by Edie Meade | May 21, 2021 | micro
Shrapnel bores out of Daddy when he chops too much wood. They float to a place near his spine and Momma fishes them out with tweezers and a needle.
Shrapnel bits don’t look like bullets. Sometimes they look like hominy, sometimes like baby teeth. They’ve been coated with scar tissue, given their own skin.
I think it’s strange how Daddy can go on, chopping wood far away from the war with its metal still ripping through his body. Momma says the war never really stops; it just becomes a part of a man and destroys him from the inside out.
by Bayveen O'Connell | May 20, 2021 | micro
Just as the Greeks hypothesised, my uterus traversed my whole body, and yet in an absence of hysteria, she squeezed herself calmly out from between my legs. I set her free and she rose like a glowing New Year’s lantern. Getting caught in bare branches, she fluttered from bud to bud: a bright pink robin with fallopian wings.
My brother called wombs man-traps, my best friend grieved ’till hers was filled. But no squatters, no prisoners, tenants nor tears for me: I just watched her joy, serene and sisterly, as my uterus floated away, augmenting us both.
by Laura Besley | May 19, 2021 | interview
We Love in Small Moments: a Collection on Love is the debut chapbook by Melissa Boles published by Emerge Literary Journal as part of their Magpies Series. In these 14 stories, Boles looks at many different aspects of love – the main two themes being romantic love and parental love – and the myriad ways this can be experienced.
Many of the stories in the collection are about characters leaving. In the opening story, ‘Wishing’, a couple makes love, but the ending is a little melancholy, with the impression that he wants more than she can give. “Ana is the most intriguing woman he’s ever dated, though he wishes that, just once, she would still be in his arms when he wakes up.”
‘Left in Valdosta’ encompasses two different types of leaving. There is the immediate leaving in the story: a man and his daughter are visiting the man’s dad and their visit is nearing its end. Neither the young girl nor the granddad want the visit to end, both calling out from the garden to “[s]tay a while longer” or “[f]or five more minutes!” The man, watching his dad and daughter play, is washing up at the end of the visit. He’s scrubbing tobacco spit out of a Valdosta state mug which until his wife left “was just as crisp and white as the day they bought it.” Resigned at the state of the mug or the length of the visit, or both, he sits with a whisky and waits.
“It’s hot out and I’m sweating and I don’t want to be here, but his son is playing.” This opening sentence of ‘Home Plate’ is pitch-perfect and Boles deftly portrays the situation. The new girlfriend looks at the other people sitting on the bleachers and makes the observation that: “[a]ll the moms have matching handbags and matching up-dos and I am out of place but still here, clapping and cheering when he does and not actually caring what is happening.” There seems to be a deep sadness in this line; the feeling of being out of place, but trying to fit in, however only on the surface as deep down you know you never will.
In contrast to some of the grittier pieces about couples, ‘Hormones’ and ‘Toe Shoes’ are soft and sentimental stories about babies yet to be born. The interaction between the parents and the child in ‘Hormones’ is very realistic, the young girl puffing out her stomach to be like her mother, waiting for her father’s affection. In ‘Toe Shoes’ “[h]is wife finds the necklace while pulling out Christmas decor, the sterling silver toe shoes glistening in the sunlight as she runs her thumb over their outline, remembering how they used to feel on her feet.” Instead of suspected infidelity, the necklace is not for another woman, but their future daughter.
We Love in Small Moments: a Collection on Love is striking and unflinching in language and exploration, containing stories that will stay with you long after you’ve finished reading them. More importantly, maybe, reading this chapbook will make you breathe a little easier, your belief in love restored.
Melissa Boles (she/her) is a writer, storyteller, and impatient optimist. Originally from the Pacific Northwest, she is currently residing in East Tennessee with her two friends and their four dogs. Her writing focuses on art, mental health, love, and human connection, and she believes that storytelling is humanity’s most incredible miracle. Melissa has been published in multiple literary journals and on several websites and is in the Pages Penned in Pandemic Collective (published January 2021). If she’s not writing, she is reading or helping people tell their stories through her day job in marketing and communications. You can find her online at melissaboles.com.
by Grant Faulkner | May 16, 2021 | micro
I’ve always thought life is more about what is unsaid than what is said. We live in odd gaps of silence, irremediable interstices that sometimes last forever. A lingering glance averted. The lover who slams the door and runs away. Unsent letters. We all carry so many strange little moments within us. Memory shuffles through random snapshots. Sometimes they seem insignificant, yet they stay with us for some reason, weaving the fabrics of our beings. In the end, we don’t seize the day so much as it seizes us.
