by Olga Musial | Apr 4, 2022 | micro
Father says he built the house back in Poland and hauled it with him across the Atlantic. The story goes: once, there was a field, and in the field, there was a cabin, and inside the cabin was a man, and inside the man’s stomach was a house. He gave birth to it during a storm that scared all the storks off, and now Polish is the language of storms. Storms are your mother tongue, says father, Polish making waves on his tongue until it falls limp. Don’t say the language is twisted. He’ll hear.
What I remember about the house is the spine. Bricks and honey, not like father’s bone and marrow. He says the spine is where you find the soul. We slide through its mouthpiece onto herringbone floors, jump up to feel the ceilings. The house is no longer young, and we are to be kind to it because the Atlantic set salt in the cracks of its bricks. We tour father’s twin, so that we don’t get lonely with our stories. We’ve not heard his in a long time.
We wait to be welcomed for tea until the milk goes moldy in the fridge, until vines grown on the house’s mouth like a beard. Father has a beard too, says brother, now I see how he’s twin to the house. Do you see the resemblance? Sometimes I think, concerning human standards, the house is more of a person than father is. Oh, we do get so lonely with our stories.
We’d ask, at dinners, if he could invite English onto his tongue and learn our own stories, and not only his. We know yours, said brother, but ours are dim for you. No, he has tried, it doesn’t feel right to him, he won’t go again, alright, alright, it’s his tongue that rebels, ties a knot in his throat. His mouth is native to storms and not skyscrapers and sunny beaches and Costco’s.
But that is how you fit in, said brother, except the only place father fits in is the 60s futon we found at a landfill with a beer in his left hand and a ham sandwich in his right, and the remote in his mouth so he can change channels with his tongue. Father would leaf through our heads to see if we dreamt in Polish, left bruises to blacken our sleep if we didn’t. He said he’d crack my bones open, squeeze me into the size and shape of his fist, and I giggled because I didn’t know what to say if it hadn’t been a joke. This is how he lives his story we’re not part of. Unless…
The tongue, I said, you have to take his tongue.
But he looks so peaceful asleep.
Listen, do you want the story or not?
But his tongue cannot tell our story, only his, said brother.
We reach into his throat, except now he is not moving.
That’s enough, wake up and tell us the story. Or we’ll ask the house.
I know what it is, says brother. He’s grieving, it’s that easy. He says it as if grief was something you could unhook a person from like you unhook fish from a rod.
But that’s only if he’s too small to be eaten by it, brother adds.
You think he’ll be grieving for his tongue?
No, brother says, besides, we can’t have the story until we strip him of his language. Then he’ll spit it out. What’s left of a story if you strip it of its language? The sky is a splash of dark paint and on it there are spots of clouds we cannot see through. So, we haul him along through grass and into the storm outside. This is how you rebirth a person, I say. You give them back to where they come from.
Father’s mouth splits open. This is your story, he says and shoves it down our throats, but that’s the way you don’t hear it: Once, there was a cabin, and inside the cabin was a man and inside the man’s throat was a language and inside the language was a storm. Language made you a home.
No, we say. This is your story, and we are barely part of it.
by Fractured Lit | Apr 1, 2022 | flash fiction, micro, news
These 39 stories thrilled us with their specific and creepy details, their attention to character, and their surprises in plot and language! We’re narrowing it down to our shortlist and this will be sent to judge Amber Sparks very soon!
Flesh and Blood
Regarding the Disappearance and His Subconscious Mind
Dealing with Black Mold
Devotions
Gone
Tribute
Local Color
Speak to Sire of Love
Double the fun
The Bottom of a Well is Also a Home
The Prize
Her Secret Dark
Selkie Wife
Omigaa
Vampires in the Basement
Should be Around Here Somewhere
A Love Story
The Pigeon-pea Princess of Sanganakallu
Hypnos & The Mother
You Ain’t Heard of the Buffalo Man?
Breathing Room
Hair, Teeth
Millie & Mary
Monster Diary
Blood Honey
Game
Mousetrap
Mr. Reynolds Made All the difference in the World
After the End
My Brother, Named and Unnamed
Searching for Pesticide
The Loch Ness Monster is Dead
Fridge
Three Part Figment: a Woman, a Mother, the Bird
a modern fairy tale
Papaya Erectus
THE CHILDREN HAVE COME
Escapologist
by Elizabeth Maria Naranjo | Mar 31, 2022 | micro
We wait until the soft explosions above deaden to absolute silence—not the kind of silence that listens but the kind that sleeps, and teenage girls know the difference. We wait until our murmurs turn to whispers and even the whispers seem loud—muffled collisions, muted giggles. Fingers fumbling at the silver latch of a basement window. We crawl through the narrow opening, climb over the well, roll onto cold grass. Streak across the backyard and scale the fence like wood sprites, two girls—jeans, sweaters, sneakers, cigarettes. We run.
