by Sarah Freligh | Aug 24, 2020 | micro
Because Davie Gray is protected by the blood of Jesus and his scripture-spouting pastor daddy, he stays in the classroom practicing his times tables while the rest of the class waits outside the gymnasium, sleeves rolled, for the stern-faced nurses to swab and stab us with the biggest needles in the history of the world, according to Markie Wolf, who will faint at the very sight of it, or Judd French who Darlene Meadows will tell us cried like a little baby though he looked just fine by the time we break into groups of three and argue over what color to make the map of the Dakotas, green or blue I say, though Judd insists on brown because of the Badlands while Davie just sits there coloring and quiet.
Because we are inoculated, none of us will get the mumps that year or the next, though Davie Gray will spend a month in the hospital in eighth grade and come back to us a shadow, skinny as a scarecrow and sterile, according to Darlene who claimed she overheard her nurse mother say the sickness settled in his balls, which is how joke got started: How is a starter’s pistol like Davie Gray? Answer: Both of them shoot blanks, something we will all ha-ha over until the day Davie shows up at school with his father’s gun in his black backpack and shoots his way through the cafeteria before the cops cuff him and lead him away but not before he kills six people, Judd and some other jocks and a lunch lady, and for weeks the school will be lit up with television cameras and microphones tethered to women with glossed-on faces who talk about never forgetting what happened here but there will be a mall next week and after that a synagogue and a movie theater and a nightclub and a mall again until we lose track, an epidemic of violence say the glossed-on faces before tossing to the weather guy for tomorrow’s forecast more rain on the way. And sometimes I think about hunting down Davie Gray on the Internet but I never do, though what I did do once was drive through North Dakota where I took a cell phone shot at sunset of the Badlands, which weren’t bad at all, in fact, they were kind of lovely in their vast and shadowed dark.
by Fractured Lit | Aug 20, 2020 | interview, news
What are your favorite things to write about? Those topics or items you can’t stop thinking about!
“Favorite” implies that I have a choice about the content of my fiction, and frankly, I don’t believe that I do. I read an interview with George Saunders where Saunders observes his stories are always about class struggle, and explains that he doesn’t feel like he chooses that subject matter—it’s hard-wired. I deeply relate to that. The things that come up in my fiction (infidelity, dysfunctional parenting, strained friendships, to name a few main chords) are subjects I have as limited control over as the content of my dreams. I’m sure a therapist could track down their origins, but I’ve been writing about this set of topics since I first started writing. If there’s a “thing” I write about, it’s how people treat each other, how people both elevate and disappoint each other. I’m very interested in locating the dime on which things turn. The shorter the piece, the more crucial to hone in on it immediately and to show every radial angle of that turn.
What’s your favorite point of view? Why are you drawn to this particular voice/perspective?
I have many different first-person and limited third POVs, of all ages and both genders (though women more than men), and many of those POVs are quite similar to me (teachers, writers, parents). But oddly enough, the point of view I most enjoy inhabiting is that of a young woman making bad choices, and possessing a kind of “damn the torpedoes” attitude about those choices. As a human, I’m such a ditherer and second-guesser, and I constantly worry about how other people feel. So perhaps that middle-finger-up attitude is pleasurable for me to try on because it’s so not me. I’m thinking here of my narrator in “Useful Information,” who has an almost clinical approach to her two lovers (Boyfriend One and Boyfriend Two), or Sarah in my story “Impulse Control,” who gets caught by her ex-boyfriend sitting in his empty office. Those two women are tough; I envy them. I also love to write unreliable narrators. It’s challenging (and fun because challenging) to lay out the clues for readers that elucidate the narrators’ blind spots. Liz in my story “Squirrel Beach” is oblivious to some of the most pertinent information she’s disclosing. My favorite short stories and novels often feature unreliable narrators or limited-third protagonists, characters who don’t understand themselves well (The Good Soldier, The Remains of the Day, Emma).
