and often forget to argue at all. That terrifies us more than any witch-mark—losing our separate angers, our different hungers.
Truth strikes deeper than mosquito-thirst: we stronger this way.
When soldier-man comes hunting our village girls, we shift quick-quick between souls until his head spins. One minute we’re in warrior stance, ready to open his belly slow-slow with rust-blade. Next breath we’re the medicine-woman, feeding him his dead mama’s tears till shame drowns his courage. Third turn we’re spirit-walker, showing him seven deaths waiting in his future, each one worse than the last.
Some people think cursing is a simple thing. Put lizard head in someone’s soup, murmur mmuo words. But real curses got layers like iroko tree got rings. First layer: flesh binding to flesh, palm sap thick and unyielding. Second layer: raging thoughts eating memories until even our scars forget which body birthed them. Third layer: power growing in the spaces between souls, strong enough to make even Shango stutter in his thunder-walking.
Night market women say they see us dancing when the moon swells full as a witch’s calabash. Say we fracture into three wraiths but keep one body. Say spirit-forms hunt each other like leopard stalking gazelle—kill-dance, fuck-dance, both the same blood-rhythm. Each shape wearing a face our mothers once named, before witch-woman’s pot boiled us into something new.
Some nights we dream we were one soul all along, split three ways when Olodumare first shaped dawn. Dreams lie though. Taste sweet as rotten mango—sugar on top, maggots beneath. We remember our separate selves clear as machete-light on bone, but memory means nothing when you are becoming something that makes the oldest Gando leak fear from every hole—rank as week-old fish. A thing that trades riddles with river mothers, drinks kunu fermented in grave-soil—thick as clotted blood, sharp with sorghum bite.
Village children sing about us in twilight:
Three heads in morning
One body at noon
No heads in evening
Death coming soon
But death already came and went with harmattan winds. Came when the witch bound us together, went when we transformed confinement into coronation. Now we wait to see what emerges from this chrysalis of flesh, what sublime terror we birth from unified breath.
Let them bring their holy water. Three pots, three souls, one body walking. Every footstep writes juju-law no Imam or Reverend or Babalawo ever learned to read.
They say witch-woman Nnenka died because you can’t bind three spirits stronger than your own. She thought we’d war for the flesh until nothing remained. Last thing she saw was three powers turning her own curse into knives that cut her throat.
They say three girls went missing the same night Nnenka died. Say nobody ever found their bodies.
We not missing. We right here, walking—three-souls-strong—daring anyone to call us cursed.
by Pascha Sotolongo | Oct 20, 2025 | contest winner, flash fiction
Between Abuela’s mobile home and mine, a white sand path interweaves the moonlit scrub pine. Sometimes it is ribboned with the tracks of sidewinders, so we watch our step, especially near the Spanish bayonets beneath which they like to coil. If the snakes have any sense at all, they will stay put tonight. The fantasma rides moonlight like an updraft, talons gleaming, velvety wings combing the air.
The bathtub faucet drips, and my mind travels the sound of it to the dark drain from which crawfish sometimes emerge. Mami’s working the overnight shift at the airport and will come home smelling of hot dogs. Papi’s driving a cab. Except for the dripping, the place is silent. Me, I’m a fifteen-year-old high school dropout with a mind adept at focusing down and down until the only reality is this window where I wait for Ines, my tia, two years older than me and adjudicator of all that is awesome. Where I am naive, the product of strict and overprotective parenting, she is a teen sage, wise to all that’s bad, fine, rad, or elicits her incredulous, Oh right. Here’s how it is: Ines and I can watch the same sad story on TV, and I’ll exclaim, qué lastima! totally meaning it, while she looks on blandly and finally comes out with, Oh, right, and a smirk to remind me I’m a rube.
