Blossoming

by Claire Gallagher | Jul 28, 2025 | contest winner, flash fiction

The bruises bloom like purple flowers. Hibiscus perhaps. Hibiscus rosa-sinensis. The marks will fade to a deep blue. Like cineraria. Cineraria senetti. After that, a sickly yellow.

Tansy. Tanacetum vulgare.

You recite the names in your head, your mouth forming soundless words.

A hairline fracture in the ceiling captures your attention. An imperfection in the

otherwise immaculate surface. You’re surprised he hasn’t noticed. Fixed it. Like he tries to fix you.

Lying on the bed that you share, you wonder when he’ll be back.

It won’t happen again. I swear.

***

He likes to drink beer in the sunshine. Today he’s watching you plant marigolds.

Calendula officinalis.

“Make sure you don’t track dirt into the kitchen again,” he says. The bottle clanks as he places it down on the patio table.

You turn your face in his direction. Nod once. In your peripheral vision, you see him stand and stretch.

“I’m going for a nap.”

You turn back to your task, listen as his footsteps recede. You breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth.

***

The glass lies in fragments on the kitchen floor. You imagine one of them slicing into your finger, the blood that will flow down to your wrist when you hold it up. Rose-red. Deep Secret. Floribunda.

He’s at work. You must sweep up the mess before he returns. But you know his lips will tighten when he notices the missing tumbler.

***

Your gown is ankle length with a high neckline. Periwinkle blue. Vinca minor.

You did not want to come to the ball. Did not want to sit here while he bids for

expensive lots.

A squeeze of your thigh. Warm breath in your ear. “You’d better not be making eyes at him.”

You realise your gaze has been fixed on the man seated opposite while your mind

wandered.

A quick response. “No.” You focus your attention on your half-finished meal.

You sense him studying your profile. A heartbeat, two, three. Then his lips move to your neck.

***

“When are you coming to visit? I haven’t seen you for months,” your mother says.

Your grip tightens on the phone. “Soon.”

You wait for him to arrive home.

When he walks through the door, you keep your gaze on his tie. Black narcissus. Not black, but deep red. You offer your cheek.

“My mother called,” you tell him over dinner. “She wants us to visit.”

“She called you, or you called her?”

“She called me.”

He sighs. “You know how I feel about your parents.”

“If we don’t go, they might turn up here.”

A frown. “I don’t want your dad here, stinking out my house with his cancer sticks.”

Your father always smokes in the garden, but you don’t point this out.

“And your mother looks down on me.”

You remain silent.

“Look at me.”

You lift your eyes.

“Don’t I provide for you?”

You lick dry lips. “Yes.”

“Don’t I give you everything you could ever want?”

“Yes.”

“Am I not good enough for you?”

“You’re more than enough.”

He stares at you. “Then say it.”

“I love you.”

***

You join the queue at the bakery, inhale the yeasty aroma.

Three women sit at a table for four. They sip frothy coffees and share gossip. You

remember what that’s like, the camaraderie of friendship, the intimacy of exchange.

There are no free tables. You wonder if you could buy a drink, ask to join them.

Pretend that you belong for a while.

Forget-me-not, you want to tell them. Myosotis sylvatica.

You reach the front of the queue, ask for the loaf, examine the drinks menu. Flat

white, you are about to tell the young man. But a small commotion draws your attention back to the table. The women are standing, kissing cheeks, promising to meet again soon.

“Anything else?”

You turn back to the server, shake your head.

***

You will pack lightly. Return to your childhood home.

There will be tears, anger. At him, not you. The police will be called. He’ll be

questioned, held accountable. You can show them the fresh bruises between your thighs.

But he calls the office, says he’s sick, spends the day watching you with hooded eyes.

How did you know? You wonder. How did you know?

***

You lose track of days and nights. Your world is small, your isolation total. From

eight to six, you live in silence, until the rain stops one afternoon and you can return to your garden. Now the birds sing to you. You almost smile.

Geraniums are re-potted. Pelargonium graveolens. You like the texture of the furry leaves, the earthy scent. Time becomes meaningless.

Until it isn’t.

***

You select a packet blindly and head to the counter. Your hand shakes as you tap your card on the reader. You don’t remember the journey home.