What’s your favorite craft element to focus on when writing flash? Is there an element you wish you could avoid?
I love similes! They’re the most fun, imaginative, and artful thing to write, as well as one of the most pleasurable things to read. (I’ve been rereading Lorrie Moore’s masterpiece collection Birds in America, and Moore is a hand’s-down master of weird, shocking, scalpel-blade similes). My friend Michelle Ross and I prune similes for each other because we go a little simile-nuts. As far as an element I wish I could avoid, I don’t much like describing how people look. It’s hard to make it not sound like a driver’s license (blue eyes, brown hair, blah boring blah). Because of that aversion, my characters are often faceless, or I’ll hone in one specific, strange, defamiliarized feature (bulbous eyes, sagging breasts).
How you know when a story is done or at least ready to test the submission waters?
My breakthrough as a writer was finding a first reader whose judgment I absolutely trust, and that has exponentially condensed my draft-to-submission time. Once I’m done with a draft, I send it to my good friend, the super talented, afore-mentioned Michelle Ross. (Well, sometimes I’ll send Michelle five versions of that same draft in an afternoon: “read this one,” “no read this one”). Michelle gives me edits, I take most of them, and then off my little paper airplane flies. I also have a writing group with Katie Flynn and Katherine Leiban, two San Francisco writers whose work I love. I’m a teacher; I’m a huge believer in the fact that you need other eyes on a piece besides your own. But I also try to avoid the too-many-cooks paralysis (anyone who’s been in an MFA workshop might identify with that).
When looking for places to submit your flash, what are your priorities for finding a good home for your work?
I have my favorite places to submit to—the Usual Suspects. I tend to prefer online journals, so more people can access my work. I love editors who are encouraging and respectful and don’t take forever to read work (big shout out here to Christopher James of Jellyfish Review, who has the world’s fastest turnaround, and Christopher Allen of SmokeLong Quarterly, who never made me feel like an idiot-pest or a puppy dog at the gates for sending him story after story after story).
What do you know now about writing flash or other forms that you wished you had known from the beginning?
I think I *knew* these things about flash, but the more I write flash, the more I understand how crucial they are: start strong; stick the landing. I’m an editor as well as a writer, and I can’t emphasize enough how crucial those book-ends (sharp opening, killer closing) are. My big discovery about flash, and why I’m now so obsessed with it, is that the skills it hones are portable skills. Writing flash will make you a better writer. My novel The Light Source is a better novel—tighter, crisper, more elegant—because after immersing myself in flash I cut 8,000 words from it.
What resource (a book, essay, story, person, literary journal) has helped you develop your flash fiction writing?
I really like David Galef’s Brevity: A Flash Fiction Handbook, and The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction. In general, though, I learn less from craft books and prompts, and more from reading great work. I’m an English professor; I’m a firm believer that the best way to improve as a writer is to read, read, read. So I do—both what’s out right now in journals, and excellent collections that feature a lot of flash. Among my favorite writers of books with flash, though this is a far from a complete list, are Lydia Davis, Amy Hempel, Kathy Fish, Sherrie Flick, Michelle Ross, Grace Paley, Sandra Cisneros, Joy Williams, Cathy Ulrich, Michael Czyzniejewski, and Amelia Gray.
What’s your favorite way to interact with the writing community? Do you have any advice for writers trying to add to their own writing communities?
I love being a fiction editor. I recommend volunteering to read for lit journals. It’s energizing for me, and always thrilling to find some sparkly gem in the Submittable queue. I’m grateful to work with my team of editors at Pithead Chapel, all themselves talented writers. I’m proud of the work Pithead Chapel has been publishing; that’s my main way of feeling like I participate in (and hopefully give back to) the literary community. Advice? Well, I live in San Francisco, so I’m lucky—but go to readings! Support local bookstores! And here’s one thing that worked for me: submit to the Sixfold contest—$5 submission fee, the contestants are the judges, it’s all anonymous, you’ll read a total of 18 stories—and be generous and detailed in your comments to other writers. If you like a story a lot, sign off with your contact info. Sixfold is how I “met” my sometime writing partner and first reader. Every writer needs to find their perfect first reader. It has seriously made all the difference for me. If I had a magic wand, I’d bestow on all writers as gifted, witty, and blunt a first reader as I have!
