Sowing

by Michelle Ross | Feb 8, 2021 | flash fiction

A seed is an escape pod. A plant egg detaches from its mother from the start, Jody says as she presses two speckled brown beans into each of our palms.

Jody used to just be our babysitter, but now she’s Dad’s girlfriend. “But don’t go asking your dad about it yet,” she says. “You know how he is.” She makes her voice low and stiff. Says, “Eat every pea on your plate, Laney. I’m serious. Eat those peas!”

How this came to be and what that makes Jody to us is confusing, but we like Jody. The lobes of her ears are decorated with rainbows and stars. She lets my little brother, Sam, and I style her hair and paint her eyelids with one of the eyeshadows Mom left behind. We brush the pink powder across her lids over and over so we can watch those spidery hairs flutter.

Also, she answers our questions. When we asked Dad why Mom left, he said, “Heck if I can explain that woman.” When we ask Jody, she says, “Because she’s got a disease. It’s called selfishness.” She says her own mother was the same way. Then she puts her finger to her lips and says we shouldn’t talk about this around Dad, either.

*

The lucky seeds drift away with the wind, Jody says, as we bury the beans in tiny pots filled with dirt. Or they sail streams or rivers or oceans before putting down roots. Or they hitch rides on cats’ backs, bears’ paws, or birds’ beaks. Or they get swallowed. They travel through the foul, bacteria-ridden bodies of animals.

“But fuck if they care,” Jody says.

My brother’s eyes sparkle. Cuss words spoken without hesitation or shame is another reason we like Jody.

Jody says the seeds that escape don’t mind traveling through the godawful intestines of animals because, at the journey’s end, they’re released far, far away from their mothers.

“What about the unlucky seeds?” Sam asks.

“What do you think?” she says.

“They fall down?” he says.

“That’s my boy,” Jody says.

Sam smiles, but those words, “my boy,” stick messily in my head, like the globs of glue, grayed from the grime of the day, that I’m still prying from my fingers hours after we made macaroni sculptures. We used the fancy red and green pasta Mom bought from a farmer’s market then never cooked.

“The unlucky seeds’ escape pods don’t work. They’re born in their mothers’ shadows,” Jody says.

We stare at the dirt, wondering if anything is happening yet.

*

When our bean seeds push up through the soil and split their shells in two to wear them as capes, Jody says they look poised to rocket into the air like Superman.

Sam grins, lifts his pot, and pilots it around the kitchen.

“But flight will not come,” Jody says. She looks wistfully out the window.

I look, too. What I see are the hard, green balls dotting the limbs of our orange tree. When Mom left in March, there wasn’t any fruit yet, only white blooms that she clipped and arranged in a juice glass.

When Dad calls, Jody takes the phone into our parents’ bedroom. She whispers to us, “Girlfriend/boyfriend time.”

We listen at the door, ears pressed against the cool wood. We hear Jody say, “Sure thing, Mr. Hayes. They’re in good hands.”

When she opens the door, she’s got a shimmery green neck scarf Mom left behind tied around her neck like a bow. She says, “Your dad’s going to be away an extra day. Important business stuff.”

Jody scoops us into her arms. “That’s OK, though, right? We’ll survive without him, won’t we?”

We spend the afternoon in bed with a pile of books. We admire how Jody contorts her voice in so many different directions.

*

So much can go wrong for any seedling in these early days, Jody tells us, as we water our little bean plants. When a seedling is small and weak, one injury to its flesh can ends its life. One day without water, and the seedling may crumble. Not enough sunlight, and the seedling may yellow and limp.

But for those born in their mothers’ shadows, Jody says, the biggest threat is Mother herself. If resources are scarce, she will not ration. She will not sacrifice for her offspring.

Jody removes a pan of cupcakes from the oven. Vanilla cake with chocolate frosting, both made from scratch. “The right way,” Jody said, after I pointed out that we had boxed cake mix and a tub of frosting in the pantry.

She tells us she taught herself how to bake, just like she taught herself everything else she knows. “It’s hard having no one to help you and teach you,” she says. “It’s so fucking hard.”

Jody takes off the red oven mitts, stacks them on the counter smudged with frosting. The mitts were my present to Mom last Christmas. Mom said they were too beautiful to risk dirtying. She hung them on a hook on the wall.

“But better to struggle alone than the alternative,” Jody says.

She explains that if little seedlings growing in their mothers’ shadows die, then as they rot and decompose, their mother will gobble them up, too.

