housekeeping

by Wenyi Xue | Jun 30, 2025 | flash fiction

What To Do If Someone Tries To Tell You Bad News

by Kim Magowan | Jun 26, 2025 | flash fiction

Perhaps you will find yourself in this situation, returning late at night to a university campus, deserted for the summer. This is where all of you visiting chemists are bunking during your one-week Biomolecular conference. You left both your wallet and cell phone in your assigned dorm room because you were rushing out the door to get a ride to the dinner in town for all the chemists. That dinner was a clever concept, but off-putting to eat (like the fizzing cake—who would want to eat a fizzing cake?).

So you’re already stressed about getting past the security gate because it’s late at night and you have no ID, and therefore startled when the security guard looks you in the eye, as if he’s been waiting for you, and says “Are you Mrs. Gallatin?” [insert your own husband’s last name here]. You pause because that isn’t your name, it’s your husband’s name, which you never adopted, so you think the security guard might have you mistaken for someone else. But then he says, “Are you Christine Gallatin?” [insert your own first name], dispelling all confusion. So you nod, even though that isn’t technically you. And he takes your elbow, gently, not in an alarming, arresting-you sort of way, though you are nonetheless alarmed. He says, “Come over here, please, Mrs. Gallatin,” leading you to the left of the security gate to stand by a peeling eucalyptus tree.

A young woman walks swiftly towards you. She’s wearing a dark suit and has a low ponytail, and her face is a perfect oval, egg-shaped. But the thing you notice most is the concerned expression in her large eyes, which makes your heart, already beating quickly, race. She says, in a gentle voice. “Christine, I’m afraid I have bad news.”

Instead of saying “What?” you say, “Really bad news?” which you understand, even while saying it, is not a question so much as a deflection, a bid for more time. She doesn’t respond to this verbally but tucks her chin in a quasi-nod. Now your brain mimics your heart, racing from your mother (awful but tolerable, she’s old) to your sister (two years younger than you, shocking) to your husband (not tolerable) to your—and here your brain shudders to a halt and you say, “Just tell me!”

So, here’s my advice.

Instead of saying “Just tell me,” swap out the first word and say, “Don’t tell me!” Then run. Run as fast as you can. You will be traveling light. You may be wearing a silly dress and a thin green cardigan, and you may have a small purse with nothing inside but lip gloss and a box of Tic Tacs, but whatever! You will just have to make do. And no phone, but that’s for the best, because the last thing you want right now is to be accessible. And espadrilles instead of sneakers, but tough shit. Run! Run for the woods outside this bucolic campus. Run before the social worker and the security guard pursue you. Disappear in the woods. Make a life there. Try to recall your forestry skills, which are negligible (you dropped out of Brownies and went camping twice when you were a kid). Eat nuts and berries and mushrooms. Hope they aren’t poisonous. (Though, do you really care if they are poisonous?).

As long as you hide in the woods, sleeping on the damp ground, you won’t have to hear whatever news that pony-tailed, sad-eyed woman intended to tell you. If you think about it, think about it cautiously. For instance, consider who could stand to have a job like that young woman has, telling people terrible news? Or realize how certain phrases like “Are you sitting down?” aren’t delivered because anyone actually needs to sit down, but to offer a built-in delay, an opportunity to prepare oneself (as if one could ever prepare oneself) to receive bad news. Or think about Shrödinger’s hypothetical cat in the box.

Do not, under any circumstances, think about your daughter. It may occur to you that the news could be bad, but in such a way that knowing it would be useful. For instance, your daughter might be in a coma, and you might have an opportunity to visit her and hold her warm, dead-weight hand. But in your heart, you know from the sad-eyed woman’s face that this is not the news, which is why it is best to simply make a new life, alone in the woods.