Kim Magowan lives in San Francisco and teaches in the Department of Literatures and Languages at Mills College. Her short story collection Undoing (2018) won the 2017 Moon City Press Fiction Award. Her novel The Light Source (2019) was published by 7.13 Books. Her fiction has been published in Atticus Review, Cleaver, The Gettysburg Review, Hobart, Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, and many other journals. Her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf’s Top 50. She is the Fiction Editor of Pithead Chapel. www.kimmagowan.com
by Rebekah Bergman | Aug 17, 2020 | flash fiction
It was a bright, gray day with no breeze, and she had just finished digging a grave. She’d woken that morning and her turtle had not. How should she feel on this first day without Tulip? Or on all the days without Tulip to come? Sad, probably. But sometimes being with someone only makes you feel more alone. She thought of a chair in the corner of an empty room and how it makes the room look even emptier. As she put the shovel down, the sky turned a raw-yolk yellow. She looked up and felt dizzy, so she leaned against a sapling, closing her eyes.
“Hi,” a voice said above her.
He was only a mini-tornado. Room-sized, not house-sized. He had vague shadows for his eyes and mouth, like the face people see in the moon.
“Hi,” she said, tentative.
“What’s that?” he nodded at the shoebox.
“Tulip,” she said, and she told him about pets, about death.
Suddenly, she realized she needed a eulogy. What to say about Tulip? Sebastian had brought him home in a shoebox like the one that would serve as his casket. He’d had an ugly frown and an ancient face
“Tulip,” she tried, “you were slow and steady and dissatisfied about everything.”
The tornado darkened. “But you’ll miss him?”
She shrugged.
“Ashes to ashes.” She dropped some dirt onto the lid.
“Please,” the tornado said, “let me.” He lifted a small mound and funneled it through him.
So, she thought, he’s a gentle tornado. She invited the tornado inside.
She gave him a quick tour. The living room was empty, save for one chair in a dim corner. In the kitchen, he touched the ceiling fan by accident, and it spun like a propeller and crashed to the floor.
There was the bedroom, the bathroom. In front of the last room, she paused.
“If it’s messy, I’ll clean it,” he offered. He did a graceful pirouette, and a layer of dust floated up from the carpet. The door blew open. She followed him in.
Everything was just as Sebastian had left it. The rubber ash from his old erasers, his favorite pencils, his half-used chapstick, his dirty tissues, his coffee mug. She opened a window to let it air out.
The tornado gathered a stack of loose papers. “What should I do with these?” he asked, helpfully.
She pushed them, in one motion, right out the window. They scattered like gulls and disappeared.
For dinner, she made pancakes and the tornado whipped up dollops of cream. They ate and he continued cleaning. He cleared a clogged drain and dusted the shelves. He whistled as he whirled through the hall.
“Who’s that with you?” he called at the base of the stairs. He’d just straightened a crooked photograph and polished the glass. She saw herself in it—not in the photo, but as a reflection, the dark shadows of her eyes staring back.
“Sebastian,” she said. Her voice sounded like distant thunder. She didn’t tell him anything else.
That evening, the tornado used himself as a corkscrew on a wine bottle so masterfully she asked if he’d done it before.
He couldn’t remember. His past was hazy. “It doesn’t matter where I’ve been,” he told her. “I can never go back. No place is the same once I’m gone.”
If that was a warning, it was already too late. Here he was drinking wine with her, not taking up space, just moving the air.
The next morning, she couldn’t find a few small belongings: a sock, the back of an earring, a silver bracelet. The tornado looked bigger.
“Let’s go outside?” she offered.