It’s awkward to hold the stick between your legs while you pee. You finish and place it next to the sink, then sit on the edge of the bath tub and stare at it until it reveals its secret.

Two lines. Pink. Anemone sylphide.

You lurch back to the toilet.

You’re still there when he returns. You push yourself up, fumble to hide the test at the back of a cupboard, swill some mouthwash.

“Where are you?”

You press the flush in response. Stare at the mirror as you wash your hands.

Who are you?

***

The lady’s voice is reassuring. “We’ll develop a plan with you, assign you a bed in

one of our refuges. You’ll be safe there.”

Safe.

When you disconnect the call, you pack minimally and pause to look out of the

kitchen window. Your garden is blooming. Perhaps the refuge will have a few flower beds you can nurture.

As you walk down the street, you do not look back.

Christina

by Madison Cyr | Jul 17, 2025 | contest winner, flash fiction

I named her Christina. She began as they all did—a greasy secretion that shimmered and then solidified into a milky coat of wax. It reminded me of the hospital where we were only allowed to write with crayons because you couldn’t puncture someone’s larynx with a crayon. I spent my time there in the TV room with a box of Crayolas. I peeled off their labels and skinned their naked bodies with my fingernails. I did the same thing to Christina, leaving little white curls of her at my feet.

If not for the hospital, we never would have met.

I saw the poster on my way out. I delivered my discharge paperwork to the reception desk, where the friendly blonde nurse who had admitted me two weeks before was working.

“Feeling better?” She asked. Her tone was so upbeat, I didn’t want to disappoint her.

“Much,” I said. That made her smile. She told me to have a wonderful day.

The world outside was so bright and cold and sure of itself that I hung around in the lobby for a bit just to gather courage. There was a community bulletin board near the sliding doors, and that’s where I saw it.

CLINICAL TRIAL – PAID

Looking to lose 50 pounds or more? You could be eligible to participate in a paid clinical trial for Vitalex.

Maybe I would want to kill myself less if I lost 50 lbs.

***

They told me it would happen, but still, it was a shock. The wax thickened and hardened. It fell in warm clumps where my joints met. They asked me to collect as much as I could. I saved the clumps and scrapings in dated plastic containers that I refrigerated and delivered to the lab at my weekly check-ins.

At the end of the trial, they gave me my check and asked if I wanted to keep my “production” now that they had no use for it. The trial lasted 6 weeks. No one ever said the word “fat”.

She weighed in at 54 pounds. The day I took her home, I searched for “Vitalex Production” on TikTok.

A skinny man in some seaside village sat beside a behemoth mound of yellow tallow. It glistened in the sunlight. He called it Davi and ran his palm over its wet back. Something in his expression touched me. A private smile lifted his lips. His eyes were soft and watery. He opened his hand so wide, splaying all his fingers out, like he couldn’t get enough.

I looked at my tub of gray production and grimaced. It wasn’t a good look for her, the five-gallon storage bin. And she needed a name. I named her Christina because of the obvious religious parallels. Immaculate conception and all that, and the fact that my own name is Mary.

I bought her an aquarium and wrote messages on the outside with those markers people use to write on car windows:

You’re beautiful.

Welcome to the world! It sucks.

My mood lifted. It was good to have somebody to talk to. 

A week in, and there was a smell. A cross between earwax and the inside of a belly button. I kept a cinnamon candle burning all day, and that seemed to do the trick.

After a month, the mold appeared in little green freckles across her sallow face. Something had to be done. It was the right thing to do, the only thing to do. I had to take her back.

 I’d made Christina over the course of a decade. A few pounds every year, most of it in the past 18 months when nothing stirred my appetite except ice cream. I bought it in gallon tubs and attacked it with a spoon every few hours. It took time to make her, and it would take time to remake her.  The idea was both frightening and a comfort. I missed and was repelled by my old body. But this new body presented its own set of challenges. Even though I was smaller, I found it harder to hide. Men’s eyes were everywhere—as omnipresent as the sun or the sky, another element that could kill you from exposure.

I put her in everything. Fried eggs in the morning, a scoop stirred into my coffee where the fat would rise to the top and form an iridescent film. I plopped spoonfuls of her into empty Cool Whip containers and set them out for the stray cats. But it wasn’t enough. I needed more mouths.

