by Holly Pelesky | Mar 3, 2025 | flash fiction, publications
You can see the backdrop of my loneliness from the interstate. Today it’s an advertisement for the World’s Largest Truckstop, take exit 284. There were other messages before. I’m up here on our billboard’s platform, listening to my Discman, draped in the scratchy plaid blanket dad keeps in the trunk of our car in case of emergency. I could make this an emergency. But I won’t.
Dad has no idea what an emergency would entail here in the Midwest, he just has the vague notion that he should be prepared for it. We aren’t rural people, we’re suburban ones interloping. We know where to take our vacuum to be fixed, but we haven’t learned how to do anything ourselves. I’m from Columbus, then Pittsburg, then Denver.“We go where the money is,” dad says, meaning his. He takes whichever finance job will pay him the most. Mom and I are capitalism’s collateral damage.
The money now is in a cornfield in Iowa. We have no connection to this soil: it is only real estate to us. Dad rents it out to local farmers who grow crops I can see from up here—corn mostly, but there’s something in the far corner nearly out of eyeshot I’m not familiar with, maybe soybeans, judging from what I’ve heard some kids talk about at school. They talk in a language I can’t decipher, some strategic plotting of agriculture, of how to continue recovering from the flooding that happened around these parts a few years ago. The dirt here means something to them in a way I wish I could understand. I’ve never known land as home.
I seem to have a lot more time on my hands than the rest of the high school students. They’ve all got jobs or chores or 4-H. I’ve got the new Gin Blossoms CD and the latest issue of Billboard magazine. I bought a subscription for my dad as a Father’s Day present. A truly funny joke that went unappreciated. “It’s passive income, Jason!” He said, defending our I-80 eyesore. “Just like the land is.” Then he cleared his throat and launched into a lecture about how I should be creating my own revenue streams rather than making fun of his.
I hadn’t been making fun of the billboard, he’s just sensitive still from that time I had Alison over.“You live here?” She had said, even though she already knew where I lived, everyone did. “I can’t believe you have this sky trash erected.” She gestured needlessly toward the window, toward the giant proclamation that Abortion Stops a Beating Heart. “It’s super embarrassing,” I had said meekly. After she left, dad made sure to find me to tell me my friend was a real Lady Bird Johnson type. I had no idea what that meant except that I should believe it an insult. Turns out the first lady had promoted the Highway Beautification Act, limiting—among other blots on the landscape—billboards.
Alison is in art class with me, her mom’s the teacher. Art is my favorite class and every day I think I’ll come up with something witty and smart to say to Alison, but she always beats me to it. Mostly with snipes about the billboard. “I see you updated your yard’s visual pollution,” she said today. “From anti-women to pro-capitalism. So progressive.” The abortion sign had been papered over with Joe Camel. “Very cool of you to get all the zoo animals into nicotine.” She was so clever so quickly, I don’t know how she did it, but I wanted to teach her something just once, to know something before she did.
Alison paints, but not as well as Mrs. Thompson does. Mrs. Thompson thinks I have real talent for creating. She said that. She said, “I see students who like the idea of art and I see students who have something to say. You, Jason, have something to say.”
“Tell my dad that,” I mumbled under my breath, but she didn’t hear me. Not that I think she wanted to talk to him anyway.
When I got home from school, I pulled out my charcoal pencils, still riding high from Mrs. Thompson’s compliment. I sat down at the kitchen table and turned to a fresh page in my sketchbook. I began to shade the bottom of the clouds I saw yesterday from the billboard. All those different types of gray.
“Where’s Jason?” I heard dad holler from the other room. I adjusted my headphones and turned up the volume on “Follow You Down.”
“He’s in here fiddling with his pencils again,” mom yelled back from right behind me.
“Tell him to come in here.”
He wanted to show me the article he was reading, point out that the national average ACT score had risen a point from last year. “The average is still only 20.9. You’re gonna do better than that, aren’t you? I don’t know if I ever told you, but your old man got a 31.”
He had told me. He was very proud of his intelligence, his business acumen, his car, my mother’s commitment to dieting, everything, it seemed, but me.
Dad didn’t notice when I didn’t answer and slipped away from the house, into the field, back to the billboard I am always drifting toward. I climbed the ladder again, my footing sure by now. Up here, the cars look like toys. They are full of people going or leaving somewhere, and I have the thought that maybe the drivers and passengers are all just being played with. I put that same song back on and watch traffic, sure as always, the need to be anywhere else pulling people in all directions.