In the yard, he spun wildly. “Did you love Tulip?” he asked as he passed the fresh grave.
“A little,” she said. “Enough.”
She used to tell Sebastian that you should only love someone to a certain extent. “You should know you’d be complete without them,” she’d say.
Sebastian hadn’t shared her philosophy.
She was standing next to the sapling again. Sebastian had planted it. Why was it still growing when Sebastian was gone? She reached, grabbed hold of a branch and pulled it free. She kept going, grabbing and tearing, spinning around it until no branches remained. She thrust her weight into the thin trunk, but it wouldn’t budge. She found the shovel and dug it up from below.
The tornado had slowed down to watch her. He was almost entirely still.
The tornado slept in the backyard that night. He stopped growing and his winds calmed. He seemed tired or ill. She thought she saw something within him sparkle, but she said nothing about it.
Sebastian had given her that silver bracelet for an anniversary. It looked like a handcuff and never fit right. A month after he bought it, he asked where it was and she couldn’t tell him. He held it out inside his own fist.
“Here,” he said. “I’ve had it this whole time. And you didn’t even know it was gone.”
She slept outside with the tornado. “When I’m gone,” he said in the morning, “you can miss me. But I won’t even know who you are.”
He had it wrong, she thought. “That makes you lucky,” she said. But he couldn’t hear her. Inside him, there was lightning and rain.
“Tell me about Sebastian,” he called out. And since she knew he’d be gone soon, she did.
The last time she saw him, everything was bright and gray as if there were no such thing as weather at all.
“Are you still there?” she whispered. He was still there.
She reached for him and the sky turned yellow. He said nothing. She said nothing. They knew. And then—in an instant—there was no sound, no light, no air, only that violent kind of emptiness that you carry inside you, around and around and around.
by Fractured Lit | Aug 14, 2020 | news
We’re proud to announce the 56 titles of our longlist! The submissions we received were fresh, fierce, and so engaging that we’ve had a hard time narrowing down the list! From this list, 25 stories will make it to the shortlist for judge Megan Giddings to choose her final 3 winners! Please don’t identify your story title as the shortlist will be delivered to Megan anonymously!
When It Gets Cold in the South, The Youngest Baby Dies
Instructions for Avoiding INS, 1996
You Married
Departures
Rada’s Story
Exigua
Jump Cut
Eyes Like Cherry Tomatoes
Wolfie
The Nineteen-Point Day
Bird and Balloon Go Racing
Carlos Inside Out
Adam and Eve
Aeroplane man
Sweet-tooth
Crocodile
Where is Stephanie East?
Too Contrived
Bed 15A, Qualia
Here Is How
Southwest Loop 820
Skeleton Crew
Morning
There is No Ocean in the Bucket
Sole
Crawl to Me
Funeral Party
Stripping Off the Glitz
Revenge of the Cloud Makers
Introduction to Improv Tragedy
Antiparticle Delivery Driver
Stories
Summer Hand
Mrs Chandler Wants to Know
The Tick
The Future History of the Arctic
A List of Things I Have Used the Knife for Thus Far
Surely, You Aren’t Like Them
Consider the Shape of Your Fist
Disappearing
There, I Said It
Benny
Counting Trees With Mr. Gillson
Ellis
The Unicorns
Peach Fuzz
Tagged
Teeth
SixFeet
Spaghetti Junction
The Ceremony
Remember Tomorrow in Seasons
Beers and Blueberry Cosmos
You Will Do This
We Are Still
Pelee Island
by Jonathan Andrew Perez | Aug 13, 2020 | micro
In the footnote: He read Basketball diaries, but he was Latino and he did not wear a shirt titled, Latinidad, or at least not out in the daylight, or it was that his shirt titled Latinidad was too tight to fit into. He could finger roll like Ewing. He could fake to one side while backing down a privileged white boy in Carl Schulz park on 86th street near the East River, like Pippen (but not Mike). The large hulking building to the right was where Margaret Sanger’s son grew up, and eventually someone got pregnant. He hated being expected to do more than he was. The rest of the day was spent catching butterflies in a small net, and watching them come to rest in a container bought from the party store. He felt them deeply as their wings slowed to a rest, and the beautiful colors shined in the polluted light over the FDR driver. It all made sense.
by Alexandra Matthews | Aug 10, 2020 | flash fiction
Bette was stirring her coffee when she saw the postcard, tucked between a large print arthritis monthly and debt consolidation offers.
