Nurturing

by Lucy Zhang | Jan 25, 2021 | flash fiction

Protection

Erik is raising three chicks in his backyard. Erik is always telling us how he’ll have fresh eggs once they’re grown, bright orange yolks from the paprika-mixed grains he’s feeding them, tough shells that require a good thwack to crack. We’re all jealous so we tell him a hawk will snatch them up while he’s at school, or that the neighbor’s Pit Bull Terrier will break free from its leash and turn one into puppy chow. When we visit, he has a new contraption built for the chicks: a miniature wooden house with ramps and ladders and a nesting box. He built it in woodshop. We don’t take elective classes like woodshop.  We take computer science or statistics because we’re only allowed to be doctors or engineers. And not even really doctors, because mom says women can’t stand as long especially after having children, so they can’t perform surgery well. Where are the chicks? We ask. They’re in the main house, Erik says. Under the asphalt roof so no hawks can pluck them away, behind the walls so no dogs can bite into them. We peer into the small square window, an unevenly cut hole in the wood, and we see the fluffy wing and tiny beak of a chick. But when will they go out to play? we wonder. When I let them, Erik says. But we never see him let them out again.

Freedom

When it rained, we’d pick up earthworms with our bare hands, moving them from the middle of the sidewalk to the grass. We were little heroes saving lives on our way back from school like it was nothing. Because real heroes don’t ask for praise or recognition. The day after a heavy storm, the sun already out and drying the roads and tennis courts, we saw one long earthworm flattened in the middle with its two ends still wriggling, like life was still in reach so long as it could break free of its other half. We dug out the metal ruler from our pencil case and sliced down the earthworm’s desiccated middle. Then we picked up each wriggling half and moved them to the damp soil patch besides mom’s snow pea plants. Be free, we thought. Survive. Later, after we finished our homework and had computer time, we looked it up online and prayed we made the cut behind the earthworm’s clitellum, so at least the tail could regenerate, no suffering prolonged.

Affection

Duo Duo (“多多” – nicknamed so by my aunt and uncle because she was an unexpected child, an extra element tacked onto their lives) got a bernedoodle named Bilbo. I found out through her Instagram stories. So did my parents. My parents ask me why she isn’t having kids and I tell them it’s a decision that my cousin and her husband can make on their own. I don’t tell my parents that the bernedoodle is an emotional support animal. That’s information for my cousin to share. Bilbo is a fluffy, soft, hyper thing always vying for human attention. The moment I look away, he begins to whimper, and I have to crouch down and start petting him again. He pants and lets his pink tongue dangle out of his mouth like he wants more of something. My cousin picks him up like a baby. “Do you want to hold him?” Duo Duo asks. “No,” I say. Not to offend. Maybe I’m over projecting my personal preferences onto the dog; just because I don’t like being carried or tossed around or hugged doesn’t mean Bilbo doesn’t. But really, what’s so good about being held? Your unpredictable gushes of skin and bumps of spine exposed to foreign fingertips? Good for them though, I think. I hope taking care of a dog will keep her mind off any personal troubles. But I hope she doesn’t ask me to take care of him when she flies back to Shanghai for Chinese New Year. I’d keep him fed, for sure, but I’m not sure I can shower Bilbo with lots of cuddles in bed, and Bilbo seems like the kind of dog who needs that kind of affection to survive.

Companionship

Spud nibbles on pineapple leaves. He’s a fat, white rabbit–the type raised for eating. Of course, my sister is vegetarian and would never eat her foster pet (which she never ended up returning, so I suppose Spud is hers now). When we were little, we thought: we will get a dog once we’re adults; we will get a cat; we will get a few ducks and dig a pond for them; we will start a small farm where no one eats anything with a cute face, and instead you cuddle with them as you please. But it’d have to be after we became adults because we knew dad had eaten dogs used for his medical lab experiments at Fudan University. He said dog tastes bad, but we stayed vigilant and waited patiently until we were across the country, living on our own. Now my sister has one rabbit and one chinchilla–used to be two but she found one toppled over like it had passed in its sleep a Friday evening after she’d returned from work. I don’t know if I can raise something that’ll die before me. I have trouble squashing the Machiavellian thought from my head: what was the whole point? So I focus on seven-pound Spud and the spiky pineapple leaves, drag the FaceTime window to the side of my screen and navigate to Google: it looks like pineapple leaves are nutritious, packed with fiber and calcium oxalate and Bromelain, which reduces swelling and inflammation, and maybe I’ll boil a few leaves and drink the water as tea because my body feels a bit inflamed and I don’t know why these white blood cells are trying so hard to fight outside invaders that now I’m the one left burning.

