by Tina May Hall | Jul 19, 2021 | flash fiction
After dinner, Father folds a swan out of his paper napkin. Mother says, “My, how early it grows dark.” First Daughter laughs at a flickering outside the window. She thinks it is an out-of-season firefly or a spark from the chimney, but really it is someone creeping through the trees with a flashlight.
Father folds triangle over triangle, smaller and smaller, until a head and wings appear. Second Daughter watches the ghost of her grandmother walk around the table and touch everyone’s plate. Second Daughter wonders if the dead get hungry and eats the last corner of her tuna sandwich in one bite so grandmother’s ghost will not stand too long by her. Birds fly up from the apple orchard in a cloud blacker than the sky. Only Son screams for his bottle. Mother says, “He has such strong lungs; perhaps he will be a soldier.”
First Daughter goes to the fireplace and pretends to do homework. She writes numbers in long columns and eats the eraser of her pencil in secretive nibbles. Second Daughter follows grandmother’s ghost into the kitchen and catches her trying to chew through the rims of cans. Second Daughter wonders if the dead feel pain. She whispers, “Stop,” and grandmother’s ghost throws a can of pureed tomatoes at her. Father places the swan in the bowl of grapes where it rocks over the uneven fruit and watches everyone out of its mustard-spot eye.
Mother clears the plates from the table. She says, “Goodness, these dishes are so clean, I don’t believe they need washing.” Father tears Mother’s napkin into small pieces. In the garden, rows and rows of green beans tangle closer for warmth. The eggs in the henhouse mutter in their sleep. The light outside the window draws closer. Second Daughter sees it and knows what it is. Someone is moving through the forest toward them.
Only Son screams because grandmother’s ghost is biting his upper arm. Mother says, “Perhaps he will be a stockbroker.” First Daughter throws her wool mitten into the fireplace to see the yellow smoke. She loves things for the colors they burn. Mother says, “What is that smell?” Grandmother’s ghost flies shrieking up the chimney. Second Daughter wonders if the dead can get stuck in small places, and Only Son screams because he is growing older. Father touches the swan’s wing with the brown tip of his finger and imagines holding a grape in his cheek, not biting it, just feeling its roundness.
First Daughter wishes she could burn everything. First Daughter wishes she could set her whole body on fire.
Mother says, “When the wind howls like that, it means snow.” Father pinches the swan’s beak so it opens and closes as if repeating Mother’s words. Mother and Father both think of the garden and the tender asparagus, which sells for two dollars a bunch. Later, they will have to cover everything in burlap, as if pulling the covers up over their children. Mother remembers her own mother sitting by her bed on fever nights. Mother remembers planning her trousseau, remembers begging for the white silk nightgown, now yellow as an egg yolk in the upstairs closet. Second Daughter points to the window where the flashlight shines. Everyone looks at the window. Mother says, “My, the moon is bright tonight.” Only Son screams. He can’t remember what moon is, but he thinks it means winter.
Second Daughter imagines all of the things that could be circling her house with a flashlight. She remembers stories from school of children being cut up and left in the forest. She remembers the wolves and the bears and the abused boys who grow up to torture people found via classified ads. Mother says, “Nonsense, that light is too white to be the moon.” Father’s brown fingers crush the swan’s long throat. The grapes wither a little in their porcelain bowl, roll closer to each other for comfort.
Second Daughter opens the door, and a wind rushes in that is not grandmother’s ghost. The light moves away from the window and is lost in the shrubbery. Only Son screams because he knows someday he will sit alone in this same room, hungry and cold. Mother says, “Perhaps he will be a dictator.” Father feeds him a grape. First Daughter holds one finger over the fire and then her whole hand. The swan closes its one yellow eye and tries to remember life before dinner. Father sings a lullaby about three thieves and a serial killer. Mother says, “I believe I am getting a chill.” Mother says, “No one buys the cow when they can get the milk for free.” Only Son moans, and Mother gives him a knife to teethe on. Mother says, “You’ll thank me for this later.”
