Endangered Species

by Caroljean Gavin | Aug 26, 2021 | flash fiction

My five-year-old walks the sidewalks with me into town. There is no other place for him. He holds my finger with one hand. His other hand clutches a headless black bird. He nibbles on it from time to time. I cannot wrench it away from him. It wouldn’t matter. There are always more, dropping from the sky in scores. There is no protecting him. His eyes are wide open, nostrils flared, teeth gnashing and tongue lapping at the wind without boundary. 

The grocery doors slide open for us, my son runs through the cool air and straight to the produce. It is hard to stop him. An older woman coughs, coughs, coughs, and even through her coughing she glares at me. The little black birds spin out of her mouth. Keep control of your kid. The bananas are all black, the nectarines have rotted in their bags, the apples bruised beyond recognition. My son grabs a putrid, weeping mango and takes a huge bite. It’s a man staring this time, a stocker, looking over his stack, his eyes tightening over his mask, and behind the mask, little beaks, poking, poking, poking, trying to break through. You’ll have to pay for that. We will. We do. We pay for everything and seven cans of chili and three boxes of snack cakes and almonds and jerky and so many pouches of apple sauce while the birds circle and my son reaches up for the arms of every stranger, reaches up for the wing of every bird. What can I do? We have to eat.

My five-year-old walks through the parking lot with me, towards the school. He holds my finger with one hand. The drop-off line is a crush of cars. The birds are thick. Each car door that opens lets out a clot of them, that ride the air to join the birds hovering over the building or the birds pecking through the grass, waiting. I throw my arms over him. But there is no protecting him. Not once he gets inside. If he does not go inside, they tell me, if he does not see the other children play, he will not learn to play. If he does not go inside, they tell me, if he does not see the other children talk, he will never learn how. I cannot keep him inside, I cannot keep him safe, this is what they tell me. My five-year old son is so hungry for the clamor, he breaks away from me and runs, runs, runs inside chewing on his dead bird in one hand, slurping up his rotten mango from another, and the classrooms are full of the corvids and there is nothing, nothing, nothing I can do.

Rodney & Chelsea

by Kathy Fish | Aug 23, 2021 | flash fiction

1. Tangerines

Rodney and Chelsea have decided this is the day. They are sixteen years old and they are in love. Neither of them has ever done it, though Rodney has come close, with a girl he worked with at Dairy Queen who smelled like French fries and who had perfect, melon-sized breasts. Chelsea’s breasts are more the size of tangerines, but he likes them. He likes that she smells like Fruit Loops and that her front teeth overlap slightly. Her mouth is glossed. He slips his tongue inside.

2. Bear Spirit

“Rodney’s an old man’s name,” Chelsea’s mom says and calls him Rascal instead. It makes Rodney feel like a Labrador.

Chelsea’s mom believes that life is a celebration and that people should live in the Now. Chelsea has an older brother named Royal. Nobody knows where the hell he is. He ran away from the halfway house downtown, the place Chelsea’s mom said was his best chance and hope. He has a behavior disorder which involves beating people up. He doesn’t know his own strength is what Chelsea’s mom says. He has a bear spirit. He is unruinable.

The last guy he beat up now walks with a cane.

3. The Bunnies

Chelsea’s father left when Royal was ten and Chelsea was a newborn. Every Easter, he sends Chelsea a six foot Easter bunny and now she has sixteen huge Easter bunnies and there are no more places to sit in Chelsea’s house. Sometimes people sit on the bunnies’ laps or sometimes they just stand, looking around or sometimes they sit on the floor.

4. A Small Complication

Their first date, Rodney plucked a daffodil from Chelsea’s garden and presented it to her at the door. And Chelsea’s mom gave them Boone’s Farm, mixed with a splash of 7 Up. All three of them got a little drunk, sitting on the porch watching the sun go down and a full moon rise. Chelsea’s mom insisted on driving Rodney home. Before he got out of the car, she pulled his face to hers and kissed him, hard. 

5. About  Rodney’s Parents…

Rodney doesn’t have any siblings. He feels lucky, given the circumstances. His mother died of cancer when he was five. He remembers standing on tip-toe to reach a cookie off a plate on the counter and her hand slapping it away. He tries to really see that hand, to see something about it that is especially hers, but it always ends up being just a hand.

