by Anais Godard | Jun 9, 2025 | flash fiction
When he walked into her studio, Elodie was sculpting her seventh ceramic penis of the week. This one had antlers.
She didn’t look up. “Custom or classic?”
The man hesitated. He was tall, with nervous shoulders and a brown paper envelope clutched like it contained his last will and testament. “Custom,” he said.
She glanced at him, a quick, assessing look. No sleazy grin, no too-wide eyes pretending not to scan her overalls. His posture said apology. She’d learned to read them, over the years: the oglers, the moaners, the “accidental” touchers. Men who claimed it was about art but watched her work like they were waiting for a lap dance. This one wasn’t like that. This one was here for something else. Something he almost didn’t want to ask for.
Elodie rinsed her hands in the sink, clay circling the drain like it wanted out of this conversation. “Alright. There’s a form.” She handed him a clipboard.
He read the first line aloud. “‘Please describe your member in three words or fewer?’”
“It’s a vibe check,” she said, shrugging.
He wrote: “Not conventionally impressive.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Brave.”
The next part involved measurements, preferences, and the option to provide photographic reference. He slid the envelope toward her.
Inside was a Polaroid, and she appreciated the analog commitment. The photo was… honest. There was no dramatic lighting. No shadow games. Just a man, standing in what looked like a dentist’s office, stark naked, with a hopeful tilt to his head and socks that read “Mondays, amirite?”
She bit her lower lip, but she didn’t laugh. She didn’t need to. He was already doing it.
“I know it’s not—well. People laugh. Even doctors. I just thought… maybe it could be art. You make everything else look heroic.”
She looked at him properly for the first time. Noticed the way his hand twitched on the table. The way he didn’t look at her, exactly—just to the left of her face, like eye contact might crack something still setting. The shadow of a dimple in his three-day beard. Also: broad across the chest. Solid, in that quiet, unassuming way. The kind of body that might make a satisfying sound if slapped.
She blinked. Refocused. “What’s your name?”
“Dave.”
“Alright, Dave. I’ll need you to sit for me. Not nude,” she added quickly, watching the blood flee his face. “Just your energy. It helps.”
He came every Tuesday at 3 p.m. She sculpted. He sat. They talked about Renaissance depictions of masculinity, about humor in Japanese pottery, about growing up small in Texas. Once, she told him about her first boyfriend, who said her work was “cute but not art.” She broke up with him via sculpture. A sad, drooping thing, slightly crooked to the left. That’s how she found her medium and her muse. She hadn’t stopped since.
What she didn’t say was how Tuesdays became her favorite. How she looked for his text. How she liked that he never flirted. That he didn’t treat her like a curiosity or a kink.
That he smelled like cedarwood and tea tree oil.
Seven Tuesdays later, she handed Dave a box.
Inside: a sculpture the size of a thumb. Polished, delicate, burnished gold glaze. It was resting on a pedestal, under a bell jar. And beneath it, a plaque:
Dave. Not large. Just brave.
He stared at it a long time. Then he looked at her.
“You made it beautiful.”
“No,” she said. “You did.”
He kissed her in the parking lot, awkward and warm and a little clay-smelling. It was not a cinematic kiss. It was better. It was true.
by Janna Miller | Jun 6, 2025 | flash fiction
I
A cottonmouth swallows me when I am seven. It waits for me just outside my front door, stretched out along the walkway. When I step into the concrete space, it opens its mouth wide. Hemmed in by coquina walls and boxwood bushes, the only place to go is within the belly of the snake. The last thing I see is white, the color of ice and bone–but supple and fleshy between fangs, until I am gone. I am lodged in the reticulated stomach next to a mouse, who trembles and climbs into my lap.
But this isn’t what happens.
I remember jumping over the white maw. With a running leap and a perfect aerial split, my body glides over loops of coiled muscle. I run down the street and do not look back, not even when my house is a dot on the horizon. Instead, the cottonmouth swallows me again in my dreams. Over and over.
II
I am abducted when I am eight. I am home alone and a man calls me. Do not hang up. Do not hang up. I have your momma. You give me your address right now. Tell me your bra size. Your momma is tied up. I will hurt her. Do not hang up.