Second Daughter walks outside where everything smells like a ghost. She leaves without her red cloak, without her father’s ax, without breadcrumbs for the path home. She has only her proud virginity that clangs like a bell, her will to escape like an egg slipping free, and her curiosity, that strange puss, the part of her brain that claws toward the dark. In the night, in the black fringe of the forest, she could be anyone. She could be the witch sipping boy-blood, the doctor scraping lichen for his collection, the girl who runs and runs and runs.
First published in The Collagist January 2010
Published in The Physics of Imaginary Objects, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010.
by Star Su | Jul 14, 2021 | flash fiction
—after Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express
Clare dresses like an ice cream cone. Chocolate lace, vanilla skirts. All of it melting down her limbs, rain or slush. Faye is glad that Clare doesn’t give her an ounce of recognition—not when they sit next to each other in calculus, or every Saturday after varsity tennis, she stops by Baskins Robbins. One scoop Very Berry Strawberry, one scoop Gold Medal Ribbon in a sugar-free cone. Faye is not good at memorizing equations but she knows how to make substitutions, especially to find out the nature of an unknown variable. She swaps the sugar-free cone for one made-to-order in the waffle iron. Clare grasps her order, nails painted whorls of peach sorbet, and shouts “Thank you” over the counter. Faye never hears, or pretends to. California Dreamin’ chips through the stereo, fights the brown snow coating the sidewalk. Both of them dream of LA, a trajectory towards palm trees and promise.
Two years later, Faye part-times at The Broken Egg when she finds Clare at the formica counter, her eyes cracked and puffed as blueberry pancakes. Anything light on the stomach, white chocolate mocha. Faye folds eggs in the buttered pan with more care than she ever has, trims the browned edges before plating it onto a thick slice of rye. She squeezes whipped cream over the coffee even though Clare didn’t ask for any. At the diner, Faye has seen this equation many times but still has no solution. Clare closes her eyes when she eats, chews a long time before swallowing.
Ten years later, Faye works the tables at Ruth’s Chris, a steakhouse inside a train station, where everyone in this town buys a one-way ticket from. Faye tries to take the second wine glass from the table but Clare tells her she’s waiting for her husband, a pilot whose flight must be delayed. Faye serves Clare the best thing on the menu—crab cakes with lemon butter—though if she had a choice, she would take Clare home to her kitchen. And then what? Faye stops thinking further than the studio kitchen, the futon at its feet. Clare smiles each time Faye passes her table, and by dessert, they are the only ones left in the domed dining room. They light the bread pudding on fire, the whiskey burns until there’s only orange-scented smoke. Clare beckons Faye to sit by her side, sneaks a spoonful to her mouth. Faye works backwards from the night before. A pair of lobster bisques and one-way tickets for a pilot and his date. Faye decides Clare knows how to isolate a problem variable, subtract what she needs. Faye decides this is the closest she’s going to get (after all, every tangent has only one point of contact with the curve they lean against) and squeezes Clare, waiting until she drives away, before buying a ticket.
The next morning, Clare walks into each of the eateries downtown, searches through smoothie joints, bakeries, and arcades with pizza that is 50/50 good and games that do not obey probability. She buys mojitos and loaves of bread but neither solves her hunger. Waiters assume she likes mochas without whipped cream, serve her Diet Cokes until they are sun-piss warm. When she asks the staff at Ruth’s Chris for Faye, they pass her a napkin in advance. Clare is left with a theorem, no proof.
One year later, Faye tugs her luggage into the one air-conditioned shop downtown. She smudges the glass display with a California-tanned finger. One scoop of Very Berry Strawberry, one scoop Gold-Medal Ribbon. Only when the server hands her a real waffle cone does Faye look up, her fingers laced into one with sorbet-dipped nails.
by Edie Patterson | Jul 8, 2021 | flash fiction
1.
The bird flies in through an open window on the first story of the hotel. The bird flies through a patch of dead zinnia stems in a splintery wooden window box where the cat sits sometimes in the nice weather, his shiny fur full of the dust that is disintegrating flower petals and spider legs and dirt. In the summer, he lies there to watch the glimmering translucence of cicada wings and white moths, his green eyes filled with daylight and flower petals and spider legs.