She divides the cupcakes between us so that we each get to frost six. Then she says, “What do you think? Two for me and five for each of you?”

Sam’s eyes widen. He slides five of the six cupcakes he frosted closer to his chest.

I locate the dingy blue oven mitts still in the drawer next to the oven, yet another thing Mom left behind.

As Jody and Sam lift frosted cupcakes to their mouths and bite, I drop those old mitts into the kitchen wastebasket with the brittle shards of cracked eggshells.

Nanay Is Mother

by Veronica Montes | Feb 1, 2021 | flash fiction

Behind the books on her shelves she finds the artifacts of their girlhood, all of them fuzzed with dust: pocket-sized dolls with safety-scissor haircuts, crayon stubs, origami frogs, magnetic letters. She frowns when she finds the Tagalog flashcards, a reminder of all the things she failed to teach them: nanay is mother, kanin is rice. She places the items in a basket, sneezing as she goes, and carries them to the dining room. 

Her husband has been chiding her for years now to choose a new table; this one still bears evidence of glitter wars and errant markers. In an uncharacteristic burst of frivolity, he has purchased a vintage bar cart and, if delivery tracking is to be trusted, it will arrive in three weeks. He has forced her hand, yes, but she tries one last thing. She says, “The juxtaposition of this glittered farm table and a 1920s bar cart would be interesting, don’t you think?” He shakes his head no, but he does it kindly. 

She places one of the ugly-hair dolls in the center of the table, and straightens its checkered dress while she wonders what to do next. On the nights she can’t sleep she ticks off the last time she spoke to each of her three girls, and the last time they visited. She does it now, recites her litany in a whisper like it’s a secret. Last Monday, two Thursdays ago, thirty-six hours or so. Two weeks, one month, ten days. She stares at the doll. And then, even though she really should get started on dinner, she begins to peel the paper off each crayon, she reads and re-folds the notes from summer camp, she groups blocks by shape and color. Around and around the table she goes, moving slowly, humming, setting one thing here, one thing there, arranging and rearranging until her project reaches what feels like its natural end. It’s not quite symmetrical, not quite a mandala, but it’s beautiful in its own way. She stands on a chair and uses her phone to take a photo from above. And another and another. 

She senses that her husband is wondering why there are no smells emanating from the kitchen, no garlic, no onions. She sits down anyway and crops her photos. She runs them through a dozen filters, but decides they look better without. She chooses the one she likes best, changes her mind, chooses another. And then, finally, she sends her favorite to the group chat their daughters have set up. At bedtime, she’ll slide her phone under her pillow, and just past midnight, it will start to vibrate every few minutes. She’ll read their messages in the morning, first thing.

Nurturing

by Lucy Zhang | Jan 25, 2021 | flash fiction

Protection

Erik is raising three chicks in his backyard. Erik is always telling us how he’ll have fresh eggs once they’re grown, bright orange yolks from the paprika-mixed grains he’s feeding them, tough shells that require a good thwack to crack. We’re all jealous so we tell him a hawk will snatch them up while he’s at school, or that the neighbor’s Pit Bull Terrier will break free from its leash and turn one into puppy chow. When we visit, he has a new contraption built for the chicks: a miniature wooden house with ramps and ladders and a nesting box. He built it in woodshop. We don’t take elective classes like woodshop.  We take computer science or statistics because we’re only allowed to be doctors or engineers. And not even really doctors, because mom says women can’t stand as long especially after having children, so they can’t perform surgery well. Where are the chicks? We ask. They’re in the main house, Erik says. Under the asphalt roof so no hawks can pluck them away, behind the walls so no dogs can bite into them. We peer into the small square window, an unevenly cut hole in the wood, and we see the fluffy wing and tiny beak of a chick. But when will they go out to play? we wonder. When I let them, Erik says. But we never see him let them out again.

Freedom

When it rained, we’d pick up earthworms with our bare hands, moving them from the middle of the sidewalk to the grass. We were little heroes saving lives on our way back from school like it was nothing. Because real heroes don’t ask for praise or recognition. The day after a heavy storm, the sun already out and drying the roads and tennis courts, we saw one long earthworm flattened in the middle with its two ends still wriggling, like life was still in reach so long as it could break free of its other half. We dug out the metal ruler from our pencil case and sliced down the earthworm’s desiccated middle. Then we picked up each wriggling half and moved them to the damp soil patch besides mom’s snow pea plants. Be free, we thought. Survive. Later, after we finished our homework and had computer time, we looked it up online and prayed we made the cut behind the earthworm’s clitellum, so at least the tail could regenerate, no suffering prolonged.