I used to construct stories about them but now I watch the sky cross over me. The shadows the clouds cast on the corn stalks—nearly full-grown now—are something I want to recreate on paper. I should repaper this billboard with a mural of something beautiful, something useful.
My music is loud but not too loud to hear the screech of a hard brake and the crushing of metal against metal. Then slammed doors and screams and I see a woman flailing her arms at a man twice her size—at least I think he looks much larger than her, but both of them look so small from here. I think for a second of climbing down. Alison would, I tell myself, she would be a witness for that woman to make sure she didn’t end up paying for damage she didn’t cause. But I feel too immense up here on my perch to be bothered with trivial details. That life is not mine, I think.
I wonder if there is a god, how lonely he must feel, with no one equal, everyone beneath him. If no one could ever understand me, I would have to make isolation a cure for loneliness rather than its curse. Mrs. Thompson had just finished telling that expression is the opposite of depression. I pull a utility knife from my back pocket, sharpen my pencil, press its tip against the billboard paper.
Dad punished me by forbidding me to go to school for a week. “People are putting the wrong ideas into your head!” he bellowed. He also took my bedroom door off its hinges, carried my mattress out to the garage. The only thing he didn’t take away from me was my Discman, which I had stashed inside my pillowcase.
When I returned to school, Mrs. Thompson stopped me first. “What you made was stunning,” she said. I was twisting a piece of paper in my hands, looking at the floor. “Just stunning,” she repeated, looking at me until I met her eyes. I think I’ll draw them next.
When I saw Alison, she smiled at me. No snarky comments whatsoever. She simply quoted, “the clash of ideas is the sound of freedom.”
by Katie ten Hagen | Feb 26, 2025 | contest winner, flash fiction, publications
My dad mowed the lawn every Saturday morning—weather permitting—for seventy-two years. Vacations were scheduled around it, plans turned down, brunches skipped, because that lawn wasn’t gonna mow itself. When his heart started acting up, and I said maybe he could think about getting someone else to do it, maybe he could take a break, enjoy retirement, he looked at me like I’d suggested he take a bath with some morays, just for the thrill.
So, in retrospect, I don’t know why I expected death to be the thing that stopped him.
He’s shimmering like dew in the early morning light, pushing that old mower as if his funeral hadn’t been the day before, as if we hadn’t all wiped our tears and said our goodbyes and started planning how to move forward with our lives. You can finally do something with that damn yard, I’d said to my mom, somewhere between laughing and crying. Native flowers, vegetables, fescues, trees. I’d needled my dad about it for years, but he’d always shaken his head: but it’s such a nice-looking monoculture.
I pour cold coffee from yesterday over ice, stir in cream as I watch him work. He is silver, not filled in, all one color with the mower, a picture flashing against the glass of the window. He could be an after-image, a film negative, the outline of something left behind, and I wait for him to dissipate. But when I step outside, he comes into focus, shining and bright.
I tiptoe barefoot across the lawn as if my steps might wake the mourners still sleeping in the house behind me. The grass pokes up between my toes and I wiggle them into the damp earth as I wait.
“Dad,” I say, when his next row comes past me. “What are you doing here?”
“Lawn’s not gonna mow itself.” He doesn’t look at me as he says it, doesn’t bother to smile. The mower leaves tracks in the grass, the little green shoots bending and springing up again, not quite cut but not quite ignoring him, either.
Condensation drips down the sides of my glass, leaving prickling cold rivulets over my fingers. Ice clinks when I swirl it, a sound my brain says I shouldn’t be able to hear. But the ghost-mower is silent.
“We’ll get someone to mow the lawn, Dad.”
“Don’t be silly.” He doesn’t stop, doesn’t seem to find it strange that we can have this conversation at normal volume, that he doesn’t have to pause the gas engine and talk in a cloud of fumes as it idles. “It’s my job.”
“Don’t you have somewhere to be? Isn’t there something…else you should be doing?”
He coughs a laugh, the same raspy sound he always made when I surprised him. “Not before the grass gets mowed, Eloise. You know that.”