Dark empty streets, a world asleep, the gift of midnight. Our voices now like bells. We light our cigarettes and inhale deeply, listening to the paper crackle, watching the embers momentarily glow brighter before they turn to ash. We blow jets of smoke into the night air. We have nowhere to go, and nowhere is enough.
Another night, another bedroom, this one above-ground. We slide the window open, quietly, carefully, pop the screen. We lower ourselves gently onto the gravel, tiptoe across the gravel, wince at the comically amplified sound of our sneakers on the gravel. We leap silently onto the gray strip of sidewalk and bound across the street, waving at the neighborhood boy who sits on his front porch smoking, friendly face, long blonde hair—he waves back. Later we will stop for boys, later boys will run with us, after us, they will pick us up in cars and drive us places and buy us alcohol. But for now, it’s just us.
Maybe we’ll walk to the elementary school and climb the highest horizontal bars—one with chipped blue paint, one with chipped yellow paint—eight feet up, sitting, falling, coordinating death drops so our feet hit the ground at the exact same time.
Maybe we’ll jump onto the swings, side by side, long brown hair streaming, voices shrieking, kicking our legs higher and higher until our feet shatter the moon.
by Kayla Rutledge | Mar 30, 2022 | flash fiction
In her old age, the Virgin Mary moves to your town in the North Carolina backwoods, buys a fixer-upper and takes walks on the side of the freeway. As she walks, she hums — a song by Lennon, or Handel’s Messiah. Or something else. A lullaby with a name you can’t remember, something whistled through an open window on the last day you were young.
The Virgin Mary on the highway, amid the blown-out tires and glass-sharp gravel and styrofoam cups stained with dip spit. She comes after sunrise and before the end of night shift, like a yellow clearance tag on the cuff of the new day. The sun on your plastic tollbooth window shows all the fingerprints.
You recognize her by her gait, the song, or because your brother calls you up and says, “Did you know the Virgin Mary lives right around here?”
“Thank goodness she was able to get in,” you say. The country, you mean, with immigration being what it is, and of course, there being no box for ‘Saint’ on the paperwork.
She arrives without fanfare, no donkey or frankincense. She leaves her sneakers on the porch, to air. The Madonna wears a pair of Sketchers GOWalk Arch Fits in light maroon. She double-knots the laces.
*
The Virgin Mary on the highway, rolling dandelions between her index finger and thumb. When people from town drive past, they roll down their car windows and wave. They shift politely into the middle lane. It’s spring. The grass comes up finespun as fur.
No one important lives in your town. Even the local weatherman commutes back and forth from Fayetteville. The Baptist minister worries the Pope will show up next. Or worse, Jesus Himself.
“We can’t have the second coming here,” people say to each other. “Think of the traffic.”
More traffic means more work for you, the click-slide of the window, rattling drawer, pointing at the sign: Exact Change, Please.
The Madonna always turns around before reaching you, as if you might charge her for walking. What does your tollbooth look like to her, flattened under the glare of the sun? Opaque and resistant. A silver thumbtack marking out Nowhere from Somewhere.
*
In summer, you are the last stop before the road trip begins, the beach vacation, the out-of-town-email-response. Families pull up in the pink dawn, already poor-tempered from packing and preparation, thermoses of coffee throwing steam. Their cars teem with boogie boards and chip bags the size of small children. The Madonna trails behind them with the sun.
“She’s funny, isn’t she?” they say. “But nice. Definitely nice.”
They say this with concern, like they’re waiting for you to tell them otherwise.
A class of Sunday schoolers leaves a skyline of candles on the Virgin Mary’s porch. She extinguishes the display with a bucket of dishwater. She leaves dough in a bowl on her windowsill, to rise.
*
The Virgin Mary on the highway, in fall. The grass grows, tall and brittle, to her calves. School starts, and everyone is late all the time. The cars scream past and do not slow, they come one after the other like notes at the bottom of a piano, like the huffs of a woman in labor. Always the strong, angry colors: red, grey, black. Her head covering flaps in the wind.
