by Gwen Kirby | Jun 30, 2021 | flash fiction
“No small sensation has been made by the report of a duel between two ladies. . . . The [disagreement] was regarded as so serious that it could only be settled by blood.” —Pall Mall Gazette, August 23, 1892
We call it an emancipated duel—the duelists, seconds, and doctor, all women—but we will never be emancipated from the stupidity of men.
I am the doctor. In the carriage, I have pads of fabric prepared to staunch the bleeding, and before they fight, I insist they remove their upper garments. If a rapier pierces muscle, I won’t have dirty linen entering with it. The duelists unhook their shirtwaists, untie their under-bodices, fold their chemises over their skirts, leave their steam-molded corsets to lounge on the grass, eerie as the skeletons of whales. All that is left on their lovely ribs are red divots from the places they’ve been bound.
They breathe deep for the pleasure of it. They shake hands. They strut. They speak. It’s all bravado, a script we have read in novels and watched on stage. Isn’t this how men speak? How dare you. You presume too much. I’ll repay your insolence with blood. They are dueling over a flower arrangement, who copied whom, and it would be easy to think them ridiculous, but I don’t. As if flowers are ever only flowers, words only words. As if men duel over anything better, shooting each other over the imaginary flowers we press between our legs. The women move three paces apart. One of them looks a bit pale now that it’s beginning in truth; she looks to the side, eyes searching, as if she has expected someone to stop them. They hold their swords high. Who should be the one to say en garde?
A blade through flesh is nothing like a needle pricking a finger. When I first cut open a cadaver, I expected the incision alone to crack the chest wide, to open the dead like a cabinet. But it takes strength to crack a sternum and will to get inside.
The duel is quick. The pale woman cuts the other’s nose with a wild, panicked swipe. She’s shocked at what she’s done. The other woman grins, blood on her teeth, and dances forward, cuts a deft slash across the pale woman’s arm. First blood to one, but the better hit to the other. Both look happy when I yell that it’s done. The women touch their wounds and lick their salty fingers and one of the seconds faints, but not at the blood—though that is what the paper will say—no, she faints at the pleasure on the duelists’ faces, the flush across their upper breasts, the strength of their arms, the desire she feels to strip her own clothes off and join them.
Not to be out done, the other second fakes a swoon. But she’s felt lust before, seen blood on her menstrual rags and gushing from her sister as she died in childbirth. They had to burn the mattress, the stain was set so deep. I check her pulse as she lies in the grass and when she glances into my eyes, she looks ashamed of herself.
Honor has been satisfied, I say, and the other women nod. As I bandage an arm, tie a corset tightly back into place, I think that if I were to design a duel, I would not imitate men. What does skill with a sword or a pistol prove about truth or right? Why must half of us always lose? Place the duelers in neighboring rooms and leave them there. Let them grow bored. Give them nothing to do but embroider and nothing to drink but tea. See how long they can stand the silence. See how long it takes before they are whispering through the wall, grateful for the sound of another voice, willing to admit that they were both wrong, willing to admit anything if it will set them free.
by Leigh Camacho Rourks | Jun 19, 2021 | micro
She gets off the bus at the tenth stop.
She walks one mile. She walks 280 more feet.
She pays in damp cash from the cup of her bra, curled and crunched, soft with the smell of agua de violetas and sweat. Like a baby’s head.
The man at the desk smiles, his maw a creaking, unused thing, but she is turning. She is gone.
In the room, she tilts and falls. She stretches, she spreads. She takes up space with curve and heft. She bends her arms, she opens her legs. She fills the bed, its mattress mottled, sex hollowed. She finds a heat, nestles there, into the soft, musty remembrance of the warmth of bodies on bodies on bodies on bodies on time. She scatters: feet, fingers, curling hair, those bunched atoms between the tip of her tongue and her teeth.
She pushes ghosts aside.
She unfolds. She unfurls. She exhales. She exhales.
Her skin, not golden, but gleaming and yellowed, pocked with freckles and moles and glittering stars and light and folding age, her skin unfurls. Her skin unbinds.
She dips her fingers into the slit at her side, spreads epidermis, dermis, fat, glands, tissue, layers, the layers, spreads the layers wide.
There is a gap. There is a crevice. There is, beneath heart and winged lungs, a cavern, a canyon.
This is where the Earth and the Moon, your mountains, your seas, the red sky of Mars turn. This is where dark nebulas blackout the Milky Way. This is where you tell your stories. This is where dust expands.
She puts her hand inside, pulls a thread and frees your spinning satellite from orbit. Watches it tumble. Watches it burn.