Any minute now, she will materialize, and I should say a prayer for her safety. Ines fears the night, fears la fantasma more—winged Llorona in love with moonlight. For years, darkness treated my tia cruelly, veiling the sins of a vile father, the man Abuela took up with after she and Abuelo divorced. Now in her bedroom late at night, Ines turns mean, transforms into a girl monster, lowering her voice, curling her thin fingers into claws, lifting her elbows like wings, making her eyes wide and fiendish. At first, I maintain my composure, telling her to stop, sighing. Then terror squeezes my eyes shut and screams out of me. When Abuela demands to know what the hell is going on in there, Ines only laughs.
I have no prayer for Ines.
And here she comes, a dark shape propelled by spindly legs. She looks spooked already, pale face lifted to the sky, then peering down as she dances around ruts and roots, then facing the sky again. The owl has a record, has rushed Ines twice this week. Probably has a nest nearby, Abuela says. I’ve heard it hooting but never seen it. For me, la fantasma lives only in my imagination, where it is something ferocious and beautiful. My breath grows audible against the window, and I use my sleeve to wipe away a coin of vapor. Ines looks almost fragile, like a moon maiden, like a child with dark curls swinging.
People assume we’re sisters, usually that I’m the older one. Abuela likes challenging cashiers and waitresses to guess which of us is her daughter and which her granddaughter. They always guess wrong, and my grandmother laughs at how readily they fall into her little trap. So here comes mi tia who is not mi hermana, the bond between us strong because it’s a blood bond and because when the relationship is good, it’s like stepping out of a cold shadow into the sunlight, goosebumps delicious as love. We understand each other. When no one’s looking, we hold tea parties and pretend we’re English royalty. We drink Materva out of plastic wine glasses and imagine the bubbles have made us drunk. We cut each other’s hair, bleach our Cuban girl mustaches together.
Ines moves quickly, and I start to think she’s in the clear, but a black form wheels out of the silver night and falls upon her, its immense wings indistinguishable from the shadow they cast. Mi tia makes a small sound, almost a whimper, but I hear it because my forehead presses the thin glass. I, too, gasp and feel my shoulders rise as Ines ducks and throws her forearms over her head. In the kind of silence that makes you feel you’ve gone deaf, the owl flaps and lurches so that whichever way Ines thinks to dart, it is already there, charging her.
Ines is no fiend. I see this now and at last send up a gauzy prayer, but it’s too late. The sand, the roots that breach it like the backs of sea monsters, make Ines’s skinny ankles wobble and turn. When she falls, I feel my body lurch—an S snapped into a straight line. I should grab the broom, run to her, save her from la fantasma. I should. But first I watch. First, I count to three.
Uno.
Dos.
Tres.
Ines! I call. I’m coming! Already sand has flooded my flip flops, grinds against my heels and the balls of my feet, slaps my calves as I run. Before me, the owl rises, slips into the moonlight where it glows pale and soft as fog, its yellow eyes watching me, blinking once before it floats away.
One of Ines’s canvas shoes lies on the path that is otherwise empty. I pick it up—too small for me—shake off the sand and walk to Abuela’s trailer. Ines? I call from the porch. Ines? The door is unlocked, and it’s dark inside. Feels like as far as I want to go is the doorway, so I stand there, a velvet painting of Ortiz’s guapo matador on the opposite wall, his sure gaze trained somewhere over my right shoulder. Ines? I call again. No one answers.
From the edge of the porch, I scan the path, the treetops, the sky, the moon so bright I can feel my pupils contract. Ines, I say to the stars, my voice tight, my hands beginning to sweat. Far away, la fantasma snickers, hoo-h’HOO-hoo-hoo.
by Fractured Lit | Oct 20, 2025 | news
This shortlist didn’t come any easier to decide as we received so many great stories with unique premises and characters! There was a great response to this contest, and so many great stories that it took us longer than usual to decide, but we’re excited to share with you the shortlisted titles. We’ll be back with Judge Gwen Kirby’s winners in 4-5 weeks!
Shortlist:
- Body Count
- What Were You Thinking
- The Wreck of the Medusa
- Blackboxing
- The Weight of Jade
- Cat Lady
- A Thousand Ways to Eat a Heart or: Is It Worth Going Inside the Sagrada Familia?