The hotel is busy on the day the bird flies in. It’s early spring, a warm day, and the cat is lying in some pool of sunlight far away; there are guests there and one of them spots the bird and yells something. It’s a starling and it flits around in a panic, a whirl of wings and the tame talons that sit on bird feeders in backyards. But still it is wild, angry, shrieking and frenzied and mottled wings and beady eyes too far away to see.
2.
Fall sinks into winter, flocks of geese into the fanned-out sparrow wings that dart between skeleton branches in the snow, a mess of heartbeats and birdsong. Our days are penciled in planners and guestbooks, colored by memories in organic shapes. We dream of soft ice cream and chlorine blue beneath our atlas of oak trees.
One day, the heater breaks in the hotel, and everyone sits inside piled in coats and blankets until there is nothing left showing, nothing the wind might sting. Except our eyes, filled with anticipation and glass windows. We are afraid to close them.
Today is winter and cold and the sky is so heavy with gray it’s snagged on the naked limbs of elms. Today, we hold our breath, which is a hazy cloud that drifts upwards to join the sky, an organic shape.
3.
The hotel is full of houseplants, six feet tall from the brims of their ceramic pots, explosions of green on trellises and hooks and nails, and butter-yellow sunlight confined in neat rectangles on the hardwood floor, and people and our backpacks and suitcases and orderliness and instincts. We’ve shed our puffy winter coats and patterned wool hats and started to open our windows, just a bit. We weigh ourselves down with suitcases and we hold room keys and pamphlets and exhaustion. We ask about the weather and tourist spots and where to eat dinner. We carry our belongings in tidy stacks inside bags, heavy and self-important.
Everyone stops when the bird flies in. It’s scared at first, fluttering around with sharp wings full of dust. Then it stops and sits on a railing of an upstairs hallway that overlooks the lobby. It sits there in the sun so we can see the blue-green iridescence of its feathers and the scared clutch of pink claws on our polished railings and the point of its beak. We are scared of it and its unpredictability. It is scared of us and ours. So we wait, and in a minute, we watch its wings awaken and some impulse leads it out a different open window where it disappears, unhurt and wild, into an organic shape in a white sky.
4.
In the spring, two barred owls nest in an alley three blocks away from the hotel and stare at us through budding branches and golden hour light and glassy unfazed eyes. We release our breathing, and the world instead holds its breath. We think of underground rivers and owl feathers. We float as organic shapes on the steady syllables of our words, held captive by the enigmatic hopefulness between the lines of tree branches that begin to fill in with letters and viridian greens.
The last time we see the owls is in May. One of them is perched on a telephone wire across the street from the hotel. The hotel manager comes inside, and we hear the echo of the door slamming from within the enclosed right angles of the white walls of our rooms. Outside is the beginning of night and the end of evening and a sliver of yellow moon suspended in an inky dusk.
Months shift from breath and memories and leaves. May is a planner page, pencil lines. The breath is still there, exhaling with moon and stars and birdsong.
“There’s an owl outside, a barred owl,” we hear faintly from behind our closed doors.
So we congregate on the lawn, green grass peppered with blooming clovers, a celestial mirror.
We stand in the middle of an asphalt street, barefoot, staring at the sky and the trees, a collective gaze. It feels like watching the world spin or watching a flower open. There’s tar that fixes cracks in the street and yellow streetlamp light. We can barely make out two owl eyes on the telephone wire. There’s a shroud over the owl, a branch of a tree, and its tendrils. They stretch out in shades of green through a heavy darkness.
We glance back at the hotel building, its neon sign and stacked bricks and mortar square corners. We feel heavy placed here on the asphalt beneath these trees. We watch the world spin. The owl flies away, hidden by the brown blur of its wings. We watch a flock of birds on the darkening blue horizon. We watch the world spin, barefoot on asphalt. We watch the iridescence of starling wings, too far away to see.
by Tara Stillions Whitehead | Jul 6, 2021 | flash fiction
The bluegrass is dry and sick.