And Even Still the Rivers

by Kate Finegan | Jan 21, 2021 | flash fiction

1

Remember when the river ran just beyond our door, when rains replenished this ribbon unfurled blue and raspberries ripened close so we could smell them through our bedroom window. Remember when the robins flew in with their red breasts and you sucked the red of this body and ran the river of your tongue across this stomach wet, and wet, this body swelled and crested.

 2

You smile at me, and I can almost hear your skin crack.

3

Remember when the rain rebirthed the earth in wriggling worms.

4

Remember when you said you’d like to eat raspberries off this body’s breasts, so we plucked buckets full, and you placed the cool cups of them over this body’s nipples, dug your tongue beneath the berries, sucked them off without the lightest graze of skin, bit down just-too-hard enough to make this tongue curl back and sigh, tongues two tributaries meeting, tongues exchanging sweetness when the berries and their seeds were done and your mouth tasted of summer.

 5

You smile at me, and I take this word within the redness of this mouth, roll it around, suck its salt like pebbles on a hungry beach, hold it still.

6

On hot days, the salt crust cracking is a requiem.

7

You smile at me. The word I’m tonguing is enough.

8

The Nile, the Amazon, the Yangtze, and the Yellow. The Rio Grande and River Thames. The Tigris and Euphrates, this aching fertile crescent. The Tennessee and Colorado. To think we once flooded valleys to fight the course of blood. To think we ever needed so badly to spell Mississippi we taught our children silly songs. To think still we teach our children songs.

9

In a time like this, it feels wrong to see you smile.

10

In this time of lips like callouses, tongues of pumice, it feels wrong to see you smile. In this time of so little sweat, no beads for this tongue to suck, no slick of skin on skin, too tired. No good morning, here’s a glass of water, sparkling, full color spectrum on the sun-drenched bedroom wall refracted. No drink it down so I can drink you up, no drink it down so you can scream my name. No finger-knots in hair. No get down to the delta of this body, take it all the way to roiling sea. In this time, all we have is smiles.

11

The maps still have their arteries. I trace the blue inside your wrists with this parched tongue and you smile, say remember when it rained for forty days and forty nights and I say that’s a story, what used to be a nightmare but now sounds like a dream. We need a different dove, you say, and I can hear your voice crack, lips crack, all that runs now is blood from these cracked bodies meant for water—remember being bodies made of water—and you say, a dove with water in its mouth. I trace the blue after the blue has gone, beyond your elbow to the crater of your armpit, and remember the rainbow, hope it can mean something else, hope the rain might once again remember this parched bed of earth. You unstick your thighs from the leather sofa, sigh and smile sadly, too tired for anything more than this tongue-scrape traveling to your heart, your inland ocean, and here we are, an ark of two, this promise that if we break, we’ll break together. And the raspberry vines wait outside, and the riverbed lies empty just beyond the door.

This piece was originally published in Gigantic Sequins.

Receivers

by Ra'Niqua Lee | Jan 19, 2021 | flash fiction

Thursday nights, half the country gathered in their living rooms to watch Chad Dylan Scott shake blonde hair out of his eyes, curse his football teammates, and strip down to his Hail Mary boxers. His abs were like the ridges in an ice tray, rigid, but a jostle and a shake would be sure to make something wet. Dena Brown, twelve and sprouting, watched with her momma from their apartment on the end of the city where the rent was still cheap. “I hate sports,” her momma said one Thursday, “but I like this show.”

By sixteen, breasts had sprung up from Dena’s chest like sunflowers from dirt. She had to tell a boy “No” for the first time. She stepped out of his Cadillac and marched away from his headlights in heels a size too big. Later, inside the apartment, she found her momma watching TV in the easy chair. “You’re late,” she said. “and go put my shoes back where you got them.”

That season, Chad Dylan Scott began his fifth year of high school, second officially, and fell in love with Angel Hearting, the butt-chinned Baptist who waved pompoms as he ass-ed, damn-ed, and hell-ed his team to victory on the football field. Angel could hell as well as Chad. She had the same blue eyes and hair sleek enough to line the coffins her father sold. When she appeared on screen, the dubbed-in studio audience applauded.

Dena graduated two years later. No one clapped for her except her teary-eyed momma. “That’s my baby,” she said, “all my dreams come to bear.” Dena was five feet even, brown like polished wood, and she wore her high school graduation gown like a coatrack in a blanket. She wasn’t big enough for her own dreams, let alone her momma’s.

The finale aired. Dena and her momma watched together, mother and daughter still bonding over fake football and abs, touchdown perfect.