- Meiyue
- Sometimes Grief is a Moonrise
- Three Months After Turning Forty
- Miss Piggy on the Dashboard
- Plaque
- Kismet
- Lessons from Birth
- Advertence
- Cranberry Thyme
- Grooves
- Simulcast
- The Cardinal
- Tiny God
- The Last Wrong Turn
- Every Solid Thing Casts a Shadow
- Fishy Pants
- Dead Mother Card
- I Want That Tomorrow
- The Pitch Perfect
- Pure Trash
- L’Emergency Bars
- With These Wings I Set Thee Free
- Ah Ma is a Reusable Bag
by Fractured Lit | Oct 16, 2025 | news
Writers and Readers! We’ve been spending our time this summer and into the fall reading for this contest, and we’ve finally set our longlist! There was a great response to this contest, and so many great stories that it took us longer than usual, but we’re excited to share with you the longlisted titles. We’ll be back with the shortlist shortly!
Longlist:
- Sweetheart
- Body Count
- The Lost Brother
- My Your Her Boots
- Sunday Nights
- What Were You Thinking
- The Wreck of the Medusa
- The Surrogate
- Blackboxing
- The Weight of Jade
- Cat Lady
- Quills
- A Thousand Ways to Eat a Heart or: Is It Worth Going Inside the Sagrada Familia?
- Meiyue
- Sometimes Grief is a Moonrise
- Three Months After Turning Forty
- Miss Piggy on the Dashboard
- Plaque
- Kismet
- The Red Line at Glòries
- Something They Know
- Lessons from Birth
- What is Home
- Days of our Goddess
- Advertence
- Cranberry Thyme
- Grooves
- Some Facts About Dawn
- Simulcast
- Miniature Donuts
- The Cardinal
- Tiny God
- The Last Wrong Turn
- Every Solid Thing Casts a Shadow
- No Life Forms Detected
- Fishy Pants
- Dead Mother Card
- I Want That Tomorrow
- The Pitch Perfect
- Pure Trash
- L’Emergency Bars
- With These Wings I Set Thee Free
- Ah Ma is a Reusable Bag
by Sherry Mayle | Oct 16, 2025 | flash fiction
My dad sits on the couch after Thanksgiving dinner and announces he wants buried in Carhartt overalls.
He’s 82, retired from the mines, and too cheap to buy Carhartt while he’s alive.
“I hear they’re warm. Leave a clawhammer in the pocket.” He pats his jeans. “If you’re wrong, I’ll dig my way out.”
My brothers laugh at his punchline. My mom rolls her eyes. I tilt my head like his beagle. A man who’s always worked with his hands is trying to use his mouth to tell us he feels the end coming, and he’s afraid it’s being shut in the dark, cold for eternity.
I want to pat his head, but I don’t know how to tell him what I think I know.
Death is not an experience. Would that mean anything to him, or be hollow, like my sharing lyrics to a song he’s never heard?
Afraid of sounding like a holier-than-thou nitwit, I keep quiet.
* * *
He dies two weeks after Thanksgiving, and my mom fights me in the funeral home.
“He never wore Carhartt’s.”
I want to hit her over the head with the clawhammer I’ve brought and bury her in his place.
“He’s wearing them today.” I slip the hammer into the brown pocket on his right side.
After he’s in the ground, I feel cheated, like he died as soon as I’d learned enough to tell him something important.
* * *
A day after the funeral, Mom calls and says I’m not acting right. I haven’t been sleeping.
“Be careful, baby girl. You got a family tree full of lunatics. Your granddaddy claimed he seen green little men.”
Mom likes to pretend people are crazy to control them, so I end the call.
I’m not crazy. Neither was my dad’s dad, who did see green little men. He had narcolepsy. I Google narcolepsy and confirm that hallucinating is a symptom. Grandpa’s brain was misfiring.
There is a genetic component.
