by Yunya Yang | May 7, 2021 | flash fiction
Years ago, his mother brought home a rabbit.
“Make it fat, will you?” she asked him.
The boy held the shivering rabbit in his arms, wrapped it in his coat, folded its body into his, feeling the weak tremble next to his heart. It was spotlessly white like fresh snow.
On his way back from school every day, he collected weeds from the side of the streets. It ate them quietly, with a quivering mouth. Sometimes the boy could catch a glimpse of those big front teeth chewing on the green.
It never made much sound, which the boy liked.
***
One day, when the boy came home, his mother had made soup.
“Eat up. It’s good for you.” She filled the boy’s bowl with meat and broth.
The meat was tender, falling off the bone.
“Fatty, isn’t it?”
The boy paused and looked at his mother, then stared at the soup. Chunks of pink meat floated in it. He thought of the warm, mute snowball against his chest.
“You already had two bowls. Wasn’t it good?”
Yes. It was good. The boy thought he’d be sick, but he only felt full.
***
His father’s new wife had a small daughter. She didn’t like it whenever the boy went to their home.
“My dad hates you,” she told him. “Both you and your mama.”
She loved wearing a puffy white dress, with a white hair thing on her head. She had a wide gap between her front teeth.
“Take your sister to play, will you?” his father asked while playing mahjong.
They played badminton at the empty lot next to the apartment. There was a bicycle shed by the lot, about two-story high. Every time the bird went on top of the shed, the boy climbed up to get it.
“I want to go up this time,” the daughter said after the bird went up again.
“It’s dangerous.”
“I don’t care. I’m going.”
She climbed up.
He didn’t know she’d fall. It was her own fault, of course. He told her it was dangerous.
She hurt her head, the boy heard, never quite the same. His father didn’t let him see her again.
***
A matchmaker once introduced a vegetarian woman to him. She wore a string of sandalwood Buddha beads around her wrist. When she talked, she fiddled with them nonstop.
She asked him if he’d ever thought about giving up meat. He told her it was too hard.
***
Sometimes he feels guilty about the loosened step on top of the bicycle shed. But it never lasts long.
by Fractured Lit | May 4, 2021 | flash fiction, news
We’re proud to announce the 57 titles of our longlist! The submissions we received were so thrilling, inventive, and affecting that we’ve had a hard time narrowing down the list! From this list, 20-25 stories will make it to the shortlist for judge Kevin Brockmeier to choose his final 3 winners and 2 honorable mentions! Please don’t identify your story title as the shortlist will be delivered to Kevin anonymously!
A Guide to Small Town Ghosts
The Better to See
Ghosts in Towers
The Only Problem
This Is How You Become a Myth
Sinta
El Triste
The Changeling
The Fischers
In Her Own Darkness
The sixth-eldest dancing princess looks back at her legacy
The Good Wife
The Meal
The Bone Child
Recorded Live
Nosebleed Weather
A Too Small Room
The Sea Witch
Marjorie
Mortimer
Springriven
Refrigerator Death
A Home With You In It
The Day The Moon Fell
Midnight
Into the Wild
The Fisherwoman
Mother
1,000 Words on Leftovers
Unsure by Faces
Scratchers
Boiling Point
Shimmer
Bitter Doll
Funeral Party
The Last Days of the Henry Doorly Zoo
Bardo
The Moon That You Wait For By Standing
Bloodcoat
He Becomes the Wind
Griselda
Shame Street
The Eaves
Dialogue Between a Woman and Her Ba
A Short Story about a Long Time in the Woods; A Short Story about Boxes
White and Wolf
The Mermaid’s Tale
The woodcutter’s daughter
With Appetite
Ornithology for Girls
Women’s Work
Tap-Tap
An Ordinary Wife
His Mother’s Teeth
god at the side of the road
I Wake with The Cicadas
The Thick Green Ribbon
by Shyla Jones | May 3, 2021 | micro
