by Pamela Painter | May 25, 2020 | micro
He hands me a place card, high rag-content, from our glittering table with someone else’s name in calligraphy so elegant I can’t read it without my glasses, and he says, “Pretend this is a hotel room-key for two nights.” He curls my hand around it. We are in a too-red, too-green banquet room for the club’s annual Christmas party, surrounded by too many blistering poinsettias, which I recall are poisonous for cats. A string quartet, thoughtfully in black, is sweltering near a fake open fire, playing soporifically muted Christmas chestnuts. He is a neighbor from two streets over, our children have known each other since their same mean, pre-kindergarten play group, and his law firm is my husband’s fierce competitor. I am wearing my too-red dress with the low-cut back. He is wearing Drakkar Noir—everywhere. I step in very close to him to whisper, “Well, I would have to know time and place, place being a suite in a four-star hotel, time being when we are both going to the same conference, or board meeting, and who brings the wine, or should it be champagne, and thankfully condoms and pills are no longer a question, but does he mind that I always travel with a reading light, and I do wear teeth guards, and does he snore, because I do, I do snore, and…” He unfurls my hand from around the place card. He takes it back.
by Veronica Klash | May 20, 2020 | news
Top 5 Stories that Will Break You & Top 5 Stories that Will Repair You
The magic of flash can be summed up in one word—feeling. Good flash will inevitably and unequivocally make you feel. Whether the emotion generated is despair or delight is not the point; it’s the resonance achieved in such a small space that is true enchantment. The lists below are not exhaustive or objective (or in any particular order) though I do hope they spur discussion and addition.
Top 5 Stories that Will Break You
- Roe Soup Dance by Tammy Heejae Lee
Lee carefully illustrates how distance can be measured not only in miles and years but also in sips of soup. Though the story only encompasses a few hours (at most), we are rewarded with the fine points of not one life, but two. Lee immerses the reader in significant details which forge a scene so vivid, so charged with subtext, that even morsels of dialogue feel like a feast.
It’s rare to see scarcity translated into a lush tone. Park spends no time in the past, giving the reader no footholds for what came before this sliver. Yet, the narrator’s feelings are not obscured. They are highlighted against a backdrop of decaying nature. The singular imagery thread pulls sentences and paragraphs together—focused and tight. This creates a narrow labyrinth that leads the reader toward an inescapable end.
Choosing to hang a story’s conceit on a cultural reference is a risky endeavor. And one that pays off in this literary equivalent of a Seinfeld episode—about nothing. Tanaka weaves Murakami themes throughout to underline Susan’s loss. How does one mourn the life they thought they’d have? How do they mourn it in someone else’s home? The answers’ banality is what gives this piece its tragic, relatable core.
- Vows by David Byron Queen
This piece mines the mundane moments for heartbreak. This isn’t the big fight where someone asks for a divorce. This is stretched unraveling, illustrated in anaphora, which raises tension and keeps an energetic pace. Momentum is achieved by placing the bulk of the narrative in a single paragraph. With each sentence, the reader discovers a new transgression and additional action-centered characterization. We know these people. We are these people.
A single-sentence stream unites scattered instructions into a powerful narrative. Forsaking the period in favor of semi-colons and question marks is symbolic of a relentless, unpredictable existence. The voice shifts between cold to berating and back again, with a dissonant repeating phrase. Kincaid communicates a passage of time in the changes that phrase undergoes. Two interjections (in italics) reveal a complete character that the reader can’t help but love.
Top 5 Stories that Will Repair You
- Girls of the Arboretum by Brianne M. Kohl
It’s a treat to get lost in poetic language and gossamer imagery. It’s a magnificent treat when those two elements carry the reader—buoyant and excited—through an actual plot. Kohl molds her words with beauty, but not merely for beauty’s sake. She designs a fantastical world where the flora is more akin to fauna, and a gruesome end doesn’t feel like violence. It feels like justice. Poetic justice.
Though ‘LOL’ is as ubiquitous in typed conversation as ‘like’ is in verbal communication, how often does a story sincerely make you laugh out loud? An honest voice and informal language aid the humor of this piece. As the narrator’s thoughts spiral, so does the sense of urgency. It’s clear that each word is chosen deliberately to achieve that goal. There’s an indulgence here, a life within hyperbole.