On the front was a rose window. She turned it over, expecting to learn that Jesus loved her, or God would smite her.
Finally taking a road trip. Made it to Atlanta. Slept in a twin bed last night. Ha! Got this in the motel gift shop. Beautiful. No time to see the real thing. Have you heard from Lars? Tomorrow: Louisiana. —Glen
It was addressed to the former tenant, Martha. Martha had died a month earlier from a stroke and Bette got off the waiting list for senior housing. It was affordable and there was a clubhouse. She liked the picture of a group playing cards in the pamphlet.
Bette clipped the postcard on the fridge next to a diner delivery menu, where she had circled Meatloaf with Mashed Potatoes and Caesar Salad.
She took a sip of her coffee, then spit it back in the mug. She’d bought the coconut creamer again.
***
The second postcard came a week later. It had Louisiana landmarks on it.
New Orleans! Full of music and life. Had my first beignet. Best thing I’ve eaten in a while. Wish we could’ve tried them together. Lars isn’t answering my calls. I think we should’ve waited to tell him. Headed to San Antonio now. —Glen
There was no return address, no way to tell him Martha was gone.
Bette had never had a beignet. She looked it up on the internet: fried dough squares covered in powdered sugar.
She went out to buy a cruller and confectioner’s sugar from the grocery store. She expected the nice cashier with the blue hair to be there. Maybe she would tell him about the postcards. But the shy girl rang her up instead.
At home, Bette warmed the cruller in the oven, then sprinkled the sugar on top. As she was cutting it into quarters, the knife slipped, slicing her index finger. She watched the blood turn the sugar into a bright red paste.
She rinsed her finger and fished a bandage out of the first aid kit. Rubbed a little honey on the soft part of the bandage before putting it on, like her mother used to do.
When Robert was alive, Bette thought, he would have called her stupid for trying to make a beignet out of a cruller, for putting honey on a wound.
***
The day she received the postcard from Texas, Bette skipped her crochet group to wait for the mail. Her joints were stiff and the women didn’t talk much.
San Antonio is unlike any other city. Hope to do the River Walk with you some day. You said you needed time. I understand. Lars will accept it, accept us. You were separated by then. Already in Tucson. Heard cacti can grow to be several stories high. Let you know if I see one. —Glen
Her stomach turned, like it did when she forgot to take her ulcer medication. Tucson was just hours from San Diego.
Bette considered calling her son, asking to stay with him in L. A. for the week to spend time with her grandchildren. But she knew he’d say they were busy. She had barely seen them since Robert passed.
Lars might give up the cold shoulder and tell Glen, she hoped.
Bette put the Greetings from San Antonio! postcard on the fridge next to the others and took a microwavable chicken pot pie out of the freezer.
***
On the postcard from Tucson was a single cactus with pinkish-white flowers.
I’ve seen weeds taller than some of these “big” cacti. Guess I wasn’t looking in the right place. I’m coming to see you, to talk in person. You might not open the door, but I have to try, make the grand gesture. You are the sweet to my sour, Martha. I won’t leave here for a couple of days. —Glen
Glen would get to San Diego that day, or at most, the day after.
Bette imagined Glen angry. She had read his postcards, kept them for herself. She had attempted to make a beignet. By pretending for a moment she was someone else, she had betrayed him somehow.
She considered shutting the blinds and hiding in her bathroom until he left or one of her neighbors called security.
No, she thought. He wouldn’t be angry. He’d be sad, heartbroken. Like her, he would feel alone.