Every summer, my flower collection expands with my lungs. I gather them before the solstice, because my mother always told me to stock up for winter. She’s a hoarder and has a basement lined with silver cans, the labels old and worn, peeling off like epidermis. My father was a gardener, but he only planted vegetables; he grew them to eat, because all of the whiskey had started to make him think the government watched him through the seeds of a sugar snap pea. Because of the growing black mold in our upstairs bedrooms, my parents and I slept in the living room in sleeping bags and hardened sheets and throw pillows. They never fixed the black mold. They never fixed anything. The vegetables would not save us, so I stole flowers from the world. My father believed the young woman next door poisoned our walls with witchcraft because of her amethyst necklace and bumper sticker of the Queen of Pentacles. One morning while I plucked cosmos from a private garden, he carved Bible verses into the paint of her car with a sewing needle. I came home with a basket of illegal petals and had to apologize on his behalf until the police got bored of us. My father died of stubbornness. The evening of the fifth anniversary of his death has me sneaking into the garden of an odd couple who make rugs from animal hide. I clip the petals from bushes of roses, magnolias, camellias, and then the butterfly bush in front of an old bank. On an apartment balcony sits a plethora of potted flowers; I climb up the fire escape and clip all of those too. I imagine everyone’s faces when they wake to water their sweet smelling children, only to find that they are gone, snipped down to a nub of roots and soil. I chew the petals for dinner and drink the leaves in hot tea. The velvet tongue of a flower melts in my throat and perennials grow in my chest with each breath. When I die, the posies will sprout from my lips, through the dirt of my tomb and across the earth.
by Deirdre Danklin | Apr 30, 2021 | news
The Children of Flash
I don’t like novels told from the perspective of children – they make me uncomfortable. I used to think my distaste was for their naivete or the either overly-precocious or under-developed voice adults use when they’re trying to sound young. Now, I think what I really don’t like is a child’s vulnerability. Things happen to children, they have little agency, and there’s nothing a reader can do to protect a child in a story.
In flash fiction, childhood is a common starting place. A memory can spark a story and can remind the reader of a time when they felt helplessly tied to the whims of the adults in their lives.
In “On “Day Without Name” by Kay Sage” by Nadia Arioli, published in The Whaleroad Review, the childhood memory slices the reader quickly – a stab right back to sitting through Sunday school. The piece begins, “At Bible study, you read about Thomas. The other kids snickered at his unbelief. You thought of his worker hand, gliding into a wound, like a knife into fish.” No phrase makes me more anxious than “the other kids snickered.” There is a culturally-specific vulnerability to this short piece that benefits from being positioned, at first, in childhood. When the piece moves beyond childhood, it says, about Thomas searching the wounds of Christ, “The image lost its resonance over the years,” which is the sort of thing we all think about moments or images from when we were young, that they have faded and we are grown people now, in charge of what we believe and what we do. The pleasantly resonant discomfort of this piece comes from knowing that, far from fading, the things that slice us when we’re children are forever bubbling back up.
This pattern is visible in “The Hills Have Secrets” by Annika Bee, published in Cease, Cows, as well. Once again, the flash is anchored in childhood. It begins, “My uncle used to say that hills held secrets, that hills grew over the Earth specifically to protect those secrets. I grew up in a hilly suburb on Long Island and spent my childhood digging holes in our yard, hoping to unlock their secrets – to my parents’ dismay.” The speaker is forever affected by something her uncle told her when she was a child. Even as the speaker moves on from the hills of her earliest years, her uncle’s words haunt her. Moving next to a canal, she says, “I often wondered what secrets the water held, but the water didn’t hold secrets. It held things.” When the water gives up a bloated, drowned body, the speaker has a shattering moment of nauseous revelation. The “secrets” that sounded enchanting in childhood, the things she dug for and hoped to reveal, can often be upsetting, grotesque, or traumatizing when finally brought to the surface. This is the secret that adults know. The piece, in its forward momentum, leaves the whimsy of childhood behind. The final line says, “Now I leave the hills alone.”
