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.
by John Fulton | Feb 28, 2022 | flash fiction
When the boys’ father came to pick them up at their mother’s and take them for the day, he was not driving his green Ford truck but a red Porche that could not have been his. “What do you think, boys?” His voice swelled with aggression and enthusiasm and with a sudden love for himself. He was wearing his monkey suit from the garage where he worked and had the smell of metal tools and the strong flammable odors of oil and gas and gin on him.
Standing out on the lawn, the boys’ mother was still wearing her pink nightgown, ripped and coffee-stained on the sleeves. It blew in the wind and made her look fragile and discarded like a candy wrapper. “What do you think you’re doing? That car’s not yours. Boys,” she said, “you’re not going anywhere with him today.” But the boys were already in the car, their eyes looking out at their mother through the dark glass that was made for speed. When she advanced, their father pushed her and she tumbled over the burnt yellow grass and before she could stand again the little green house had disappeared and the man and the boys were driving on the freeway towards the mountains above the city, then in and out of the tunnels that pierced the mountains until the buildings and streets of the city were tiny, like sutures, in the valley below.
The interior of the car had an expensive, feminine smell, a light perfume of leather and freshness. As the man drove, he talked about the car as if it were a beautiful woman who needed him to do something great, something heroic for her. “Listen to her purr, boys,” he said. “We’re not going to let her down. We’re going to give her all we’ve got.”
Their mother no longer loved their father. Both boys knew that, even the smaller one who was not yet five. “Where are we going to, Daddy?” this one asked.
“Oh no you don’t,” the man said. “I’m happy! Happy!” He said the word as if hammering on it. “And I’m not going to let you sour pusses ruin my fun, you hear?”
The boys kept asking him that same question, but their father only answered them with the figures of their acceleration. “Ninety,” he said. “One-hundred. One-hundred-and-ten. One-hundred-and-thirty-five.”
The speed pushed the boys back in their seats and pressed against their skins like a firm caress, a preparation or a warning for something painful that would soon come. The windows began to tremble and the car beneath them shook as the man held it in a turn and the mountains and the other cars fell behind them. They had passed the timber-line and huge treeless lumps of snow rose above them.
“One-hundred-and-sixty,” he said. He looked over and back at the boys now, trying to hold his speed. He wasn’t looking at the road. “One-hundred-and-sixty-five.” His eyes were dipped inward and were a strange purple color of black. He seemed hungry. “You never went this fast before, did you? Did you?”
by Judith Claire Mitchell | Feb 24, 2022 | micro
At eight I was rich and powerful, controlled railroads and electric companies. A banker, I embezzled rainbows of cash that I flashed at the twins while our parents slept in. Let’s play restaurant, I’d say. Jacob, you’re the chef. I’ll be the customer who leaves a big tip. Even at six Jake made an elegant French toast. Syrup, Madam? he said. Please…allow me.
Later, after he washed my dishes, pocketed the orange dollar bills I left on the table, we played The Game of Life where convertibles motored across the board as we acquired advanced degrees and children and wealth. Our favorite part was the oversized spinner, the ratchety clack when a flick of thumb and forefinger turned it into a blur like Jake when he tried to make himself dizzy. Sometimes, if my fortunes lagged, I’d take his car, heavy with pink daughters, blue sons, and oil rigs, place it right on the spinner, and launch that ragtop into outer space, tell him, oh, so sorry, but his family had landed on Mars, the red planet.
In the end he never left home. He is upstairs now in the same bedroom, shades drawn. He takes pills, some turquoise like the backyard pool, others white to compensate for the absence of light. He is all we talk about. Why does one child thrive, the other hide? All our holidays and reunions, all our birthdays and breath, are devoted to him. My mother says, Merry Christmas, the doctors think it’s ADHD; happy birthday, it’s borderline personality disorder; pass the white meat, it’s plain old depression.
These doctors, they’re picking diagnoses from a hat, rolling the dice and seeing what comes up. They don’t know what I know: that he can’t leave home; that each morning, our parents asleep, he comes downstairs to search for his car, his future, his lost children. They are slivers of pink and blue plastic, negligible as eyelashes. They are buried somewhere in the pile of the carpet. Because I was unkind, because I needed to win. My nieces, my nephews. They are four planets away from the sun.
This story appeared in slightly different form in StoryQuarterly, #33, 1997 pp. 47-48
by Tina May Hall | Feb 21, 2022 | micro
The bloom of your skin as the river thickens around us. Constellations of algae exhale. We eat the fish that bob to the surface. Suffocated. The flesh tastes of mud and cumin. Our campfire flares in the night, a signal no one is close enough to answer. Three elements to build a fire, you tell me. You used to wear a costume of khaki. Adults embroidered your accomplishments onto your torso. Heat, fuel, oxygen. The air here is thin. We sip it from each other’s mouths. The large animals have died, but we are small. The fever comes at nightfall and everything hisses. There used to be teakettles and family dogs, limited-edition sneakers kept clean in their boxes, spun sugar on a paper cone. More fish lie atop the water, gifts from cold gods, fragile bones to pluck. You make a harmonica of yours. I whittle needles to stitch the sky.
by Christine Kandic Torres | Feb 17, 2022 | flash fiction
When Tía Amelia died, we ordered KFC.