I follow him around the lawn, back and forth, watching the grass change into familiar stripes. I wonder if other people can see him or if a neighbor looking out their window will see only me, walking patterns into the lawn, chasing empty air. Will they think it is grief, manifesting in some harmless and pitiful way? Will they turn from the window, eyes full of that specific sort of relief that comes from watching a misfortune not your own, and shake their heads, whisper “so sad” to their partners?
But it’s not sad, I want to tell this probably imaginary watcher. My father lived to be 83. He had a good life and died peacefully. We will be okay. We can mow this lawn, dig it up and plant flowers, make it our own.
The ghost pushing the mower hasn’t gotten that memo yet, though.
He’s on the last row now, and I’ve taken to circling him, sometimes jumping in front of the mower, ducking down to try and see his face, his eyes. He isn’t ignoring me—at least, he isn’t ignoring me to be cruel. He’s just focused on his task. If he’d been alive, he would’ve asked me what in god’s name did I think I was doing, told me to get out of the way, I was going to get someone hurt. But he doesn’t say it.
He comes to the end of the row and spins the mower in a circle, a flourish like a period that always made me roll my eyes. End, stop, finished. But when he looks up, finally looks at me, he is smiling. He wipes invisible sweat from his brow.
“No reward like a job well done,” he says, hands on hips, surveying his work. Then he vanishes.
I don’t stare at the spot where he vanished but at the lawn, at the lines he left that still glisten in the sun. The pattern that is uniquely his, still etched in light and shadow upon the world.
by Fractured Lit | Feb 25, 2025 | news, publications
Microfictions often set-up and exhibit their own kind of narrative rules, and we’re excited to honor these 47 rule-breaking stories. We will announce our shortlist very soon. We’re excited to get those stories to judge Deb Olin Unferth as soon as possible!
- To Keep
- Runaway
- Arab Sabbatical
- Call Me
- Dad Never Gave Me a Rabbit’s Foot
- Glass
- The Story Goes
- Fishing
- She Won’t Survive This
- Fifteen Shades of Pink
- Dear Kylie Minogue
- To Play the Blues
- At the Bottom of the Sea
- The Time Eater’s Last Meal
- Tummy Tuck
- I Come From Aliens
- In This Skin
- These Thoughts Are Mine Alone
- One of the Lies I Tell My Children (#2)
- My Shadow’s Keeper
- Too Bright a Dark
- Tears
- Playing with House Money
- Fall of Eighty-Four
- If you Got ’em
- magical thinking is to paracosm as repetitive behaviors are to autistic threshold
- A woman makes a cardboard train
- Protoplanet
- Your Funeral Was Lovely
- Uncle’s Spiders
- The Wild Ride to Rehab
- Two Fathers
- Like Broken Glass
- Car Crashes
- A Hawk Brings a Message
- Secret to Marriage
- Baby
- Neighborhood
- Summer Morning
- Weightless
- The Last Apricot
- Our Father
- The Cape
- One Night, The Moon Starts Crying
- Dated
- Small Golden Squares
- Boy and Balut
by Vanessa Tamm | Feb 24, 2025 | micro, publications
They spoke with such thick accents that she sometimes couldn’t understand them, her father’s distant parents, but she clearly heard the woman say, “It can’t be yours, not blood-related, not this loud little silly girl,” and so she tried her hardest to be quieter, and tall, and levelheaded, and she tried to think of things they might want her to say. She told them about things at home, things they’d only seen in movies, like root beer and Halloween and heat, things they’d lived without their entire lives. She told them about things she liked, hoping they might like them, like reading books beneath a tree or running through the sprinklers or picking berries in the summer until her skin was stained. Then there were the other things, like waves of pink and orange fog rolling past her window, like a mountain lion walking down a spongey, fern-lined path, like jazz trailing out of her aunt’s redwood kitchen, songs she would forever link with cinnamon and apple bread and bourbon in a glass. These were things she wished to tell but had trouble describing, things they couldn’t visualize or touch, so she tried instead to hum the tune to Idle Moments, a fifteen-minute track, pressing her cold hands between the cushions of their couch to try to hide her shaking.