And I tell him and I don’t hang up and he comes and gets me. He bangs on the front door until splinters fall off the back and I let him in. His mouth is like the maw of the snake and I am swallowed into him. The mouse trembles in my lap again.
But this isn’t what happens. What really happens is this:
I hang up. I hang up. I hang up. I know that I hang up after minutes of frozen fear–my hand curled into the receiver, my fingernails cut into the plastic. I don’t have a bra size, not yet. My mom is at work and this son of a bitch knows I am at home. One of many kids alone. He pawed through the white pages or the school directory until he found me. His voice grinds into my ears like gravel stuck in a fan. In my nightmares he wears the face of a snake and mouse in my lap becomes a child I cannot save.
III
I am eaten again. This time as an adult. In days and work and children. I am swallowed whole. I do not know if the mouse is nearby. I am too tired to check.
IV
There is a vole trapped under the rug at work. I chase it from one corner of the bookshelf and then back again. I skin my knees on the carpet, my skirt riding up my thighs. I capture it in my hands, warm and soft. He does not tremble, but bites into my flesh again and again. I do not let him go as his teeth puncture the soft pad of my palm. If I lose him in the building, he will be killed.
This is true.
Another morning, I find a snake at the base of the steps, next to my chair. He is cold and docile and I scoop him up. He curls into a spiral in my palm. I recognize this one. It is the same kind my children used to play with outside our front porch. If I lose him in the building, he will be killed.
This is also true. I take both the vole and the snake into the woods and let them go.
V
Inside the warm stomach of my longer days, my dreams have not changed, though sometimes the snake and the mouse resemble each other. I hold them all in my lap: the lost child, the trembling snake, the biting mouse. They regard each other in spinning fantasies and solid regret. Who have I saved? The danger and silence of the world are still as soft as white cotton–as inviting as an open mouth, poised to strike.
I am sure this is true.
by James Montgomery | Jun 2, 2025 | micro
The men are dying.
We’re the boys who see them. In tabloids, on news bulletins. Faces pocked with purple lesions, bodies ravaged by weight loss. Their abandoned eyes, their hollowed-out stares, hold us.
We’re told it’s a plague of our own making. Our fathers—both Holy and holier-than-thou—say it’s unnatural, say their boxes are wired wrong. We sit to these comments daily; as every day as pouring the last remains of dust from a cereal box.
So we hide. In boy-sized boxes we call bedrooms. We while away the hours tuning transistor radios, searching and searching, until, amid the static, we find it: the welcoming shimmer of a synthesiser, a voice that sounds like want.
We lock ourselves in bathroom boxes. Just us and our mom’s Sears catalogue, spine creased to the same few spreads of men in their smalls.
In locker rooms, the wet slap of heat, boxed in by back-row jocks and small-town heart-throbs. We learn how they got hot and heavy with so-and-so, some girl, straddling laps and burning rubber in boxy American muscle cars. And real men don’t wear rubbers, we’re told.
After, if we’re lucky, we wander the long way home, with Tommy or Rico or Scott. We share a box of Marlboros, filched from our folks’ stash. They take a cigarette, lift it to their lips, and we breathe in how it smoulders—the hit, the rush—before they pass it back to us.
When the day comes, when our front doors are slammed in our faces, we shoulder a backpack of belongings—barely enough to show we ever belonged—and hitch a ride with a stranger, wave down a bus. We watch the world whizz by from the window and, through tears—because beautiful boys ugly-cry too—see all the square suburban streets, all the boxes of buildings where we stored our lives, blending and blurring into one. And we free our favourite cassette from its case, ease our headphones on, and travel to those cities that have always sounded like home, travel to where our real lives are waiting, new and ours and unboxed.
Originally published in Reflex Fiction.
by Theresa Sylvester | May 29, 2025 | contest winner, micro
There’s a photo of our father, donning a black suit, standing under a tree, with a mischievous smile and a diamond stud in his left ear.
He was at a wedding, at a funeral, at a party, at a business meeting, outside a church, behind a courthouse, in another city, in another country–everywhere, all at once.
There are eight duplicates of this picture in frames made of gold, silver, or ornate wood matching his brown skin. It hangs on a wall in a living room, sits on a desk in an office in Lusaka, or rests on a bedside table next to a rosary that glows in the dark.