It’s an incredible feat of storytelling to create a stunning ending, especially when the entire plot is laid out in the first sentence. Three-dimensional characters are realized here through the skillful placement of hints instead of backstory. Fuentes employs the sharp and alluring edges of nature to frame a simple narrative. She elevates a straightforward conversation, as well as the resulting action, to a monument of epic exploration.
Dotted with detail, this piece examines love with a gentle, comforting touch. The repetition of “If I were…” gives the reader an easy way out, maybe none of it is real, maybe it’s all hypothetical. The tension and conflict are generated through expectation instead of drama. And rather than moving forward in the plot, Ulrich creates a sense that we’re sinking into it, ensconced in smiling.
Valentine spotlights a tender mother-daughter interaction. The two women come alive through specific and sensory prose. In a stream of consciousness paragraph, the reader is granted access to an intimate, bordering on religious moment. The communion is so intense you almost feel as if you shouldn’t be allowed to experience these thoughts; they’re too personal, too real. But of course, that’s exactly what makes them captivating and sublime.
by Matt Bell | May 18, 2020 | micro
Because the princess was dying of love for the suitor, the suitor who was so athletic and so strong, the great suitor who despite the princess’s would not love her back—because when he spurned her, she determined to kill herself—
No. No she did not. She would never kill herself again, not for this suitor or any other.
1.
Because after her husband died writhing in his poisoned robe, she did not cry at what she had done, or if she did cry it was not enough for us, or if it was enough then still we fumed when she refused to take her own life. I was tricked, the older said, blaming not herself but the dying centaur who gave her the poison, that husband-shot beast who told her it was a salve made to guarantee not death but monogamy. After all, how many times had her husband cheated, how many children had he sired by other women, by women and nymphs, dryads and witches, other creatures of the forests and marshes?
Her anger was righteous, her violence accidental—and if now her husband were dead by her hand, the older said, then surely she was not doomed but set free.
2.
Because after the virgin prince firmly explained his refusal to sleep with the younger, he expected her to die of lust and longing, as all others had—but instead she simply took no further notice of him, spending her days as she always had: at her loom or upon her harp, or else smashing her mallet against loud-clacking croquet balls, her blows sending the bright orbs spinning across the prince’s father’s vast palace lawns. How angry the prince was at her refusal to be affected by him, how in his anger he followed her everywhere, begging her to die, whining out his reasons! Hadn’t her heart been broken? Didn’t she wish to put pen to paper, to write out a false accusation against him, then kill herself, so that their story might be fulfilled, so that when the prince’s father came home the prince would be exiled for crimes of passion never committed?
Pen to paper, the prince cried, then poison to lips! I demand it!
The prince believed he deserved a tragedy, but the younger didn’t care, didn’t listen. She was done listening to him and to all men like him, done dying for them too. In those days, there was so much fresh sunlight to feel upon her skin, so much bright birdsong to hear and sweet breeze to smell, so many harp chords she wanted to perfect, and always there was so much croquet to play, so much satisfaction in smacking mallet against ball, the satisfying thwack of the mallet so much like how she imagined it might sound when at last she tired of the prince’s whining, when finally she took her tool to his crying skull.
3.
Because surely, the king thought, his daughter would understand they needed the north wind to cease its blowing. And anyway, aren’t all a king’s children the king’s possession, shouldn’t the king spend from his treasures how he wishes? And so the king promised the younger sweet marriage, and so she dutifully she arrived arrayed in her wedding dress—how beautiful she was, how perfectly she made the picture of Greek girlhood.
The fool, the fool! Too young to marry, she should have known better—but wasn’t she also too young to die?
What girl expects her father to tie her to the altar, to approach her with bloody blade and burning pitch to put her to the sacrifice?
What girl but a girl in tales.
In one telling, the king killed the younger, the north wind ceased to blow, the king’s fleet sailed off to ten years of failure followed by a single night of victorious battle. But in our tale, the tale told right for this book, the younger escaped, saving her life and dooming her father’s fleet. Perhaps she took the north wind’s place, sinking the fleet herself; perhaps she transformed, becoming an albatross flying overhead, ill omen dodging the arrows of men. Or else, in my favorite of the possible tellings, she had invited her older to attend her false wedding, and thus it was the older’s army who saved her, all the brave women who rode beside her, who had named the older daughter their Achilles, who called themselves her Myrmidons, a company of great soldiers who fought for no man or king, only women, only queens.