Rodney’s father is a podiatrist who is working on his overall fitness. Every day at dawn, he walks the perimeter of the cul-de-sac, gripping fifty pound dumbbells in each hand. In warm weather he goes without a shirt, his burgeoning muscles gleaming. He makes three trips around, bobs his chin to Chelsea’s mom who watches from her kitchen window, and lays the dumbbells on the porch in the special box. He consumes nothing but protein: lamb chops, sausages, steaks as thick as two hands clamped together.  He will never love another woman, he promises Rodney, who really doesn’t care if he does or not. Rodney only wants his father to be happy, which his father assures him he is.

6. Clinical

Two bunnies sit in opposite corners of Chelsea’s bedroom. One is missing an eye and one’s polka-dotted ear is nearly torn off. Rodney and Chelsea undress in a clinical manner, and fold their clothes, as if they have decided to join the Army together. Rodney has seen parts of Chelsea but never the whole and now he stands before her and reaches out to touch one tangerine breast. Unsure of what to do with her own hands, Chelsea simply places them on Rodney’s shoulders.

She’s afraid to get closer because his thing is standing up. She digs her toes into the pink shag rug and closes her eyes. The breeze through the window is making the shutters flap against the window frame and Rodney’s breath smells like oatmeal and grape jelly.

7. The Now

At this moment Chelsea’s dad is getting fired from his job selling tires in Terre Haute and her mom is hunched over a patient, scraping plaque in an office downtown, thinking of that kiss and Royal’s getting the shit kicked out of him in a bar in Tucson. At this moment, Rodney’s dad’s outside on the curb, sweating, coughing, turning blue, as Rodney kisses Chelsea. Like howling into her mouth.

Originally published in Blip Magazine (now New World Writing)

Connect the Dots Love

by Sarah Fawn Montgomery | Aug 19, 2021 | flash fiction

N says we’re looking for that Leo and Kate love that crashes sudden, veins fire and ice, the kind where you go down with the ship.

I tell N that Kate didn’t die, except inside, but N doesn’t mind because she’s lusting after Leo while I’m trying not to stare at Kate’s pale bobbing breasts. I wonder how he can concentrate enough to draw her with a steady hand, to make a solid line. Her skin’s like N’s, translucent moon and swoon.

We lay out in the sun to urn, trying so hard to be golden that even our skin peels away from us. We talk sky (good) and sea (better) and how to breathe in a circle to make the music last.

We’re listening to the Spice Girls say what they really, really want and N shows me how to be two ways at once—breathing in even as you exhale. “The note won’t break,” she says, fingering her imaginary clarinet. “No one knows when you’re struggling for air.”

 I can’t keep up. I’m always spurting out staccato, gasping where I begin, choking when I end.

N touches my throat, my stomach. We practice breathing together like the afternoon never ends.

Maybe love is Leo letting go, the way he freezes when the hurt is too good. N swears he’s ro-man-tic, stretching out the middle like her want, gender a pulse in her throat. Her hand grasps mine during sleepover movies when an asteroid heads towards earth or the poltergeist comes through the television.

It feels like everything is always dying—my breath on my tongue, the small fish of N’s foot in my lap when Ben saunters by, the smell of vanilla body spray we waltz through before the school dance where we slam our bodies down and wind them all around.

Ben grabs my waist and later N cries because she has no one to dance with but me.

“Connect the dots,” N says into the mirror while I bring her Dr. Pepper Lip Smackers to my lips like a kiss. “You don’t count.”

 With the lights out and the glow-in-the-dark bracelets we wave through the gym, I am a specter, my lonely lit up for the world to see.

In band, N taps my thigh to keep time. I struggle to keep up, the sound my instrument makes a strangle. It’s better not to make noise, I think. Since I’m always behind, it’s better not to breathe at all.

In science I label the parts of a jellyfish—the tentacles, the arms that capture prey and ingest them with poisonous venom, but that also pull desire up into the mouth hidden hungry in the center of the creature. They pulse and billow like ghosts, gorgeous if they want, invisible if they need.

I remind N that the Titanic didn’t sink that deep, instead became a reef. Jellyfish dance through the ballroom, stand on the railing, arms out and flying.

But N isn’t interested in the wreckage, just the wreck. She wants that romance where someone loves you because they leave. Where you know you were special because someone haunts you the rest of your life.