She pulls another. Water breaks, and in your flat, rutted lots, blossoms birth, red and raging. A taking back. Your garbage, stinking land—reborn—is hers now (and again tomorrow and again tomorrow after that).
Her hip shattered from the push, she fingers burning edges, knitting and vessel. Threads of her looping, looping.
She lights a cigarette. She tooths the puckered skin from a bruised plum.
by Sudha Balagopal | Jun 17, 2021 | micro
I place Sygna, my late husband’s silver swan, into a box in the attic. She keeps me awake all night with her furious metallic din, an unyielding crash-clang of protest. Next morning I surrender and put her back next to his photo on the desk.
Sygna quietens, shifts her breast toward the picture, beak uplifted. She is squat with smooth, metallic feathers and sapphire eyes―one of which she lost decades ago.
She was a gift my husband received from his grandmother at age seven. She tinkled for him when he released a coin into the slot on her back, clinked for him when he jiggled her, chimed when he joggled her.
Every day he dropped a few coins to feed her, every week he asked if she kept count, every month he took her to the bank, where they scoured her insides and made a deposit into his savings.
Sygna’s beady eye watches as I dust the computer monitor, the drawer handles, the desktop. She clashes like a crashing cymbal when I approach my husband’s photo, her beak poised. When I try to give her a wipe down―she’s dirty from being in the attic―she rocks maniacally, insides fierce-jangling, and directs her empty-eye-socket gaze at me.
Weekends, my husband took Sygna to the beach. She snuggled into his pocket while he sauntered along the two-mile stretch, his hand stroking her feathers, her beak, and the gap where her eye used to be.
She sings for him now: a sharp, discordant, tinny dirge. She ululates while I do the dishes, wails as I mop the kitchen floor, and unleashes a series of shrieks when I pack my husband’s clothes into the donation box.
I stop, palms over the spike-throb in my ears.
Snatching my husband’s ugliest shirt from the pile, an ancient plaid, I grab Sygna and wrap her in the flannel. I shove her into a satchel and drive to the beach.
At the spot where I sprinkled my husband’s ashes, I toss her on the waves.
She does a wibble-wobble-wibble, floating for a moment like a real swan, until water washes over her body and into her slot. Breast, tail, and neck disappear, one bob at a time.
Before the final submerge, I catch the glint of sun on her single, sapphire eye.
by Jessica Evans | Jun 15, 2021 | news
Word count 762 | Reading Time 3 Minutes, 4 Seconds
At a lecture given by Kathy Fish and KB Carle on the topic of flash fiction, the perennial question about word counts came up. Fish said if a story is getting close to the 800-900-word count mark, she pauses to consider whether the piece is best served in a small fiction form or if it wants (and needs) to be something else. Fish’s response echoes a common question about short-form fiction work – is this piece micro, flash, or does it want to be something longer?
Consider what flash and micro asks of us.
When I sit to pages, I ask myself how much of the story do I want the reader to infer? I don’t want to make anyone work too hard to unravel my prose, but I also don’t want to give it all away. Maybe the sweet spot to determine the length lies in ambiguity.
We find the story we want to tell, and then we look for all the ways we can tell it so that it’s immersive, sensory, and alive. But what is flash? It’s a moment of narrative that shines in a brief, bright, sudden way. We expect flash to move quickly; we expect it to offer a sudden glint on the reflective surface that are our writer’s minds. We also expect it to be elaborate, complex, and full of nuance. What we don’t always expect is that it gives us a complete ending.
So, is this piece flash or micro?
I think there’s a level of nuance in really dynamic pieces of short-form fiction directly tied to ambiguity. What are you leaving off the page for the reader to piece together? What needs to be said for the story to be complete?
Let’s take a look at Kate Finegan’s And Even Still the River, 599 words, published in January in Fractured Lit. In the final stanza of Finegan’s work, we see a summation of the narrative arc. Again, there’s a layer of ambiguity, but we see a conclusion that feels complete. Finegan’s last line, “And the raspberry vines wait outside, and the riverbed lies empty just beyond the door,” is loose but feels buttoned up enough to end the piece. Throughout “And Even Still the River,” Finegan pulls us close and then pulls back, giving the narrative an undulating wave that allows the last line to be perfectly complete with just a few questions lingering.
Conversely, when we explore Your Life as a Bottle by Sarah Freligh, 168 words, published in Pithead Chapel, we see a micro piece of fiction that leaves the reader with enough of a conclusion that’s not completely buttoned up. It’s loose and open to interpretation, but it still satisfies all the pieces required of a complete narrative (beginning, middle, and an end, along with clearly defined stakes and a narrative arc). The last line of “Your Life as a Bottle,” begins with the word “later,” allowing the reader to infer and understand that the definitive arc of this character is going to happen off the page, which the reader can fully buy into since Freligh has given us all of the details so perfectly that the story is complete.