“Kentucky Fried Cruelty,” she used to call it, before biting into the flesh of a drumstick, brown breadcrumbs on her white teeth, fingertips slick. Red ink bleeding on paper bags scattered before us now outside her empty bedroom, cardboard buckets gray with grease; we trained our teenage grief on this coffee table altar in her dark living room. Unable to eat like the rest of my cousins, I picked at the embroidered veins of the couch, the same couch where Amelia’s husband Gustavo once tried to explain to me how big his dick was. How familiar, the ever-present task of choosing which feelings to play, to keep inside, a 5-CD changer of inappropriate emotions, eject, eject, eject.
Amelia was my aunt, but only fourteen years older—a whole teen mom apart, we joked—and I spent most of my time after school in the rent-controlled railroad apartment she shared with Gustavo in Greenpoint. He welcomed relative after relative at the front door now, another buzz, another knock, another pastelón. A laugh track roared from a UPN rerun on the television, but none of the cousins paid attention to anything but the bones, the screen throwing blue and white shadows across the oak-paneled walls while adults and Gustavo made arrangements around us.
Amelia died no more than fifteen feet over from where we sat, in the bedroom behind us, alone in the dark. “Blood just up and quit traveling to her brain while she slept,” my mother said. A stroke at 31, que pena, un freak accident while Gustavo was away on business. Nobody in the family knew exactly what he did; something with computers and the internet, but it was for Jet Blue, and they sure understood comp flights to San Juan and Orlando. Amelia died in the next room over from us, the room where Gustavo unzipped my pants while she enjoyed Even More Space on her way to visit our abuelo in Caguas.
Is she a ghost now, or am I? Are ghosts just carbon copies of our energy, existing alongside us, repeating our pain over and over again out of the corners of our eyes? Were our ghosts there beside her as she took her last breath, Gustavo’s hand snaking around the curved shell of my back while I slept? Will Amelia haunt me as the blue-lipped corpse, empty and still, or the incredulous wife, laughing as she slammed her door in my face?
After the funeral at St Michael’s, we ate asado in the back room of an Argentinian restaurant where Amelia first took me when she learned I’d never eaten ribs before. “Here,” she’d secured a bib around my neck. “You’re still my own baby muñequita.”
Gustavo led the family in prayer, his voice wavering each time he said her name, and then explained which parts of the cow the chafing dishes along the wall contained. Costillas, yes, but also chorizo, entraña, vacío. “We Argentinians know our meat,” Gustavo said before sitting down at his seat across from me. “You’re gonna love it.”
I frowned, dipping a piece of saltless bread into olive oil, wondering when exactly it is that a body becomes meat. When exactly Amelia will become a meal for the earth.
Lost in that thought, I reached for my water glass the same time Gustavo did, his fingers resting briefly atop my knuckles.
“Whoops,” he winked, performing embarrassment. “I’m like a kid.” He squeezed my wrist. “You’d think I’d know by now what’s mine and what’s not.”
The room offered light laughter in response, a kindness: the cousins whose noses were usually in their phones, the long-jowled uncles whose giant ears housed wiry tufts of hair, the aunts whose ages you could tell by the depth of the crease in their cleavage, they all laughed, including my parents. I cleared my throat, synapses tripping over the joke as I registered Gustavo’s smiling teeth inside his mouth, instead of against my ear, biting and licking the soft cartilage after challenging me to down a 12-pack with him in that apartment he shared with Amelia, who was now a ghost, or meat, depending on what you were hungry for. My finger pads tight against the sweating glass left a topographical map behind that no one else could follow except maybe her, now, finally. Phantom trails, like his wink, not visible to others.
I blinked away the pain of Amelia’s happy face printed on the back of the prayer card in my pocket, the laminated corner digging into the top of my thigh, and understood that the only path forward for me was to part my lips and ride the swell of laughter from the bitterness at the back of my tongue, and sink my teeth into the ribs before me, its meat glossy and red against my open mouth.
by Myna Chang | Feb 14, 2022 | micro
On Sewing and the Anatomy of Lips
Cupid’s bow: The contour line of the upper vermilion.
I am drawn tight, nocked with pretty words and flattering susurrations, pulled close like the fletch of a hapless arrow trembling in that heartbeat of before—then released, flung afar, the unforgivable distance of a promise unkept.
