Nesting

by Blake L. Bell | Sep 18, 2020 | flash fiction

Walls

Her nest is too tall by the time Molly realizes she can’t climb in. “I left my tools inside. Should I stop?” She asks her husband, who looks at the wall so hard the plaster cracks.

“Put some of those plaster shards around the outside, honey? Like a fence, you know?” Molly asks.

“Yes, love,” Greg says, grabbing the broom and dustpan for the smaller bits.

They’ve been in a bizarro routine for days. Her mother says she’s using art to heal her loss. She hates calling the dead lost. As if one day, while doing laundry, she’ll find that one she hasn’t seen in years.

Fallen twigs

Genesis is in twigs she finds fallen from pines in their backyard. She spreads them across their guest bed on top of a forest-green tarp. They are so stiff, so still. She needs to make them into something beautiful again. Something with purpose. Molly gathers them together in the center of the tarp and, before she knows it, she’s made a small, semi-circular nest. This feels right, Molly tells herself. I have something here.

Maternity clothes

Greg follows his Dionysus, hoping she can make a way out of what’s crushing her. Him. Them. He believes Molly can make almost anything. He buys her a new hammer and handsaw. She builds and builds—long, slender fingers cutting and weaving fabric from flowing gowns, tying twigs with elastic bands, and eventually, sawing branches from around their neighborhood. Each time she adds to the nest, she snaps a photograph.

Baby Blankets

Some of the last material Molly puts in the nest. One for each child, flown away, she thinks. “Maybe that’s a better word than lost,” she tells Greg as she braids the three blankets into the twigs and maternity clothes. Flown.

Photographs

She takes one last picture of the nest then develops her film. She orders the photos, conception to birth. A slow, steady witness to creation. She studies the structure that looms, that shadows her. The bigger the nest, the bigger the hole. She folds the photographs into thin rectangles and feeds them through cracks in the nest. It’s cavernous, sharp, and wooden. Inhospitable, she whispers to no one.

Hammer and Saw

Molly tells Greg they need to climb inside, just once. He takes pillows from their bed and throws them in the center of the nest, wide as the bed itself. They climb a small ladder. Greg gets in first, then helps Molly. Once inside, she hands him one of the tools she left. In this new world, it is only them and together, they hack at neighboring walls, rough twigs splintering, falling back in the nest, bursting them out.

Millennial Pink Bread

by Meagan Cass | Sep 14, 2020 | flash fiction

As if covered in invisible glaze, her bread bakes pink. She buys new flour, new yeast, sends it into the oven a butter yellow moon. Still it comes out pink, a darker shade each time.  

“It must be the water here. We’ll get filtered; don’t eat it,” her husband instructs, disappears back into his monograph. 

This is the last move, he has promised. The department here is well-resourced, his position tenure track. She’ll find another gig teaching painting soon, how hard can it be in a college town. Now they can put down roots. Yet she feels as if she is watching her life from the ceilings fans, or carrying it on her back like wet cement. Out their bay windows, the sunsets are trying so hard across the soy-corn sky. She drifts back into the kitchen, closes the blinds.

 Her bread is Barbie dream house pink, millennial pink, chapped lip pink. It smells just like her usual bread, as rich and warm as the loaves she’s made them in three different kitchens, in three different states. Before trashing it, she eats a pinch here, a slice there. At first it tastes like her childhood, like pool french fries after a swim meet, like her mother’s rose water perfume. Then it tastes like the sandalwood incense her college roommate used to burn, the girl she used to call her twin sister, a poet whose father had also left her, who also wanted to make a life around art.  

 Then it tastes of her first date with her husband, when she was still in undergrad and he was a grad student, the T.A. for her required Western History course, tastes of the penne vodka he recommended she order at the Italian place, and the mints he swallowed in the bathroom before kissing her at the Gillian Welch concert he’d gotten them tickets to as a surprise. How bowled over she’d been. The boys she knew never planned, just wanted to have drinks, “see where the night takes us,” played her pop punk in their cars.  

 The first date bread makes her body ache with hunger, as if consuming it does the opposite of its purpose, ignites new, hidden needs. She eats all of it, the last bread she will eat in this house. The next one comes out bloody, beating like a heart, slick and oblong like a baby with no face, like the child they will not have. She serves it to her husband as if it is a normal bread, places it on the table beside the roast chicken.

 While he stares, she runs up to their bedroom, retrieves the bag she has already packed full of bathing suits faded by distant oceans, stiff, frayed brushes that just need a wash, a dash of rabbit skin glue, half-empty oils that are still good, and a hundred other things, all of it light on her shoulders.

Two Identical Strangers

by Rosetta Young | Sep 3, 2020 | flash fiction

These days, when I pull up the old photographs, most people still attribute the resemblance between Lydia Lissing and me to the uniforms. My husband, who has always refused to see it, has never gotten past this first reluctance.   

“You all look like the same girl,” he said on our third date, years ago, when I first showed him the line of girls in blue tartan kilts, knee socks, white sweaters, half-smiles. He laughed at the photo, asked if I still had my school skirt, if I would wear it for him. 

A few, though, when I show the second image of just Lydia and me, will say: “Oh, now I see it.”

Snapped by my best friend Amelia, it downgrades our likeness from uncanny to strong. The light is wrong, distorting the planes of our faces. Lydia stands in the sun and, over my shoulder, you can see the branches of a weeping willow. I wear my school sweater, but Lydia has on the white polo. She frowns into the camera and I smile in the shadow.

When I was younger, around the time I was dating my husband, I would use Lydia as a conversation starter.