What if Dad was only asleep yesterday in his casket? Maybe we buried him too soon.
My eyeballs burn from too much air. I close them, but in the dark, I become him and feel his chest shaking when his eyes snap open underground into black silence.
What if he can’t reach the hammer?
* * *
Hours later, I’m in bed with sweaty sheets pulled to my chin. I’m shaking in that uncontrollable way I find so embarrassing. Last time it happened was during an IT meeting at work. My nervous system doesn’t know the difference between a bear and a cranky dev, or between dying and grief.
I know he’s not buried alive.
Who is this I? How do you know that you know?
But my body doesn’t know. My body won’t be still. My body needs to see.
Whose body?
* * *
I have shovels in the shed. That’s the problem. If I had no shovels, I could stay home. But I have shovels, and so my body — Whose body? Who are you in there? — has to dig.
Dad never went to Mom’s Wesleyan Methodist church, but she buried him in the graveyard beside it anyway. I drive there in minutes.
I was raised in this church. I learned how a preacher gives you chills before I learned about the science of mass hysteria. I went to bible school before I went to college for what my dad called computers. I hid in the pew the night they turned off all the lights, cranked the furnace, and had adults wailing in the vestibule so us kids could get a taste of hell.
The Wesleyan Methodists are too serious.
That’s why I love Zen. Zen isn’t serious. I decide if I dig my dad up and he’s alive, I’ll teach him Zen and see if he wants to burn down the serious church.
I leave my headlights on, pointed at the fresh grave. He doesn’t have a headstone yet. Good.
I get my shovel from the trunk and start to dig.
My back hurts, but I’m lucky the ground isn’t frozen. Cold and sweaty, I tell myself Dad would be impressed with all this manual labor. The pile of dirt behind me grows, and I have to step down, farther and farther into the hole, to dig deeper.
I’m inside my dad’s grave. Lunatic. Hank Williams, Jr.’s Family Tradition plays like a soundtrack. I laugh until I’m dizzy. I dig faster. I fall and get back up.
There’s a vibration in my wrist when the shovel hits his casket.
* * *
Examining the wooden box for signs of escape by clawhammer, I yell, “You in there? Make some noise!”
I kick the side and listen. My car’s engine sounds like wind from down here.
With numb fingers, I pry at the lid. Too heavy. There’s still too much dirt. I sweep with my palms, pressing my ear down between swipes, listening for scraping.
But I can’t hear him in there, because I’m screaming too loudly out here.
“Dad! Dad! Dad!”
I holler the word again and again, so that Dad is a noise, like my car’s engine, which is a very different noise than saying the words my car’s engine, out loud, just like the word Dad, out loud, is very different from the Appalachian sound the man who raised me made.
The word is not the experience. Death is not an experience. Try to eat the word cake. Try to talk to a corpse.
My body collapses. I remember now. He’s not in there, because he’s in that eternal place deep inside where wind blows without a name.
Dying is going to sleep and never waking up. Getting born is waking up after never having gone to sleep. He doesn’t have to be afraid.
Those are the lyrics I wanted to share, but he already knows.
* * *
b. 1942 – d. 2024: I am not in here.
by Charlie Rogers Jaime Gill | Oct 13, 2025 | flash fiction
The television casts a garish parade of colors across your unlined brow. From the corner of the bar, you watch me, not the game, but drop your eyes when I meet your gaze. More mating whisper than mating call.
Wesley, the sleepy-eyed bartender, spies my nearly-finished drink and ambles in my direction. The simple act of waving him off triggers a series of scenes, the filmstrip of his future unspooling behind my eyes.
Wesley will lose this job in three weeks. His second wife, a distracted beauty, will seize the excuse to leave him, unaware she’s a month pregnant. He’ll flirt with benzos and oxys for thirteen precarious months. He’ll meet his third—and final—wife when she sideswipes his car in a church parking lot.