The idea of capturing such small but telling moments of life is what drew me to 100-word stories (or “drabbles” as they’re sometimes referred to). I’d previously written novels and longer short stories, forms that demanded an accumulation of words—to sew connections, to explain, to build an entire world with text. I wondered, what if I did the opposite? What if instead of relying on the words of a story, I relied on the spectral spaces around those words? What if I privileged excision over any notion of comprehensiveness, and formed narratives around caesuras and crevices?
We live as foragers in many ways, after all, sniffing at hints, interpreting the tones of a person’s voice, scrutinizing expressions, and then trying to put it all together into a collage of what we like to call truth. Whether it’s the gulf between a loved one, the natural world, or God, we exist in lacunae. I wanted to write with an aesthetic that captured these “fissures,” as I began to think about them.
Perhaps I could have accomplished such an aesthetic of writing in a longer form, but the hard borders of a 100- word story put a necessary pressure on each word, each sentence. In my initial forays into 100-word stories, my stories veered toward 150 words or more. I didn’t see ways to cut or compress. I didn’t see ways to make the nuances and gestures of language invite the reader in to create the story. But writing within the fixed lens of 100 words required me to discipline myself stringently. I had to question each word, to reckon with Flaubert’s “mot juste” in a way that even most flash fiction doesn’t. As a result, I discovered those mysterious, telling gaps that words tend to cover up.
We all have a literal blind spot in our eyes where the optic nerve connects to the retina and there are no light-detecting cells. None of us will ever know the whole story, in other words. We can only collect a bag full of shards and try to piece them together. This collection is my bag full of shards.
Castings
A resistance to spontaneous modes of imagination. A disdain for sultriness. Tattered underwear. Every marriage has its own legalities, and these were Anthony’s claims for divorce. Sometime, long ago, they’d believed in something that rhymed with galactic. Now, if gossip columns about ordinary people existed, they would have reported him howling at the moon. In one last attempt to save their romance, he asked her to get high and lay on the grass. She held a grocery list, stared at him with a survivalist’s determination. He saw teddy bears, grasshoppers in the clouds. The worms beneath him abandoned their selves.
Originally published in Fissures: One Hundred 100-Word Stories from Press 53
by Kyra Kondis | May 14, 2021 | flash fiction
There was a man—there is always a man. There was the crush of gray wave. The cold bite of late fall.
She’s been down here for so long, she can’t remember things she once would never have thought important enough to forget. What the ground feels like. What smoke smells like. What clocks sound like. She doesn’t know how many years have passed, how many times the sun has sunken to a rind on the horizon and then risen again.
But she remembers everything else. The boats are different these days. Blocky cargo freighters. Small yachts that sit lightly on the water’s surface. Long white ships she’s learned are called cruises, their underbellies casting dark shadows on the seafloor. They jostle the water, fill the air above with noise: the whir of engines, shrieks of laughter, jazz music.
She has been down here for so, so long.
A little-known fact about Davy Jones: there is no locker, but there is a trench. No matter where you are at the bottom of the ocean, there is just about always a trench. The locker is a figure of speech, more of a concept than a place. This is how things are in general now, for Davy: intangible, just like herself, her skin.
And she used to get lonely by herself in a vortex of ocean. She used to wonder, why her? Why had the universe one day decided that she would end up down here, like this?
It wasn’t the universe that decided this, of course. It was, of course, a man.
She is close to the beach today, whatever day it is, in the shallower water that’s more of a brackish brown. There is a boat she has her eye on, a small white yacht. She has been watching. She is always watching.
Here is another little-known fact about Davy Jones: there are scarier things than Davy Jones across the miles of unexplored seafloor, sure. But there are definitely scarier things than Davy Jones on land.
When she lived, she wore panniers and corsets that only slightly squeezed the air from her lungs. She worked as a seamstress. She learned to read, then to write, in looping script that looked like strands of curly hair. She did needlepoint. She created things. She didn’t always just destroy.