The woman, hardened by her life in granite buildings with a man who turned violent whenever he was drunk, scoffed at these dreamy scenes and hurried from the room. The man, softened by a set of lungs that would no longer let him walk three miles for a drink, grieved silently that he had never had the chance to dream such pretty things. He studied the girl’s worried eyes and curls, which looked so like the spaniel that sat outside the pub, and he could not recall the spaniel’s name but knew the smell of its brown fur: cigarettes, and coal tar soap, and rain. He smiled at this memory, and so she kept on humming because it mattered to her father, even if she had to change to make these strangers like her, even if these strangers would only meet her once. She tried to place the jumbled notes in perfect order while staring at the clock, counting down the hours until she could fly back home, and her father tried to think what else his daughter should have done to win over his mother, and his mother tried to drown her family out by washing pots and pans, and his father tried to make sure he would not forget this music or this little girl that he would never see again, like the spaniel at the pub, like the night he sat beside it, petting its soft head, whispering kind things to it that he was never told.
by Kristen Skovsgard | Feb 20, 2025 | flash fiction, publications
My uncle showed me a casting from one of his hawks. I asked if it was the same as a pellet, and he said it was, but with hawks you call it a casting. I knew what a pellet was because earlier that year a lady in khakis had come to my classroom and handed out owl pellets for us to dissect with tweezers. She told us about the gizzard and the crop and I asked if I had one. She laughed and said no, because I was a girl, not a bird. I asked my uncle if I had a gizzard. Maybe, he said. Would be a good place to keep all those old bones before you’re through with them. Could get poke-y, though.
That was my first summer with my uncle and his boys at the Bird Ranch. It wasn’t really called the Bird Ranch, there’s no such thing as a Bird Ranch, but at the time that’s all I could think to call it. I said it aloud once and my uncle’s boys laughed. Their names were Joshua and Jonah. My aunt had named them, since she was a proper Christian lady, but Joshua’s middle name was Harley, since she wouldn’t let my uncle have one. She would tolerate the birds, not the bikes.
Back then Joshua had a kestrel. It was a tiny little thing that fluttered miserably on his gloved hand. He always held the jesses too tight. I knew that the kangaroo leather straps around each bird’s legs were called jesses since I had first referred to them as “bird bracelets”, which got me in a lot of trouble with the boys since bracelets were for girls and hawking was for boys. I knew that the jesses were made from kangaroo leather because the first time I heard it I was alarmed that kangaroos could be leathered. But kangaroo leather isn’t made from kangaroos, and now I call jesses bird bracelets on purpose. Mostly when I’m around the boys. They don’t bother me about it anymore.
That summer my uncle showed Joshua how to toss a lure on a string. It was a fickle art, to snap it midair, to whip the string in a widening gyre, to drag it across the ground after a hit in a clumsy imitation of a wounded animal, the lure’s leather wings embedded with the feathers of some unfortunate sparrow. I wasn’t allowed to hold the kestrel, so I sat beside its perch. Together we watched the lure go up and down, up and down.
I know it’s not real, the kestrel said, but I’ll go after it anyways.
My uncle had lots of birds. Some were his, some weren’t. There was always a Harris’ hawk, a kestrel, one or two red-tails. Nothing quite as noble as a peregrine or an eagle, but that summer, he had a moon-faced barn owl he’d taken in for rehabilitation. One day I asked her how she liked her mews and her Astroturf throne. I asked her if she missed the trees.
In a past life, she told me, I looked a lot like you. I was taller, though.
I asked my uncle if I could hold her. He was surprised. Joshua and Jonah hadn’t asked before. She wasn’t like the others, hatched from heat lamps and revolving incubators, soothed with imping needles and antiacids. My uncle called her wily. She had a scream like all of hell was after her, and she told me that it was.
You can hold her, my uncle said, but first you must prepare her food.
My uncle led me into the shed. Earlier that day I’d watched him carefully mend a snapped feather on one of the red-tails. He was pointed and slow as he chose a primary from the box of last year’s moult, dipping the imping needle through its hollow spine. Someday I would stand there alone, imping eagle feathers. That day I watched my uncle remove a defrosted Tupperware container from a cupboard. He popped off the lid and a wet, musty smell filled the shed, like the odour of a formerly beloved stuffed animal left in the rain to mould. He removed two corpses. Chicks, no bigger than my palm, Easter-yellow and limp.
Jonah leaned against the door. Joshua stood a few paces back, the kestrel in his gloved hand.
You don’t have to do this, the kestrel said. It’s gross.
You don’t have to if you don’t want to, my uncle echoed. It’s not pleasant.