I no longer wonder whether these things I see will come true. They do, they always do, if left unchallenged. When I was younger, I thought these visions were a curse, and prayed to be spared their often cruel revelations. Now I don’t bother, mostly letting them drift from my mind unexamined, like idle recollections. I have a now to live in.
I glance toward you, feigning nonchalance. You catch me looking, nodding your head as if we now share a secret, and flash a conspiratorial grin. You wipe your palms across your charcoal t-shirt, then approach.
You’ll tell me your name is Connor, and your barstool will screech, nails against blackboard. Undeterred, you’ll offer to buy me a drink. I’ll be charmed, but won’t touch it.
“Hey there. I’m Connor.” Your smile falters until I gesture for you to sit. Skreeee. You wince in embarrassment as your stool loudly scrapes tile. Your expression shifts to hopeful as you settle beside me with a genial smile. “Want another beer?”
Our fingers will touch as you slide the beer in my direction, a spark passing through a newly connected circuit.
I feel the future tugging, insistent on revealing itself, but I resist. You reach past me to wave for Wesley, and your woodsy, spicy scent breaks my defenses. A vision floods me and scattered pieces cohere into a clear picture—everything that could happen between us.
Later tonight, at my place, after we’ve shed sopping clothes and exhausted each other in every way, you’ll gather the courage to ask to stay. I’ll hesitate, reminding you of my early wake-up, but I’ll already have my arm stretched across your wide chest, claiming you.
“I had a pickup line ready, but it’s too dumb.” Your laugh is boyishly adorable. Like the rest of you—your intentionally uncombed hair, button nose, dark playful eyes. “I just wanted to say hello.”
You’ll weave tonight into a story, wearing out its edges through multiple tellings. “Oh, I knew he’d never come to me,” you’ll tell our friends, always adding, “he even tried to run away!” We’ll already be a unit—Connor and Matt. No one can imagine us apart, lungs and heart in a single body. You’ll burst into laughter at the analogy, asking why one of us couldn’t be the brain—the birth of a long-running joke.
“I’m glad you did.” I run my finger through the condensation on my beer bottle. You have no idea how handsome you are, Connor, and never will. “I’m Matias.”
The “brain” will, when he turns up, be named David. An awkwardly handsome computer scientist you’ll meet at your gym. You’ll suggest a threeway with him, though you’ve already hooked up without me four times. You’ve noticed my ability, gift, curse, or whatever this is, but pretend you haven’t, and so you lie about your burgeoning feelings for him—even though I always know. I hate that I always know.
“Do people call you Matt?” A nervous swig. Your roaming gaze charts my contours with cartological precision. I do the same to you, constructing a map of hastily gathered details. The twitch of your mouth. The vein curling around your bicep. The fuzz on your thick fingers.
The apartment will be so empty without you, a mausoleum of memory. You’ll call to check in, and I’ll say “I’m fine,” until I finally stop responding. Distance will grow between us like an invasive vine. A friend will tell me you married again. Not David. Someone called Neal.
I laugh. “Not usually. But you can.”
I’ll meet Neal at your funeral. A lovely shell of a man. We’ll share stories about you, crying until we laugh and laughing until we cry again. He’ll be jealous that I knew you when you were young. I don’t offer up your favorite story, about tonight—about what happens next. That’s mine.
I’ve seen many terrible, wonderful futures upon meeting strangers, but I’ve never played so large a part in them, like I just became a character in a novel I’m reading. It’s frightening.
Across the bar, a man in an orange shirt breaks at the pool, the sound crisp and sharp as a gunshot. Wesley watches us like he knows, like everyone in here knows what I know.
There’s still time, if I get away from you now. If I reach the door quickly and don’t turn back, I can outrun our future together. Other futures will find us.
I stand abruptly. “You’re sweet, Connor, but I’ve got an early start tomorrow. Sorry.”
The vision of the future blurs, smearing into sloppy watercolors, as I push my body against the heavy door. Outside, lazy thunder grumbles in the distance.
The street is quiet—no crowd to lose myself in.