The Methodists want the Blessed Mother as a guest speaker for the youth group. They show up on her front porch, asking for the hits: the angel, the manger. Perhaps she could mention the benefits of virginity. They would feed her, of course — pizza.
The Virgin Mary just tilts her head politely, drying her hands on a chintz dish towel. It turns out she doesn’t speak English. She doesn’t eat pizza, either.
This is really the last straw. Nobody wants to say it, but they do, in texts, at home, in church, to each other. The Virgin Mary is weird. She sends dishes to the potluck that are too spicy to eat. She doesn’t keep up with college football.
“If she’s living here, she could at least try to get to know us,” people complain. “She could make an effort to fit in.”
They toss their trash out car windows. They pay their toll.
*
The Virgin Mary on the highway, mostly forgotten. She wades in ripples through the grass. Sometimes an artist passes through, hoping she’ll sit for a portrait, or a particularly penitent Catholic. “What’s she like?” they ask, running their hands up and down the wheel. “I mean, what should I expect?”
What is she like?
You went to her door once, toward the end. You wanted to tell her that no one pays attention unless you make them, until you hold them up for every last cent.
Your brother was dying then. A tumor on his liver the size of a quarter. His life was a noiseless walk through tall grass. He never asked anyone for anything, and when he died, you knew, people would say his life was a waste, if they spoke about him at all.
It didn’t have to be like that for the Virgin Mary. You wanted to tell her that.
It was Friday, the beginning of Shabbat. You saw through the window. The Virgin Mary alone at her kitchen table, watching the candles burn down, eating carefully the bread. It struck you then that she knew a thing or two about the way things are paid for. She understood what being worshipped demands of you, in the end.
*
They say the Virgin Mary might live here forever. Her tomatoes are doing well. She is accompanied by no miracles except one. When death, in all its forms, comes to visit your town — when a toll is paid, at the line between Nowhere and Somewhere, leaving someone else behind — the grief-stricken open their doors to find a single pair of Sketchers sneakers on the porch, perched like a polyester butterfly.
One day, it happens to you.
by Sara Chansarkar | Mar 28, 2022 | micro
I did not combine melted butter and eggs in the medium mixing bowl or beat the mixture with the hand blender. Did not add organic flour and sugar, breaking the lumps with my fingers before whisking the contents together. Did not transfer the batter into a greased baking dish, smoothing the top with a spatula. Did not stow the pan in the oven, setting the timer for 45 minutes, did not open the fridge to find the cream cheese jar empty, did not pull out a flattened candle packet from the sundry drawer, chiding myself for being unprepared. Did not run to Kroger’s for a quick purchase.
On the way back, did not stop at the screaming blue and red lights careening in beside the yellow buses at the K-1 school, did not press my heart with my left hand, steering into a parking spot with the right. Did not trip on the strap of my satchel while scurrying out of the car, falling on the tarmac, skinning both my knees. Did not watch stretchers with little bodies being stowed into ambulances—a pink headband, the sparkly purple letters spelling “BIRTHDAY” soaked red. Did not level the surface of the earth where she lay with my hands, again and again, breaking the lumps with my fingers, smoothing out the surface, wishing I had a spatula. Unprepared.
by Lena Valencia | Mar 17, 2022 | micro
When they ask the hero how big the bomb is, he says “Big enough to blow a hole in the world,” and we know we’re done for.
It was a normal day. We were going to work. We were going to visit the grandkids. We wear toolbelts and have a wife. We are the working-class symbols who travel by bus in a city of cars. This action narrative doesn’t have the capacity for our lives but that’s ok. The villain is the only one with a backstory, and no one is surprised when it turns out he used to be a cop.
Still, questions linger: Will we be fired for missing work? Will the grandkids still want the teddy bear, now that it smells of gasoline? Will we ever be able to slow for gridlock without doom choking us? Will we ever be able to take the bus again?
We don’t actually have a choice in the matter, never did, unlike the tourist, who can just go home and never has to see a freeway again, or the woman who was only there because driving on them made her tense up, but she’s dead now, skull crushed by the tires of the great machine, the same machine that soared fifty feet across the gap in the 10 Freeway interchange. For you, it was watching a gymnast handspring across a balance beam and stick the landing. For us, it was the red of our eyelids clenched tight, urine pooling in our seats as we clutched our bags like the hero told us to, hearts in ears, praying.