His offspring, all eight of us, sit around the fire, trading stories late into the night. Our mothers are inside, scattered in undesignated spaces, leaving us to sip cheap wine while we search for our father. We find him in our oldest brother’s swaggered gait, in the bridge of our baby sister’s nose, in the long fingers of another, in a tooth gap, in broad shoulders, in our misty eyes.
We stoke the fire and unpack our memories, holding them up to the embers. One of us claims our father attended their graduation carrying such a massive bouquet it shielded his face. Another swears they spotted him from behind at a political rally, but lost sight of him in the crowd. Someone heard his laughter in a room brimming with voices, or caught a whiff of his woody scented perfume in a barbershop in Lilongwe, or stumbled upon a gold pen identical to the one he wore on his suit pocket at a till in a bank.
To liven things up, we mimic the sound of his yellow Datsun Skyline vrooming off because he always had somewhere else to be. Spit sprays from our lips and we burst into laughter.
We pull into a huddle, promise to stay in touch, that our children will be cousins, and their childhood won’t be as fractured.
We are all here, entwined in his intricate web.
The mud that clung to our shoes at his graveside in the morning is now dry.
None of us wants the night to end, yet we harmonise to a song he sang to us as children;
Tulo? Eh?
Ubwela? Enhe!
Tulo? Eh?
Unzune? Enhe!
Sleep? Yes?
Are you coming? Yes!
Sleep? Yes?
Will you be sweet? Yes!
by Laura Sciortino | May 27, 2025 | contest winner, micro
They sit in silence on the farmhouse porch. It’s nothing, he hopes.
Earlier as his wife lay sleeping, toes twitching, nightgown transparent from sweat, he’d turned away, denying her protracted slumber meant anything. He brushed teeth, brewed coffee, ignoring his knotted gut.
“You’re quiet,” he says, admonishing himself for waiting until hope has ballooned
inside his aching chest.
Her palms rest on the Adirondack chair, preparing. She’s beautiful, undiscouraged by 74 years. “I’ve decided to become a giraffe,” she states.
But we haven’t even hung the hammock yet.
Clinging is futile. He must muster courage.
I can do this. What’s one more go-round?
Yet something twists. He’s tired. Hungry.
He wants ham on rye. He winces at his predictability, but there it is. He likes Dijon. He likes to shit on the toilet. He likes being an old man.
How many more years do we have?
Her head cocks against the cedar backrest. She gazes up, previewing her new
dominion. It isn’t the first time she’s uprooted expectations. This is how they’ve worked
things … maintained freshness, stoked passion.
As newlyweds, she signed them up for a workshop: “Live the Animated Life!” As
they walked to the train that bitter morning, he’d smacked his gum. It was Saturday. He
liked sleeping in. Through the scarf held to her nose, she’d hissed, “I hate it when you
smack.” He’d snapped, “What do you want from me?” Inside a steamy, glass-ceilinged
conservatory surrounded by flora, their flamingo instructor taught them they were snakes, coiled and defensive. They’d slithered home and promptly shed.
Since that verdant day, they’d been tortoises, eagles, woolly-bear caterpillars, foxes. It helped avert his midlife crisis. She’d breezed through menopause.
But the last few years, they’d settled down. Knitting was pleasant, as was reading. It was nice to sit in cars and eat with forks. He liked tinkering with his terrarium.
Her neck elongates. Her gaze is farther away … eyes larger, sadder. Soon, her jaw will protrude.
One last kiss before?
Too late. She’s already removed her glasses, stands barefoot in the grass.
And if I don’t go along? I could straddle her neck?
He’s grateful they made love last night. When she’d arched her back, howling, he’d recalled the year they were coyotes. Never still. Nothing unturned, untried.
The sun is high. He squints.
She’s really getting up there, casting a longer and longer shadow.
What now?
by Fractured Lit | May 24, 2025 | news
We finally curated a shortlist of 41 stories, and they’ve been sent to judge, Tara Isabel Zambrano! It’s out of our hands, and we can’t wait to see which stories Tara chooses to include in the final 20 for the anthology!