4.
Because the older’s husband died so bravely, the gods that in those days still were reluctantly decreed he could visit his wife one more time. Soon he returned to the living lands to haunt the older’s house, the house that was now only hers, the husband’s shade clattering her dishes, unfolding her laundry, making himself known by tapping spectral code against her bright-washed walls, by knocking askew the paintings hung in her hallway. Everywhere the older roamed, she wore the mourning clothes, black on black; but nowhere did she acknowledge her husband’s return, no matter what trouble he made for her.
After the widow began to court other suitors, the dead soldier manifested with new anger, breaking heirloom furniture, shaking the high bed in which he had once slept, where now his supposedly mourning wife dreamed sweet dreams without him, about another. Due back in the underworld on the third day, he manifested fully to demand she kill herself, so that he wouldn’t be lonely in the land of the dead—and when she refused, claiming that she had loved him in one life, all the life she had promised to him, what could he do but leave her be, to watch her strip off her mourning clothes and begin to live again, to live on as he could not?
5.
Because he said they were not married. Because he said he could leave at any time. Because Zeus had bade him to go, or else Jupiter, or else some other god who was always the same god, the god of all men who preferred questing to husbandry. The older suffered his excuses, then made her own complaint: had she not given him all of herself, her household, her kingdom? What now was she to do in his absence? Was he to become a hero, she a mere spinster abandoned, some crone aged and unloved, not married enough to ever even become a widow, even if he came home carried upon his shield?
In another story, he said, I sailed upon my ship while you stayed here in your palace. And by night I looked back at this mighty city, and saw at its heart a great column of flame burning. Then I knew you had killed yourself, that it was your funeral pyre I witnessed, for you knew I would not come back, for you would not live without me.
But this is not that story, said the older, shaking her head, waving away his suggestions of death. What did Zeus ever do for me, the older said, that I could not do for myself? Was it Jupiter who gave me my crown, my kingdom, my many warrior-women? Am I not a queen all my own, great giver of gifts, grave avenger of slights? Am I not ruler of all the domain I can see from my high castle, a kingdom of no more men, not now or ever again?
Before the night was through, the disloyal suitor was sentenced to banishment and exile, his armor stripped, his sword and shield broken, his men put to the spear. So what, so what, the older cried, as in her harbor the suitor’s ships burned, so what do I care if this means Zeus is denied a hero, if this means Jupiter has no champion, if this means no more great men of Greece land on no more foreign shores?
by Cathy Ulrich | May 13, 2020 | interview
Cathy Ulrich’s story collection, Ghosts of You, published by Okay Donkey Press, hums with the chatter of forgotten women. Ulrich creates a creeping resonance through the details that make these characters rise above their deaths, their fabricated plot devices to dazzle us with their humanity. Ulrich uses the magic of language, her skill with repetition to awake our empathy.
Dean: I’ve read several of these stories
online in literary journals and magazines, but now that they’re collected, I
didn’t realize you had written so many! What was the first story you wrote? Was
it the first one that was published? What inspired you to keep coming back to
this theme and subject matter? When did you start to think that maybe this
would be a book?
Ulrich: The
first story is the first in the collection, “Being the Murdered Girl.” It was
written at least a year before the second was written and, yes, the first one
published! (It was in the lovely Crab Fat Magazine in – don’t hold me to this,
but I think 2015?)
It
wasn’t written intended to be anything more than a stand-alone story, and I
actually didn’t think about it for a while after it was published, until I read
an article about Joan Vollmer (she was married to William S. Burroughs, he shot
her in the face) and was inspired to write the second story, “Being the
Murdered Wife.”
It
wasn’t until the third story, “Being the Murdered Lover” that I realized this
was going to be a series (like the “Japan” stories), and that they were all
going to have the same title and opening sentence and point of view.
What
inspires me to keep coming back to this theme and subject matter is, often, rage. I had never even heard of Joan Vollmer before I read this article,
but everyone has heard of Burroughs! She was completely erased in service of
his legacy — and that happens a lot, I think. So I will see something in the
news or in fiction about a woman being erased, and it will “inspire” me.
I never
really thought it would be a book until it became a book! It’s kind of
unbelievable for me.