Misty was the only person I could think of. We’d exchanged info in the hospital, careful numbers copied down in red crayon. She was thrilled.

I made a feast. Two dozen buttermilk biscuits, brown butter gnocchi with fried sage, and a spice cake with buttercream frosting. Enough for us both to feed off the leftovers for days. I didn’t hide Christina or make any effort to conceal her role in the meal, and Misty didn’t seem to mind. One might say it brought us closer. When I hugged her, I said to myself, “I love you, Misty. I love you, Christina.”

It took a month. On our last morning together, I drank my coffee slowly. By then, Christina had a warm, earthy taste, like morel mushrooms. When the coffee was gone, I scraped the sides of her tank with a spatula and set the remains out for the cats. It was a cool spring morning, the dew shone silver on the grass. The cats were waiting for me, their fur shiny and clumped with grease. They wrapped their stout bodies around my ankles and let me scratch behind their ears. When they’d licked the bowl clean, they looked up at me with sorrowful, expectant eyes. I held out my empty hands.      

Jigsaw

by Anna Cabreros | Jul 15, 2025 | contest winner, flash fiction

My sister Jane and I make the ideal jigsaw puzzle partnership. She’s more organized than me, the one who categorizes and compartmentalizes, but I have all the patience.

Most recently, we tried a 1,000-piece train travel scene. She dutifully separated the pieces into little groups – landscape, tray of food, luggage, maps. And then there are always those pieces that color-match but blend amorphously into the backdrop—the wall, the shadows, the seat cushions.

I will obsess over fitting these mundane pieces together. But Jane hates the slog. So she focused on the tray of food and the maps as I toiled through the pieces that all looked pretty much alike.

When we invited the police officer inside that night, I had nowhere to put my nervous energy but the puzzle. I’m sure the officer wondered how I could focus on a puzzle amidst a crisis. But I couldn’t make myself stop. I felt the disoriented need to be constructive even as I knew nothing I did would change a thing.

“I’m going to ask you some questions. I have to ask them to everyone even though I already have the details of tonight.”

“Okay,” said Jane.

I rotated a bluish blurry piece and tried to fit it to another. No luck, no matter the angle.

“Has he ever hit you before tonight?”

“No,” she said.

“Has he ever choked you?”

“No.”

“Does he have a weapon?”

“Yes.”

“Has he ever threatened to kill you?”

“No.”

How much has this questionnaire changed since we were kids? I wondered. Did it even exist back then? I thought of how varying the answers would have been depending on the timeline.

As the officer rattled off more questions, I kept trying the pieces. Sometimes looking for matching colors, sometimes honing in on the particular curvature of each edge. I had a few successes, but spent most of my time relentlessly rotating the shapes in hopes of finding them a home.

After the questionnaire was finished, the officer handed my sister a pink paper.

“This is an information sheet with numbers to call if you need a safe place to be until we issue the arrest and the EPO. But it looks like you’ll stay here, with your sister?”

“Yes,” she said.

“That’s great,” said the officer. “Most women in this situation don’t have a safe place to go. You’re very fortunate.”

Yes, we agreed. Very fortunate.

The officer left, and I kept working the puzzle as Jane calmed herself down. We wondered if her husband would open the door to the police tomorrow since he had refused tonight. If maybe he was too drunk to have heard the police knock tonight. We wondered, when did it get this bad? How hadn’t she seen this coming?

She thought she knew him, she said. She knew he was being erratic and increasingly seemed violent, but she never thought he would take it to this extreme.

I was still worrying the pieces when Jane asked if I thought she should go ahead and get him arrested.

“I don’t know,” I said, pulling apart two mismatched pieces ferociously clinging together. “I would. But it’s not my life. It’s yours.”

My husband chimed in. “He doesn’t know how to control himself,” he said reasonably. “Call. It might be the only thing to de-escalate the situation.”

He was right, of course. And it was the only thing she hadn’t tried. It’s the one thing our mother never did.

We set up the air mattress in our youngest daughter’s room. On most weekends, she likes to bunk with her older sister. Jane smiled at the small sleeping forms gilded by the nightlight in the adjacent room. She gave me a tender look before retiring to the air mattress.

By the time she was settled, it was near 3 a.m. But I wasn’t tired. I lay in bed until I heard my husband’s breathing regulate, and then I returned to the dining room table.