Of course, this advice is all contingent upon the supposition that you have only one child. If you (like me) have two children, then I am afraid that there is no holding your hands over your ears and running off to the woods for you. When the sad-eyed woman does her chin tuck, half-nod thing, your mind will go to the one daughter (the one you worry about). But of course, it’s possible that the bad news involves both children, which will then make you realize there are degrees of intolerability here, and one intolerable thing is preferable to the other.

At any rate, I am afraid, in the instance that you have more than one child, that you are stuck, and in that case, I can only say, like the pony-tailed woman said, I am so very sorry.

Mother, False

by Tara Isabel Zambrano | Jun 12, 2025 | flash fiction

The girl grows overnight after her mother dies–two extra hands emerge from her back, like the Hindu goddess Durga. Her forehead is lashed with lines, her mother’s curses roll on the surface of her tongue. They fall and clog the drains. The girl’s extra hands work as a plunger, extend to the fridge to pick items, fan air on humid days. She starts wearing her mother’s clothes–oversized skirts and blouses and a stained apron, her eyes deliberately keen like a hawk’s. From the park bench, she watches her siblings: the six-year-old and the toddler on the swing, up and down the slides, the teenager on the monkey bars, his scrawny arm barely strong enough to hold on, his fingers slipping. They laugh and run. There’s love in their voices but not enough to call her Ma.

Before her mother died, the girl considered herself an atheist, but now she lights an incense and an earthen lamp every evening, bows her head in front of the metal idols of Krishna and Vishnu lit in orange glow. She whispers OM a hundred and eight times like her mother used to. She wipes the dust off her mother’s framed photo taken at her wedding–her chin lowered, her eyes gazing into her hennaed palms lifted close to her face, the light coming at a slant on her cheeks and forehead, reflecting from the edges of her fingers. She looks radiant unlike how the girl remembers her when she died. But the girl decides this is how she’ll think of her mother, beautiful, confident like she knows her mind.

Most nights, her father falls asleep on the couch, an empty bag of potato chips crunching under his frame. Double chinned and balding. TV on, volume down. Documentaries on wars and planes. Natural disasters. Sometimes he pours a double scotch, sips, and watches the twisted branches of the banyan in the patio, the hinged wings of the warbler, a slow grief accumulating on his face. Then he takes out his handkerchief and wipes his brow. The front door is always unlatched because he goes out and comes in at odd times. The girl starts calling him by his name.

Days splinter. Her hands smell of garlic and garam masala, fingers curved inwards because of constantly holding things. Sometimes, the girl feels she was born a mother. The feeling is so old that her young reflection in the mirror reminds her she is still a girl. Her transformation strange as the fact that they haven’t been out of monsoon, but the wind only brings in the dust and debris through the cracks of the windows and the space below the doors. The sky is crowded with clouds like an unmade bed and rain has left them as all breathing things do. To conserve resources, the girl showers once a week, the water muddy as it drapes around her. The toddler sleeps curved like a bean, his nose pressed into her neck, trying to sniff the semblance between their mother and her. When the teenager plays the violin, suddenly off-key, she reminds him to keep the music simple, carve out the sour notes and start again. At night, her extra hands shuffle through the dark, reach the faces of her siblings and run fingers through their hair, feel the rush of their breath blowing north, press their foreheads with blessings. The girl has varicose veins because of standing too long in the kitchen preparing dal and rotis, scrubbing the greased pressure cooker and the karahi. She chases the kids in her dreams.

Sometimes the girl’s mother appears in the doorway between the kitchen and the patio. “No help will come for you, you’ll only grow hands, one pair from another, light year after light year, and still, it will never be enough,” she says in her usual high-pitched sing-song voice, continues with her tense sips of air as if she’s still breathing.

The girl massages her mother’s scalp−there are dead insects, dried leaves, dirt, as if it’s a little ritual to make her feel at home. Her extra hands swat the flies. Steam from a pot of boiling rice curls in their hair like cobwebs. She offers her a bowl of stir-fried veggies, boiled eggs. Her mother’s mouth opens like a dark, wide hole where all her children can fit in. She swallows the food without chewing. “In afterlife, there’s no metabolism, only hunger,” she says. From the drawn curtains, the sun pokes their eyes. The girl touches her mother’s blue-cooled skin, love handles around her waist, a rice-bowl cavity of her chest and senses a pulse−not enough to be a heartbeat, only a memory of a life that once was.