Affection

Duo Duo (“多多” – nicknamed so by my aunt and uncle because she was an unexpected child, an extra element tacked onto their lives) got a bernedoodle named Bilbo. I found out through her Instagram stories. So did my parents. My parents ask me why she isn’t having kids and I tell them it’s a decision that my cousin and her husband can make on their own. I don’t tell my parents that the bernedoodle is an emotional support animal. That’s information for my cousin to share. Bilbo is a fluffy, soft, hyper thing always vying for human attention. The moment I look away, he begins to whimper, and I have to crouch down and start petting him again. He pants and lets his pink tongue dangle out of his mouth like he wants more of something. My cousin picks him up like a baby. “Do you want to hold him?” Duo Duo asks. “No,” I say. Not to offend. Maybe I’m over projecting my personal preferences onto the dog; just because I don’t like being carried or tossed around or hugged doesn’t mean Bilbo doesn’t. But really, what’s so good about being held? Your unpredictable gushes of skin and bumps of spine exposed to foreign fingertips? Good for them though, I think. I hope taking care of a dog will keep her mind off any personal troubles. But I hope she doesn’t ask me to take care of him when she flies back to Shanghai for Chinese New Year. I’d keep him fed, for sure, but I’m not sure I can shower Bilbo with lots of cuddles in bed, and Bilbo seems like the kind of dog who needs that kind of affection to survive.

Companionship

Spud nibbles on pineapple leaves. He’s a fat, white rabbit–the type raised for eating. Of course, my sister is vegetarian and would never eat her foster pet (which she never ended up returning, so I suppose Spud is hers now). When we were little, we thought: we will get a dog once we’re adults; we will get a cat; we will get a few ducks and dig a pond for them; we will start a small farm where no one eats anything with a cute face, and instead you cuddle with them as you please. But it’d have to be after we became adults because we knew dad had eaten dogs used for his medical lab experiments at Fudan University. He said dog tastes bad, but we stayed vigilant and waited patiently until we were across the country, living on our own. Now my sister has one rabbit and one chinchilla–used to be two but she found one toppled over like it had passed in its sleep a Friday evening after she’d returned from work. I don’t know if I can raise something that’ll die before me. I have trouble squashing the Machiavellian thought from my head: what was the whole point? So I focus on seven-pound Spud and the spiky pineapple leaves, drag the FaceTime window to the side of my screen and navigate to Google: it looks like pineapple leaves are nutritious, packed with fiber and calcium oxalate and Bromelain, which reduces swelling and inflammation, and maybe I’ll boil a few leaves and drink the water as tea because my body feels a bit inflamed and I don’t know why these white blood cells are trying so hard to fight outside invaders that now I’m the one left burning.

And Even Still the Rivers

by Kate Finegan | Jan 21, 2021 | flash fiction

1

Remember when the river ran just beyond our door, when rains replenished this ribbon unfurled blue and raspberries ripened close so we could smell them through our bedroom window. Remember when the robins flew in with their red breasts and you sucked the red of this body and ran the river of your tongue across this stomach wet, and wet, this body swelled and crested.

 2

You smile at me, and I can almost hear your skin crack.

3

Remember when the rain rebirthed the earth in wriggling worms.

4

Remember when you said you’d like to eat raspberries off this body’s breasts, so we plucked buckets full, and you placed the cool cups of them over this body’s nipples, dug your tongue beneath the berries, sucked them off without the lightest graze of skin, bit down just-too-hard enough to make this tongue curl back and sigh, tongues two tributaries meeting, tongues exchanging sweetness when the berries and their seeds were done and your mouth tasted of summer.

 5

You smile at me, and I take this word within the redness of this mouth, roll it around, suck its salt like pebbles on a hungry beach, hold it still.

6

On hot days, the salt crust cracking is a requiem.

7

You smile at me. The word I’m tonguing is enough.

8

The Nile, the Amazon, the Yangtze, and the Yellow. The Rio Grande and River Thames. The Tigris and Euphrates, this aching fertile crescent. The Tennessee and Colorado. To think we once flooded valleys to fight the course of blood. To think we ever needed so badly to spell Mississippi we taught our children silly songs. To think still we teach our children songs.