The men on the boat are young. Their shirts are button-up and short-sleeved and printed with bright tropical flowers. They are having trouble with their boat. The caterwaul of the engine echoes across the water. They are unconcerned. Beer cans fly like lures off the side of the yacht, which is emblazoned with the words The Casanova, and, next to that, Sigma Chi Seniors in a blocky, red paint.
The man who pressed his cold hands into Davy’s collarbones was young, too. He flashed a silver knife as if to tell her: obey. His eyes, the color of storm clouds. She made sure to get a good look at his eyes; if you want to recognize someone later, always look at their eyes.
Sometime before now, when Davy was up here at the surface, watching the Casanova, a young woman was brought aboard, slouched over the arm of one of the men. Her dress glittered like fish scales, slipped a little off a shoulder. The men on the deck hooted and cackled after she disappeared inside the boat’s cabin.
Davy did a double take.
It’s silly, but at first, looking at the woman, Davy thought that she was looking at herself.
When she sank the ship of the man with the storm-cloud eyes and cold hands, she was messy, angry. It was her first time doing such a thing. She was adjusting to her own death and what came after. She enveloped the boat in walls of water until it split with a deafening crack. She watched the pieces float to the seafloor, slowly, like flakes of snow.
Now her form is measured, perfected. The Casanova’s engine starts and the men cheer. They putter forward into deeper waters, not knowing the ways in which they will sink.
Davy Jones watches, ready. She is always ready. She has this down to a science. She is not who you think she is.
by K-Ming Chang | May 12, 2021 | interview
by Veronica Montes | May 11, 2021 | interview
Fractured: What excites you about writing flash fiction/ Are there any limitations to the form?
Montes: For me, flash is often about exploring life’s small moments, times when not much seems to be happening, and yet…everything is happening. And so I’m excited by the challenge of trying to give these moments the attention they deserve. By this I mean a beginning, middle, and end, a sense of before and after, whole characters, and a touch of lyricism. The challenge of trying to achieve all of this in under 1,000 words is what I find exciting about writing flash.
As for limitations…what are those?! My fellow flash writers are dazzling me with their experiments and derring-do. While I have yet to push the limits in my own work, they’re providing plenty of inspiration.
Fractured: What normally comes first in your writing process? Image, language, a voice? Titles or a first line?
Montes: My process almost always starts with a snapshot-like image. And then I try to puzzle out why the image came to me or sticks with me. Why these deer feeding from an apple tree? Who is this woman sitting in the dirt? Where is this little boy going, all alone, with that look on his face? Despite my mother hissing, “Veronica stop staring,” into my ear while growing up I have remained, like most writers, extraordinarily nosey (though perhaps more discreet now). One of my favorite things is to observe someone while my train is pulling away, and they’re waiting on the platform. Once on a snowy day in Virginia, I saw a man in a work jumpsuit sitting on the ground with his lunch box beside him, and he was just so weary. This was probably twenty-five years ago, and I’m still waiting to put him in a story. Said story will also feature…soup. I think.
Fractured: I’m in love with cover art/ How do you think it helps contribute to the themes of the book? What was the process like working with Black Lawrence press?
Montes: I love my chapbook cover art, too! Black Lawrence Press was very open to input, so I did what I did for my full-length collection: turned to the Filipino/American Artist Directory. As soon as I saw Mary Jhun’s work, I knew I’d found the right artist. I felt like this painting, “The Young House,” spoke to the rich interior lives of my characters, of their attempts to speak and be heard, of both triumph and failure. Black Lawrence Press is terrific: they have an author handbook to walk you through the entire publication process, and they offer a pre-sale incentive program, plus plenty of support for readings, reviews, etc.
Fractured: How did you decide which stories made it into the chapbook?
Montes: I wanted to create a timeline of sorts, so I chose pieces that told the story of a woman at eight different points in her life (alternately, they can be read as stories about eight different women), from adolescence to elder status. The stories are similar in tone, and they’re all flash, so I wanted to include one piece that was longer (in this case, just under 1,000 words) and had—to me, at least—a completely different feel while still keeping with the themes. I placed that one in the middle and called it an interlude.
Fractured: A lot of these stories feel like allegories. Is that something you focus on when writing/ Is allegory another way of conceiving fairy tales? How did you make these stories so personal, so active?