Dean: Your readers have been asking when you’d
have a book out for a while now, and then we were happily surprised when you
announced you were publishing a collection of your “Murdered Girls” stories
with Okay Donkey. This is there first
full-length publication. How did all of this transpire?
Ulrich: I
was incredibly lucky — the editors at Okay Donkey reached out to me and said
they were interested in starting a press and wanted their first publication to
be a chapbook of the Murdered Ladies series. It turned out, though, that I had
written about twice as many pieces (at that point!) as they realized, so it ended
up being a full-length collection instead of a chapbook!
I’m just
so grateful that this is something they wanted to do. I hope it will be just
the beginning of a great publishing career for them!
Dean: When writing this series, were you ever
worried about writing too close to a trope?
Ulrich: Actually,
that’s not something that really crossed my mind! Tropes are tropes for a
reason — there
are a finite number of stories in the world. What isn’t finite is the ways
people tell them. I have my own way of telling stories that I think, especially
in this case, where I’m kind of subverting tropes, that works really well for what I’m doing.
Dean: How did you create such specific details
for each woman, each side character? The concept of each story may be the same,
but each character is idiosyncratic, each story is different because of your
attention to detail! How many of these details were in the original drafts? How
many of them were found during revision?
Ulrich: That’s
not really something I think about either, actually. The characters are with me
from the moment I start writing their story, so the details kind of come along
naturally. There might be some finessing in the end, but the characters are there from the beginning and so
are the details that make them real.
I will admit there are a few Murdered Ladies stories that have been put aside because I lost the character or couldn’t create her completely — I think this is because I didn’t have enough feeling for the character I was writing to make them real. Hopefully, someday I will be able to come back to those stories and set the characters free.
Dean: Do you think death reveals us, shows the
world who we are? Or are we always a mystery?
Ulrich: Oh,
absolutely death makes us even more mysterious — while I’m here, now, I can maybe correct some assumptions that
people might make about me, or do something that makes people think, “oh, that’s
what she’s like.” Once I’m dead, I
haven’t got any say anymore in how people see me. I will be, like the
characters in these stories, recreated the way people need for me to be
recreated.
I think
it’s true of every death, like you see in obituaries “loved by all who knew
her,” but how often is that really true? I’ll bet some people despised her. I’ll bet some
people saw her coming and made their excuses and left. But her family wants to
remember as beloved. And so they do.
But it’s
especially true of murder victims, because so many people outside of family become
“invested” in their death. They need to create a story for themselves to
understand what happened, or to feel like they understand.
A friend
of mine was murdered when I worked at the local newspaper, and the reporters
all had their theories on what he had done to deserve it. They needed to do that for themselves, they needed
to talk about his murder like he had somehow caused it, somehow deserved it.
Because if a murder victim isn’t somehow complicit in their own death, then
couldn’t any of us be killed?
At any
rate, I had to tell a lot of people to shut the hell up about my dead friend
when I was around! (Ha!)
Dean: Another trope you’ve managed to subvert
is that most of the murders are never solved. What intrigued you about not
solving the murders? Does this say something about our larger world? The way
women are treated by society, our American culture?
Ulrich: In
the real world, a lot of murders go unsolved! And the truth is, I just didn’t
want to focus on that. I think some of the murders in the Murdered Ladies do get solved (as a matter of
fact, one of the stories was based on a local murder and, though I say in the
story “your killer is never found,” about eight months after the story was
published, in real life, he was! I am
so relieved he won’t be able to hurt anyone else), but I didn’t want that to be
the focus of these stories. That would make them plot-driven things, focused on
the crime-solving and detecting. For me, I’d prefer to keep my focus on the
people: the victims and the survivors.
I think,
for our culture, there is something inherently comforting in crime stories:
something bad happens, it gets investigated, the bad guy gets caught. The day
is saved! That’s not how it really works, and it certainly doesn’t heal
anyone’s wounds, but it is comforting to think of a world where bad guys never
get away with the things they’ve done.
Dean: I’ll admit that when I first started
reading this book, I had nightmares about murdered women. Once I was the
murderer myself. I could only read it during the day from that point on. Were
you able to separate your own self from these women while you were writing
these stories? Did the empathetic act of creating these characters cause any
difficulties for you?
Ulrich: Oh,
gosh, I’m so sorry you had nightmares! For me, by keeping the focus on what
these women were and
what they have become rather than
writing about what was done to them has definitely kept me from getting too
upset by the subject matter.