Bette filled her electric kettle with water. She arranged an assortment of herbal teas, two mugs, and a plate of sugar wafers on a serving tray. In a small bowl of honey, she put the wooden dipper she never used.
When he arrived, Bette would offer Glen something sweet, something soothing.
And he would listen.
by Kara Vernor | Aug 6, 2020 | flash fiction
Maggie has clouds for eyes. Also, she barely talks. Other kids have asked her how those clouds got stuck there, but she just blinks back, clouds churning. My best friend, Bernice Wallers, heard Maggie used to have eyes like ours, that fire ants devoured them while she slept. “All that was left were two smoking holes,” Bernie said, “so the clouds moved in to cool them.”
Mrs. E paired me with Maggie for our 6th grade presentations on World War II. We got Japanese Internment Camps. Maggie hasn’t opened a book even though we’ve been studying for twenty minutes. She says, “They’re American internment camps. Americans interned Americans, Japanese-Americans.”
“No one likes a know-it-all,” I say, and I slam a book down on her fingers. “Open it and read.” Then I wonder if she can read, with eyes like hers.
I’m not the only one who hits her. My mom told me once, “Maggie makes her own weather,” which was basically my point: she makes us want to hit her. Yesterday, when I saw tears on her face, I willed my hands to stop. I said, “Look, don’t cry. Maybe you could try talking more?”
She said, “It’s rain; I can’t help it.” She didn’t think twice about my advice.
I ask Bernie to jump her with me after school because I’m ready to know what her clouds feel like, if they will cool me too. We grab her by her arms and pull her behind the 7-Eleven, and she doesn’t even fight when we push her down next to the empty boxes of beef jerky. I straddle her chest and push the tip of my finger into her right eye. It shifts like smoke. I poke deeper, slowly, until my whole finger is in, but I still don’t feel anything. Bernie says, “Let me try,” but I can’t stop. I slip in more fingers, then my whole hand. Her eye socket stretches until I’m up to my elbow in her cloud eye. “Bernie,” I say, “All I feel in there is my own fist.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Bernie says.
Over the summer Bernie and I spend a lot of time at the pool because she wants to start junior high with a tan. We hear from our friend Juniper that Maggie moved to Albuquerque to attend a school for genius kids. “We did get an A on our presentation,” I say. Between jumps off the low dive, Bernie talks about every little thing: how to convince her mom to let her pierce her nose, roll-on vs. stick deodorant, next year’s boys and how they will try to feel us up. She talks and talks, but I can’t find much to say. I’m lying on a lounge chair studying the cracks in the concrete beneath, waiting for the bloom of ants that will seep out when it rains.
Originally published in Gigantic Sequins 6.1
by Neil Clark | Aug 3, 2020 | micro
Legacy
My ancestors were star smugglers. Becoming a mule was their only way out of the darkness.
They would hide the stars in their bellies and wear thick clothes to conceal their glowing midriffs.
Every night, I thank them. For the sacrifice they made. For what they left for us in our sky.
Cakewalk
I added lunar dust to my cake mixture.
In the oven, a Moon baked.
As it rose, my cooking utensils floated around the house and a tide rose through the sink.
When you got home, I took you by the hand, and we slow-danced against the kitchen ceiling.
“Happy birthday,” I said.
Shimmer
A cosmic storm hit last night.
Now, we find a mound of stardust shimmering on the side of the road.
I dab it with my pinkie and put it in my mouth.
“How does it taste?” you say.
Before I can answer, I dissolve into the sky and become the reflection on your face.
Shattered Illusion
When I was a child, I thought the stars were just light bulbs in the sky.
I thought they could rain down on us, and we would need to take shelter as they popped on rooftops.
Then I learned the truth: that I’d never be able to touch them, or dance in the falling light, or make star angels in the shards come the aftermath.
It hurt me like hot glass.