There are no answers!
Kidding, there’s an answer, but it’s so personal for each writer. Asking myself how much work I want the reader to do by the end helps me determine if I allow the final/full arc of the characters to happen elsewhere or on the page. If the narrative demands a turn on the page, then it’s likely I’ll let the piece extend to flash length. However, there’s merit to seeing if you can compress your flash to micro. Chances are, this experiment will help you get to the true heart of your story, which might ultimately help you revise it so the prose sings and the narrative shines. If you can’t compress it and it’s already at that 800-900 mark, ask yourself what the story wants. It might want to become a short, a series of interlinked flashes, or even, dare I say, a novel.
Of course, there’s no hard and fast rule to any of this because it’s all creative work and open to interpretation. But when I explore work with these perimeters in mind, it helps me decide if I can whittle a flash into a piece of fiction. Ultimately, the end goal is always to present a complete and total story with all the requisite elements on the page. Otherwise, we wade into vignette territory or even prose poems, and that’s a different set of weeds.
by Michele Finn Johnson | Jun 14, 2021 | micro
Aunt Sylvia says it’s nothing, but she coughs wicked and that’s when I know it’s coming.
Death. We never talk about anything but Judge Judy and how dumb those people are,
airing out their nasty shit on television when they could be your neighbors, and then how
do they ever go home?
Aren’t you ever goin’ home?
Aunt Sylvia says this like she wants me o-u-t and I know it’s cause she wants
to hack in peace, but I’ve got too many aunts in the grave now, and I don’t like thinking
about what’s happening to them down below.
Where’s your water glass, Aunt Syl?
She’s off and at it again, covering her purpled face with a KFC napkin, and I can’t
be the one who watches her die. I pick up the remote and crank up the volume—it’s some
jazzy Beethoven tune that the Judge Judy show bastardized—but Aunt Sylvia’s cough
out-blasts the theme song. Where is her—Ack, her teeth are sunk to the bottom of her
water glass. Now I’m gagging. Aunt Sylvia grabs my water bottle; she knows I hate to
share and there’s Aunt Tuna, Sylvia’s oldest sister, glaring at me from a black and white
portrait of all seven sisters, the one I never look at because Momma’s in there looking
young and pretty and hopeful—and Aunt Tuna with her I’m a survivor wrinkles even
though she’s maybe 25 in that photo yells at me with her gymnasium voice —Get her to
the hospital you big never-had-to-survive-anything dope.
Lift.
Aunt Sylvia’s so light it’s like she’s made of cheese puffs and her mouth’s leaking
like a slit milk carton and Aunt Tuna bellows—Good boy, good boy.
I sit in the green waiting room surrounded by closed-captioned TVs, but I swear I
hear Momma and she’s crying for Sylvia. Come home. Momma in her yellow Sunday
dress buttoned all the way up, the way she never wore it, the way she’ll wear it for
eternity. I grab the seat of my plastic chair and try not to go underground.
by AJ Cunder | Jun 10, 2021 | flash fiction
It started out small—a red speck hardly noticed on the Harlem sidewalk. Maybe it drifted down from the heavens. Maybe a bird scavenged it from Central Park. Maybe it grew from a crack in the concrete. However it came to be, passers-by stepped over it without a glance, caught up in their phones, smokes, or whatever Facebook joke their friend just read. Those of us who lived in the Kingdom had other things to worry about.
When it started to grow, slowly creeping above the bottom of a windowsill, its color shifting from red to brown to green like a mood ring, Grandma Peck peeked out and huffed. “Jim. Go see what’s out there blocking my view.”
Her husband of fifty years squinted and said it was probably nothing, but Grandma Peck insisted. He poked his head out and gave the red ball—now encroaching on their doorstep too—a quick tap with his foot. “Ain’t moving, Jane. Maybe one of the youngins can budge it.”
But the youngins couldn’t budge it either, no matter how many passing kids Jim asked. He even offered a reward of five dollars to the one who could move it, and the challenge soon became a game throughout the neighborhood as the ball continued to grow, still shifting colors as though deciding what skin suited it best, perhaps trying to fit in. We prodded one another. “Like ‘calibur,” we said as the ball began to press against a tin overhang, its shell-like compacted elastic bands, or the yolk of a hard-boiled egg. “First one to move it will be king of the Kingdom.”