Sometimes, the whimsical beliefs of childhood turn dark. In Jiaqi Kang’s “L’oeil d’Orochimaru” published in Wildness, the characters are vaguely placed in childhood from the perspective of an adult who can’t remember precisely what ages they all were, “We were five and seven and eight and nine, or maybe six and eight and nine and ten, but ten feels too old for Nozomi, or maybe she really was ten at the time.” The children have decided that a tube in a farmer’s field is really a monster requiring sacrifices. They bring it grass and they tell it their most fervent dreams. They are afraid of the tube, and they seem to need it to exert some control over their lives as the children of Japanese expats in French-speaking Switzerland. The speaker of this piece says, “I said that all of these prayers were little practice ones, to help Orochimaru get used to the lilting tones of our French, and one day l’oeil d’Orochimaru would blink and that would mean he was awake and ready to acquiesce, and we had to be ready with the most sincere wishes of our hearts.” This game seems like practice for power and control and agency and manipulation. Children practicing for the darker and more dramatic aspects of adult life, while still waiting for a greater power to grant or deny their wishes. Unique to the stories under discussion, “L’oeil d’Orochimaru” ends in childhood. However, the voice makes it clear that the speaker is an adult now, looking back on the events of the story, somewhat bemused by the intensity with which she enacted these childhood rituals – rituals I recognize from my own days on playgrounds, clutching wildflowers ripped from the ground.
Maybe this familiarity is what makes me squirm when a novel’s voice is a child’s voice. Maybe it reminds me too much of wanting desperately to be old enough to control something. What an adult also knows when faced with these fierce children, is that getting older is no guarantee of control. Part of the poignancy of a child’s voice in fiction is the disparity between what we thought adult life would be like and how it actually is. In flash fiction, I have no trouble with the child’s perspective. I think it can add an off-kilter magical reality to a short piece. The children of flash are rarely precious, and they always have something to say to the children that the readers used to be.
Links to the stories:
“The Hills Have Secrets”
by Minyoung Lee | Apr 29, 2021 | micro
There was once a girl who’d text a boy: I caught a dream on my way home last night.
And the boy would text the girl: I can’t wait to see it.
The girl would see an orange butterfly with clusters of green and gold. She’d text the boy her recollection, translated carefully into pixels.
And the boy would text the girl: She’s beautiful like you.
The girl would read the text and think, “He’s thinking of me, too.”
At each beautiful moment, the girl texted the boy to share.
And though the boy lived far away, he texted her right back every time. He seemed to wait by the phone for her.
Come home soon. What’s for dinner? I can’t wait to see you again.
That’s what the girl saw in her mind.
Until one day, the girl texted the boy and he never texted back.
What the girl didn’t know was that whenever she texted the boy, she’d sent him a bit of her memory. She didn’t know memories were the bits that made up a soul, made up her soul. She didn’t know that bit by bit, byte by byte, the snippets of her soul that witnessed beauty were sent forever to the boy. So, she kept texting and texting even though the boy never returned any of his soul. Through the cellular network’s waves, her very particles evaporated into air.
The girl texted until there was nothing left of her but a rose bush in front of her home.
One day, the boy came to see the girl, but could not see the girl was home. All he could see were luscious roses glistening in the yard. The boy was overwhelmed by the rose’s luster, the scent that filled his hair. He came back day after day to care for the rose bush, to care for the growing beauty. The roses thrived under the boy’s care, her blossoms were bountiful, petals sleek.
The boy grew and became a man. He left the rose bush and the town behind. The rose bush grew too even though he was away.
The man fell in love with a woman. He brought her home to show her his rose bush, his pride and joy, the thing he watered and pruned and protected. The woman fell in love with this man who loved his rose bush and showered love on the thorny plant.
The rose bush, left without memory, could not love. But she seemed to respond to what she felt coming from the man and woman by sending out her fragrance.
On their wedding day, the man crowned the woman with his roses. He loved seeing them in her hair. The rose, shriveled, still waited for his words, the words she’d hoped to hear one day.