That
said, I think there is a piece of me in all of these women. But there is a piece of me
in all the survivors too.
Dean: Do you think you’re done writing about
these women? Are there other murdered women whose stories need to be told?
Ulrich: I
actually wrote two new Murdered Ladies stories in the last couple of weeks, so
I’m definitely not done! There will always be women whose stories need to be
told, and I don’t think this series has an ending point.
Dean: This quote comes from the last story in
the book. “They will say girls like you. They
will say and they will say girls like you.”
Why do we blame victims? Why do we create these myths? Do they ever help
anyone?
Ulrich: I
kind of touched on this when I talked about my experience in the newsroom —
people need for victims to be somehow guilty so that they can feel safer. If a victim is somehow to
blame for their own death, that means that, yes, the rest of us will be safe.
And I think, logically, most people know that it isn’t true, that it isn’t
right, but there are some people who are so eager for the world to make sense
in the most narrow, limited way, that they hope and want it to be.
And, no,
I don’t think it helps anyone, least of all the people who are trying to
protect themselves by thinking like this.
Dean: When the readers turn the last page,
what do you hope they will feel?
Ulrich: Like
reading it again? Ha, ha.
But
seriously, I just hope they will feel something. Good books always make you feel something, even if it’s maybe not what the writer intended.
Dean: You have a large presence on Twitter,
especially with reading, sharing, and supporting hundreds of writers. How do
you balance your non-writing life with your writing and your generous support
of the writing community? Thank you, by the way!
Ulrich: I’m very lucky that I have a lot of down time for reading and sharing writing. I love to read and I’m grateful for all the opportunities I have to read and share the amazing work that is being published! I think it’s a really important and great thing if someone’s work means something to you: TELL THEM. A lot of people, and writers especially, can feel really worthless and hurt inside, and if they think no one cares about something they’ve worked so hard on, that can be really terrible. So I want people to know that their work has meant something to me, that they have meant something to me. And I hope by sharing that work, it will mean something to someone else too.
Dean: What are you working on now?
Ulrich: I have a lot of different series going, the “Japan” series, the “Astronaut Love Stories” series, and my newest “Girl Detective in the multiverse” series, which needs a much shorter name. So I’ve always got some project or another going for writing.
Plus, I’m busy with my journal, Milk Candy Review, and with Atlas and Alice and Parentheses, seeking out more amazing writing to share with the world!
by Tara Isabel Zambrano | May 11, 2020 | micro
Living so closely
When the girl falls off a cliff, a few people hear a shriek, see a black dot with flailing arms. Thereafter, fear colors their ohs and ahs, as they talk about her, the color of her dress, her hair, even her eyes, aimlessly staring at the fogged-up windowpane in front of them, their hands pressed on their chests until their breathing is even. Afterward, they sit quiet like a rock in a valley, while her red scarf stuck on a crumbling log in the dark-snuffed creek, recedes like a worn-out heart.
Off season
Every Fall, for a night, he comes to my bed, his neckline smelling of dirt, bug sap, roots stuck on his tongue. Together we milk the night, grind against the jawline of the moon, his breath a hot wire extended across the length of my body, a hint of early love. Through the dark, life keeps bleeding through. Come morning, I scrub his body, place him under a fallen trunk where mushrooms and yearning spore. When the ache gets too big to live, I lean in, curl to the earth’s breathing while the sunlight whipped to a peak, falls and falls.
Larger things
It’s an ordinary night when the earth feels juvenile, skips hours, splinters on its surface. It grinds its arctic teeth, wobbles in and out of its orbit, as if it has given up waiting for answers. It’s only a few billion years old, fossils peeping from its underbelly. She rests her head against the periphery of unfamiliar. The stars down and above, shoot aimlessly in the leather of night, looping into themselves like spun sugar, sucked into their gravity. Light years pass by. When the solar system opens its jaw, the moons and the oceans fall out, dimpling the dark, each planet a snuffed-out flame, with nothing to give.
