by Sara Fraser | Jan 30, 2026 | contest winner, flash fiction
We meet at a fifteen-year-old’s birthday party. You’re attractive in an offhand way. Girls dressed as pop stars with weaponized fingernails giggle as you pass.
You catch my eye and smile. We are two in an army of waiters careening under blossoming trees with silver trays held aloft like skewed halos. At the kitchen counter, Chef Lisa lines up canapes and mini tacos. My elbow touches yours as we refill our trays. You say on my fifteenth birthday, we didn’t have a caterer. We had Spam sandwiches. I reply, did you know there is an actual museum? To Spam? You didn’t. I’ve never been, I say. We should go sometime, you say.
I offer napkins to girls who seem ashamed of their sloppiness. I’ve been thinking, you say as you pass. About what? But you are the sudden stamen inside a petal circle of young girls. They point at things on your tray. Some hold pale hands on their stomachs to say, No, I’m too full. You know they’re not full. You get them to eat.
I am by the swimming pool, cucumber slices with crème fraiche and seaweed caviar dotting the doily on my tray. What were you thinking? I ask when you approach, your tray empty. You say, let’s go. I say, where? I follow you to the kitchen. Chef Lisa has her back turned. You grab my wrist and say you have a convertible. I’m awestruck. Who drives a convertible in Providence?
To the Museum!
Yes, yes! I say. Our eyes so wide.
We drop our trays and run to the parking lot, looking behind us like two escaped prisoners, leaving others to finish and clean up.
The roads shake out into straight lines. I am committed to the adventure, but you are still a stranger. At my knees, a stranger’s glove box. I can’t offer money for gas, but I buy you a Pez while you pump. When the candy is finished, you mount Miss Piggy on a base of chewed gum on the dashboard.
How lucky that we arrive on a Tuesday, the only day of the week the museum opens. Maybe not luck, I think. Maybe a smiling universe. The universe loves love, encourages it. We are twenty-two! I have enough to pay the admission fee for us both. You thank me with a stranger’s kiss.
Before we have seen all the exhibits, lights flicker and dim.
It is my idea to hide atop two toilets until the museum empties and closes.
Spam, Spam, Spam! we sing in Monty Python accents, huddled together behind the empty cash register. We wonder why Monty’s last name is a snake, our shoulders touching, your hand halfway under my thigh. The sun setting blood orange through the plate glass window and we nibble at each other like grazing animals, but with more curiosity, more intention.
Later, we are surprised that the front door cannot open from the inside. You throw yourself at it in a drama of claustrophobia. I hold your head to my chest and calm you, remind you there is soda, there is Spam. There are sporks. We will survive! You won’t say out loud that it is my fault. It was my idea.
I have seen something you didn’t want me to see. Are you ashamed to be the one who worried?
The next days are a cycle of moods, some retaliatory, some born of honest weakness.
Day after day, you sleep on a red upholstered bench in the Spam Shack while I take in exhibits for the hundredth time: the Spam Can race cars and handwritten letters from World War II praising Spam as indispensable to the fight against fascism. Surrendering to insomnia, I settle on a bench near you and hum to the rhythm of your snoring. When you wake, we lie together in silence, our bodies reaching for each other despite everything. We tumble onto the floor from the narrow bench and laugh.
It is eerie how much we’re starting to resemble what we’re eating. We gaze at ourselves and each other in the women’s room mirror. It’s true. We are pink, though maybe we started that way from the drive in the sun with the top down. I say, you are what you— and you raise a hand to hush me. Rule number one, you say. Did you forget? We are anti-adage.
You grab a pen from behind the register and make a list of the rules. No adages. No past. No future. No whistling. We’d agreed on them before, but you need to remind me. To put our pact on paper. This paper gives you some kind of protection, though I’m not sure what from.
On Friday, I dare to ask about your family, despite the rules. Where did you get a convertible? I see longing in your eyes, but you turn away, disappointed, and spend several hours locked alone behind a piggie diorama.
Our bodies have their own ideas, and you emerge, take me in silence, our eyes closed. I bring you tins of Spam, and you sit up, eat. But you don’t like i,t and your tongue moves around your mouth with resigned anger.
By Tuesday, even my body rejects you, and we sit on separate benches, waiting to be set free.
When the door is unlocked, we limp, pink and withered, past the confused face of the man with the keys. You go to your car and wait for me. I see you there, but I look in the other direction, consider my options.
by Allison Field Bell | Jan 26, 2026 | contest winner, flash fiction
They are standing on the woman’s porch. The woman and her friend. They stare at the road in front of them. Empty. And beyond the road, an apple orchard. And beyond that: sky. Night sky. Stars, and a hint of moonrise.
The woman is smoking a cigarette. She doesn’t usually, but the occasion calls for it. She takes a long, deep inhale. She coughs out the smoke.
The woman’s friend also doesn’t smoke. She takes the cigarette to her lips, coughs. “That is disgusting,” she says.