“You were the one who survived,” I say. “You were very fortunate.”
You are an expert forager, combing the orchard for chokecherries and fallen apples. The summer worms are desiccated and flat, but you capture a young garter snake in a silted patch of creek bed. We feast. I marvel. I do not have to teach you to be brave.
My first hatchlings were stillborn.
I am not prepared to hear your first song—light, liquid bursts of music, ascending phrases slurred like your dead father’s chatter.
“Tell me a story about when you were young,” you say.
It is the first time I see myself as not being young. We are bathing together in the amber creek, sycamore and ash leaves crowding my reflection.
“I wanted to fly to the sun.”
“That’s silly,” you say. Then, sotto voce, “Did you ever try?”
If I could smile, I would.
I clear a small opening of leaves. Dive to the creek’s dirty bottom. The current moves me downstream, and I do not resist. Movement is a relief.
The worms are wintering underground when I tell the story of your father’s death.
“Still water possesses dark magic,” I say. “He didn’t recognize himself. So strong was his instinct to defend the nest.”
I don’t tell you how badly he beat himself, that it wasn’t the first time he’d done it. It is not uncommon for a father to pulverize himself against a closed window, convinced he is slaughtering his rival. He is not entirely wrong.
Your first frost comes early. I teach you how to preen for winter, how to oil each vane.
I tell you that you will bring the spring. It is in your blood.
I don’t tell you about the autumn a swan killed my young mother or that this is my final winter.
I don’t tell you I am terrified for you, or that I wasn’t hatched from an egg, not entirely.
My origin story is a passing away, a nagging memory. Incantations and silphium and bloodwort. Thistle wreaths and possession and protection charms. A seductive feast of worms. A girl desecrated and deplumed on the bank of a river. Murdered by a swan for her soft womb.
A father cannot sew life back into his dead mother’s belly, but he can procure another bird’s shell and suffocate life into animation.
“Dark magic is not our only predator.”
You are the one who notices my afterfeathers are brittle, splitting like cambium beneath a blade of frost. I’ve ceased to molt, and upon awakening, I can hardly fly. You stay with me through the winter, but your restlessness is palpable.
We are eating a modest meal of holly berries and snow when you ask what the first spring without me will be like.
“A mate will find you, and you will breed. You will build the nest. You will give birth, more than once, maybe in the barn, maybe in the crotch of this sturdy Cortland. Some eggs will be speckled, some will be plain. Most will not survive.”
Your feathers are less downy now, more elongated and gray. I can’t make out the spots on your breast anymore. I am so small next to you, my last child.
“How will they die?”
“You will lose them to the crows. To the snow. Every loss will try to ground you. But you are strong. You defy gravity. You harness wind.”
On the morning of my death, I wake to the sound of screeching. It is a sound I have made, one that rattled the elm leaves the night I was born. I have never taught you this sound.
Whoever he is, he left evidence. Deep claw marks in the soft bark of our tree. Fresh mudding and needles and grass for construction.
I hear your desperate flapping somewhere. His wildness upon you beyond the bare rows of orchard. Each violent wing stroke recalls your conception. The percussion of hollow bones. Blood scent on my flightless wings. The nest built too low to the ground. “You are fortunate,” he had told me afterward. “You will bring the spring now.”
It is quiet morning again.
You return with a piece of black yarn and begin bundling the mud and grass. Your feathers are slick and disheveled. You work quickly, uncharacteristically distant. You know I am watching, but you do not meet my gaze.
You finish securing the yarn and then hurl yourself, all fit and feathers and dew, into the air you love so much. My sight is failing. You. Gone and then there. I can barely see you—a vision—alighting on the highest branch, heartbroken, far from reach.
Dawn blushes life into your breast.
I want to warn you about the worms and their aphrodisia. I want to teach you how to prepare hemlock in the case of emergency. But you’re contemplating the distance to the sun, calculating dates using the rime’s thickness, searching for your magic’s color in the snow vapor.
You are no longer mine.
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.
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