Cosmic eyes
The space station is a cold, white skeleton in the abyss. The astronaut breathes between manuals, operating instructions, muscular atrophy and fluid shift. Samples of moon dust, pieces of meteorites. He imagines his wife standing next to their toddler, pointing to the sky. The code written inside each of them, bodies, dust, rocks, even gravity. Cells from his bone loss floating in the thermosphere, each time less and less of him makes it to home as if the dark is keeping a piece of him, staring at it.
by Cathy Ulrich | May 7, 2020 | flash fiction
The girl detective has just turned fourteen. She will be kidnapped a week before her fifteenth birthday, ice cream in the freezer, balloons wilting on the dining room table, birthday cake gone stiff and dry. The housekeeper will sweep up ashes from the girl detective’s father’s cigars, she will run the dishwasher, do the laundry, leave meals out on the table that grow cold while the girl detective’s parents wait for a ransom call that never comes. The housekeeper will keep the house fresh with opened windows and lemon polish, she will find blank pieces of paper hidden in places she thought she had already checked, turn them over in her hands, over and over, crumple them up and throw them away.
The girl detective, at her fourteenth birthday, has 19,000 followers on Instagram. She shows them pictures of the magnifying glass her parents gave her, what do you want with a thing like that, her mother wondered, poured herself a glass of red wine. The girl detective’s mother doesn’t have as refined a palate as her husband when it comes to wine; she tells the housekeeper to keep something nice on hand for guests, drinks from the same cheap bottles she did when she was young.
The girl detective was holding her magnifying glass above her hand, admiring the wrinkles and hairs and tiny scratches of her skin, she was thinking everything is so much closer now, and her father said, it’s time to start thinking about growing up.
When the girl detective was small, there was a nanny. The girl detective doesn’t remember the nanny, but there she is in the family albums, standing in the background at the girl detective’s birthday parties, one, two, three.
The nanny is smiling in the photographs and the girl detective is smiling and the party guest and her parents are smiling. The girl detective thinks everyone was so happy then.
The girl detective doesn’t recognize anyone in the family albums except her mother and father. Even the little girl in the photos, she thinks, was that me? Was that really me?
The girl detective, sometimes, asks her mother things, like what happened to the nanny, who is this in the photo, can we get some ice cream?
The girl detective’s father goes on business trips from time to time, that’s what she’s heard her mother tell people, he goes on business trips from time to time. The house is always quieter and somehow heavier without him. The girl detective and her mother leave his place empty at the dinner table, scrape their forks across their plates.
What happened to the nanny? the girl detective asks.
I don’t remember, her mother says. I don’t know.
At her fourteenth birthday, the girl detective shares a video with her Instagram followers. She is writing a message with invisible ink.
It’s just lemon juice, she says. It’s not hard. It’s science.
She shows her followers how heat brings the message forth, browning her words into reality.
I’m here, the girl detective writes. She tears off scrap of paper after scrap of paper.
I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.
by Jen Michalski | May 2, 2020 | flash fiction
The meteor fell from the sky and landed in the yard of the couple. It charred the grass and flattened the grill and sent the soccer ball whining until it was flaccid. It pulsed, a white and orange marbled planet, stoic, propelling waves of heat through the neighborhood, wilting the tulips next door, melting the tires of a Toyota RAV4. The woman came out of the house, drawn to the murmurous sphere, its undulating marble lava moving in its core. She walked across the warm soot, embers stinging her face, the waves becoming hotter and hotter. The man came out of the house.
We have to leave. He pulled at her synthetic shirt, which had begun to melt to her skin. The whole neighborhood has to evacuate.
I want to stay. She did not look at him. I think I am in love.
With the meteor? He squinted his eyes at the white-hot light, pulling at her arms. Are you crazy?
Don’t you feel the enveloping warmth of its heart? She struggled to free herself from his grasp. Don’t you understand the radiance of its mind?
It’s going to kill you. He hooked her by the arms and began to drag her away. You’ll thank me later.
The fire department came. Fire trucks from several municipalities joined in, and the firemen knocked down fences and sawed down trees until they could surround the burning rock with their hoses. They sprayed the water, and steam filled the air, burning the neighborhood squirrels and raccoons. The powerful streams of water bounced off the meteor and pelted the aluminum siding of the houses, stripped paint off the cars.
Several times, particularly in the thick steam, the woman escaped the man and secretly made her way back to the meteor. The entire neighborhood waited in the gymnasium of the nearby high school except for the emergency response units and the man and the woman, who, without protective clothing, were badly burned. The woman was blind in one eye, and began to lose sight in the other, but with her arms in front of her, she felt her way again and again to the now-cooling mass.