 “I’ll never be whole to reincarnate as long as all my kids are living,” complains her mother, her fingers fluttering like wings. For a moment, everything is quiet, then a hush of her mother’s sigh like a day turning over a page. Her father walks into the kitchen, “You are talking to yourself,” he says and stares at the girl. Her mother half-smiles listening to the sound of her husband’s deep-throated voice, the slight dark between his lips that separates memory from loss. She watches him walk into his room and close the door behind him. Then she plucks the girl’s extra, worn-out hands like two bad teeth.

“What would I do after the children grow up and leave,” the girl asks her mother.

“You will raise your shortcomings as your own child, one that will always stay,” she claims.

The girl looks at her mother’s glinted eyes. She has so many questions, but is unable to find the right words.

“Women have a hard time in this world, but I have high hopes for you,” she says and pinches the girl’s cheeks for good measure before she disappears. The girl feels all the tears inside her rocket like bubbles in a soda bottle. She lets herself weep, needful and gasping. Until she is left with hiccups. Until her face is glazed milky in the moonlight. She wipes the snot from the tail of her apron and unties it. The holes her extra pair had left feel hollow like a contracted womb of a hand-me-down-mother-who-never-birthed-a-child, who craves her mother. She wraps her discarded hands in an old towel and places them under her bed. At night, she hears them scratch the floor, crawling back and forth as if unsure what to look for. How to search another source of blood, another body, another mother to mobilize them.

Originally published in Post Road and Ruined a Little When We Are Born (Dzanc 2024).

The Clay of It

by Anais Godard | Jun 9, 2025 | flash fiction

When he walked into her studio, Elodie was sculpting her seventh ceramic penis of the week. This one had antlers.

She didn’t look up. “Custom or classic?”

The man hesitated. He was tall, with nervous shoulders and a brown paper envelope clutched like it contained his last will and testament. “Custom,” he said.

She glanced at him, a quick, assessing look. No sleazy grin, no too-wide eyes pretending not to scan her overalls. His posture said apology. She’d learned to read them, over the years: the oglers, the moaners, the “accidental” touchers. Men who claimed it was about art but watched her work like they were waiting for a lap dance. This one wasn’t like that. This one was here for something else. Something he almost didn’t want to ask for.

Elodie rinsed her hands in the sink, clay circling the drain like it wanted out of this conversation. “Alright. There’s a form.” She handed him a clipboard.

He read the first line aloud. “‘Please describe your member in three words or fewer?’”

“It’s a vibe check,” she said, shrugging.

He wrote: “Not conventionally impressive.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Brave.”

The next part involved measurements, preferences, and the option to provide photographic reference. He slid the envelope toward her.       

Inside was a Polaroid, and she appreciated the analog commitment. The photo was… honest. There was no dramatic lighting. No shadow games. Just a man, standing in what looked like a dentist’s office, stark naked, with a hopeful tilt to his head and socks that read “Mondays, amirite?”

She bit her lower lip, but she didn’t laugh. She didn’t need to. He was already doing it.

“I know it’s not—well. People laugh. Even doctors. I just thought… maybe it could be art. You make everything else look heroic.”

She looked at him properly for the first time. Noticed the way his hand twitched on the table. The way he didn’t look at her, exactly—just to the left of her face, like eye contact might crack something still setting. The shadow of a dimple in his three-day beard. Also: broad across the chest. Solid, in that quiet, unassuming way. The kind of body that might make a satisfying sound if slapped.

She blinked. Refocused. “What’s your name?”

“Dave.”

“Alright, Dave. I’ll need you to sit for me. Not nude,” she added quickly, watching the blood flee his face. “Just your energy. It helps.”