“It’s relaxing,” the woman says.
“It’s toxic,” the friend says.
Then there’s silence. What the woman could say: I truly didn’t want it. Or: I don’t ever want one. Or: thank you. Beneath the cigarette smoke, her body aches. That hollow feeling. Like a shell. Like she was never more than just a container.
The friend says, “You’re so quiet.” And then, softly: “You’re scaring me.”
The woman sighs. The friend drove her, and now she won’t leave. There’s something to the idea of being alone right now. But the woman could never say it. The thing didn’t just happen to her, to her body. The friend was there, holding her hand, shielding her from the cardboard signs. The vicious face of one man in particular: he spat at them. Not on them but at them. So much anger in one body.
“I’m tired,” the woman finally says.
“Of course you are,” says the friend. “You should lie down.”
“Yes,” the woman says.
But neither woman moves. In front of them: the empty road, the apple orchard. They watch the night grow. The barn owl who lives next door swoops over the trees, hunting, elegant.
The woman says, “I don’t know why this is hard.”
The friend says, “Of course it’s hard. Your body.”
The woman says, “My body.”
The friend says, “It’s a loss. A loss you get to choose. But a loss all the same.”
The woman takes another drag from the cigarette. She had insisted they buy them on the way home. The yellow box. They had to buy a lighter, too. She wonders now what the man at the gas station thought. Cigarettes and a lighter: what kind of meaning there. Not a regular smoker, just a circumstantial one. Maybe he imagined a scenario for them. A boyfriend cheated. A relative passed. Or maybe sisters, and they had to put down the family dog.
The woman considers living inside of one of those scenarios. The rightful grief she could feel. This isn’t the same. This isn’t a kind of wishing a being back to life or wishing a different decision had been made. This is a kind of loss that is an extraordinary relief. Gratitude. Freedom. And the horror that someone else a few states away can’t. How to explain that.
The cigarette is a stub now, mostly filter. The friend takes it from the woman and crushes it beneath her foot.
“Come on,” she says. “Let’s go inside. It’s getting cold out here.”
The woman notices the cold abruptly. She’s shivering. Still, she says, “Give me a minute.”
The friend looks skeptical at first. Then she nods and moves through the door into the house.
The woman is alone on the porch. The apple orchard dips into darkness, and she hears the owl, imagines her flapping her wings. The woman pulls another cigarette from the box, but doesn’t light it. She chews the filter, watches the sky. The moon rises just as the orchard vanishes from view. Slowly, the outlines of trees reappear, cast in silver. So much beauty. Such a small body to carry it.
by Deborah J. Chinn | Jan 23, 2026 | contest winner, flash fiction
First came the click of the front door lock, then the thud of his heavy American shoes dropping to the wooden floor. My silence and sleep were interrupted. I rubbed my eyes and checked the time. Garbage trucks were starting their rounds.
3 a.m.—fourth late night in a row. Just like his father.
Come morning, I peeked into my son Bing Kuen’s bedroom. He lay uncovered in his street clothes, softly snoring. His father gave him a bag of marbles for his eighth birthday—forgotten for years on the dresser. I picked his empty wallet off the floor and placed it on his nightstand. I pushed a stray lock of hair out of his face.
As I pulled his blanket up, he stirred and mumbled, “Leave me alone. I’ll pay it back, Ma,” waving me away before closing his eyes again. I caught a whiff of the sickly-sweet scent of opium he carried. For years, it had seeped into the curtains, the furniture, the walls—leaving a sticky, unclean film on my skin. I rubbed my hands as if I could wash it away.
Drawn by the familiar aroma, my husband’s spirit stood beside me, looking in on the boy. The odor intensified, the air thick with his presence. Marbles clicked and clacked when the two played on the floor. Years later, he taught his son to run numbers, keep ledgers, make a profit.
I opened the window, replacing the air in the room.
I went to the kitchen and pulled out the hidden safe. Holding my breath: two clicks left, one right, one full spin. The tumblers aligned; the door swung open. Bing Kuen had been there—just like his father, years ago.
Inside were only a few bills, barely enough to pay the butcher. I let out my breath. Placing the money underneath the stack of overdue bills, I left the safe out, door hanging open.
Lying out my last two jade bracelets on the bed, I held each to the light before slipping the thicker one onto my wrist—a wedding gift. Catching the morning sunlight, the deep green glowed from within. My skin warmed the stone, and I thought of my husband’s smile as he gave it to me.
I walked past a framed family photo from 1903. In it, Bing Kuen sat on my lap, the jade bracelet resting on my arm. I turned away—already running late for the Bay Ferry.
At the busy San Francisco Ferry Building, the streetcar line still runs right into Chinatown. But everything’s been rebuilt since the Great Earthquake and Fire. If I can’t find the shop, I’d have a good excuse to turn back with the bracelet.