Jane was there, trying to make sense of the pieces I had set aside. All of them were in the same family of blurry blue, but on closer look, they belonged to completely different parts of the picture.

“I can’t sleep,” she said. “I thought this would help.”

I nodded in agreement and acknowledged that I was there for the same reason.

“But I hate this part of the puzzle,” she said. “All the good stuff is done, and now every piece looks the same. It’s giving me anxiety, trying to sort it out.”

And for the first time that night, tears. She had held it together the entire time, from the moment he slammed her against the wall to the panicked moments on the phone with me, from escaping her house to making it to mine, from calling the police to being questioned by them. All of it had gone so quickly, almost calmly. But now it was over and we weren’t sure what was next and she had to decide whether or not she should have her husband arrested the next morning.

I held her and let her cry for a while. Then coaxed her back to bed.

As I walked back through the dining room, I glanced at the nearly finished puzzle. It was true. All the pretty parts of the puzzle were fully assembled, and what was left looked like a monochromatic mess. Big open spaces between the landscape and the tray of food and the luggage and the maps. White space littered with tiny odd shapes, all clearly belonging to each other in some way. But what a process, what a mundane and tedious and painful challenge it was to anchor the beauty to the murky background.

Wife 2.0

by Nancy Alvarado | Jul 10, 2025 | contest winner, flash fiction

“Do you want a bite, Linda?” you call out cheerfully from the living room. You’re settled into your recliner, hunched gleefully over a cinnamon roll. I pause, grip the broom hovering over a pile of debris in the middle of our tiny kitchen floor. I wanted to playfully scold you for the decadence of the cinnamon roll, but her name falls into the space between us. 

I am not Linda.

She was a force, a tiny package of brains and courage. Her presence filled a room. Years before I knew I would love you, I wept at her funeral. 

Now no longer small and fierce, she is forever contained, reduced to a box of ash tucked into the recesses of your closet, bones and teeth and memories. 

Linda is your dead wife. I choke on her name as I would choke, dry-mouthed, on the cinnamon roll, on the ashes.

The black box from the mortuary takes up more space than its size.

II

“Sweetie, can you bring me the pictures from the top of the bookcase?”

You call me “sweetie” now, perhaps afraid of how her name and mine intertwine in your mouth, pleasing neither of us.

It’s good that I don’t believe in ghosts; poster-sized canvases, photos from Linda’s memorial service, cascade down on me from the top of the bookshelf where I dared to pull the corner of a frame. Her face, repeated, rains down on my head. Your face, kissing her temple, bruises me.

You are cleaning, purging, heaping a pile of your old life in the middle of the garage. The floor is covered with junk and memories. I silently hand you the stack of photos, gazing one last time into her piercing blue eyes. You gently turn the top photo over, leaving me staring at white canvas, and tenderly place the canvases alongside the broken vacuum cleaner, the plastic bags of expired ginger candy gifted to us almost daily by the neighbor with Alzheimer’s, and the leash for a dog who no longer exists. I covertly slide notebooks filled with her spidery writing into the heap, hoping her words will no longer take up so much space in our home. 

I keep her journal hidden in our bedroom; I haven’t finished reading it.

Two fat men in a truck come to collect the pile. Grunting and sweating, they cart away your old life. I reassure you that you don’t have to do this, that you can keep bits and pieces of her until you’re ready to let go. 

Your reply is brusque, “I know. I’m ready.” And then, softly, “Thank you.” I touch your shoulder.

I still the urge to beg the two fat men to load their truck faster, to take her away, to let us live as a pair instead of a trio. 

III

You chose a sunny day to let her go. Hard things are always better on sunny days.

I walk silently beside you. For once, I don’t want to know what you’re thinking. Sand and shells crunch under my feet. I let the sound fill the space between us.

I watch your back, its shape as familiar to me as my own hands, as you step into the water. Foam laps at your knees. You dip your hand into the open bag of Linda’s ashes and toss them into the sea. 

The wind whips your second handful into the air toward the shore, toward me. Gritty ash lands on my bare arms; I shiver.

Will I always be coated with her residue? 

I lick my finger, salt and ash. A wave rises, washing Linda’s ashes from my skin. 

The sea quietly carries her away, as you turn and walk toward me.