- Wife 2.0
- Veterans
- No Soap
- After the Rocket
- Abraham Ritter: March 7, 1949—
- Isopentyl acetate
- Jigsaw
- Christina
- Lightyears Away
- One Day in December, My Trapezius Decided to Write a Short Epic Poem
- Nest
- Feeling Cakes
- Blossoming
- Before The Everything After
- Dog Years
- Sister Sister
- Scintilla River
- Ripe
- Good Dog
- Another Friday
- Weed
- Rock Dove
- Burn
- New You Wig Emporium
- Last Things
- Close and Far Away
- Blackberry Pie
- Sick Day
- Some of Us Notice the Berries
- Miss Tafia, Her Snakes and Her People
- The Verizon Guy
- Kintsugi
- Big Top
- The Bride Is Eating Cake and the DJ Is Playing Werewolves of London
- Birds
- Richter Scale for Heartbreak
- Empty Bottle
- Percussion of Empty Rooms
- Didn’t We Realize We Were Drowning?
- Hands
- By the Sea, By the Sea, By the Beautiful Sea
by Janet Fancher | May 22, 2025 | contest winner, micro
There’s a picture from my wedding where my father looks at me with his face all screwed up with concern and his hand scratching his head. Forty years later, on the couch at the dementia ward where he now lives, and I visit, he gives me the same look. This time, I’ve called the brown thing in front of him a table, and he isn’t certain I am right. Last week he told me about the world he used to live in, this week this is the only world he lives in. Gone are the roads and the hills and my mother and cars and fishing. Much simpler this way.
He pats his shirt pocket where he keeps his glasses. When he can’t find his, he steals other peoples’ glasses. My brain, he says. Why don’t you wear them? I ask, and I get that look again. My brain, he says more emphatically, so I will understand his need to only bring them out in the most dire circumstances.
Gone is his walking. Gone is his scratching out numbers in some obscure equation. Gone is his lanky body at the dining table trying to explain story problems to me. Gone are the gardens and house and the trip to China and the exact way he reloaded the spoons in the dishwasher after my apparently feeble efforts.
We look at family photo albums. Occasionally he reaches out and touches the face of someone. Gone are the names, though he doesn’t seem to care. Look at the old people, he says about the pictures of his parents. He touches an ancient picture of me, says That one was trouble.
Even baseball disappears. I give him his glove with the softened and scratched leather, and he turns it and turns it. Gone is the National Championship he was so proud to win. Gone are his buddies and their rallying cry of Let’s We Go. Gone are the days he called me scatter arm. Gone, all of it, to some other planet. The glove so used it folds in on itself. Finally, he slides his fingers into the glove and smacks the palm. He winds up and mimes throwing a ball at me. I catch it, and across the universe, I throw it back.
by Linda Shapiro | May 19, 2025 | micro
Occasionally I walk here, when the weather permits.
Today I spot a man watering his garden, a riot of grasses and Yarrow bushes colonized by bees, prairie flowers penned up with Zinnias. A tall and forbidding something with bulbous green knobs that attracts wasps, which the gardener identifies as Rattlesnake Master.
He says the garden harbors hummingbirds, or maybe only one that sometimes comes right up to his face and flutters its wings as if to thank him.
Throughout the neighborhood numbered streets loop off of numbered avenues, like math problems with many possible solutions. It is possible to lose your way.
Simple bungalows with complicated angles line the quiet streets, stucco and brick with gingerbread accents. I long to gaze in the windows at night, when faux antique lamps are lit, to see the occupants eating, reading, watching TV. Miming conversations I cannot hear.
But I never walk here at night. As an elderly woman I cannot take such chances.
Still, in the daylight worrisome situations reveal themselves, like a dusty room exposed to sunlight. A lawn scorched by chemical treatment, a patio with broken furniture mended by duct tape. Hints of mold and spots of rot.
I ignore these things or take them in stride. Overall the neighborhood suits me. The vegetative flourishes, the eccentric houses have the feel of a mythical village that appears Brigadoon-like, only when I enter.
When I was a child my brother and I were sent off to the fields surrounding our house with Velveeta cheese sandwiches, and apples we neglected to eat. We played at games I no longer remember, but there was risk and there were riddles of our own making to solve, all on our own.