I would disarm his weapon, the clever charm of his mouth, snip his bowstring and thread it sharp through the eye of my needle, Cupid’s falsehoods be damned.
Vermilion border: The demarcation between pigment and surrounding skin.
I am without boundary, threading the lines of him and me, craving the simmer of fire he breathes across my skin, dreading the harsher whispers, the ones that inflame my flaws, char my weaknesses to naked bone.
I would set my foundation stitch in the depth of his vermilion kiss, knot the filament to hold firm against the heat of his exhalations, even when he enkindles cinnabar and mercuric love.
Oral commissures: The corner intersections of the upper and lower vermilion.
I am entangled, caught in his caress of contrition, enticed by apologies murmured sweet in the space of my doubt, over and again.
I would stitch my resolve true, corner to corner, right to left, my needle piercing and tugging snug, sealing me safe from the taste of betrayal. I would reinforce the seam, whipstitch strong, and bury the traitorous scissors that, even now, beg to cut loose the thread, long to let me again fall into the curve of his infernal, beckoning vermilion.
by Brett Biebel | Feb 11, 2022 | micro
Mom was pushing 80 past a semi on the wrong side of Madison, and it was one of them numbers with the cows in it, and you could see the faces peering out through the slats. She must have caught them on the periphery, or maybe she got a glimpse of me in the mirror, and she guns it up a few hundred yards or so and then brakes. Hard. Swerves so we’re straddling the midline, and all I hear is a horn and Pen wailing from the car seat, and we sat there for a while. No one came. We got going again eventually, and who the fuck can say where we were headed, but I still dream about it, and in the dream, the truck hits us. Lots of red. Dead within microseconds, but there’s that way time slows down, and I know the cows are up there, floating overhead like clouds, or else maybe flying all panicked like them 38 frames or whatever from Twister, and all I know is Christ. That’s curtains. But maybe there’s a way they don’t ever have to come back down.
by Patricia Q. Bidar | Feb 10, 2022 | flash fiction
She calls herself Rat Girl, but she looks like a little Swiss doll. Now in the Chapel, she is singing round-eyed over our heads and serpentine-ing her head in the shape of infinity as she always does. Her arms are sinewy, pounding at her guitar; bracketing small breasts in a tiny pink t-shirt.
Now she is reading from her book, about that time when she was hit by a car. How afterward she saw her reflection in a Good Samaritan’s mirrored sunglasses. How she saw her own blazing eyes in a bloody mass of meat. Then she puts the book away and the sound of her singing tears the air between us again.
All four of us are standing at the side of the sanctuary-turned-performance space. It’s me, Trinidad, Blaze, and Michael. All of us are old fans. Because of Rat Girl’s wiseacre patter, the intimacy of her lyrics, and her frankness in interviews, people feel they know her well. She is small and bright-eyed and has suffered many hardships, so thousands of people over the land would like to take care of her. I myself am a middle-aged married woman who wishes to lick her biceps, strum her neck tendons. “Get in line, Mama Cat,” I imagine her saying in that cactus dirt rasp.
Michael brings more drinks, and Rat Girl sings about the notion of spurning. What am I spurning by scribbling notes on the backs of business cards during this performance in this room its shipbottom ceiling illumined by purple light? Why push Rat Girl away by snapping a blurry photo with my cell phone? On my third glass of vodka, dulling her potency? She is too strong for me. The details of her life too dark.
Rat Girl’s husband has recently left her, I know. She has endured dissociative disorder, the kidnapping of one of her children by his father, the suicide of her best friend. She tours constantly, like any brilliant artist without a record contract. Her lyrics are crystalline. Members of the audience shut their eyes, overcome.
What happens after you realize the members of your support group are dead? Rat Girl asks us near the end of the show. Do you keep yearning for them, or do you dig in where you are? Her eyes are still bright. She makes these questions sound wry rather than tragic. Maybe that is why she is so beloved.
The show is over. Thank you very much, Rat Girl says, and while it does not sound earnest, she is a 100% earnest woman and the real deal. She reads a little more from the book she wrote, this time about a bus ride that turned into a crime scene when she was “a hundred years pregnant.” She swears to all of us it’s a pretty funny book, and that she doesn’t die in the end. Then she adds that she hopes she isn’t spoiling it.
After the concert, we walk with Blaze and Michael to 16th street BART. The iron Day of the Dead tree grates have all been installed on steel and glass Valencia Street. But Mission looks exactly the same to me as when I lived in this neighborhood years ago.
Perhaps inspired by Rat Girl, Michael tells a story about almost losing his arm. It seems that earlier this month, he contracted some kind of flesh-eating bacteria, which led to a terrible infection. We are passing that liquor store that sells cards and dice. It is on the corner, and if you were to walk straight forward through the door, you would ram into a pillar. Then the Roxie Theatre, then Esta Noche, that drag bar where Michael’s friend used to perform as Diana Ross.