“Have you ever met your doppelganger?” I would ask. “I went to boarding school with mine.”

You would be surprised by how many people want to believe in the uniqueness of faces. Like my husband, some simply treat the resemblance as a matter of opinion, and others insist there must be a secret family connection. Only a few are willing to admit that given the limited amount of face-types, complexions, features, ethnicities, genetic material, that such freak resemblances are perhaps inevitable.

“But,” they always say, “It’s not like you couldn’t tell the two of you apart.”

I tend to shrug. “Yes and no.”

Lydia came in the tenth grade, one year after me. When she was introduced in the assembly, I had the sense of seeing myself walk in front of the entire school, the terrible immodesty of it, as if I were being forced to watch myself on videotape.

We both had dark brown hair that grazed our shoulders, red mouths, short black eyelashes, pale blue eyes, flat little noses, slightly heavy cheeks. But, of course, it was more than just a collection of colors and features. It was the cumulative effect.

That first day, I heard Michael Anderson, the best-looking guy in our grade, say, “Creepy,” as Lydia and I walked by each other in the dining hall. I kept catching my classmates staring and pointing back and forth between the two of us. No one would quite look me in the eye. Finally, Amelia said,

“She looks like you.”

Sometimes, when I was in class, I would just stare at her. Whenever we spoke, though, I couldn’t concentrate. Something kept slipping away. We’d both get distracted. It was the bed-sheet that wouldn’t stay put on the far corner, that one French conjugation you always forget—that feeling when you can’t remember your PIN for no reason at all.

By junior year, though, everyone began to forget we looked the same, and instead, they thought we looked alike, and then, by senior year, no one ever called either of us by the wrong name anymore.

That last Halloween we tried to dress it up—I think it was Amelia’s idea—and we went to a party as Twins. We wore identical red dresses and did our hair in Heidi plaits. Everyone thought it was hilarious and, by the end of the night, Lydia was in the master bedroom with Michael Anderson and I was chain-smoking on the unfamiliar suburban lawn with someone’s older brother.

After graduation, we ended up at the kind of party where sentiment and nostalgia morph into bacchanalia and delinquency. The boys kept promising to execute stunts more and more daring, and, then, a few of the girls started kissing one another.

Michael Anderson, seeing an opportunity, shouted, “Wait.”

Amelia and a girl from our AP English class unpeeled themselves from one another at the sound of his voice. And then, with everyone looking at him, he pointed at Lydia and then me.

“You two.”

I am not sure why he wanted to see us in particular—it could have been that he liked Lydia or because we were both considered pretty or because it was a particular fantasy of his or because he was articulating something that everyone wanted to see but hadn’t known until that moment. And I am also not sure why Lydia and I laughed and started gliding towards each other in our tank tops and cut-off shorts. Under the bluish, dimmed lights of the party, we looked identical.

Everyone was cheering, and Lydia was laughing, but then, when she looked right at me, her eyes got serious.

What can I say about the kiss itself? Have you ever felt yourself doubled, like your body was a shape cut simultaneously into two sheets of paper and then unfolded to create one unified silhouette? That to be human is not to be a unique thing but just a copy made over hundreds and hundreds of times? 

Me and Eddie on the Boulevard

by Francine Witte | Aug 28, 2020 | flash fiction

waiting to cross.  My heart tick, ticking like a stupid clock.  Eddie and his dark hair forest, his blue eye ocean.  Eddie, who is only 15.

But to me, he is a man.  In five years, I will catch up.  By then, I will be beautiful.  My hair will be a riverflow.

Eddie walks me home from school for extra money.  Mama trusts him cause of when she broke her leg.  He was sweeping our sidewalk, and she fell from the garden ladder. Our beautiful Mimosa tree.  Eddie carried Mama 20 blocks to the hospital.  Past Mr. Steinberg with the snaggly dog, past Susie, the rose girl always on the corner, past the lawn chair ladies who look at Eddie – why don’t you carry me?

Your ambulance is too slow.  Eddie tells the hospital nurse.  Mama thanks him, here’s ten dollars.  He won’t take it, and I think maybe Mama starts to like him a little herself.

Every day, before Eddie comes, I tie my hair in a sparkly ribbon.  I borrow apple burst lip gloss from Becky, my best friend.  Outside, Eddie, by the gate.  The older girls look as we pass them by.  We are married, I want to say, so stop looking already!

And that’s how it’s been.  Me, Eddie’s wife in secret.  Together on the boulevard in silent love.

Until this moment.  Waiting for the light.  Cars swim by like metal whales.  Eddie looking over their tops and across the street.  Looking for something on that whale horizon.  And then, there it is.                                                                                         

Across the street, the candy store girl.  Arranging the newspapers outside. Thin, with midnight hair.  She is the beautiful I want to be.  I look at Eddie and the way he loves her.  The tornado starting in his eyes.

When she looks our way, he waves, but she doesn’t wave back.  She doesn’t even see him.  If she did, she would love him, too.

That’s when I know how hard I love Eddie, and how I have to let him go.  A boy/man like that with all the girls looking and him wanting the one who doesn’t.

 I tell him right there on the boulevard, it’s okay, I’m a big girl and I can walk home with just Becky.  I can’t tell if the sadness in his eyes is from me or the girl who is still not looking back.

The light turns green, and Eddie takes my hand.  We pass the cars standing still.  Their metal fronts.  Big frozen smiles. They are waiting, just waiting while me and Eddie cross the boulevard on the way to the next thing that is going to break our hearts.