He came every Tuesday at 3 p.m. She sculpted. He sat. They talked about Renaissance depictions of masculinity, about humor in Japanese pottery, about growing up small in Texas. Once, she told him about her first boyfriend, who said her work was “cute but not art.” She broke up with him via sculpture. A sad, drooping thing, slightly crooked to the left. That’s how she found her medium and her muse. She hadn’t stopped since.

What she didn’t say was how Tuesdays became her favorite. How she looked for his text. How she liked that he never flirted. That he didn’t treat her like a curiosity or a kink.

That he smelled like cedarwood and tea tree oil.

Seven Tuesdays later, she handed Dave a box.

Inside: a sculpture the size of a thumb. Polished, delicate, burnished gold glaze. It was resting on a pedestal, under a bell jar. And beneath it, a plaque:

Dave. Not large. Just brave.

He stared at it a long time. Then he looked at her.

“You made it beautiful.”

“No,” she said. “You did.”

He kissed her in the parking lot, awkward and warm and a little clay-smelling. It was not a cinematic kiss. It was better. It was true.

Cotton Mouth

by Janna Miller | Jun 6, 2025 | flash fiction

I

A cottonmouth swallows me when I am seven. It waits for me just outside my front door, stretched out along the walkway. When I step into the concrete space, it opens its mouth wide. Hemmed in by coquina walls and boxwood bushes, the only place to go is within the belly of the snake. The last thing I see is white, the color of ice and bone–but supple and fleshy between fangs, until I am gone. I am lodged in the reticulated stomach next to a mouse, who trembles and climbs into my lap.

But this isn’t what happens.

I remember jumping over the white maw. With a running leap and a perfect aerial split, my body glides over loops of coiled muscle. I run down the street and do not look back, not even when my house is a dot on the horizon. Instead, the cottonmouth swallows me again in my dreams. Over and over. 

II

I am abducted when I am eight. I am home alone and a man calls me. Do not hang up. Do not hang up. I have your momma. You give me your address right now. Tell me your bra size. Your momma is tied up. I will hurt her. Do not hang up. 

And I tell him and I don’t hang up and he comes and gets me. He bangs on the front door until splinters fall off the back and I let him in. His mouth is like the maw of the snake and I am swallowed into him. The mouse trembles in my lap again.

But this isn’t what happens. What really happens is this:

I hang up. I hang up. I hang up. I know that I hang up after minutes of frozen fear–my hand curled into the receiver, my fingernails cut into the plastic. I don’t have a bra size, not yet. My mom is at work and this son of a bitch knows I am at home. One of many kids alone. He pawed through the white pages or the school directory until he found me. His voice grinds into my ears like gravel stuck in a fan. In my nightmares he wears the face of a snake and mouse in my lap becomes a child I cannot save.

III

I am eaten again. This time as an adult. In days and work and children. I am swallowed whole. I do not know if the mouse is nearby. I am too tired to check.

IV

There is a vole trapped under the rug at work. I chase it from one corner of the bookshelf and then back again. I skin my knees on the carpet, my skirt riding up my thighs. I capture it in my hands, warm and soft. He does not tremble, but bites into my flesh again and again. I do not let him go as his teeth puncture the soft pad of my palm. If I lose him in the building, he will be killed. 

This is true.

Another morning, I find a snake at the base of the steps, next to my chair. He is cold and docile and I scoop him up. He curls into a spiral in my palm. I recognize this one. It is the same kind my children used to play with outside our front porch. If I lose him in the building, he will be killed.

This is also true. I take both the vole and the snake into the woods and let them go.

V

Inside the warm stomach of my longer days, my dreams have not changed, though sometimes the snake and the mouse resemble each other. I hold them all in my lap: the lost child, the trembling snake, the biting mouse. They regard each other in spinning fantasies and solid regret. Who have I saved? The danger and silence of the world are still as soft as white cotton–as inviting as an open mouth, poised to strike.

I am sure this is true.