9

In a time like this, it feels wrong to see you smile.

10

In this time of lips like callouses, tongues of pumice, it feels wrong to see you smile. In this time of so little sweat, no beads for this tongue to suck, no slick of skin on skin, too tired. No good morning, here’s a glass of water, sparkling, full color spectrum on the sun-drenched bedroom wall refracted. No drink it down so I can drink you up, no drink it down so you can scream my name. No finger-knots in hair. No get down to the delta of this body, take it all the way to roiling sea. In this time, all we have is smiles.

11

The maps still have their arteries. I trace the blue inside your wrists with this parched tongue and you smile, say remember when it rained for forty days and forty nights and I say that’s a story, what used to be a nightmare but now sounds like a dream. We need a different dove, you say, and I can hear your voice crack, lips crack, all that runs now is blood from these cracked bodies meant for water—remember being bodies made of water—and you say, a dove with water in its mouth. I trace the blue after the blue has gone, beyond your elbow to the crater of your armpit, and remember the rainbow, hope it can mean something else, hope the rain might once again remember this parched bed of earth. You unstick your thighs from the leather sofa, sigh and smile sadly, too tired for anything more than this tongue-scrape traveling to your heart, your inland ocean, and here we are, an ark of two, this promise that if we break, we’ll break together. And the raspberry vines wait outside, and the riverbed lies empty just beyond the door.

This piece was originally published in Gigantic Sequins.

Receivers

by Ra'Niqua Lee | Jan 19, 2021 | flash fiction

Thursday nights, half the country gathered in their living rooms to watch Chad Dylan Scott shake blonde hair out of his eyes, curse his football teammates, and strip down to his Hail Mary boxers. His abs were like the ridges in an ice tray, rigid, but a jostle and a shake would be sure to make something wet. Dena Brown, twelve and sprouting, watched with her momma from their apartment on the end of the city where the rent was still cheap. “I hate sports,” her momma said one Thursday, “but I like this show.”

By sixteen, breasts had sprung up from Dena’s chest like sunflowers from dirt. She had to tell a boy “No” for the first time. She stepped out of his Cadillac and marched away from his headlights in heels a size too big. Later, inside the apartment, she found her momma watching TV in the easy chair. “You’re late,” she said. “and go put my shoes back where you got them.”

That season, Chad Dylan Scott began his fifth year of high school, second officially, and fell in love with Angel Hearting, the butt-chinned Baptist who waved pompoms as he ass-ed, damn-ed, and hell-ed his team to victory on the football field. Angel could hell as well as Chad. She had the same blue eyes and hair sleek enough to line the coffins her father sold. When she appeared on screen, the dubbed-in studio audience applauded.

Dena graduated two years later. No one clapped for her except her teary-eyed momma. “That’s my baby,” she said, “all my dreams come to bear.” Dena was five feet even, brown like polished wood, and she wore her high school graduation gown like a coatrack in a blanket. She wasn’t big enough for her own dreams, let alone her momma’s.

The finale aired. Dena and her momma watched together, mother and daughter still bonding over fake football and abs, touchdown perfect.

Chad Dylan Scott graduated from fictional high school with two state championships; a prom king crown, sash, the whole tacky get up; one pregnancy scare he never found out about since Angel kept that one in her silk-lined pocket; six fistfights, which made for six come to Jesus moments, glory and hallelujah; around two hundred beers, at least once per episode; a DUI; and a pity date for Lorraine Woodhouse, a wheelchair bound spitfire who spoke four lines in a single episode during season three. Scott went out in a blitz, confetti over the football field, him on the shoulders of his teammates, wide receivers, mostly extras. The screen went black, rolling credits, the end of the scrimmages, the offsides, the hell Scott charged toward Angel.

“That’s done,” said Dena’s momma. She had not yet taken off her work attire, all black with her security guard badge. The evening news started, wildfires and politics. They watched for a moment before turning it off to sit alone together.

Chad Dylan Scott took to doing made-for-TV movies after that, the kind where he could be the boyfriend, the husband, the killer, the man of drool, sweat, and dreams.

Dena watched other shows. She started college, tried beer, hated beer, and dated one boyfriend after another. The older she got the more damns she found in the back of her throat, the pit of her stomach. Nothing quite as soft or as sweet as a Thursday night spent with her momma, thirty-minutes, an abundance of Scotts, all interchangeable, in a prime-time peace that surpassed understanding.