One Long Sting

by Emma Stough | Feb 18, 2021 | flash fiction

From the time I learn how to bleed I keep a scab in the fleshy inner curve of my ear. Small, coarse, red-brown. I tend to it like I should tend to myself. When I am lonely, or need something to ruin, I dig a fingernail into the cartilage, tear the scab. Little blood, bearable pain. I like being in charge of how I feel. If this is being selfish then I am definitely selfish.

At my job, I pick the scab and squint at it on the tip of my thumb while selling lime green diet pills to women who can talk for hours about their skewed body image. I am required to tell you I get paid for this, I tell them. $7.50/hour. They tell me this is terrible compensation for all I put up with.

I keep the scab a secret because I once told a boyfriend and he asked to see it. When I showed him, he licked my ear, and the scab fell into his mouth, and he swallowed it whole. He blinked at me in surprise. I felt an unbearable pain.

There is no medical cure for having a body, the women who don’t need diet pills tell me. This is how I will look—and feel—for the rest of my life.

As a kid, I kept the scabs in an empty gum tin under a loose floorboard. Sang them lullabies.

One of the women buys three whole bottles of lime-green pills every month. I think she is in love with me. Tell me something you wouldn’t tell any other customer, she says. I check to see if my boss is watching. I tell her about the scab. She asks what caused the injury. I ask, What injury?

We meet for coffee in autumn, then winter, then spring. In summer, she asks me to take a trip with her. The diet pill company has gone under and my scab has doubled in size. It requires a little more force to extract; one long sting.

The flight is delayed. I check on the scab in the airport bathroom. I dig around in my ear. It’s nowhere to be found. Fingernails etched in blood. I tell the woman that I have to go home, that something terrible has happened. Take me with you, she says. Your ear is bleeding. A feeling along my legs, prickling, like I’m shaving with cold water. Good luck with your body, I say. In the cab, I make a phone call. And what’s the reason for your visit? After a moment of thought, I say: Disappearing parts.

The doctor asks me what’s wrong. His last name looks like “apricot” but is not pronounced the same. I tell him that the scab in my ear has disappeared. He says, You’ve healed? I try to explain that it’s not the healing I’m worried about; it’s the absence of pain. He shakes his head, like he’s disappointed, and scribbles a prescription out onto a pad. I take the paper and grip it hard through the hallway, through the waiting room, through the parking lot. In the car, I unfold it and find he’s written something absolutely illegible. Absolute gibberish.

Sometimes, when I try to remember what it felt like to be in charge of the removal and the regrowth, I imagine the paper said something like: It’s okay that you’ve handled things wrong. It’s okay to get worse, and worse, and worse.

the sea was there

by Alvin Park | Feb 11, 2021 | flash fiction

I don’t know where Mom learned to drive. I don’t know where she learned to hold the wheel firm or belt my chest with her right arm whenever we stopped suddenly for the stray deer lying in the road, still half-breathing, or the broken homes that spilled their bricks onto the whitened dirt.

Last night, the man on the radio spoke of some rock, some piece of mountain falling from the sky. He said, Please stay clear. It will bend trees, take apart homes, melt glue and nails, turn crops to craters.

He mentioned the name of a village at the center of impact. Mom said, That village used to be home. When you were still in my belly. Do you remember?

The neighbors gave her the keys to their broken car, and she gave them the cookie tin full of coins and jewelry. They asked, Where will you go? Where will you take your little boy?

We arrived at the village, her once-home. It resembled our other village, the one we’d come from, my once-home. Houses collapsed onto their broken foundations, their walls dotted with white soot. I recognized where the gunpowder had bitten into the wood, poisoned the river with lead. I recognized where the soil had become pitted by the worms, the flies, and the boots of hungry men passing through with uniforms tied around their waists, sweat licking onto their upper lips.

With the homes vacated, the last villagers trailed down the road, shaking under the strain of books, photographs, and clay pots strapped to their shoulders. Mom watched them from the car, thought of her parents’ words from so long ago. Where will you go? Who will take you in?

She took a bag full of tools from the back of the car, held my hand as we found our way to one of the few homes with its head still lifted. I looked up at the sky thinking I’d see the shadow of that falling piece of mountain.

The door was unlocked, and the home was empty save for papers, the smell of moldy jujubes, a wooden crib tipped to its side.

She laid out the tools, and I drilled holes in the floorboards the way Mom told me: deep enough that I could feel dirt sticking to the auger, the wood coming loose like paper skin.

With the boards gone, she gave me the trowel while she held her shovel, the handle already smoothed by the months she spent clearing our fields, hoping to de-seed the fungus.

We’re digging a place of rest for that stone in the sky, she said, Dig until the ground is as tall as me and then a little more.

She raised her arm above her head, and I jumped to slap her hand. She caught me, kissed where my shoulder folded to my neck. She laughed and I laughed, and I didn’t think there could be anything brighter than the way that she smiled, held each breath between her teeth, looked at me like she knew every good thing that I could ever become.

She spoke of the stone as a seed, and I imagined grapes, plums, melons, new roots with soft voices full of juice and pulp.

Hours passed, and we stood in a waist-deep hole. The man on the radio said, You can see it now in the sky, between the stars. Impact in eight hours.

But out our window: clouds, a diffused light, a faint moon cupping the sound of cicadas.

This will have to do, Mom said, and we lay in the dirt. She held me close, the smell of lemon and perilla in her sweat. She whispered the bedtime story about the man with our surname.

They called him a war hero, she said, He sank with the ship, guided people to rafts even as he swallowed saltwater.

But he made a promise, she said.

But there is only so much to take, she said.

I fell into a dream where I heard her say, I’m sorry, maybe it’s not too late.

Morning: Mom sat in the doorway. The men on the radio spoke over themselves about trajectories. They explained that even math could fail to predict the turning winds, the way that air can prevail.

The stone skipped into the ocean, they said, No casualties.

I wiped the strange tears at her cheeks, careful not to get dirt in her eyes. She pulled me into her lap, and I asked her about the seed, the stone, the mountain. She wiped the hair out of my face and pressed her lips into my face over and over until I could taste salt through my laughs. She smiled, like a dimming sun.

I wanted to ask her why she was crying. I wanted to ask her what she wasn’t saying to me, but she turned my head and pointed over the hills standing guard outside the village.

I could have sworn, she said, I could have sworn I saw the sea there.

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.