The aroma of freshly baked pork bao led me to Eastern Bakery, where customers carried pink dim sum boxes tied in red string. Years before, we visited the shop as a family.
A few doors down, I saw Quong Lee’s shop. I recognized the characters printed across the red awning. Gold necklaces glistened in the window. A bell above the door rang, and Quong Lee emerged from the back.
“Hello, Chin Dong Shee,” he said formally. “It’s been a long time. Sorry to hear about your husband.”
I nodded.
Reaching into my bag, I ran my fingers over the cold, smooth stone one last time. I hesitated before handing it over. He took one look and gave it right back.
“Eighty dollars. I see a lot of these lately.”
“It cost three times that in Fuyue village.” I placed it firmly in his hand, turning it so the dark green vein caught the light.
Quong Lee’s left eye twitched slightly. He fingered the bangle a second too long, then smiled. He kept it.
“Okay, okay, your husband—good man. His lottery business brought in many customers. Friends for twenty years.” He paused. “Ninety. Final offer.”
A young couple, hand in hand, strolled towards the jade showcase. They pointed at a smaller bangle marked at two hundred dollars. Half that amount would buy groceries for months. I closed my eyes and saw the safe. The overdue bills. I asked for water.
“Would you prefer tea?” he asked, pulling out a celadon pot. I smiled. He poured the amber liquid into two small teacups.
“Now, you bought this with Qing dynasty money—before the Revolution. Not so valuable today,” he argued, raising a brow.
“We paid what it was worth then—investing in jade over paper. I expect to get what it’s worth now in American dollars.”
His eyes narrowing, he held the jade in both hands, turning it slightly to catch the light. I waited, tapping my finger on my lap. I imagined our wedding day—my husband’s smile.
My tapping resumed. Finally, Quong Lee raised his chin, clearing his throat.
“Ok, Ninety-eight dollars.” Reaching for the till, he added, “Hard to raise a child alone.”
I slipped the money into my purse before he could close the cash register. Stepping outside—Grant Avenue was busy now as if nothing had changed.
Longing to visit my husband before returning to Oakland, I stopped by Eastern Bakery to pick up an offering. Bing Kuen was just a year old when he tried his first bao. His little hands needed help peeling the paper off the bottom.
Pink box in hand, I caught the train from San Francisco to Colma Cemetery. Today we’d share dim sum again.
A light breeze blew as I stood by his gravestone. I rubbed my forearms, but my wrist remained cold where the warm jade once sat.
I lit joss paper and watched it curl upwards in flames, black smoke slowly spiraling into the cool winter air.
I lit a second paper, remembering him shooting marbles with his son. Without the weight of jade, I raised an arm to the sky and whispered into the trailing smoke:
Protect Bing Kuen. Before your fate becomes his.
The wind picked up the lingering scent of opium from my skin—blowing it into the ether.
by Christina Berke | Jan 20, 2026 | contest winner, flash fiction
You are running late to catch the bus to the train to the plane trying to get to your boyfriend who thinks you’re The One but wants to make sure you’ll start to exercise more first, eat less, and somehow you think getting lost is because you are fat and now you’ve missed the last train and are stranded, worry slicing your head as you try to balance your luggage and backpack and fears and how fucking disappointing you are to yourself but if you hurry, you could still make it and he will only be mad for a short burst that you are late, yet again, that you made him wait yet again.
You lost, a man says. It’s not a question. He’s been watching you.
You tell him you’re just trying to get to the airport, but you’ve taken the wrong train. You went the wrong way. Your instincts are wrong.
I’ll take you, he says.
Your body quiets in a strange relief, grateful for a kind stranger, too anxious to still make it on time. You can make it. You can get on that flight, return to your boyfriend, prove that you are not who he thinks you are— lazy and silent and soft.
Get in, the man says.
When you sit in his truck, you wonder about the tarp covering the seats. He must have noticed your eyes wandering because he says, construction work.
He smiles, foot hovering on the gas.
That suppresses your concerns enough to ignore how your skin sticks to the plastic, how it keeps you stuck in place. Luggage at your feet and lap, you’re pressed close to the passenger door as he makes small talk. Sleepy street lamps bleed past you.
Maybe you could take a bus, he says, showing you the empty station. It’s closed, though, he says without stopping.
You can get out here, you think, and reach for some cash to hand over.
He insists it’s not safe. His house isn’t far away. You can rest there, he says. Catch a flight in the morning. He’ll drive you to make sure you make it on time. A nice nap, he says more to himself than to you. It’ll be good for you. His eyes stay on the dark ahead.
You say all of the other words for no. Your body stays rigid against the door. He drives further. You’re on the freeway now. You wonder how much it would hurt if you tuck and roll out of a moving car. How fast could you possibly be going? It’s so late, the roads so clear. Would you take your bags along with you, or leave them? What would hurt worse? What if he came back to find you on the roadside, upset that you tried to leave him? Your palms slick with dread.
