Baby Goat on the Roof

by Fractured Lit | May 8, 2025 | flash fiction

“You’re dead to me,” Cas says when I dart back inside the house and catch her dancing through the living room in her red string bikini. Cinnamon scents the room as she waitresses a plate of oatmeal cookies—hot, no raisins—and rotates for her boyfriend Earl, bending forward, making his Adam’s apple bobble.

I was supposed to be getting lost for two hours, but now I want to call Mom about the weird game Cas is playing, and I want to yell at Earl to get out of Dad’s chair, and I want to scream how stupid Cas looks in a bikini holding cookies, but I can’t because there’s a baby goat on the roof.

I shout and shout about the goat until they follow me into the yard and watch it sproing to the tip of the pitch and down again. Its little hooves tap-dance along, frolicking on the dull gray shingles.

We can’t figure how it got up or how it’ll get down, so Earl drags Dad’s rusted ladder from the shed, and climbs up, clomping after the goat in his clunky black boots. The baby goat squeaks like a dog toy then full on laughs, a weird ba-ha-ha sound. Earl chases it round and round, but each time the goat side-hops away, slipping just out of reach.

“Stop playing hero and come back inside,” Cas begs him.

Earl’s eyes swivel, his attention caught between the baby goat and Cas’ red strings, the ones she says he can untie with his teeth if he follows her back inside this second.

“Playing hero?” Earl says, “I’m only kidding around.” He raises one brow, waiting for Cas to get the joke. She rolls her eyes, but I full-on snort. Kidding.

It makes me miss Dad and his dumb jokes. Even though Mom says we don’t need another man around, I don’t think she means Earl, with his lopsided hair and big milky teeth. Earl, who’s still more boy than man with that gulping gaze he gets whenever he sees even an inch of Cas’ skin.

Today, she’s showing miles. Cas moves and Earl wobbles. She bends low, and he nearly busts through the rain gutter. All the while, the baby goat laughs and laughs, darting back and forth, and I don’t know why Cas refuses to help. It would be good practice for chasing her own someday kids, but she only huffs and flops on a deck lounger, readjusts herself so her butt plumps into the air.

Cas whiffs of cocoa butter, and I know for a fact she hates the knobs of her kneecaps, hates that Mom says sunning will make her as leathered as an elephant’s ear, hates me and not just for being underfoot when Earl is over.

I add baby goats to the mental list of things Cas hates, while the goat skips in a figure-eight pattern and Earl scrambles after it, like a dancer on TV, but clumsier. The baby goat looks so happy, and Earl looks happy too.

He waves his cap at the goat and shouts, “Hey!”He whistles and begs Cas to come up, but she ignores him, so I snake up the ladder instead.

On the last rung, Earl takes my hand and I imagine how soft the goat must feel. Its heart pounding. The smooth velvet nubs of its horns coming in.

Earl and I go after the baby goat together. It whips by me and I lose my balance, but Earl swoops me up and holds me steady. We come up with strategies—one chasing, the other catching—and try different snicking sounds, but nothing works. Earl suggests we try trapping the goat in a sheet and I picture limbs punching out, like how Cas’ belly will look if she keeps trying to do it with Earl.

Cas has a woman’s body already. She flops onto her back, cocoa butter slicked, the lines from the lounger leaving white grill marks on her pink pork chop skin. It reminds me we’re getting burned too.

I palm my hot nose and Earl plops his cap on my head while the baby goat nibbles at the edge of the gutter. He chomps on a loose shingle, then chews at the coil of Christmas lights Dad put up years ago. The ones we never took down. The ones with a broken bulb that Mom keeps saying we can replace, and it will all light up again. But we never do.

As we tromp around after the goat, I have half a mind to ask Earl if he’s any good at replacing bulbs or if he plans on sticking around after he’s done sticking it to my sister, but I’m already imagining he will. The same way I imagine Dad will come back and Cas will get nice and Mom will get happy, the way I pray for something to lift us so we’ll all be whole again.

I whisper-think my prayers to the sun, to the pork chop lines on Cas’ legs, to the soft hairs on Earl’s arms. To the baby goat, sproinging again so high it’s practically flying.

Earl sits down to catch his breath and I join him on the hot shingles, marveling at how far you can see from the housetop—dirt puffing up in far-off fields and the hazy mountains beyond—and here on the roof, the warm animal smell of the goat, the musk of our sweat, and cinnamon swirled with Cas’ suntan lotion as she carries the oatmeal cookies up the ladder and joins us. She sets the plate in her lap, laces fingers with Earl and beckons the baby goat with her free hand. It eases toward her, shyly at first then all at once, nuzzling, the same way I would to Cas or Earl, to anyone who’d let me.