Montes: I’m asked this question a lot, and I’ve never answered it to my satisfaction. So once more unto the breach: I wish I could be the kind of writer who understands what they’re doing while they’re doing it, but I’m just not. I’ve only consciously written a fairytale once (it’s not even finished; I’ve been writing it for years!), yet many of my stories end up, more or less, in that space. I just write what comes to me without trying to force anything, which is how I think I often end up in a dreamy kind of place. When editing, I look for the point in the story that makes me the most scared or uncomfortable, and then I drill down a little. It’s kind of like pressing on a bruise. Maybe this is what you’re sensing as personal?
Fractured: I love how evocative your titles are, how they are rarely one word! Do titles come naturally to you?
Montes: Thank you! As flash writers we’re hyper-aware of every word, image, and a bit of dialogue; most of it has to do double-duty. So I think flash titles should work just as hard! I find that my titles are often a piece of information that I wasn’t able to include in the text itself or, more generally, an attempt at additional clarification. For example, I wrote a flash that was a little confusing because it featured four characters, but was only 240 words. It received a few good rejections before I realized that the title was contributing nothing—less than nothing, to be honest—to the piece. I changed it to clarify the cast of characters, and it was picked up the next time out by a publication I’d never been brave enough to submit to before. If anyone is curious: “The Alchemist, His Daughter, Their Two Servants” in Wigleaf.
Fractured: What are you waiting for? What would end your waiting?
Montes: There are so many ways to answer this question in these fraught times, but I’m going with the eradication of margins. I’m waiting for zero margins, and I think the end of white supremacy will be the beginning of the end of my waiting.
by Fractured Lit | May 10, 2021 | contests
fractured lit anthology 1 prize
judged by Kathy Fish
CLOSED April 19, 2021
Add to Calendar
submit
2021 Winners:
Night Vision by Anna Gates Ha
(Don’t) Remember Me Like This by Cyn Nooney
Girl on the Bike, Boy in Dayton by John Bensink
Girl in the Snow by Wendy Oleson
I Chose the Pencil by Richard Schwarzenberger
Sweets from Strangers by Tian Yi
We Don’t Boil Babies by Alicia Dekker
Salt City Runaway by Gillian O’Shaughnessy
In Andromeda by Jonathan Cardew
Evening Clay by Josh Wagner
As Solid as an Ashtray and Emits More Smoke by Edie Meade
Grandma Kim at Forty-Five by Chloe Seim
Muscle and Might by Bob Thurber
Mi Porvenir by A.J. Rodriguez
Rabbit, Rabbit by Sally Toner
Account for What You Have by Alexandra Blogier
Marriage Market by Susan Wigmore
If This Were Tracy Island by Marissa Hoffmann
Oil Drills by Lauren Weber
Thursday Night at Lucky’s Liquor Store by Shareen Murayama
Shortlist:
Henrietta by Kim Magowan
Wild Jill’s Bangin’ Karaoke Bar by Kayla Upadhyaya
Animals by Catherine Bush
Love, Exactly by Nikki HoSang
Buen Provecho by Amina Gautier
Waste Meadow by Greg Schutz
Harvest Moon by Kristin Saetveit
Little Tin Box by Jessica Daugherty
Make Dust Our Paper by Bill Merklee
Rustic Haircuts for Returning Ghosts by Nicole Tsuno
Almost Like a Heart by Jason Jackson
Freshman by Allison Renner
Blueberries by Adrienne Barrios
Lace in Your Hands by Lydia Copeland Gwyn
We invite writers to submit to the Fractured Lit Anthology 1 Prize from February 19 to April 19, 2021. Guest judge Kathy Fish will choose 20 prize winners from a shortlist. We’re excited to offer the 20 winners of this prize $250, publication, and 5 contributor copies of the printed anthology. All entries will be considered for publication.
Kathy Fish has published five collections of short fiction, most recently Wild Life: Collected Works from 2003-2018. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, Washington Square Review, and numerous other journals, textbooks, and anthologies. Fish’s “Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild,” was selected for Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018 and the current edition of The Norton Reader. Her newsletter, The Art of Flash Fiction, provides monthly craft articles and writing prompts and is free to all. Subscribe here: https://artofflashfiction.substack.com.