Thank you, you say instead.
He takes an exit you try to singe into memory. Here’s a great school for you to raise the kids, he says. There’s where I want to start my business, he says. You wouldn’t have to work, he says.
The truck slows. You are on a tree-lined street, a suburb that could be peaceful. Wait here, he says and kills the engine.
You don’t move. You worry he’ll see the glow of your phone and get angry. Instead, you watch him walk around the back. He returns and grabs your bags.
Thank you, you say again.
In this house, you sit with a dancer’s posture on the edge of an armchair, upholstered in ugly flowers. The curtains peak open into the oceanic street outside.
Be right back, he says.
He returns minutes or seconds or hours later with a bag. You imagine what’s in it: rope and tape and tools or snacks and hot sauce and soda.
In one version, you see headlights coming down the inky street, desert throat, vibrating hands, as you bolt out the door, waving spaghetti arms, screeching out I’m here, I’m here, I’m here. You get on a flight in the morning, mind ballooning with what an idiot you are, a fucking moron, a stupid piece of shit, this mantra playing until your boyfriend, the one who says he loves you, picks you up because he’s feeling generous that day and now all you can think about is how exhausting it is to calculate how much you now owe him. You could have been murdered, he laughs at the idea. What were you thinking? You say, I’m sorry, you say, It won’t happen again, you say, Thank you, you say, I’m so sorry, but it comes out in a vaporous whisper, curling smaller into itself until it disappears.
In another version, you eat the chips, sip the soda.
In another, you will never be able to sleep with the lights off or the bedroom unlocked without springing up slick with sweat, wondering where you are.
by Savera Zachariah | Jan 15, 2026 | contest winner, flash fiction
My father brought home strange things: a crumpled five-rupee note, a nose stud, a baby’s anklet. Things the dead no longer need, my mother muttered while grinding rice for idlis. She steadied the pestle, afraid it might slip and bruise her thigh.
We lived near Canal Road — canal on one side, and houses and shops on the other. My father’s job was to ferry dead bodies from the government hospital to the crematorium at the other end of the road. “Easy job,” he said — hospital to crematorium and back in the vandi. He had to cross the railway tracks before the gate closed and reach the crematorium before dark — as it was inauspicious to cremate after the sun set.
“Appa, can I ride in your vandi?” I asked him. He flicked my ear. “No — you aren’t dead yet!”
Every day, my father staggered home and, like a drunken shaman in a trance, muttered about dead people and their sins. Once the arrack had done its thing, he collapsed onto the broken chair and slept, snoring like a lorry belching smoke down the ghat road.
One evening, I sneaked off to Canal Road, hoping to see the van my father was driving. Children played by the sidewalk. I ducked behind the bus stop, humming a radio jingle.
“Deadman’s coming! Deadman’s coming!” the children shouted as they lined the sidewalk, ready
to play their favourite guessing game.
“Quick, quick — Is it a man or a woman?”
The factory siren wailed the end of the shift, and as the sun set, an orange glow enveloped Canal Road like a shroud. In the distance, a man dragging a donkey cart came towards the bus-stop. But I was looking past him, for a big white van.
“My turn today,” shouted a boy. I turned and watched them. The children were pushing each other and passing a small ball around. One boy ran towards the cart as it levelled with him. “It is a woman. I can see toe rings.”
I looked. And froze.
Appa?
Why was he pulling a cart and not driving a van?
Sweat trickled down his torso. His calloused feet shuffled on the scorching asphalt. He pulled the cart forward, his eyes fixed ahead. The humped cart had flapping curtains that barely hid the body. A pair of legs was sticking out of the cart, silver toe rings catching the light. I blinked hard and bit my lip. Won’t cry.
I watched the boy take aim at Appa’s feet and hurl the ball, giggling, as if it were another toy. They wanted him to trip, to make the body slide out. Appa sidestepped and the ball hit the canal wall. He didn’t stop — just kept going as the boys groaned with disappointment and stomped the sidewalk. I ran home as fast as my seven-year-old legs could carry me, my face was wet, and my eyes blurred.
Some days, he walked alone with the cart. Other days, a group of women followed, ululating and beating their chests, with drummers pounding behind them. The wailing and the tuneless rhythm made my brain feel like it would burst and spill on the road.
People ran out from nearby houses to watch the death parade.
“Look at them crying,” I heard one of the boys say.
“That must be his wife,” another said. “She’s pulling her hair out.”
Mothers shooed their sons back into their homes. Bad luck, bad luck, they muttered as it was inauspicious to see a dead body.
On some days, I saw my father running with the cart. It seemed light — like empty. The curtains sucked in with the wind. A child. Canal Road went quiet then. On those days, he would come back mumbling a lot more than usual and falling over his broken chair. The air was heavy with the smell of arrack and something burnt — flesh? Maybe. My mother would shake her head and say, that his eyes had dulled with the smoke of a thousand pyres, and she couldn’t look into his eyes anymore. I didn’t understand her words.