But no one could, no matter how hard they pressed, soft-soled sneakers melting into the August sidewalk. We gathered ‘round it, hid in its shade, passed vapes as twilight fell, debating its strangeness, wondering what aliens might be hiding inside. For once, we had something to keep us out of the alleys, away from the street corners and corner stores that offered an easy score. This would be our new status symbol, our way to prove ourselves. We strategized. We tried talking to it, learning its secrets. It stayed reticent, though, despite our prying. We only ever noticed one response with our human senses—whenever our palms rested against its surface, it would pulse softly, a soft, strong scarlet suffusing the area, slowly retreating to brown or blue when we pulled our hands away.
It soon became a village hangout, so to speak, and although Grandma Peck still complained that it blocked her view, she brought lemonade and cookies for the kids who congregated, patting the heads of the younger ones, nodding sagely to those of us old enough to recognize her approval so rarely offered, especially in the Kingdom. She even nodded to the ball, Big Red as we’d come to call it. “You do good,” she said. “Whatever it is you are.”
And yet, like any good thing, it couldn’t last. City officials took notice, maybe pressured by whatever government agency monitors the occult. Men in suits came to photograph Big Red, and city maintenance crews soon followed. Citing the sidewalk obstruction as a hazard, especially as it pressed against the brick wall of Grandma Peck’s home, coveralled workers pushed, pulled, leveraged with pry bars and shovels to little effect. Grandma Peck shooed them away, and it worked for a time as the crews all scratched their heads. Until they returned with great construction machines, despite our protests with signs that said, “SAVE BIG RED!”
We surrounded the Caterpillar and John Deere behemoths until the police pulled us away and cordoned off the area. Grandma Peck became a prisoner in her own home for “safety,” and we soon drifted back to the streets as demolition crews drilled holes in Big Red, fastened hooks and looped chains. Its color faded, losing its vibrant luster, never red anymore but dull brown, then black. Only a few of us stayed until the end, when the chain tightened, taut, and with a great grinding screech, ripped Big Red from the sidewalk, taking a block of concrete with it. They loaded Big Red onto a flatbed, hauled it away. And just like that, what had become a neighborhood landmark was gone, leaving only a legend and a white square of new cement in its place.
by Deirdre Danklin | Jun 8, 2021 | news
Being A Girl in Someone Else’s Story
In workshop, writing a girl protagonist was difficult. We just don’t like her, I heard a lot about perfectly ordinary women who were maybe a little bit selfish, a little obtuse. There’s something about her, I heard about girls who got into cars with boys, about girls who could be kind of mean to their moms, we just can’t put our finger on it.
Now, in my own creative writing classes, I teach a whole unit on anti-heroes. Walter White, Batman, Iron Man, Deadpool. Is he rich? Does he give a fuck about what you think? Does he kill people? Awesome. Usually, it takes my students a couple of days to realize who gets to be bad. Is he rich? Is he white? Is he straight? Is he male? Then, we talk about the villains of their Disney childhoods. Is she fat? Does she want power? Is he a feminine-coded man? They nod, they get it, but it doesn’t help when we read stories by Carmen Maria Machado, Akwaeke Emezi, and Nnedi Okorafor. Why didn’t she know better? They ask. There’s something about her…
In flash, I’m obsessed with pieces that tackle girlhood, womanhood, and its many variations as a whole. In “What We Call the Dead Girl” by Christina Tudor, published in Flash Frog, the trope of woman-as-murder-victim (and here, who gets to be a victim is still prescribed by class and race) is explored. The piece says, “The dead girl once lived on Beach Drive in a suburban neighborhood surrounded by oak trees, and she would die on Victory Street one town over. The dead girl came from a good family with a backyard that stretched out wide. The dead girl was once a Girl Scout until she quit, leaving a voicemail for the troop leader on a Tuesday evening. The dead girl had a body everybody noticed, their eyes burning into her skin, even the girls couldn’t look away…”
The dead girl here is a specific type of girl. The kind of girl who needs to be punished for being too grown up too young. She’s the girl at the beginning of every Criminal Minds episode, cringing in the shadows, covered in tears and snot. There’s always a man with a knife or a gun or just with two hands. In this piece, “The dead girl was doing drugs with a man twice her age…” The story embodies the voice of a disapproving suburb – telling themselves that it’s the girl’s fault for dying. In that way, they make themselves feel safer. This complicated girl is allowed to make mistakes, do bad things, and take risks because she gets punished for it in the end.