Behind me, the door creaks again, spilling mumbling bar noise onto the sidewalk.
“Wait!” You call after me, the scuff of your steps loud against the concrete. You’ve followed me.
There’s still time, but—
I turn. Behind you, music’s still playing in the bar, muffled by the closing door.
“Let me walk you home at least?” That grin again. “What have you got to lose?”
You reach for my arm.
I knew you would.
by Georgene Smith Goodin | Oct 9, 2025 | flash fiction
Your older sister is the amusement park at the end of the boardwalk, the one that’s been in the mayor’s family for a century and looks it; the one the mayor doesn’t maintain because the newer one, halfway down and closer to the big hotels, gets all the foot traffic these days, so why bother?
Your sister used to be the tilt-a-whirl, or maybe the teacups, careening you in circles, breathless with laughter, falling on your knees, dizzy. Now she is a roller coaster not fully on its tracks, your stomach dropping on every plunge. Today might be the day she derails.
You can’t eat the food at your sister’s even though you love custard and Chipwiches and powdery funnel cake so hot it burns the roof of your mouth. Your sister has failed the health inspection. She does not wash her hands after using the bathroom; there are mice in her kitchen. She put bleach on the fries instead of vinegar. She claimed it was an accident, but you have doubts. The chest pain, the breathing problems were the same either way.
After the hammer incident, your sister is the Ferris wheel with two carriages sent out for repair. You’re unsure which is more frightening: the shattered stubs of her front teeth or her refusal to get them fixed. She’s the carousel with peeling paint. The new pills dry her skin, leaving it to flake into dusty pieces, like feathers on a moth’s wing. It’s been so long since your sister soared.
Your sister is a mirror maze you can’t find your way out of, her reflection distorted into the unrecognizable, every turn a prayer that she stays on these meds. She always goes off them when she’s feeling better, insists she doesn’t need them anymore.
After Labor Day, when tourist season ends, your sister is the amusement park the mayor boards up half-heartedly. No one is surprised this year’s closure is permanent, the rides to be packed up and warehoused elsewhere. The mayor says he had no choice; he could not afford the bills. He wishes there could be a different outcome.
Your parents say the same.
Now your sister is the haunted house you always hated, the one with fluorescent paint more childish than chilling, the one with balls on springs that grab your ankles at every step. You lurk in her doorway, primed for fast escape. Still, she jump scares you from behind the bed, the dresser. Memories pour from the closet, all the more terrifying because they are good ones, reminders she was once the log flume splashing away the heat; the bumper cars jolting you into giggles; reminders that architecture is genetic and you or your children could become a haunted house, too.
by Hannah Goss | Oct 6, 2025 | micro, publications
Seeking a companion. Need not be romantic; platonic is fine. Just someone to wake up to for that morning breath that feels stale with closed-mouth soft snores, and those eyes holding long, floating eyelashes that I want to touch but won’t. Just someone who will empty the dishwasher. Or load it. We can take turns. Someone who likes early mornings, but not more than me. Leave me some empty hours. Then I’ll make us some eggs, dippy in the center, to run golden down your chin. Or tofu, if you’re vegan. I don’t discriminate.
Someone who will take out the trash without me having to ask. Someone who just notices that it’s full. Someone who will follow me to parties and lean in when I tell a joke, introduce me to the people I don’t know. Make me feel important. Someone to whom I can say: “The electric bill is kind of high, will you call?” And: “Don’t forget the garlic,” and “Did you see that look she gave me?”
Someone who likes getting caught in the rain. Maybe likes piña coladas. I don’t know. They seem fun. Just someone who is fun.
Someone who will watch horror movies even though I’ll close my eyes when the knife goes in or the lights go out. I’ll yell, “Right behind you!” You grip my hand. Someone who will hold my hand when it gets scary.