On one of those days, he sat bolt upright, calling out to me.
“Kanna… when you meet those boys from Canal Road, tell them about the wailing women. All paid criers only. Only noise. And, when it is my turn, put me in the white vandi and cover my feet.” And he slumped back to sleep.
All these years later, the cries of the wailing women still echo. Money could buy the dead their mourners. For us, death paid — Appa earned by the body count. When his time came, he finally rode the white vandi. Feet covered.
by Gary Fincke | Jan 12, 2026 | flash fiction
On our street, the fathers who hunted had sons who hunted. Their rifles and shotguns, the working ones, were never visible, but each living room displayed a weapon from their father’s or grandfather’s past, some heirloom hung over the mantle like a flag that declared what sort of compact country you had entered.
Although he loved the outdoors, my father never hunted, and so I stayed silent while neighbor boys told tales in the language of blinds and points and net weight and taxidermy.
My uncle hunted, but had no sons. When I was eleven, he decided to teach me. An hour, that lesson lasted, while my father sat inside his brother’s house like a wife waiting for war news. Because I was nearsighted and never wore my glasses except to read a quiz written on a sixth-grade blackboard, I proved to be a terrible student. “A start,” was all that my uncle said, and never brought guns up again. My father, in the car, did not ask what I had hit or whether I intended, now, to hunt. What he said was, “If he had a boy of his own, he’d be different.”
He and I and that uncle lived apart for decades until the afternoon my father, who, by then, had outlived my mother by seven years, said, “He has a little cancer in his bones,” a few months before his brother would die. That day, we played bridge as if everyone were healthy. My aunt and father partnered for an hour. From time to time, my uncle coughed softly. As always, he held his cards like a weapon, expecting me, in kind, to handle mine like an expert, using each bid to reveal something important about the cards I’d been dealt. Afterward, my father said, “Frank knows what’s next.”
Fifteen years later, the last time I visited my father while he lived alone, he said his longtime neighbor’s son was dead, shot by a stranger on the back porch of the yellow-brick ranch we could see from his small bedroom window. “About your age, that boy,” he said, meaning sixty, his neighbor as near to ninety as he was, the son still living at home as if he walked, each morning, to the school bus stop with textbooks in a backpack.
“What’s next?” my father said. The answer was his moving in less than a week to an assisted living home where “what’s next” would not include his leaving the stove on or falling down the stairs or forgetting to take a full day’s worth of prescription drugs. In his backyard, a storm-felled tree sprawled so close to the house that the door couldn’t be opened. The television showed only darkness, and my father had said earlier, “You try,” as if I might resurrect the familiar reruns he watched as video lullabies.
“They say his boy shot the other man first,” my father finally said. The survivor found in the kitchen by my father’s friend came home from blood work meant to establish what medicine and how much of it might suitably be prescribed to extend his life. “A room I know by heart,” my father went on, citing the color of the chairs and how a small clock sat on a narrow wooden shelf above the window. How, if you leaned over the sink like his friend did, you could see the whole way down the porch after a bloody stranger nodded in that direction to answer your first question.
I have not touched a gun since my uncle lectured me about maintenance and safety and breath control before he allowed me to shoot. Not since he lifted the rifle from my hands, perplexed by my failure. He would likely be puzzled that each morning, always before dawn, I play a word game that seems important to solve because the site shows statistics that compare my results to those of a million others. How silly, I, too, often think, walking to a side window to watch the sunrise while listening to birds I am unable to identify by sound. Some mornings, however, I follow the brightening in the west from the other side, noting the moment I can make out the details of what sits on my neighbor’s screened-in deck.
by Bethany Bruno | Jan 8, 2026 | flash fiction
The one-hour photo smelled of vinegar and metal, the scent clinging to the back of my throat like it might stay there forever. My hands sweated inside the sleeves of my windbreaker as I slid the yellow Kodak envelope across the counter.
The clerk, a man with nicotine-stained fingers, tore the seal with his teeth, holding the flap open like it was a wound. He flipped through the stack without looking at me, his mouth tight.
“Most of these didn’t turn out,” he said. His voice was flat but not unkind. He set the photos on the counter between us.
The first few were smears of light, a sunburst where my father’s head should be, a ghostly blur where my aunt had been leaning against the casket. The disposable camera had been in my backpack all summer, tossed between sunscreen bottles and paperback books, rattling on the floor of my closet. I had meant to use it for the beach, but then August came, and my mother was in the hospital, and the beach felt wrong.
The clerk turned the stack and kept going. In one, the funeral director’s hand reached into the frame holding a white lily, but his arm was a streak, his fingers more shadow than flesh. In another, the church ceiling bent at an impossible angle, beams doubling over themselves, the chandelier split into four watery moons.
