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.”
by Moustapha Mbacke Diop | May 27, 2021 | micro
Each night, my soul flutters out of its husk and wanders between the stars. Through sheets of laterite and palm leaves, my people dance and clap along with the rhythm of ebony drums. They twirl, dusty feet hovering above the ground as mothers sing. The masquerades burst from the Rainforest, they chase giggling children, their whips crack on the spines of men who have forgotten themselves. When they see me, shrouded in arcane, they call me into their dance. Wrinkled eyes carved in ochre-dyed wood and sacred fabric embalm my soul. I am free.
by Fractured Lit | May 24, 2021 | contests
fractured lit revision workshop
CLOSES October 31, 2022
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Workshop Details
Need a close read and expert advice about your flash and/or micro fiction? This time we’re focusing on revision techniques! This workshop is all about the follow-through.
The first round of feedback will be on 3 pieces of your choice. You’ll then send us one of those pieces after your revision for further notes. This second round of notes can be on your favorite piece, or one that’s really been thorny. Up to you!
All participants will also join our editor, Tommy Dean, for an exclusive generative zoom workshop on revision. This will be recorded as well for all who register.
This workshop is open to all writers and is an excellent way to get your flash or micros ready to submit and find readers. Please keep submissions to no more than 3 flashes or 5 micros (3,000 words total or less) and include a cover letter describing your piece.
Your cover letter should include a brief introduction to your story, where you have submitted or hope to submit in the future, and any specific feedback you’re looking for, as well as challenges you’re having with the piece. When your submission is uploaded you will receive registration confirmation. Stories will be processed in the order they are received.
- an editorial letter from your instructor with specific suggestions and developmental edits that will help elevate your flash to the next level
- a chance to revise 1 flash/micro based on your instructor’s feedback and submit it to the Fractured Editorial team for possible acceptance or an additional feedback letter
- PDF of materials including craft essays from our Editor in Chief, advice and inspiration from editors across the community, editorial notes on what we see from the slush pile, information on submission strategies, and additional advice on submitting
- a free submission in a forthcoming Fractured Lit contest
- suggestions on literary magazines and contests that would be a good fit for your work, along with reading recommendations from your instructor
- an exclusive generative zoom class led by Editor Tommy Dean using stories published in Fractured Lit as inspiration! This class will provide participants with an opportunity to read and learn craft moves from several model texts followed by 4-5 writing prompts.
- the opportunity to join a workshop group with your peers in the program
- Writers will receive their final feedback no later than February 28, 2023. Early submissions may yield earlier feedback.
2022 Guest Editors:
Andrew Porter is the author of three books, including the forthcoming short story collection, The Disappeared (Knopf, 2022), the short story collection, The Theory of Light and Matter (Vintage/Penguin Random House), which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and the novel, In Between Days (Knopf), which was a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection. Porter’s books have been published in foreign editions in the UK and Australia and translated into numerous languages, including French, Spanish, Dutch, Bulgarian, and Korean. His individual stories have appeared in such publications as The Pushcart Prize anthology, Ploughshares, One Story, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, and The Threepenny Review, and currently, he teaches fiction writing and directs the Creative Writing Program at Trinity University in San Antonio.
Shasta Grant is the author of the chapbook Gather Us Up and Bring Us Home (Split Lip Press, 2017). Ann Patchett selected her story, “Most Likely To,” as the winner of the 2015 Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest. She was a 2020 Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellow and the 2016 Kathy Fish Fellow at SmokeLong Quarterly, where she is now an editor. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and The Best Small Fictions and long-listed for the Wigleaf Top 50. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Epiphany, Gargoyle, cream city review, Hobart, MonkeyBicycle, Wigleaf, and elsewhere. Shasta is represented by Saba Sulaiman at Talcott Notch Literary.
Anthony Varallo is the author of a novel, The Lines (University of Iowa Press), as well as four short story collections: This Day in History, winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award; Out Loud, winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize; Think of Me and I’ll Know (Northwestern University Press/TriQuarterly Books); and Everyone Was There, winner of the Elixir Press Fiction Award. He is a professor of English at the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC, where he is the fiction editor of Crazyhorse (now swamp pink). Find him online at @TheLines1979.
Sherrie Flick is the author of the novel Reconsidering Happiness and two short story collections, Whiskey, Etc. and Thank Your Lucky Stars. Her fiction has appeared in many anthologies and journals, including Flash Fiction Forward, New Sudden Fiction, and New Micro, as well as Ploughshares, Wigleaf, and New World Writing. She served as series editor for The Best Small Fictions 2018, is a senior editor at SmokeLong Quarterly, and co-editor for Flash Fiction America (Norton, 2022).
Tara Campbell is a writer, teacher, Kimbilio Fellow, fiction co-editor at Barrelhouse, and graduate of American University’s MFA in Creative Writing. She’s the recipient of the following awards from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities: the Larry Neal Writers’ Award, the Mayor’s Arts Award for Outstanding New Artist, and annual Arts and Humanities Fellowships from 2018 – 2022. Campbell’s publication credits include SmokeLong Quarterly, Masters Review, Wigleaf, Booth, Strange Horizons, Electric Literature’s Commuter, and CRAFT Literary. She’s the author of a novel and four multi-genre collections including her newest, Cabinet of Wrath: A Doll Collection. She teaches creative writing with American University, Johns Hopkins University, The Writer’s Center, Politics and Prose, Catapult, Clarion West, and the National Gallery of Art.
Exodus Oktavia Brownlow is a Blackhawk, Ms native. She is a graduate of Mississippi Valley State University with a BA in English, and Mississippi University for Women with an MFA in Creative Writing. Exodus has been published or has forthcoming work with ElectricLit, Hobart, Booth, Barren Magazine, Jellyfish Review, Chicken Soup for The Soul, Louisiana Literature, F(r)fiction, and more. She has been nominated for Best of The Net, Best MicroFiction and a Pushcart Prize. Her piece “It’s 5am-ish, And My Father Tells Me A Story From His Time in Singapore” will be included in the anthology Best MicroFiction 2021.
Tommy Dean is the author of two flash fiction chapbooks Special Like the People on TV (Redbird Chapbooks, 2014) and Covenants (ELJ Editions, 2021). Hollows, A collection of flash fiction was published by Alternating Current Press in 2022. He lives in Indiana where he currently is the Editor at Fractured Lit and Uncharted Magazine. A recipient of the 2019 Lascaux Prize in Short Fiction, his writing can be found in Best Microfiction 2019 and 2020, Best Small Fiction 2019, Monkeybicycle, and numerous litmags. Find him at tommydeanwriter.com and on Twitter @TommyDeanWriter.
guidelines
- We accept works of 3 flashes or 5 micros or fewer (No more than 3,000 words total). All genres and all styles are welcome.
- Please submit no more than 3 flash or 5 micros per submission. Submissions are accepted on a rolling basis.
- Editors with limited spots will be given on a first-come, first-served basis. The editor reserves the right to assign each submission to the editor of their choice as necessary.
- If you submit your manuscript after reserving your spot, you will need to request to open your submission by e-mailing us at contact [at] fracturedlit.com. We’ll grant you access, and then you can upload your pieces.* This should be completed before the deadline of June 30, 2022.
*PDF of materials may not be ready at the time of submission but will be provided no later than August 1, 2022*
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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
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