I Regret to Inform You I Made These Plans When I Gave a Shit and Things Have Changed

by Fractured Lit | May 1, 2025 | flash fiction

Willow doesn’t even get the satisfaction of saying Brandon broke up with her. They were never a couple, not officially, their relationship undefined after six months of perfunctory orgasm-less sex (for her at least). Her friends constantly pointed out she was way more into him than he was into her, all of which became obvious when Brandon ended things by saying “we should just chill for a while,”

so…

Willow calls in sick to her shift at the bank

unwraps mini-Twix

scrolls Netflix for The Vampire Diaries

wanting nothing more than to lose herself in fangs and Damon Salvatore’s blue eyes

but

The Vampire Diaries isn’t on Netflix anymore

it’s on HBO Max

fuck you Netflix

there are too many streaming services

and

whatever service Willow subscribes to never has anything good on, so the only rerun she gets is replaying the final argument she had with Brandon when she told him she wasn’t ready to get on a plane to Japan with him on the dream vacation she’s talked about her entire life

too many coughing people packed together in a metal tube

too much turbulence

crashing of course

into the ocean

sharks

all issues dealing with her anxiety she talked with Brandon about openly, and how crazy is it Brandon knows her better than anybody, which is why she thinks she loves him, and yet he still doesn’t give a shit about her, and if he can’t love her, then no one will, because seriously, he’s not even that fucking great

“finding himself” after getting fired from another parking valet gig

his absolutely ridiculous handlebar mustache

how rude he is to cashiers, waitresses, people walking dogs

which only makes it worse, how lame she must be for a loser like him to break up with her, and she’ll gladly stay in bed, Twix chocolate and caramel congealing on her tongue, miserable, alone, except her friends are concerned, and they text about painting and wine at the local art studio, and Willow’s depression is hijacked by her social anxiety, and she texts her friends hinting she can’t make it, but her friends refuse to abandon her, and they show up to drag her out of her apartment the same way they used to drag her out of the library to frat parties in their college days, and she relents, cleaning the Twix off her teeth, putting a bra on, melting into sympathetic hugs, and the whole drive over to the art studio her friends confess how much they despise Brandon, how he’s a fuckboy, how she deserves better, and Willow confesses

she’s too boring

scared of everything

owns a passport she’ll never use

the same things Brandon said to her when she backed out of going to Japan, and her friends remind her of all the times she was anything but boring, nearly peeing themselves reminiscing about the time Willow skinny-dipped in College Square fountain, and Willow relaxes a bit after her first glass of Merlot,

paintbrush in hand

meticulously stroking brown paint into the shape of a tree

sponging faint pink for cherry blossoms

which the instructor explains are currently blooming in Japan, and Willow could go see them, she could, she swears one day she will, and although her painting holds no resemblance to the instructor’s, she loves it, and afterwards she carries her painting into a tattoo shop a few blocks away, and her friends take turns holding her hand as a copy of her cherry blossom tree is inked onto her ankle like a promise, and at the end of the night she stumbles giddily into her apartment, and she sees a text from Brandon asking if he can come over, eggplant and purple devil face emojis, and she says yes because she drank four glasses of wine and shouldn’t be trusted with her phone, her cheeks and heart and body flush, and when Brandon knocks on the door

she opens it

he leans in the door frame

smirking beneath his shitty mustache

like he expected this, her giving in to him

like he’s the only excitement in her life

and she cringes at the thought of that mustache touching her

so before she slams the door in his face, she tells him they are officially done, then texts her friends, asks who’s up for an adventure, takes another look at that beautiful tattoo on her ankle, thinks of Japan, the smell of cherry blossoms everywhere.

The Flavours We’ll Lose

by Brecht De Poortere | Apr 28, 2025 | flash fiction

My daughter, Chiara, turns five today. I get up when it’s still dark because, if I wait until after the Tuscan sun rises, it will be too hot to bake a cake. I pour myself cold coffee, then I close the windows and shutters to trap the fresh night air in the house. In the thumbed recipe book handed down for generations, I look up grandma’s instructions for a sponge cake. Quality butter, she had said, is the secret to a good cake. But our Maremmana cow died long ago, when the grass turned brown and dry. Now, I make butter from our scraggly goat’s milk instead. Our chickens have stopped laying eggs, so aquafaba will have to do. And I use flour from sorghum, not wheat—a plant tougher and more resistant to these arid climes.