Till death do us part, he’d say: I do.
by Maria Alejandra Barrios | Apr 26, 2021 | flash fiction
I wear my dead sister’s lipstick around the house like Grandma told me to. It leaves my lips dry and the shade doesn’t suit me, it’s purple and dark and velvety, against her golden-brown skin luminous and edgy. On me it looks tired. Most things do. But I wear it anyway to sit in the kitchen while I do the trick that Grandma taught me to stir the soup with my mind. Grandma was a witch. She turned the neighbour’s hair red, one hair at a time. The neighbour didn’t notice at first, but she started to see it around the house and she even started thinking her husband was having an affair. One, two, three red hairs in the drain. Soon, all her hair was red like the autumn leaves.
When my sister died, Grandma gave me a bag with all her clothes. She told me to wear them often and with oomph, like my sister would have. She assured me her scent of sweet candied apples and vanilla cloves would lead her back home. But I never see her. Most days, I imagine her perky voice on the phone when she was still alive and still loved me: “Sis, you are always busy. You never have time for me, your lazy sister who lives at home with Grandma.” and I would laugh and tell her not to be silly. She would find her own way. But back then, all she wanted was to be with the baker’s son who couldn’t bake baguettes. And I, with nothing else to do when I went home to visit, would sneak out with him to throw rocks at the shore late at night, drinking mezcal and keeping the neighborhood cats company. He was the only man my sister ever loved because she liked the way he pronounced words with a vaguely French accent. And she liked how his hazel hair was always too long on the sides while sitting heavily on the top. She liked his knitted sweaters too and she liked how they always smelled musky, sparingly washed. Sis never forgave me and she never figured out a way to move out of Grandma’s house, she died, and Grandma, not ready to live without her, followed.
And now it is only me, who came back home to try and sell the house when there was no one around anymore to shut my computer down and tell me, “enough, silly girl, sit here and eat some cinnamon cookies while they are still warm.” Things never stay warm. Which is why, in this empty home I wear her cheap purple lipstick and sing the song that Grandma taught me to sing to turn on the heater using only my words.
The house feels warm and inviting now, and the leaves are changing. They both loved the golden light and crunchy apples, and although I don’t know how to bake a pie they would like, I close my eyes like Grandma taught me and say the words that open her recipe book and flip the pages until it lands on Pumpkin Pie. The cupboards open. Flour, sugar, butter, a can of pumpkin and a whisk appear in front of me. I stand up and start to stir. I’m not in the mood for lighting a candle for them in the little altar I built with all their little keychains they liked to collect of places they would visit one day.
Not tonight. Tonight, I am in the mood for eating mediocre pumpkin pie and sitting on the couch while I hear the screaming cats and the serenade that the baker does two doors down, in the hopes I’ll hear how much he’s hurting. Sis, I say just in case she’s listening, I never cared that much about him. I think he stinks. Like dust, cigarettes and cheap whiskey. The kitchen window opens, and the cold breeze makes my chapped, dry face burn. Grandma would know what to do for that. “Sis,” I say, but the wind hits the window and closes it back.
by Sabrina Hicks | Apr 23, 2021 | micro
Suburban Flight
In her bedroom, she places her voice in the music box given to her at a young age by a family friend, a groom she had been offered to in marriage, twenty years her senior, who will die in his sleep tonight with a chicken bone wedged in his esophagus. She brushes her hair, unravels the snarls, slips from room to room, from thought to thought, picking up the stored pieces of herself as she opens her mouth, fills it with broth. A pot of meat. A bowl next to her waiting with the splintered bones of an animal she had raised, tended to in the coop out back, stroked its feathers, whispering free me to a bird who could not fly.
Floor Plan
They stroll about the house, gesturing where they’d put the couch, the bed, the kitchen table, the cave where he’ll hide during her ovulation, a catcall turning into a scream, a silence turning into a home that will become a house again for sale: three bedrooms, a nursery, plenty of space to start a family.