I want to, I replied.
My uncle demonstrated. First you remove the head, that’s the hardest, so do it first. Then the legs – they should come off easily. Then you squeeze out the insides. The bodies are small, so there’s not much inside. He handed me a chick. It was cool and damp and its head lolled gently against my thumb. Jonah mimed vomiting. Joshua took a step back.
They don’t think you’re gonna do it, the kestrel said.
The head popped off like a cork. I felt light-headed. Ooze trickled between my thumb and forefinger.
Oh god, the kestrel said. Jesus, that’s gross.
But I did it, I said. And I’ll do it again and again. And I did it again and again.
The barn owl didn’t flap or scream. She held the decapitated chick in her talons, but she didn’t reach for a taste. I supposed it couldn’t compare to anything she’d butchered herself. We watched my uncle demonstrate the lure for Joshua. He wasn’t getting it right, but the kestrel went after it nonetheless. Back and forth, back and forth. The owl’s head bobbed, liquid black eyes staring through the lure and onward towards something I couldn’t see.
What was it like, I asked her, when you looked like me?
She turned her head two hundred and four degrees to look me in the eye.
Different, she said. My gizzard was harder to empty then.
by Bruce Scandling | Feb 17, 2025 | flash fiction, publications
We walk cautiously along the trail in leaden morning light, here for the spawning salmon and for a change. That’s how she said it on the phone last week, my daughter: I need a big fucking change of scenery.
The forest is dank, decayed, ripe with torn-open fish carried from the creek by bears. Alders and spruce collect the mist and drip ceaselessly. Leaves of Devil’s Club are yellow and veined with autumnal inevitability. We stop every few minutes, watching the water and listening for whatever is out there in the woods.
She could be from an outdoors catalog, my only child. With her athletic build, a no-nonsense rope of braided black hair, and her eight-weight flyrod. Except her denim is flecked with mud, she wears no makeup, and her skin is scaly. There is a new puffiness around her neck and under her jawline. She does not smile.
We talk only haltingly along the trail. I want to announce our presence in the forest, to avoid surprises downstream. And I want to understand. I know only that the other woman, her once-declared partner-for-life, walked away after my daughter’s second failed pregnancy. The partner had said she was tired of all the disappointment.
The word my daughter used was empty. She had flown back to Alaska for a long weekend away from her work and her suddenly quiet townhouse. When I picked her up along the airport curb, the first words I managed to say were, “How are you feeling?”
Empty, she told me, what else would you expect?
Her mother has been gone three years now, and I am not good at this. I don’t believe I was disengaged, yet as our daughter grew into a young woman, it was the two of them who would sit for hours laughing, crying, and apparently making sense of the cosmos. Last boyfriend. First girlfriend. Cut from the swim team. Poor decisions at weekend parties. When our daughter announced she was sick of the president and his misogynistic bullshit, her mother convinced her not to drop out of college and move to Australia to work on a fishing boat.
Then there was the crash, my wife’s tires sliding on black ice, the truck off the bank and into the ocean, her body finally recovered amidst a school of wintering salmon. My daughter shouldered our loss like a mountain guide, carrying her own burdensome sorrow while propping me up. She was sturdy and dependable, at least around me. Her girlfriend – the forever partner – must have seen the rest.
And now, along our trail, she seems adrift. We find a promising stretch of water and clamber down the bank. It is a short wade across to a sandbar. Beyond, the creek foams around rocks, swirls under rotting deadfall, and eases into deepening pools. We distance ourselves and cast, hopeful. These fish have returned from years at sea, some laden with eggs and searching, miraculously, to give birth and die in the exact gravel beds where they hatched.
Finally, she yells as a coho erupts in chrome fury. The salmon zings line from her reel, rushes upstream, and bursts from the water again. My daughter carefully follows the fish, begins to win the tug-of-war. Eventually, she pulls her catch into the slack water at her feet. She backs away from the creek, her rod curled into an arc under the strain. She slides the fish onto the sand. It is gleaming, exhausted. Its gills pulse, gasp. I anticipate oily filets and finger the knife sheathed at my side.
My daughter kneels over the salmon. With a twist of her wrist, she removes the fluorescent green fly. She cups the fish, one hand under its belly, the other grasping the tapered body just in front of the tail. She bends and kisses it on the head, prepared to return it to the water. She hesitates and kisses it again. Then a third time.