The night is crisp. Trinidad crooks his arm, and I take it. The red brick 16th and Mission Plaza are lined with sleeping people. Blaze and Michael are laughing their asses off about the flesh-eating bacteria, so we laugh, too. Inside, we laugh and laugh, avoiding looking at our middle-aged selves in the white-lit subway car. Across San Francisco, under the Bay, and back to our warm apartments and humming appliances and fitfully dozing pets who come alive at the sound of our keys in the lock.
Rat Girl originally appeared in Sou’wester Review, Spring 2019
by Julián Esteban Torres López | Feb 7, 2022 | micro
Like a toddler lost in a laundry basket full of dirty towels, the Argentine music dances.
Cuts through the candlelit fog by the lake. Hip-checks the couple swinging in the hammock
from making out—still in their bathing suits from earlier that afternoon.
They fall.
The freshly cut grass sticks to their bodies as they continue to caress … as if fate ordered them
to drop like apples.
Above their heads—nailed to the tree—the cross and Jesus painfully hang. Forced to watch.
But the Argentine music keeps dancing. Finds the shirtless, sweaty young men making and taking bets for the cockfight about to begin, and rubs shoulders with three of them.
They ignore her.
Tear the bottle of Aguardiente from each other’s hands and turn their heads to the rooster being brought out from the barn by the mayor’s sixteen-year-old daughter.
One may say Jesus was trying to turn his head and close his eyes but would have sinned if he had done so.
And through all this the Argentine music dances … no longer in the background, but in front of me.
Trips over my foot from not looking where she was going as she blessed herself trying to wipe the tear from Jesus’ cheek while walking past the cross nailed to the tree.
I offered her my hand but she slapped it aside, smiled, offered me hers, and asked me to join her.
by mandira pattnaik | Feb 4, 2022 | news
Here’s something I want to confess: I’ve stopped trying.
A curvier-beaked whale dies with a lump of plastic in its belly. Evidence of the levels of marine pollution. I want to write about it. Writing about a subject that rattles me, simultaneously about a field of study and understanding that is inadequate for me, limited only to the scope of an article, is a delicate business. I stopped trying.
Here’s something I want to confess: I’ve stopped trying.
To put words out in the world is to feel urgent, vulnerable, and to use that feeling to catapult experience onto pages and screens. Beyond the life and times, there are notions to be addressed, rules to be followed and complexities understood. When the entire hillside of a popular tourist-station nearer home fell crashing down one morning, the result of irresponsible construction, it was a news piece I did not let go of. I stopped trying to ignore. I wrote a prose poem.
Here’s something I want to confess: I’ve stopped trying.
No denying the overwhelming pressure to fit in. Perhaps in a cubicle or slot where your selfhood perfectly fits in. Amidst record unemployment across the world, I thought of a flash piece on the theme, with Hoopoe birds as central characters, stressed and underpaid, finally retrenched. Joblessness is a subject rarely explored in flash-length works, and the piece received excellent responses from editors and readers. I stopped trying to squeeze in. I refused to fit into a slotted hole that I disliked. I published a story.
So long story short, writing can be venting. It is talent, art, but also acquired skill. And it won’t be ‘acquired’ if you quit!
As diverse writers, coming from backgrounds where English is a “taught” subject, I suggest moving back and forth to observe your core areas of strength. Learning to pay attention to voice. This trait may be acquired with patience because it is like going against the grain of our current times in that our attention spans and levels are clearly declining. If it helps, try and figure out the basics: what subjects really pump you up to say something unique, what is the depth of your immersive experiences/knowledge in the matter, did you observe the details, and is the chosen form (poetry, flash or short story) the best vehicle to carry it?
Here’s a simple trick: Construct a language and image palette that uses punctuation to good effect. In the brief scope of a flash piece, imagistic vivid descriptions bring the subject alive, like this story by Shareen Murayama in Fractured Lit. Notice the immediacy and emotional pull placed alternately, expertly enhancing the overall effect. Bits and pieces of memory and summation of parts is also a great technique, like this micro by Sudha Balagopal, also in Fractured Lit. Read the pieces to see how these writers of color showcase their talent via excellent imagery and how the narrative exudes the personal styles of the writers.
In George Orwell’s essay “Shooting the Elephant”, he writes about an experience in Burma, in undivided India, concluding with this line: “I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking like a fool.” Consider this line as an expression where he offers his vulnerability. The writing of a unique experience is sure to resonate when the reader can identify with all the flaws and tensions in the story. Writing should be earnest and compelling, mined from personal experiences and observations, but always striving to answer that abstract question at the outset, “Would I stop trying and quit?”
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