Someone who will tell me that it’s them who is making the floorboards creak at night. Not to worry. Someone who will fill that space between dinner and sundown with something other than absence. Make me watch the sunset. Want to see it rise again.
by Jomil Ebro | Oct 3, 2025 | contest winner, micro, publications
during a 50-minute massage. The grading, the emails, the sunken cold: my mid-back balled into a walnut. At Hand and Stone, a blind masseuse named Homer leads me to a room with prancing emerald lights: hospital sink, mirror from Marshall’s—a franchised underworld.
“Nice name. Homer. Like the writer,” I confirm.
“Like Homer Simpson,” he corrects, voice as soothing as the guitar-plucking on Spotify.
Homer’s good. I feel his fingers vibrate; riverstone of elbow, railway of forearm, twinge of hidden bruise. But it’s the lonely, long vowel of Homer’s name that drops me: Hom-er…Home. This time, it’s my dad. When he taught me how to hit a homer. Elbows in on the swing. When he’d take me to Home Depot, which I hated because it meant resurrecting a car or a brittle house—I still smell him in 2 x 4s, see the sun in the tawny of his arm. When he’d say, “Back home in the Philippines…,” and the black wind of his eyes curled back somewhere. When he went to EMT school at 40 and tried, he got good at naming muscles: rhomboid, soleus. When last we walked on Santa Monica Pier, salted crab in the air, in his maroon Members Only jacket, eating cotton candy just to hold something, I asked in anger why he did that to mom, and who is my half-sister, and why he couldn’t quit smoking so that he might see his grandson be born. When all he’d say was, I know, in that undammable voice which made the gloaming ocean freeze.
O, how I aged into a slender axe that could shatter that Pacific with a lone syllable. How one camouflaged siren of memory beaches us. How I want to approach him, cupping my palms around his trembling matchstick one last time.
by Elvis Bego | Oct 2, 2025 | flash fiction
Winter lay down fat in its white robe as if to die. The war was over, and he ached to get home after years of service in foreign parts. The villagers kept cramming his mouth with sausages and boiled cabbage and the grime of their fingers. They had made him their own. The leave-taking took forever, but even forever must end sometime.
At dawn, the cart was loaded with his things, and the driver shouted at the horse. Everybody followed to the station, and he struggled with the saltwater that rimmed his eyelids now. Shawls and gloves had been knitted for him by ruddy old women. Somebody made him a satchel. They all made such noise you would think it was a wedding. His friends carried him, sang songs of return. The children flew about like confused swallows, shrieking parodies of the same dirges, hoping for a treat or a coin. His own children had grown up awaiting his return. Yes, it was time.
The carriage clattered down the scree and the path that had been cut atop the steep dyke. Hairs in nostrils felt like copper wires. The horse snorted clouds like a train. They all looked and still could not see the station for the fog.
The train was coming. It appeared, neighed, squealed, and stopped, but, with its own nervous snorts, seemed eager to set out again. There were hasty kisses, laughter, promises.
Come back! they said.
Someone pushed a cloth wrapped around a loaf of bread into his hands, and it was still warm.
Lake, mountain, valley, he knew none of it. Truly, clouds had spun and dropped their cloak across the world. No home in sight for days.
One night came a yellow station light, and it grew, and his heart leaped as the train neighed, squealed, and slowed to a lurch, and stopped. He jumped to his feet, but then saw it was the village station again. All his friends were there, still merry, welcoming him, sending him off.
Stay in your seat, they said, you only have a minute before the train departs. What’s going on? he shouted through the glass.
Eh, said one in answer.
What?
Are you hungry?
By now, the train was too loud and the pistons in swing.
Snow melted and drained. The train kept coming back to the village. All his friends were always there, always happy, always saying goodbye, as if for the first time.
Do you know what’s going on, he asked his friends. Why am I here? Why are you here?
Why are we here? said one, as if insulted.
Dear friend, said another.
Things are here, and things are there, said a third.
Did you just say goodbye to me? And how many times?
What?
How do I get home? he asked.
Home? said one. We will see you soon enough, no?
This is just how it was going to be.
Previously published in The Moth (2015).
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