Emptier and Emptier
You told me you’d been feeling emptier and emptier since you returned from space. Then I held your hand, and your skin crumpled. I rested my head on your chest, and it sank right in. We went for a walk the next day, and you blew away like a balloon, disappearing into the sky forever.
Blanket
I made you a blanket that doubled up as the night sky. Gave you strict instructions never machine-wash it.
My first night away from you, it rained soap. The horizon spun and dripped. The Moon and stars jangled up there like loose coins.
That was when I learned you were a disobedient child.
Love Fool
You called me from space and told me to transfer all our savings to an account in a different galaxy.
“They sell stars here,” you said. “I’ll buy us a constellation.”
After I did it, I never heard from you again.
I don’t care about the money.
I do hate how the night sky we used gaze into together so lovingly, now makes me feel like a fool.
Words/Stars
You told me there are so many stars out there, you could assign a word to each one, and you would run out of words before you run out of stars.
I did it. I assigned a different word to every star I could. Exhausted the lexicon of several different languages.
I ran out of words just before you died.
Now when I look at the sky, I use the constellations to make poems.
My way of staying in touch.
Church
I reached a church at the end of the universe.
There, I met another astronaut. It was me, from five minutes in the future.
Five minutes later, another me arrived.
Soon, there was a congregation of us, waiting patiently for answers.
Still, we multiply. Still, we wait.
by Sutton Strother | Jul 26, 2020 | micro
Bed
A gift from Kayla’s father, who put her head through a wall when she said David Bowie was holier than Jesus Christ. He buys a twin; he doesn’t know (can never know) she’s sharing it with me.
When the box arrives, we assemble the bed together and tell each other our love will make the smallness bearable. It goes clumsily, like everything we do at nineteen.
It’s me and not the sheets Kayla spreads across the mattress first. After, she giggles heat into the crater of my navel. This isn’t what my Daddy had in mind.
I don’t say anything. She jiggles my breast because she thinks I don’t get the joke, but I can’t stop seeing her head crashing through these walls, blood slicking over the beige.
Refrigerator
Inside a cheesecake is cooling, her late mother’s recipe. It’s the first thing I ever baked that didn’t come from a box or a tube.
We’re stoned long past midnight, crawling naked across the linoleum for a first taste. The fridge bathes Kayla in soft orange light as she scoops a handful from the center of the cake and shovels it into my laughing mouth.
We made this.Wonder in her voice, same wonder that recited the instructions, written in a dead woman’s even hand, from the yellowed index card.
The cheesecake’s consistency is uneven. Tiny pockets of unincorporated cream cheese burst tart against my tongue, but it’s rich and sweet and, hell, it’s cheesecake, and isn’t that enough? I kiss her, feeding her the taste of it, then move to taste her, too.
Armchair
A thrift store find. High-backed, green crushed velvet, at least thirty years old. If it was a dog, you’d swear it had mange, but at our housewarming party she pronounces it the most elegant thing she’s ever owned.
Summer faeries surround us and call us friend, sporting haircuts and tattoos that would’ve terrified us in high school. We are kissed and cuddled while by the playlist we wasted hours fussing over fills our home with music. Soon, the bottle of Two Buck Chuck in Kayla’s hand is nearly empty and my own brain is a waterfall teeming, crashing, bubbling underneath.
When everyone’s gone, Kayla strips and stretches across the seat of her chair, legs draped over one arm. She doesn’t say a word, but I know when I’m being summoned, and what for.
Halfway through, her phone rings; she answers. Her hand twists through my hair, urging me on even as she says Hello. Wet and too meek, her little sister’s voice trickles through the speaker. I can’t make out the words, but I know who they’re about.
Kayla growls and bucks against my face. Fuck him.
I pull back, risk a glance. Her eyes are closed, but the tears push loose anyway.
Should I stop? If I were sober, I’d leave the room without asking, and if pressed I’d insist there was honor in it.
Don’t you dare.
Five feet away, my iPod queues up a song about a love that will last despite hands that might age and bodies that will change. I pretend to understand.