Several hours later the meteor was the temperature of bath water. The neighborhood was ruined. The man urged the woman to go to the hospital.
I’ll wear my scars as proof of my love. She stood on the warped frame of their patio door. The attached deck had long since burned away, and she looked strange, up there in space.
Weeks later, the community association met again in the gymnasium. They decided to move the meteor to a vacant field outside the neighborhood, behind a billboard that advertised DNA testing. Everyone voted in favor except for the woman, who wanted the meteor to remain in their yard.
My love for the meteor will never die, she insisted.
The man forgave the woman. After all, the meteor landed in their yard, without provocation. In its own way, he supposed, it could be considered beautiful and pure. The chances of another meteor falling in their yard were incredibly remote. As she lay in bed recuperating from her injuries, he knew she would come to her senses, see the damage the meteor had caused.
Things got better. The man brought the woman chicken soup and diet 7-Up. They watched movies on Netflix in bed. Eventually the woman got well enough that she could sit on the couch, and they watched Netflix there. Sometimes they even held hands. It rained in the spring and the earth absorbed those tears. The dirt expanded and filled the depression of the meteor. Grass grew over it. The neighborhood slowly recovered. Squirrels ran along the newly constructed fences. Other things returned.
When the woman became well enough to leave the house, the man asked her where she wanted to go.
To the meteor, she answered. And she left.
The man brought chicken soup and diet 7-Up to the field behind the billboard, but the woman refused them. She sat and leaned against the hard gray orb, trying to wrap her arms around it. At night, the man brought blankets to keep her warm, and a parka when it began to snow. Still, the woman grew thin. Her hair got matted. She looked homeless. The man could not understand why the woman he loved did not love him, was killing herself for a meteor.
He filed for divorce. The woman did not return, and he stopped visiting her. He heard that maybe she had taken ill, or died, but he kept himself from checking. He stayed in the house. After an extensive interview process, a new woman came to live with him. She seemed to have no interest in meteors or any other types of heavenly bodies. They watched Netflix on the couch. Things returned to normal.
One night a few years later, another meteor fell from the sky and landed in the yard of the couple. It charred the grass and flattened the grill and sent the soccer ball whining until it was flaccid. It pulsed, a white and orange marbled planet, stoic, propelling waves of heat through the neighborhood, wilting the tulips next door, melting the tires of a Toyota Prius. The man came out of the house, drawn to the murmurous sphere, its undulating marble lava moving in its core. He walked across the warm soot, embers stinging his face, the waves becoming hotter and hotter. The new woman came out of the house.
We have to leave. She pulled at his synthetic shirt, which had begun to melt. The whole neighborhood has to evacuate.
I want to stay. He did not look at her.
Originally published in The Rupture
Photo by Alan Labisch on Unsplash
by Dan Chaon | May 2, 2020 | flash fiction
Alas, behind the garage where the trash cans are, hunched and weeping, your cousin Glenna says she is pregnant and you are the only one she can tell.
You are ten–a boy–and she is fourteen; the two of you smoking grass.
“It’s going to affect your little balls,” she’d said once. “You won’t be able to have babies.”
You let her smoke this one for free, the two of you passing it back and forth. Usually, there‘s a charge, even for relatives. Two or three dollars for a joint as long and skinny as a nail–and you go to the playgrounds and basketball courts and video game arcades and the county fair–which is where you once made more money than you could comfortably keep in your pocket, a wad of bills thicker than your fist.
And you take the money back to your cousin Keith–who is Glenna’s twin brother who she can’t stand most of the time–and he gives you more of the joints to sell, which are like thin little cocoons that you keep in your pocket.
And Keith has always said that he thinks Glenna will die before she is twenty. He doesn’t want her to die, but he still thinks she will.
And Glenna saying that the guy is twenty years old and he already has a girlfriend who is seventeen and dropped out of high school and who plans to kick the shit out of Glenna if she ever finds her.
And you say, “How do you know for sure?” You watch as the joint turns to ash, millimeter by millimeter. “Unless your stomach starts stretching out or whatever.”
“Do you know what a period is?” –she asks.
You think of first grade. You think of learning how to write sentences. How beautiful and remarkable it was to learn the punctuation marks. It had made you so happy to make that dot at the end. You darkened it and darkened it with your pencil, until you broke right through the paper onto the blonde formica of your desk.