I remembered lifting the camera halfway through the service, my palm shaking against the thin plastic body, the click of the shutter like an insect snapping its wings. I had wanted to catch my mother’s face one last time, even though it was already gone.
And then I saw it.
The clerk paused before sliding the photo toward me. The colors were rich, the light sharp. My mother was standing in what looked like a motel room, sunlight spilling in through a half-closed curtain. She was naked, her hair tangled, one hand holding a cigarette, the other covering only part of her chest. She was laughing at something outside the frame, her head tilted back, mouth open, teeth white against the shadow of her throat.
For a moment, I couldn’t breathe. The bedsheet behind her was rumpled in a way that made my stomach turn. There was a man’s shirt draped over the chair in the corner, sleeves hanging toward the carpet.
I gripped the edge of the counter until the laminate pressed crescents into my skin. My first thought was that it had to be from an old roll, some image taken years ago that somehow bled onto this film. But this was the same camera I’d bought with babysitting money that June, the one I’d loaded on the day she fainted in the driveway.
The clerk cleared his throat. “Sometimes these old cameras, they catch light weird. Burn in an old image from another roll, maybe.”
I nodded like that made sense, but I could smell the motel room in my head. Cigarette smoke soaked into the curtains. The sour tang of stale beer. The faint perfume she wore on days she said she was going to the store but came back hours later with nothing in her hands.
I paid in cash, folding the receipt until it was small enough to disappear in my fist. Outside, the parking lot baked under the late afternoon sun, heat rising off the asphalt in shimmers. My car door groaned when I pulled it open. I sat with the envelope in my lap, the air heavy with the smell of hot plastic and gasoline.
I pulled the photo out again. Her body was softer than I remembered, the curve of her stomach, the faint tan lines. She looked free in a way she never had at home. I thought about how she used to stand at the sink, elbows locked, washing the same plate three times over while the radio played low. How she’d sometimes hum under her breath, but never smile like she did in that picture.
When I got home, my father was at the kitchen table, the newspaper folded beside his coffee. The light through the blinds left pale stripes across his face. He looked up when I came in, his eyes tired but not unfriendly.
I slipped the photo back into the envelope, feeling its sharp edge against my palm. I stood there longer than I should have, my voice caught in my throat.
“Did Mom ever… go anywhere by herself?” I asked. My tone was casual, but my fingers clenched the envelope so tight the paper bowed.
He lowered his eyes to the cup in front of him, turning it by the handle. “She liked to drive sometimes,” he said. “Said it helped her think.” His voice was even, but I saw a muscle jump in his jaw.
I nodded like I’d expected that. Poured myself a glass of water, the faucet hissing in the silence between us.
He didn’t look up again.
The envelope burned in my hand, and I wondered how long a single photograph could live in the dark before it began to rot.
by Sage Tyrtle | Jan 5, 2026 | flash fiction
You are a billionaire’s new, about-to-turn-19 wife. You are the youngest person at the Mint Green Party, which is being held in Central Park. Everything is mint green. Even the earrings. Even the cuff links. Even the parasols protecting skin tight over cheek / chin / jaw implants. Someone’s yapping poodle is running around, pistachio curls bouncing, as servers put bloody plates in front of you and your gray-haired husband, Gary, and murmur, “Gorilla steak.” Another server puts a crystal goblet next to your plates at precisely 2 o’clock. “Glacier melt,” she says.
The outdoor heaters take the autumn chill away. The steak melts in your mouth, and you want to ask Gary if the cook will make it for the two of you at home, but he’s busy talking to the billionaire across from him about getting a shadow yacht. You might be a mom now, but you feel like a child, sitting with people who make more in one minute than your dad made in a year. The billionaires wipe their bloody mouths and say haw, haw instead of laughing. The dusk-lit lights of New York City are sea foam meringues, and you hope the nanny is remembering to sing the peacock song for Molly.
Guards in lavender jumpsuits ring the party, facing outward, pistols hanging off their belts. They are watching for the Benign Terrorists, and since no one knows what they look like, it could be the woman walking the Great Dane, it could be the smooching couple by the tree. Gary told you the security advisors were beside themselves. First of all, they said, have your Mint Green party on a super-yacht or a private 747 or one of your people-hunting islands. For god’s sake, they said, you will not be safe in Central Park. And you, three weeks graduated from high school, said but is it safe? Gary laughed and ruffled your hair, the way he does with Molly. He said, the Benign Terrorists have been around for years. If they were going to do something really bad, they would have by now.
The billionaire next to you, whose face is smoother than Molly’s but who keeps talking about seeing the Glenn Miller Orchestra live, picks up his phone and bawls for his assistant to charge it. You don’t have your phone with you. Gary likes for you to be present. You tug on Gary’s sleeve and whisper-ask where the bathroom is and he says, does the baby have to go pee-pee? and everyone in earshot goes haw, haw and he points to a little trailer in the distance. Inside, you run your fingers over the real marble counter and the soap, which a little card tells you was made by children, but in a good way. There’s pee all over the seat, and once when your mom was pregnant with your sister, the two of you went into a Porta-Potty at the fair, and there was such a mound of shit and flies that your mom stumbled out the door and threw up right there on the ground. You wipe the pee off the seat with toilet paper and then wonder on your way back to the party if it could have been the Benign Terrorists. Didn’t they break all the toilets on every whaling vessel that one year?