I feel as if I have wandered these streets forever. As if the gardens sprang up for me and arranged themselves not only to my liking, but for my survival. I am at home, no longer young and hinged together at all the wrong junctures.
The neighborhood shelters me, who I have become.
Sometimes I imagine creeping into someone’s garden, into the man’s garden perhaps. There I might succumb to the elegance of adaptation, allow my sooty feathers to catch the sun and glow with spectral colors, a whir of wings in the fading light.
by Francine Witte | May 15, 2025 | micro
Tears falling to earth in gulps of rain. No one knows why the moon is crying but everyone’s making a guess. Mr. Blake from the hardware store blames it on the fact that no one buys light bulbs anymore. “Got them LED things that never burn out, and soon,” Mr. Blake says, “no one will know how to change one.” Mrs. Hobson, the neighbor lady no one ever listens to, says “if I had to look at the sorry earth all day I’d cry and cry and never stop,”
The newsman blames the weatherman. The weatherman blames the sky. The sky, the weatherman says, is filled with everything the earth doesn’t want. Clouds and fog and useless dreams.
Everywhere people start to feel bad that they made the moon cry. Except Mr. Blake who is sticking to his light bulb theory. “People like to change the light bulbs,” he says. “Makes them feel important. Like God on that very first day.” Mrs. Hobson tells him “shush, people will hear you,” but Mr. Blake doesn’t listen and goes on saying it anyway. Even when people stop looking at him. Even when they stop buying everything from him.
When everyone runs out of nails and boards, their roofs fall in. They are left staring up at the crying moon. No one wonders anymore why the moon is crying. They just wish it would stop. Great rivers are forming and running into the streets, and no one can leave their houses anymore.
Except Mr. Blake who has built himself a rowboat out of all the nails and lumber nobody wanted. He rows down the street, passes the roofless houses. Past the weatherman standing on a rock and waving his fist at the heavens, past Mrs. Hobson, clinging to a tree branch her mouth a moving gurgle. Everyone waving and waving at him to stop, to help them, but he doesn’t. Calls them all fools underneath his breath. Knows how sorry they will be when the moon stops crying and burns itself out, like any other light bulb, and nobody with any idea how to change it.
by Amil Amin | May 12, 2025 | contest winner, flash fiction
I look down at my phone and it says Baba and I realize I haven’t seen him since that time I was at home on the couch reading and my mom was sitting at the dining table on a chair cracking pine nuts one by one, gently placing them in her mouth and slightly biting down on them as she usually does and he was screaming at the top of his lungs into the air around him, not sure who he was yelling at and who he was throwing furniture at, and now he is calling me with his sad voice, but it also sounded like he didn’t know why he was sad, like he was a bit resentful of his sadness and that I was listening to it without acknowledging it, so he covered the sound with a tender Salaam, bachem trying to perform joy, oh shit, yeah, the Warriors won last night and he is actually happy and I want to vomit because he is a child and the Warriors are fake anyways because they are stacked just because KD, who is a child too, wants a ring.
My mind gets foggy as I fight the urge to ask him how he is, but he continues to talk and asks me how my shift was as if I want to tell him, as if I want to talk to him at all, as if he wasn’t sleeping every night on the couch of his older widowed sister’s apartment whose walls are strewn with faded black and white pictures of dead people that are buried in mass graves in a land that I have never visited nor, I think, I even care to visit because my dad is a child and I don’t want to visit a land that raises children like him that sleep on the couch and rely on sports teams for their happiness, so I just say Okay, it was busy and suddenly I feel guilty that I even answered the phone call, that I betrayed my mom’s struggle against the patriarchy even though she wouldn’t even call it that, wouldn’t even be mad that I answered the phone, would tell me it is my duty to talk to him and would use that word, duty, and suddenly I noticed I wasn’t breathing and at the same time heard my dad take a deep breath in from his vape pen, using it to inhale the words he wanted to speak to me, thinking it was a literal pen that could write his words in the air, words that may not have been his, maybe belonged to the air, the air around us that might be occupied by the ghosts of our ancestors that are buried in mass graves and were now hovering around us all the time and somehow determined all of our decisions without us even knowing or understanding.
I am getting married, I am having a child.
Recent Comments