In “Two Final Girl Micros” by Meghan Phillips, published in No Contact Mag, the trope of the last girl standing at the end of a horror movie is explored. “In the Town Where All the Final Girls Live” also assumes the voice of a collective – a society that tells girls what they need to do and be in order to avoid violence and pain. The threat is always there. The piece says, “There are other men standing behind bushes and crouched next to car fenders and lurking lurking lurking under window sills at dusk.” We know what the men want to do to the final girls – we’ve seen this movie one hundred times. In “The Final Girl Takes Her Driver’s Test” the micro begins with a nod to this trope, “The last time she was alone in a car with a man he had tried to kill her.” After that kind of violence, how is a final girl ever supposed to learn how to parallel park? How can any of us girls pay attention to anything besides our own fear?
In all three of these short pieces, the girls aren’t characters so much as ideas. They are stand-ins for the kind of violence we watch play out in the media. Girls love shows about girls getting murdered. When I assigned sonnets to my creative writing students, I got three different poems of love addressed to Dr. Spencer Reid. This is the kind of media that keeps us on our toes. It tells us what to watch out for and who not to be. If we go everywhere with a friend, lock all our doors, don’t ever get drunk, carry our keys like spikes between our fingers, maybe he’ll murder the other girl. Because these stories are about society and its expectations and constraints, there’s a flatness to all of the dead girls, all the final girls, the banality of their girl-ness – their lack of agency, of individuality, and their lack of choice.
“Red Giant” by Justine Teu, published in perhappened, tackles the subject of girlhood from the girl’s point of view. A girl and her friends are doomed to live life after life, attached and disconnected from their reincarnated soulmates. The girl at the center of the story is alone. She doesn’t have a true love waiting to save her. In this way, Teu tackles the idea of what a girl should be in a different kind of narrative – love vs. violence – and what happens when events don’t line up to put the girl in a proper story. Bereft of the typical romance plotline, the girl has to figure out who she is on her own. For a while, she tries to scar her body as fake proof of lifetime-spanning love. By hurting herself, she hopes to create the kind of narrative her peers expect from her. In one memorable exchange, she says:
“With one such lover, their first time meeting in a new lifetime, she pulled her skirt up to her bare ass and showed him a bite mark on her right cheek. “From the time we were both passengers on the Titanic,” she said, hoping he’d recall.
The lover, already naked and ready in bed, took one look at the mark and shrugged. “Right. Didn’t you bleed? I just hope me remembering doesn’t give you any wrong ideas. I thought we were just having fun.””
By the end of the piece, the girl has had many lifetimes to contemplate her single status, and she decides that she’s okay with who she is on her own. In the final scene, she has the chance to rope a new lover into a rote romantic storyline:
“I called the Song boy over. He leaned his lonely head against my shoulder, his mouth close and eager enough to my ear to bite it. But I didn’t ask him to mark me. I didn’t need him to devote himself with another pierced heart.
“Can’t we just dance?” I asked the Song boy, who looked at me, frowning.
“But aren’t you afraid of being alone?”
“No,” I said, which I wanted to mean never.”
She passes up the chance to pretend she’s the heroine of a romance, in favor of being the heroine of her own life. This piece lets the girl have the final say instead of the society around her – and it made me smile.
by Kim Magowan | Jun 7, 2021 | micro
When you cook you use every pot, including ones that can’t go in the dishwasher, because I clean; when I cook, you poke my Brussels sprouts with your fork, pronounce them “mushy,” and push aside your plate.
You call my favorite show “aristoporn.”
On Saturday, you preened in the mirror before bar-hopping with your co-workers, so I knew awful Glenda would be there.
In short, there’s no grand, instigating incident.
But the cumulative effect of these irritants has worn my love into a soap so soft and thin that, the next time I shower, it will dissolve in my hand.
by Kristen Loesch | Jun 2, 2021 | micro
In my language people call it ‘slippery fetus’, cannot be held, unravels like ribbon. You are ‘slippery daughter’, will not be held, all over the floor. Wear colors, no more gray, you are almost see-through. Eat more ginger, less salt, no tears. Take showers not baths you are already drowning, get a haircut you look like closed curtains. Move out of your big house, you two rattling around like marbles, babies rattling around in you. I hear in this country nobody talks about ‘recurrent miscarriage’, nobody breathes a word, no body, no breath. ‘Mis’, like mis-take, mis-demeanor, mis-ery, mis-s you.
by Meg Tuite | Jun 2, 2021 | micro
Mom gets them out of Skokie when Laila is four. She talks about endless troops of kids and dead ends no matter which way you turn. Dad directs the operation of packing furniture, dishes, clothes, while Mom smokes with the neighbors and bitches if moving men come near her books. “These go in our car,” she says.
Laila sits on top of boxes with her brothers, screaming every time they take a turn. Dad yells, “Belt them in!” Mom says, “Enjoy the ride while you can, kids. Never know when you’ll be strapped in for good. God knows, I didn’t.”
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