Fractured Lit is looking for flash fiction that lingers long past the first reading. We’re searching for flash that investigates the mysteries of being human, the sorrow, and the joy of connecting to the diverse population around us. We want the stories that explode vertically, the flash that leaves the conventional and the clichéd far behind. Fractured Lit is a flash fiction–centered place for all writers of any background and experience.
Good luck and happy writing!
- Your $20 reading fee allows up to two stories of 1,000 words or fewer each per entry. If submitting two stories, please put them both in a SINGLE document.
- We allow multiple submissions. Each set of two flash stories should have a separate submission accompanied by a reading fee.
- Flash Fiction only. 1,000 word count per individual story is the maximum amount of words.
- We only consider unpublished work for contests. We do not review reprints, including self-published work.
- Simultaneous submissions are okay. Please notify us and withdraw your entry if you find another home for your writing.
- All entries will also be considered for publication in Fractured Lit.
- Double-space your submission and use Times New Roman 12 pt font.
- Please include a brief cover letter with your publication history (if applicable).
- International submissions are welcome, but we only read work in English.
- We do not read blind. The judge will read anonymously from the shortlist.
submit
by Sara Hills | May 10, 2021 | micro
1.
It’s always night when they wheel us girls in, gowned on gurneys. Underground. They pull their masks up and peer at our faces. Line us in rows along the dark gray walls. We must be sick. They must be healers. Lightbulbs swing from the ceiling. Somewhere down the row is Sissy. It’s her turn, and she’s crying.
2.
I refuse to count backwards because I know I’ll die. The blue-scrubbed surgeon reveals the silver-sharp instruments on the tray, filed in order of shine. He swivels smiling on the stool and asks why I’m afraid, sweeping wide with his large hands. Dark hairs prickle his arms like an animal. Each finger wears a tuft of wool.
3.
Bruises lily-pad down my spine. If I were a little frog, I could jump-jump across them, to my arm, my ass, my thighs, where the bruise is—the bruises—are clustery, both dark and bright, big as a man’s hands. Turn, they say, snapping the camera, trapping each one on film. Readying them for the exhibition. Turn, they say. Don’t look away. Drop the sheet a little lower.
4.
The woman assigned to my case has the face of a young Stockard Channing. I expect her to sing, joke, light a cigarette. We sit in her office and read the judgments, the confessions, the lies. Shapes and voices float in and out. A faceful of wet grass, a kneeful of dirty carpet. I roll into a ball. Squeeze myself as small as the head of a pin. The papers wobble in the woman’s hands and grow wet.
5.
With one gloved hand in my cunt, the midwife tells me to push. She tells me my body isn’t working, the baby isn’t breathing, the car is warming up. I float above the bed, above the dark paneled wainscot, above myself. I am the ceiling. I am the yellowed flowers on the walls. Not the blood and the twisted cord and the oxygen tank, the baby girl suctioned and swaddled. Not the panic passing in the doorway. The car is warm, and they know we are coming.
by Fractured Lit | May 7, 2021 | flash fiction, news
We’re proud to announce the 23 titles of our shortlist! The submissions we received were so thrilling, inventive, and affecting that we’ve had a hard time narrowing down the list! From this list, judge Kevin Brockmeier has chosen his final 3 winners and 2 honorable mentions! Winners will be announced early next week!
A Guide to Small Town Ghosts Regan Puckett
The Better to See D.E. Hardy
This Is How You Become a Myth Ophelia Hu Kinney
El Triste Eric Scot Tryon
The Changeling Sarah Boudreau
The sixth-eldest dancing princess looks back at her legacy Madeline Anthes
The Bone Child Meagan Johanson
Recorded Live dm armstrong
Nosebleed Weather Marilyn Hope
A Too Small Room Yume Kitasei
The Sea Witch Lindsey Kirchoff
Springriven Olivia Frost
The Day The Moon Fell Iona Rule
Scratchers Corey Farrenkopf
Bitter Doll Susan Power
Bloodcoat Carolyne Topdjian
Shame Street Anne Perez
The Eaves Audrey Burges
Dialogue Between a Woman and Her Ba Faye Brinsmead
Ornithology for Girls Tara Stillions Whitehead
Women’s Work Carolyn Jack
His Mother’s Teeth KC Mead-Brewer
god at the side of the road A Poythress
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