Chiara wakes from the clinking of the whisk against the glass bowl. I kiss her soft cheeks, flushed already, and we both step outside, where we moved the oven to keep the house cool. The sun, red and fiery, peeks over the hills, announcing another scorching day. Soon, the crows will seek shelter, fleeing from the heat. Chiara runs off into what used to be the vineyard, her pigtails bronze in the light of dawn. The lush plants have long lost their leaves and the branches stick out of the ground like gnarled zombie hands. Chiara will never know the weight of their fruit, the juice squeezing between your toes as you squash the grapes with your feet to make wine. She will never know the meaning of the songs we sing—the joys of harvest they were meant to carry. “Chiara,” I call when the cake is ready and the sun too hot to stay outside. The searing wind sweeps up the dust as we shut the door behind us.

In the cool, dark kitchen, I reach for the terracotta jar on the top shelf. I lift the lid, tilt the jar, and carefully shake out five hard raisins into my palm—one for each year of Chiara’s life. If only these were raisins from our own farm. But they’ve come by sailboat, all the way from Scandinavia—the only place where grapes still grow. They cost an arm and a leg, so I keep them for special occasions. I place the raisins carefully on top of the cake, for Chiara to pick them off again with her delicate, little fingers and pop them between her smiling lips, one by one. “Mmm,” she says, “I love raisins, Mamma.” Then she throws her arms around me in a tight hug, and I think to myself, If only you knew, my love, raisins don’t taste anything like grapes.

*Originally published in Reflex Press

The Scarecrow Takes a Series of IQ Tests

by Fractured Lit | Apr 17, 2025 | flash fiction

Predict the next shape in the pattern. Here is a wolf’s heart. Here is a wooden crucifix. Here is an emerald. Here is one drop of water. Here is a witch’s crushed corpse shoed in jewels.

Plunge your hand inside your head and withdraw a fist full of straw. Study the segments. Arrange by lengths. Order them on a spectrum from fresh to mildewed rot. Would a horse be satiated after eating your mind? How about a goat? Would any crow ever fear you? If you’re unsure, pluck another fist full. Remember, though, the timer ticks onward.

Spectacles, imposter, dust bowl, emerald, uncle, fool. Repeat these words back to me.

What year is it? What month? What day? Who is ruler of Oz? Why must it never be you? Where are you right now? Include both location and state of existence. And why do you loiter in this same spot for so many days and months and years, as if nails fix your spine to a stake?

How many triangles can you find in the witch’s hat?

How many squares can you find on this brick road painted yellow?

Identify the color missing from the sequence of blue and white squares, not too unlike the check of Dorothy’s gingham. Which quadrant most unsettles, like a tear in Dorothy’s skirt left by clawing monkeys? Second-guessing may be the tactic of a weak mind. Or is that critical thinking at work? Remember that the timer, too, factors into your score.

Even if your spatial reasoning proves weak, this is but one factor. What about ethical intelligence? Take, for example, a girl, so young, so bewildered, so lost. Are you sensible enough to chaperone her journey? Will you guide her away from or tromping straight through poppy fields? Leaving her to the whims of a shrewder creature may be wisest.

Here is a monkey. Here are some wings. Here is a balloon. Here is a basket. Here is a home. What comes next?

Repeat the previous series of words. The order does not matter, but note that you started with ‘imposter.’ And you forgot the word ‘fool.’

Draw a clock that represents the time at ten until three o’clock, the witching hour. Why are you still awake?

Identify these animals by extremities. Lion, you say? A black terrier? Woodsman’s delimbed arm? A wizard? Can you be certain without more proof? A kalidah with head of a tiger and body of a bear? This combination sounds akin to indecision.

From one hundred, subtract seven. Subtract seven again, and again, and again, and again. Go as low as you can, until you have almost nothing left.

Imposter is to wizard as:

A) paranoia is to kalidah

B) constitution is to china doll

C) tin is to skin

D) hero is to scarecrow

Monkey is to flying as:

A) survival is to lying

B) death is to hydration

C) lion is to bravery

D) emerald goggles are to bliss

Some critics claim analogies such as these are culturally biased. Know that we put each question through a rigorous review process, scrutinized by a panel of Munchkins, Wheelers, Winkies, and Quadlings. Scarecrows remain absent from our review, along with all enchanted inanimate objects. Can any diversity initiative be all-inclusive? That is not a question for the test. We simply value your opinion, which will be evaluated rather than assessed.

Birth is to rights as:

A) home is to desire

B) yellow is to brick

C) breath is to life

D) straw is to stone

Find the next figure in this pattern:

1. Wolf

2. snarling wolf

3. beheaded wolf

4. mother wolf

5. pile of dead wolves that once had much more life and intelligence than a sack of straw

Repeat again the series of words. Can you remember nothing besides ‘imposter’ and ‘emerald?’ ‘Imbecile’ was not a choice, nor ‘root rot,’ nor ‘crown rot,’ nor ‘clicking heels.