Jesus of Suburbia
In his garage, the man works on the excess of Christmas, bending metal into gingerbread shapes and men with long beards and big bellies, adorning them with colored lights. Day and night, he toils and forges, creating a world of make-believe, birthing a village of toy soldiers who will turn on themselves, whispering lies they’ll believe in the retelling, repetition making them dull, dimming their colorful lights until their smiles grow dark and ugly.
Maple and Birch
On the corner of Maple and Birch, the trees speak to one another in the soil as children step on their root sprawl, hang from their branches, snap off small twigs to use as swords until the bus arrives and takes them to school where their words become weapons, whittled into blades, allowed in their invisibility. And the trees exhale as they leave, soften and sigh, cradling the ones who stay behind, hidden in the nest of foliage, palming their bark where others have made scars of their names, a ring of sharpened rocks around them pointing up, up, up.
by David Byron Queen | Apr 19, 2021 | flash fiction
Our father knows all about fishing, but he doesn’t do it anymore. He doesn’t do a lot of things anymore. He used to be real good. About once a year when we were young, he used to drive his old red station wagon all the way down to Kentucky to fish in a competition. Sometimes he’d come back with a trophy or a ribbon, but one time he came back with nothing—just bulging veins, and eyes like an owl. Our mother didn’t speak to him again then for months, and the times she did her voice was soft and raw. He didn’t drive back down after that.
It is fall.
Each night our father walks to the edge of the property. Our father often goes out there to sit and look at the lake. He says, it’s calm out there. He says, he goes out there to get to a nice blue place. We don’t know what he’s talking about. Our mother hates it when he talks like this. She says, our father’s full of it. She says, why oh why does it have to be like this?
One night, we go outside to find our father. He’s not in his usual spot. We walk around, calling his name. Soon we find him on his back in the dirt. We get up real close. Blood pushes thick along his veins, and every once in a while he coughs and rolls over. We sit with our father, watching his breath roll, until the sun goes down and our mother’s calling us inside.
So we listen, go inside, say our prayers, get to bed. Kidding. We don’t do anything like that. We don’t even think anything like that. Instead, we stay with our father.
Our father wakes, spits dirt out of his mouth.
The thin evening light begins to empty across the yard. In the light, he doesn’t resemble our father at all—his features stretched, worn.
He says, let’s go fishing. Our hearts. Our hearts. The joy shooting through our limbs. Punching holes in our chests. None of us move. Breathe. It’s all we’ve ever wanted.
He takes us out on the boat, helps us bait our lines. He guides our hands, and shows us how to cast. We sit and wait. We reel in our worms and cast them out again. Our legs start twitching and moving. We don’t want to wait, but our father says the waiting is the best part. He says, it’s even better than catching a fish, but we think it’s probably just another thing he says. He says, your mind gets to a nice blue place and you can think about a lot of different things—how there’s things you can’t even see swimming in the water along with the fish. Organisms. And how smaller than that there are more things, harder to see.
“How do you know they are there if you can’t see them?” we ask.
“I don’t know,” our father says. “Just do.”
We spot a fish then, gliding under the water. A big dark shape—a blackish non-space against the blue glow of dusk. Pike, we’re told. Its fins thrust gently against the water on either side, propelling it forward. Each stroke shatters the lake’s soft mirror of light. The dark shape bobs under the water. All course and scaly edges. Eyes like hard black gleaming marbles. It nips suddenly at the dangling worm and our line goes tight. We cry out and it begins to swim away, zipping off into the dark of the water. Pull, our father says, pull! But we don’t listen. The line keeps feeding out and gets tangled somehow in the water below. All of us shift forward to see it. The next thing we know the boat has tipped over. We are in the lake. Cold water rushes up and all around us. We thrash and gasp. Sharp motors of elbows and knees churn in the murky water; it stings our eyes and fills our throats and noses, and when we press our eyes shut tight there are gentle floaters clicking about that look like tiny, neon skeletons.
We feel a sweep around us and then we’re back out of the water. Our father holds us in his arms, pulls us to solid ground. We are soaked and our clothes are heavy. Our shoes are missing. The grass is cold and mushy around our toes. Everything is still.