Chad Dylan Scott graduated from fictional high school with two state championships; a prom king crown, sash, the whole tacky get up; one pregnancy scare he never found out about since Angel kept that one in her silk-lined pocket; six fistfights, which made for six come to Jesus moments, glory and hallelujah; around two hundred beers, at least once per episode; a DUI; and a pity date for Lorraine Woodhouse, a wheelchair bound spitfire who spoke four lines in a single episode during season three. Scott went out in a blitz, confetti over the football field, him on the shoulders of his teammates, wide receivers, mostly extras. The screen went black, rolling credits, the end of the scrimmages, the offsides, the hell Scott charged toward Angel.

“That’s done,” said Dena’s momma. She had not yet taken off her work attire, all black with her security guard badge. The evening news started, wildfires and politics. They watched for a moment before turning it off to sit alone together.

Chad Dylan Scott took to doing made-for-TV movies after that, the kind where he could be the boyfriend, the husband, the killer, the man of drool, sweat, and dreams.

Dena watched other shows. She started college, tried beer, hated beer, and dated one boyfriend after another. The older she got the more damns she found in the back of her throat, the pit of her stomach. Nothing quite as soft or as sweet as a Thursday night spent with her momma, thirty-minutes, an abundance of Scotts, all interchangeable, in a prime-time peace that surpassed understanding.

The Big Dipper

by Meg Pokrass | Jan 14, 2021 | flash fiction

The pool was four feet deep, and we bought it at Target half off. You could float on your back and think, “fun times are here,” because at least you weren’t burning hot.

Mom and I watched it fill up with hose water. She looked around at the back yard, the neglected fruit trees, and said, “I’ve got to call those idiots and make sure they get a gardener.” It stunk from rotting fruit and dog poop.

I wasn’t going to worry about anything. I would just float on my back in my bikini. I would be weightless. There was an annoying flea bite in the crook of my arm, which I sucked on.
The pool was going to be my way of making more friends. I was sick of the two friends I had from last year. Lila and Blythe were both considered to be strange. Lila wasn’t ugly when she washed and brushed her long hair—about once a week. She memorized animal facts. Blythe looked like Pinocchio. She was a violin prodigy. She had a European hair cut—short, black, severe. She was proud of her breasts, which were large, adult size. I didn’t have any breasts yet, but the doctor said not to worry.

I wanted to know if late development meant small breasts. Mom said it didn’t, that she had been the same way. “Worth the wait,” she’d say with an exaggerated wink. Now that dad had his own place and his bi-polar disorder, she had all kinds of new expressions.
In my new pool, I would float on my back when it was dark, looking at the stars. Nighttime swimming had been my dream.

Since there was no one else, I invited Lila and Blythe for a nighttime dip on Saturday. Lila couldn’t come because her family needed to drive to Oxnard. Blythe said she sure as heck would be able to make it. She was all about nighttime and pools and stargazing.
“Show me the big dipper,” Blythe said. “I want to make sure you know which one it is.”
Blythe was wearing her bikini bottoms, but she left her top on the side of the pool. The pool seemed much smaller with her beside me. I was glad it was cheap.

Terribly absent were Lila’s cigarettes. I pointed to the area of the sky where I saw the Big Dipper.

“Uh huh,” she said. “A long bent ladle, right?”

Blythe looked wet and slick—her womanly breasts gleaming. I felt angry at her for taking her top off.

“It looks like a crooked dick,” I said. The pool was a bee cemetery. I scooped two up and threw them out.

“I don’t even really know what a ladle looks like,” I added.

I could hear all the neighborhood dogs talking to each other. A bee might have been marching down my arm. Something tickled.

“You know what a crooked dick looks like?” Blythe said. Her face was large, or maybe it was the moon.

“Not exactly,” I said, trying not to let my eyes get caught on her nipples, “but I’ve seen them, and they all have different shapes.”

True. I had a subscription to Playgirl. My mother had given it to me for Christmas instead of a new bike. Once she’d found a beat-up copy of The Happy Hooker under my pillow. I’d stolen it from a garage sale. When I came home from school, I found it laid out on my dresser next to my hair brush and retainer case. Nothing seemed to freak her, as long as she had two martinis.

“So, like… whose?” Blythe asked.

“I haven’t seen that many dicks, I just have…” If I told her I had a subscription to Playgirl she’d tell Lila, and then God knew what would happen when I stopped being their friend. The water in the pool was getting cooler, the smell of new plastic making things worse. I hoped she hadn’t peed in the pool, though I would not put it past her.

“I have a lot of cousins,” I said.

She smiled at me so brightly then, she almost looked pretty. She squealed, half laugh, half death cry. She said she was getting cold—hey, what a great idea, let’s bake oatmeal cookies.
Suddenly she said, “Could you imagine sucking one of those?”