You wish Gary wouldn’t call you a baby.
At the tables, the billionaires are spooning custard out of hollow elephant tusks, making little coos that you don’t understand until you see the custard sparkling in the candlelight. The smooth-faced billionaire leans over and points to your custard and tells you it’s diamonds, and when you take a bite, you roll the glittering glit on the roof of your mouth and lean against the table, which wobbles a little. Gary snaps his fingers, and a server gets a wrench and tightens and loosens, but after he leaves the table, it still wobbles. Your mind goes again to the Benign Terrorists, but that’s stupid. Look at all the guards.
The after-dinner entertainment starts, a comedy set consisting of real New York City residents reading their real medical bills out loud. One man lists the care his newborn son had during a two-week stay in the neonatal intensive care unit. When he reads, “Total: $570,889.23,” the billionaires are laughing so hard they can hardly breathe, and their laughter is infectious. Gary is wiping tears from the corners of his eyes. Whenever their giggles trail off, someone says, “and twenty-three cents,” and they’re off again.
It’s after the comedy set that the billionaire with the most numbers after their name asks the host why children weren’t allowed at the party. Another billionaire chimes in, saying they were heartbroken, that Elysian has the most darling mint chocolate chip onesie, and more and more are asking and the host, bewildered, says there was never anything about children in the invitation. In the ensuing silence a billionaire at a different table says, “Is it really human rights violations if the ‘victims’ can’t afford lawyers?” and then you are diving for Gary’s phone, everyone is diving for their phones, but none of them are charged and you run to a guard unheeding of his gun and beg for his phone, but the guards’ phones are dead too and no one is walking their dogs or jogging anymore and the pedicabs that were supposed to be waiting are empty spaces in the dark and you and the billionaires run through the night, holding up rainforest-dew gowns, yanking off lime-sorbet jackets.
But you’re too late. Everyone is too late. By the time you and Gary burst into your dark penthouse, you already understand. The nanny is gone. Molly is gone. Her yellow blanket and her soft elephant, and the way she grins up at you when you sing the peacock song, her jagged tooth lonely in her mouth. All of it. Gone.
by Kelly Pedro | Dec 18, 2025 | flash fiction
My mother called my father from the airport to tell him she wasn’t coming home, not that night or the next or the next. When he stopped talking over her, when he finally understood what she was saying, he put her on speakerphone.
“You better talk to Colleen, she’s standing right here.”
For a while, all we heard was the clip-clop of shoes rushing past, and I wondered if my mother was wearing the soft rubber sneakers she always used for work at the hospital or the blue stilettos she always wore when she went to her friend Stella’s for their monthly book club meetings.
“I’m taking a little vacation, baby. I’ll be home soon.” Her voice was tinny, crackling through the air. My father reached for my shoulder, squeezed it tight.
“Where are you going?” My mother kept a map in her closet with pins scattered across it—green were all the places she’d been, and red were the places she still wanted to go.
“France, maybe, I’m not sure yet.”
“When will you be back? Will you eat crepes?” We were learning to make crepes with strawberry jam in French Club, and I was the only sixth grader who could roll the crepes so that the jam didn’t squirt out the sides.
“Normally no, but for you yes,” and she laughed like she did whenever I asked what she was reading for book club.
My father scratched his stubbled face after she hung up, leaving us in the empty silence of our living room with only the patter of rain tapping at the windows, the clouds shadowing the couch my mother liked to keep covered in plastic.
“Colleen, go outside and play,” he said, his hand heavy on my shoulder.
When I opened our front door, the street was clotted with puddles, and the air in the house became loamy as rain sprayed into the foyer where my mother’s jean jacket hung, the one she always wore when she picked me up from school because she told me the other mothers liked it better when it covered her tattoos.
“Colleen,” my father poked his head from the kitchen, half an onion in his hand, “now.”
“Can’t I just help with dinner?”
My father shook his head. He turned and placed the onion on the cutting board, then I heard him rummaging in the cabinets, the clang of a pot as he set it down.
I tiptoed to my parents’ closet, where my mother had pinned the map near the old purses my grandmother had left her. The closet was stuffed with bright summer dresses with spaghetti straps, sheer batik-patterned coverups my mother liked to wear over her bikinis, jeans that fit her like a second skin, and worn caramel-colored sandals that still smelled like her feet. I ran my palm across the smooth tops of the red pins and tried to picture what France looked like and whether people there also expertly rolled crepes filled with strawberry jam. Once, my mother and I stood in here together, and she turned and lifted her shirt, showing me tattoos of every country she’d been to, like she was mapping a new world on her skin.