When we turn, the boat is gone. The poles and everything gone. All gone.
We huddle together, hide inside the warmth of our bodies. We tell each other we love each other; it’s all we can think to say in this moment: this love we have for one another, and the possibility of this love—of any love—having an end is too painful to hold inside our heads.
The sky changes. It isn’t dark or light—something in between.
We sit on the shore until our mother finds us. She doesn’t say anything, sits right down. Together we cup our hands and lower them into the water, bring it to our faces.
We don’t think about the things of that water.
We don’t think about the things we cannot see.
We think about the freshness of that water, and the chill that it leaves.
by Myna Chang | Apr 15, 2021 | micro
May 18, 1973
Sedan, New Mexico
Smoke hugs the flare of Momma’s nostrils. “Why don’t you ever follow the rules?”
The last ember of her Virginia Slim glows stubborn, even after she’s ground it into the ashtray.
I sit criss-cross on the floor, hold my breath against the menthol sting, crooked rows of cards layered in front of me. I’ve played the six of hearts on the seven of diamonds.
“You’re not supposed to play red on red.” She looks away, glares at the clock. Daddy’s later than usual for his every-other-weekend.
I soak in the grey light of the television. Watergate men bluster where Gilligan’s Island ought to be.
Momma’s friend Alva Jane pulls up outside. Her El Camino always whines like something’s wrong, deep inside, but she keeps driving it anyway.
The paisley of Momma’s bikini peeks out of her purse as she leaves. County pool won’t open until next week; the Oasis Motel pool is for paying guests only, but the chain-link is loose enough on the east side to slip through. She lets the screen door bang shut behind her.
The old men on TV scold. I thumb my cards, consider my options. Lay my five of diamonds right on top of the six of hearts.
by Molly Reid | Apr 12, 2021 | contest winner, micro
The baker’s skin, burnished from the heat of very hot ovens, is soft but taut. The taxidermist likes to pretend when she’s fondling the baker that she’s fondling an hourglass. The hourglass. What determines the duration of all activities, provides a semblance of order and congruity and meaning. God’s hourglass.
“You smell like sugar,” the taxidermist says, nuzzling the baker’s neck.
“You smell like death,” the baker says.
The baker’s secret is this: she loves this smell. Sometimes, when the taxidermist isn’t paying attention, she scrapes her fingernail—lightly, lightly—underneath the taxidermist’s fingernail. What she finds there she keeps in a small tin originally intended for cigarettes embossed with a cheeky pinup girl. When the taxidermist is gone, the baker takes the tin from her apron and brings it to her face and breathes. Only then can she really see the taxidermist, in a way she can’t when the taxidermist is right in front of her. The claw and snout of her, the blood-tongue-sweat of her.
“Here,” the taxidermist says, her mouth to the baker’s ear, “you taste like salted caramel.”
The taxidermist’s secret is this: her mother is dying. Brain tumor. The doctors say she has at most five weeks to live. She doesn’t tell the baker because she doesn’t want their moments to be corrupted. She needs this, these God moments, these sacred sands of the hourglass, in order to deal with the other moments. Her mother transformed into a bloated and incoherent version of herself. When she grips the taxidermist without understanding who she is. That kind of love: without recognition, a blind animal reaching—terrible, terrible.
“I made you something,” the baker says. She uncovers a small yellow cake. Delicate curls of toasted coconut atop snow-white frosting. So perfect and pretty the taxidermist wants to cry.
“I made you something too,” the taxidermist says. She unzips her backpack and pulls out a bundle, unwraps an immortal European starling. Iridescence licks the speckled oily wing. Beak angled to suggest wisdom and romance. It makes the baker salivate.
“Shall we begin?” the baker asks. The taxidermist nods.
And they do. They begin and begin and begin, turning the hourglass end over end, finding a new way to create and destroy, consume and be consumed, their mouths, their ravenous mouths, full of sugar and feathers and flesh—the only plausible way into love.
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