Yes, we were saved. In the shelter of the LAX shuttle, we watched with adrenaline-fueled ecstasy as the bus collided with a courier jet, heard the solid crunch of metal on metal, and then the boom, clouds of fire billowing into the sky. A blast of heat big enough to rattle the windows. It was like a movie, yes, just like a movie, that bomb that blew a hole in our world.
by Deesha Philyaw | Mar 14, 2022 | flash fiction
You were 48 hours old when I called the midwife and told her that my uterus was falling out, hanging on by a thread. “That’s simply not possible,” she said, far too cool. I told her I was splayed on the bed, naked, holding a hand mirror, and nothing down there looked familiar. Sure, the reds and the pinks and the browns of me remained, but something had come untethered. Something gaped and was lost. You lay next to me sleeping, unaware, wrapped tight in a blanket like a burrito, the way they had taught me at the birthing center.
In the morning, she nursed the baby, ate an apple. In the afternoon, she nursed the baby, found her husband’s lunch forgotten in the fridge. Mid-afternoon, she ate a bagel. In the evening, she cooked spaghetti. In the morning, she picked up Cheerios the toddler threw on the floor. In the afternoon, she ate chik’n nuggets the toddler left on her plate. In the evening, she made salmon. In the morning, she packed the kindergartener’s Hello Kitty lunchbox, found the woman’s text messages on his phone. In the afternoon, she ate an edible, waited. In the evening, she ordered Thai.
After your father moved out, I almost bought a gun. I hate guns, but I don’t hate your father, despite what y’all seem to think. I wanted to protect you, just us in that house meant for a brood on an acre of woods. Pitch black nights that swallow you whole when you step outside without the porch light on. Guns offer the illusion of safety, protection. But after “family” became a thing with two houses, you didn’t need any more illusions. No, guns shatter. What I wanted was to hold the pieces of you together, whole, in the light.
She hides her loneliness the way some people hide a horrific scar, or an outside child. There are friends she could call, and she does, when she feels like pretending. Empty nest, missing breast. But her smile; she still turns heads. And she still goes into the office every day, and makes candy-filled care packages for the residents at the senior center every spring, until she can’t. She spends a small fortune on organic whipped body butters that make her sparkle. She revels in the way she lights her own fire. Like a shooting star, she is bright, brilliant, brief.
Pink balloons hover every few feet in the hospice center lounge. The birthday girl’s fresh white gown covers her remaining breast and falls just below her knees. Her house shoes are open-toed. Her fresh pedicure features a shimmering red. A kind nurse places a decorative cover on the colostomy bag. The lounge is filled with family and friends and old classmates, their laughter at a respectful volume. The birthday girl’s favorite foods cover a table in the corner. She takes one bite each of macaroni and cheese, potato salad, banana pudding. She looks around and tells her daughter, “I’m popular.”
by Nicole Tsuno | Mar 10, 2022 | micro
wears a killer whale’s tooth like a toe tag and populates every available margin with sketches of the sea Oreos.
Clara and I don’t sit near her because her acrylics alone look “responsible for an obituary” (Clara’s assessment) and we don’t want to “become a hashtag” (ibid). So instead, we watch Orca Girl from two rows over, her uncovered stomach tight like a drum. In one hand, she fingers a bullet of cherry lipstick, or maybe, something else.
When anyone asks Orca Girl a question, she responds only in orca facts. On the symbolism of Miss Maudie’s Azaleas last month, she explained that orcas go underwater cow tipping to paralyze and eat great whites. Great whites! By now, most of our teachers have stopped asking, removed her popsicle stick from the jar completely. Only Mr. Morris presses on and with increasingly deranged optimism. Today, she tells him that orcas can punt seals up to eighty feet in the air. It’s unclear if they want to loosen the skin or just Jack the Ripper them, she continues. She turns and flashes us a smile, seaming her front teeth with lipstick, rabid.
Mr. Morris digs his hands into his pockets and dismisses Orca Girl with the sad shake of his head. Orca Girl leans back and closes her eyes and Clara says she must be sleeping. But I can see them jittering underlid, ejecting us one by one into the sky, making chalk outlines in the clouds.
by Jamie Feldman | Mar 7, 2022 | flash fiction
Sister Francis’ long black coat whipped behind her in the wind, clipping the heads off dying dandelions and scattering white fluff into the air behind her. Two by two she led us like a grim reaper with a yardstick across the soccer field and into the funeral home. The muddy earth and damp, saturated air provided perfect weather for rubber boots and coincidentally for Ethel’s wake. That morning, Daddy hadn’t come home again so Mama decided it would be okay to give me my new yellow rubber boots without him. Ethel used to have a red pair and we would always sing Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head whenever it rained on our way home from school. Mama made me promise not to wear my new boots today, but she seemed more upset over Daddy than usual and didn’t notice when I slipped them into my bag.