“God, no,” I said, fast and soft. Her eyes looked back at me big, full of thought. She moved in.

“What do you imagine they taste like?” I knew better than to speak.

“Corn on the cob,” she whispered into my ear, spitting, “with a bit of salt.”

This was not happy news. I knew that violin prodigies lived exotic lives, they were much older than other teenagers. They traveled to Europe.

I imagined Blythe kneeling in front of an audience, her mouth open like a baby bird.

“I’m not ever going to do that,” I said. It sounded fake, as if I were acting in a play.

Blythe moved to the far side of the pool. The moving water sounded smooth. She kept still, cupping her chin in her hands. I wondered if our friendship was done. Her nose was cartoonishly off-kilter, as if a person had sculpted the middle of her face blindfolded. She practiced three hours a day after school, was going to be on CD covers wearing velvet dresses. She was going to be rich. She already knew everything that was going to happen.

(originally published in Damn Sure Right, Press 53

User Profile for the Recently Bereaved

by Jessica Cavero | Jan 11, 2021 | flash fiction

I’m looking for

the way it feels to stand behind doors sliding shut on a train to Ikebukuro and you bow goodbye to me from the platform and I bow to you. I am on my way to that monster cafe we loved, where the slippers they gave us were fuzzy and green with small yellow talons, and you looked like a child come out of a storybook then, balancing on tiptoe, but sitting across from me at the table, you were just a man. The root beer floats had rubber eyeballs popped on the straws. One eye, blue and mean, caught between your teeth.

The way to win me over is

the stationary shop, let’s wait out the rain, you said, our tongues sweet with vanilla-rum. I picked up memo pads with smiling cats on the pages. Happy Birthday, Congratulations. You bought gel pens of varying line thickness, traced my profile on a sheet of newsprint, but only the outside of me and said this is Contour. When I stared at the space like my body was a house I’d just moved into, wondering how you would fill it, you shook your head.   

The highlight of my day is usually

lunchtime, looking out my office window. A woman walks her dalmatian past the maple trees and sometimes she will take her dog’s paws, lift him up. They dance on the sidewalk like that, for one full minute, and when the dog tires of the two-step, it rolls in the grass, belly up. Old style, you used to call it, putting your hands on my waist to teach me.

A random fact I love is

Hachiko’s memorial outside Shibuya Station. Now it’s a place where tourists line up for pictures, touching his bronze paws, or where drunk salarymen congregate half-asleep at dawn. But every day for nine years and nine months, exactly at the train’s moment of arrival, he waited for his person, even in death. 

I know the best spot in town for

weeping. It’s at the bus terminal in Shinjuku, best if I’m crouched between the lockers and payphone, too drunk to care if the palm reader asking for my hand is a fraud. What are heartlines? What is a life? My palms are exposed and creased with dirt. I offer them up, and the palm reader tells me you are alone in this country, as if it’s a revelation.

Favorite holiday tradition

Tiny Gracie, she is called. The cake topper for my sister’s 10th birthday is a smiling wax girl in a blue dress. After I sing Feliz Cumpleaños a ti over Facetime, my sister balances Tiny Gracie on the kitchen island, sets her on a paper plate raft and her small hands are the waves and the waves hold both of us.

Go-to karaoke song

Name anything by The Cure and I will sing it for you. I will sing Pictures of You. I will sing you were bigger and brighter and wider than snow.

I’ll fall for you if

you lead me through the rooms of your house when the power goes out, my hand in yours. If we take wide-slow steps like we are deep sea divers learning how to walk. If I cannot see your face. If you say, baby, say everything is fine.

My most irrational fear

is that it won’t be illness that gets us in the end. It will be a mouth opening deep in the earth with teeth jutting from the base of its throat, and you falling in, quick and brutal.

The one thing I’d love to know about you is

how you get through the worst of it. How do you not keep the TV on through the night, so the brush of static is like a hand in your hair, and it is close enough for you to call it a haunting? And how do you not look for signs in every winged creature? The praying mantis that sticks to your windshield as you drive too fast on the interstate back home. The dragonfly that lands on your chest pocket like a new button, stays there for hours. Tell me. How you love the world so much, even when it breaks your heart.

I’m convinced that

my sister was right when she said to speak to yourself like you would speak to a friend. I was wrong about my contour. My body was not a house. It was a landscape in winter but light existed in me too.

All that I ask is that you

teach me how to draw, not like the Italian masters, but like a child. I am not trying to make a beautiful thing yet. I want the grit of vine charcoal under my nails. I want the formless sweep of many lines on top of each other, the rise and fall of shapes like breath, yours, mine. Here, alive.