“Sure–I know,” you say–although you know you don’t. But you will know enough–soon enough–and this crying and this whitewashed garage wall and these black bags full of your dad’s beer cans are part of what you will know–and you sit down cross-legged and she wants you to press your palms against her palms–and so you do. The only comfort in life is going on with it.
Originally published in wigleaf
by Sarah Freligh | May 2, 2020 | micro
We smoke because the nuns say we shouldn’t—he-man Marlboros or Salems, slender and meadow fresh, over cups of thin coffee at the Bridge Diner. We fill an ashtray in an hour easy while Ruby the waitress marries ketchups and tells us horror stories about how her first labor went on for fifty-two hours until her boy was yanked out of her butt first and now she has this theory that kids who come out like that got their brains in their asses from Day One. She says we’re smart to give our babies away to some Barbie and Ken couple with a house and a yard with real grass and a swing set, and we nod like we agree with her and smoke some more.
Nights we huddle up under the bathroom window in the Mercy Home for Unwed Mothers and blow smoke at the stained sky while we swap stories about our babies doing handstands on our bladders, playing volleyball with our hearts, how our sons will be presidents or astronauts, and our daughters will be beautiful and chaste, and because we know our babies are not ours at all, we talk about everything and nothing while we watch a moth bang up against the light and smoke some more.
Originally published in Sad Math (Moon City Press 2015)
by Kathy Fish | May 2, 2020 | flash fiction
Their father drank Hamm’s when he finished his shift. After supper, on good days, he’d grab the boys and hang them upside down by their ankles and they’d scream and flail their arms and when he put them down, they’d ask him to do it again. He smelled of beer and hot metal and sweat. He told funny stories about the men he worked with who were not nearly as smart as he was. He was a toolmaker and he could eyeball to one-sixteenth of an inch.
Neal was the oldest and he and his father worshipped the Cubs. Neal had baseball cards he kept in a shoebox, but the Ernie Banks he kept pressed between the pages of his catechism. If his brothers begged enough, he’d take it out and show it to them. They waited for the day, the really good day, they could ask their father to take them to Chicago for a game.
In the evenings they watched Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom and National Geographic and The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. They had a full set of Funk and Wagnall’s encyclopedias their father had bought from a door-to-door salesman. They owned a Bible kept always in a box in the parents’ closet. They turned the thin, gilt-edged pages with just-washed hands. They loved the pictures and, most of all, loved the Pietas. They loved the grown, dead Jesus draped over Mother Mary’s lap, his pierced ribs, his crown of thorns, the purple lids of his eyes.
They played church and Neal was the priest. He stuffed Wonder Bread into their mouths and said, “The Body of Christ,” and they gagged and washed it down with grape Kool-Aid from Dixie Cups for the blood.
Summers they heard train whistles and the factory whistles and the rustle and squeak of corn growing in the fields outside of town. They heard tornado sirens, blaring from all directions, thrumming inside their brown chests and they stood out on the front porch and scanned the yellow sky for funnel clouds. They heard police sirens and ambulance sirens and made the sign of the cross. If the sirens were close, they ran to see where they stopped.
Once they watched Mrs. Ernst rolled out of her house on a stretcher, her face dark and shriveled like the shrunken heads on National Geographic. They drew pictures of her and wrote, “What, me worry?” underneath and tacked them to their walls. Their mother tore down the pictures and when their father came home he called them little bastards and Neal got the belt. They ran and hid under the porch and pressed their fists over their ears.
Every day at three-thirty they heard the Deere whistle and got lost quick because their father would round the corner of Leland Street and he didn’t want to see them until suppertime. He’d sit at the kitchen table with their mother and drink Hamm’s and tell stories and they would hear their mother laughing.
Sometimes he missed supper altogether and their mother sent them to bed early. They’d wake up later to the sound of him coming through the back door, the scratch of a chair across the kitchen floor, their mother’s sharp voice.
They held their breath. They closed their eyes, then opened them wide. They curled their toes. They rocked themselves. They shoved each other. They pressed their fists to their ears. Their stomachs hurt. They bit the tips of their fingers. They listened hard. They never cried.
And Neal would reach across the bed they shared and touch their backs. His voice in the dark, like the skirr of cicadas, talking about Ernie Banks and Wrigley Field and the Cubs until they fell back to sleep.
Originally published in Frigg Magazine
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