As the other children entered the church to pay their respects like the good Catholic classmates that they were, they each wiped their black Mary Janes and brown penny loafers on the front mat, while my boots squeaked and squawked up the center aisle. Sister Francis instructed us to approach the casket two by two and say a prayer. I had never seen a dead body before. Ethel just looked like she was asleep. The girl beside me reached inside and touched Ethel’s hand. “Don’t!” I said, but I secretly wanted to touch her, too. I wanted to wake Ethel up and pretend that we were in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I wanted to be Sundance and she could be Etta Place. I wanted to know if she had worn her red rubber boots today.
As we exited the funeral home, my rubber boots still squealed against the wet floorboards. I could feel the adults in the room watching me as I walked. They were all whispering and pointing at my noisy new boots. Someone began to laugh. I didn’t think you were supposed to laugh at a wake.
That afternoon, I walked home alone from school to find Daddy’s car in the driveway. Brown boxes were thrown into the back seat and the trunk was held shut with a frayed bungee cord. It kind of looked like something from one of those old movies Daddy loved to watch when they came on TV. Maybe he came home to whisk Mama off on a fabulous weekend getaway, or maybe he would take us all someplace far away like in Roman Holiday or Casablanca. As I began to pull back the screen door, I could hear Daddy shouting inside. I walked in to find Mama stooped over the oven crying into a pan of uncooked bread, and Daddy in the living room buckling a suitcase. “Where are you going?” I asked. “Today’s my birthday.”
He just stared at me for a moment and then down at my yellow boots. “You already got your birthday present, I see.” He turned away, picked up his suitcase, and walked past me. The screen door screeched open and then slammed shut.
The next day they buried Ethel. I buried the boots. After the service, I stood unseen, watching from the woods at the edge of the cemetery. At dusk, when the last pile of earth had been patted in place, I turned back toward home. The line “We’ll always have Paris” ran through my mind as wet grass and cool mud squished between bare toes.
Originally published in Every Day Fiction
by Eric Scot Tryon | Mar 3, 2022 | micro
My son starts grinding his teeth in the Fall of 3rd grade. As he sleeps. The scraping, the pressure – I hear it through the thin walls of our shoebox in the Tenderloin. Our third apartment this year. He in the bedroom, me on the couch. It keeps me up all night. Just as I’m finally adapting to our walls made pink by the neon flicker of Peaches, the strip club across the street.
I ask him one morning, are you okay? Does anything hurt? Head down, shoveling stale Cheerios, he shakes his head.
The grinding intensifies each night. That crunch, heavy like cement. In the fitful space between waking and sleeping, I dream his teeth fly out of his mouth and shoot across the room one by one. Not fragments, but whole teeth. Adult teeth, with long red sinewy roots that trail behind like streamers. I wake with a screaming headache.
Again I ask in the morning, are you okay? Lifting his head from his cereal, he looks at me, nods, and wipes a bit of old milk from his chin.
I buy him a mouthguard from CVS. He refuses to wear it. The grinding continues. Like the shifting of tectonic plates, a pressure that could move continents. Amplified by a father’s guilt, when it reaches my ears it jackhammers. And with Peaches still winking her neon nipples at me through the paper thin drapes, I can’t sleep for days.
I return to CVS. Buy earplugs, a night mask, Jack Daniels. At night, I bury my head in the thrift store couch cushions, breathing in decades of cigarettes and other people’s sweat.
I have to see it for myself. To watch him sleep, my son, my small boy, making these horrific sounds that shake our fragile walls. Just past midnight, I stand in his doorway and wait for my eyes to adjust. Bone on bone. The grinding now accented by squeaks and clicks. My eyes adapt, and there he is. Asleep. Eyes clenched like fists. His teeth and the bones in his face grinding and shifting, popping and dislocating, rearranging themselves. Desperately trying to reconfigure into a different little boy, one who lives in an apartment where the walls are still white, one whose father makes fruit salad in the morning: fresh apples and mangoes and peaches.
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