“What are you doing in here?”
My father’s body filled the closet doorway, a salted rim of a half-moon sweat stain on his shirt. He followed my fingers up to the map with its scattered pins.
“This stupid thing,” he said. “Your mother loves chasing whatever comes next. Nothing is ever enough for her.”
I reached out and squeezed his arm and wondered if it was wrong to always want something more.
He stepped to the map and began removing the pins delicately, tossing the green ones into a pouch he’d made lifting the hem of his shirt. I held out my puckered palm, and my father began dropping the red pins gently into it, each making a little tink as they landed. When he had placed the last red pin in my palm, he sidestepped past me and left. Alone with my mother’s abandoned things and a palmful of red pins, I decided I would save them for her, so we could add them back to the map when she got home. I folded my fingers over their sharp little points and squeezed my hand tight.
by Stanley Nesbitt | Dec 15, 2025 | flash fiction
The wind keened in the birches as the door swung behind Claire and the house took her in. Ice climbed the windowpanes in delicate ribs. On the mantel, three birthday cards leaned like little doors; all of them were blank inside.
“Do you like the house?” Aunt Maureen asked by the fire. She didn’t turn. Her hands were clasped—too tight, as if pinning something shut.
“It’s quiet,” Claire said. She kept her coat on. The couch still wore roses from another decade. The coffee table had a new scar in the veneer and, centered on it, a box in pale pink paper. No ribbon. A warped tag: To Claire – Happy Birthday.
She hadn’t told anyone.
“It’s polite to open a present when it’s given,” Maureen said, voice syruped, not sweet.
“I can open it after dinner.” Claire’s stomach answered with a small, hard knot. She had come for a key, for the letters Maureen said were “left behind.” She had promised herself she would not leave again without them.
“After dinner,” Maureen echoed. The fire crackled and flinched. “Go on, then.”
Claire sat. The paper was damp under her fingers. The tag’s ink looked wet, as if it had just remembered her name.
She worked a fingernail under the seam. The paper parted with a sound like a quiet sob. Maureen’s bare feet whispered on the rug behind her and stopped. Lavender. And meat.
“No ribbon,” Claire said, to have something small to say.
“Ribbons are for show,” Maureen said. “This is for keeps.”
The paper sloughed away in slow strips. Underneath: a wooden box, old and blackened at the edges as though it had been warmed too close to a fire. No hinges—only a fine line like a healed scar.
“Where did you—” Claire touched the seam. Cold bled through the wood. It hummed faintly, as if a fly were trapped inside. “What’s in it?”
“What’s yours?” Maureen’s gaze fixed somewhere above Claire’s shoulder. “What your mother and father never let me give you. Go on, if you don’t accept it, it won’t keep.”
“You said they—”
“I said what I said. And now, all you must do— is accept.”
Claire pressed her thumb to the lid and levered upward. The box creaked open. Darkness first, then the pale oval of a face nested in torn velvet. Brown hair matted to a skull. Eyes wide and glassed. Mouth slack with dried blood tracking the chin.
Maureen’s face.
Claire did not breathe, nor blink.
Behind her, Maureen whispered—right behind her—though the air had not moved. “Well?”
The head’s lips twitched. A twitch that softened into a smile with too many teeth. “What did you get?” the voice asked, silk dragged over broken glass.
Claire’s tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. The house sat silent— patient.
“You don’t want to hurt my feelings,” Maureen breathed, closer now. A hand hovered near Claire’s shoulder, yet did not touch. “It’s polite to say.”
The tag lay on the coffee table where it had fallen, a curl of pink with her name fat and black. The ink shimmered, waiting.
Claire stared into the box. She thought of her mother’s handwriting on hospital forms, her father’s careful squares on grocery lists. She thought of the key she had not yet asked for. If she named it, it would be hers. If it were hers, it would never leave.
She shut her mouth on the word the head wanted.
“What did you get?” the head asked again, smiling wider, as the tag’s letters began to crawl.
Claire picked up the tag. It tried to stick to her fingers like a tongue. She turned it over. The back was clean, pale, patient. She lifted the pen from Maureen’s dead-silent mantel, shook it once, and bent close to the box until her reflection bent with her in the head’s dull eyes.
“I—” she began, and felt the breath behind her lean in, hungry as a drain.
“I deny thee,” she whispered.
The house let go of its stagnant breath, and the warmth from the fire—found her. The tag took the ink and would not let it go, though it smeared beneath her fingertip. Claire pressed it to the wood.
When she looked up, the chair—and the room— were empty. On the table, the seam in the box knit neatly shut like a freshly sewn wound.
Outside, the wind forgot how to keen. On the mantel, two cards leaned. The third had fallen open. Inside, one last message in her mother’s handwriting: Do not open.
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