Back Porch
Screened-in, built for a southern summer Sunday, and half the reason we’d settled on this place, despite the neighborhood’s reputation. All we wanted from it was a morning like this one. Iced tea. Wicker chairs. A hummingbird feeder. Her hand working into my shorts. Small puzzle pieces of domesticity.
My mother calls this playing house. We pay the rent and try our best.
I will myself to focus on her fingers, the press of her tongue to my collarbone, but the back yard, stretch back so far you could fit another house on the lot, calls me out of the moment with its overgrowth. I’ve never mown the lawn – any lawn – before. My parents always paid some neighborhood kid to do it. We haven’t even bought a mower yet. Do we need one? Is this our job, or will the landlord see to it? What would happen if we just let it grow?
My eyes unfocus as my pleasure mounts, until the green expanse becomes a Magic Eye picture I can’t make sense of. I half-expect the image won’t resolve until she makes me come.
If it had resolved, or maybe if I’d known how to look, I could have seen so much.
At night there will be gunshots in the street, and we’ll laugh away our terror. Her bike will be stolen within the month. A week later, someone will bust the headlights out of my car and take the bulbs. In our next home, the ceiling will collapse four times, and in the home after that, our neighbor will die. No one will find his body until the building fills with horseflies and a stench that won’t have dissipated by the time I (on my own, too foolish for regret) leave the place behind.
Instead, I dig nails into the back of her arm and forget all about the image, the yard, the sun, the tea, the birds, and believe that home is the place where her body meets my own.
by Nuala O'Connor | Jul 23, 2020 | flash fiction
I was the one who took the photograph of the princess with her toes in the mouth of a man who was not her husband. I didn’t mean to take it. I was sent to pap them and I did not want to be there, not one bit. It had been a long day and a hard one.
I leaned against the fence of the property, camera balanced on the rail because I was tired, and the sticky-dust feeling of tragedy coated my skin and was under my nails and on my tongue. I’d spent the afternoon hovering by the pond below Crickle Falls Resort, based on reports of a drowning. Sure enough, two tiny bodies were pulled from the water late in the afternoon. Two little girls – sisters – who had strayed from their holiday cabin and ended up in the pond who-knows-how, their deaths the work of a few idle moments. And they were just about the most beautiful kids I’d ever seen – their Mom was Chinese, the Dad Norwegian, I heard later. They looked like they were sleeping, lying there on the mudbank, cuddled together. I took not one single shot. I turned away and came home, and when I called him, Jerry was mad at me. Then he said there were rumours that the princess was here, of all places.
I said, “Count me right out, Jerry.”
And he said, “Lisa, take this, it could be big. Besides, you owe me.”
I cursed him and kissed my own two girls fiercely, before driving out to the perimeter of the house the princess was allegedly renting. The sun was about to slip behind the mountain and the air was warm and crickety, and I remembered that the princess had two little girls too, and I chewed over this fact and wondered if they used doilies and teapots at home, and where they were right now, and who was looking out for them, and I reckoned they were safe in some castle in England or someplace. I wondered, too, about the kind of mother who goes to a foreign country, for leisure, without her children, but with a man who is not their father, and I knew that that would never be me, even if I wanted such a thing. I thought about the Mom and Dad of the drowned girls and shook my head and tried to fathom their sorrow, the true morass of it, but failed. And then I saw the princess, golden and smiling by the pool in a white swimsuit. She lay back on a lounger and the man was stretched out below her and he lifted one of her feet and put it right into his mouth.
Click click click.
The world felt like a very sad and stupid place that day. Later, at home, when I looked at the princess on my screen, it occurred to me that her life might actually be happy, in spite of everything, and she was likely relieved to be on vacation and out of the way of reality. And I thought, This photograph could get this woman into a heap of trouble. I waited a bit and considered going to bed and I thought of the princess’s far-away girls, and the two dead girls, and my own precious girls. And though now I really wish that I hadn’t, I pressed send.
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