Finally, she eases it back into the creek, where it pauses to recuperate as its gills filter oxygen from the cool, unsullied, innocent water. In an instant,t the salmon darts into the current and is gone.
She turns to me and shrugs. Then, she takes off her boots and wades into the pool.
I drop my gear and run towards her as she leans forward and gently slips under the surface. I can see the red of her checked plaid shirt as she is pulled downstream by the current. She comes up for air in a wide green pool and rolls gently onto her back. She looks at me and raises her hand as if waving a slow, calm goodbye.
She turns away and rhythmically kicks her feet, headed towards the ocean.
by Emily Rinkema | Feb 13, 2025 | micro, publications
On our first date, our only date, I lied to you when you asked me about my biggest fear. Sinkholes, I said. My therapist had suggested I cultivate a tangible one, something I could see and avoid rather than my fear of time, which was abstract and ubiquitous enough to be paralyzing. The lies came fast after that, smooth little rocks that I set on the table between us: Yes, I like French cinema; no, I just haven’t met the right guy yet; yes, I love to hike.
I probably should have told you the truth. I should have told you that I don’t have calendars or clocks in my apartment. I should have told you that I count in loops backwards from 60 when I start to panic. I should have told you that I can’t look at stars because their distance is measured in years, that I don’t acknowledge birthdays, that there wouldn’t be a second date because two points make a timeline.
That night as we lay in bed, no light coming through the curtains I closed tight enough to keep out the moon, you said not to worry, that you’d protect me from my fear. For just a moment I thought maybe I’d let you try. Maybe this time would be different. But then I remembered all the lies, stacked like a cairn–nineteen, eighteen, seventeen–and I laughed. I told you there was nothing you could do, and I’m afraid it probably came across as dismissive, particularly when I got out of bed and pulled on my dress, listing facts about limestone soil and underground rivers.
I liked you. You were kind.
As I slid on my sandals, I told you that the thing about sinkholes is that you can’t prepare for them because you don’t see them coming. The groundwater washes away the soil between the rocks, I told you, leaning over to kiss you, and then, three, two, one, it all collapses.
by Rachana Pathak | Feb 10, 2025 | flash fiction, publications
The teenagers on the subway were giddy as they downed their Starbursts, shrieking and giggling, trading yellows, reds, and oranges. Reeya remembered those days of sugar highs and how they had whispered about who did what or did not do what. And how she and her sister had walked, arms linked, behind their father on the congested Kathmandu street until they saw the candy man who was wiry, dark-skinned, and scraggly-bearded but carried a coveted stick. This upright stick was adorned with sugar treats, cotton puffs, and metallic pinwheels, which drew her in. She begged her father to buy something, anything, just one, please, please. He succumbed, not due to her begging, but because it enabled him to indulge in a packet of paan, addictive and carcinogenic. The candy man handed them their treats, baring his scary, red-stained teeth against his mournful but kind eyes. The brightly colored wrappers later appeared strewn all over the city, a place with no infrastructure, sewage system, or garbage bins, and a poor, downtrodden soul picked up the littered wrappers, one by one manually, an actual living street sweeper whose labor never ended, nor was rewarded. People flung debris in his direction, and mothers warned their kids that they would end up like the street sweeper if they did not study—a further slight on his wretched existence. Reeya downed the entire candy pack on the street in one go, mimicking her father, who downed his cancer-causing paan, and they both got high, grinning at their complicity before they reached home, where her mother would scold them. Her sister, in contrast, savored her packet, selecting one pellet at a time, letting the piece dissolve entirely in her mouth without biting or cheating, and storing the rest for later, allowing for a nighttime indulgence, more forward-thinking and refined than Reeya. This was the era of pre-diabetes, pre-adulthood, and pre-responsibility.
Now, Reeya lived in a different country, older and besieged with responsibility. The subway stopped, and she dashed up the stairs, maintaining pace with the rush-hour equilibrium, but she slowed once she approached street level and found herself inside a chain drugstore, where the candy selection filled two entire aisles, not just a mere stick. She splurged on a pack of Starbursts like the carefree subway kids, tapping her credit card without speaking or making eye contact with the clerk, who was preoccupied with her cell phone—a transaction in the strictest sense. Reeya left the rectangular cement building, walked several blocks, and stood outside her office, checking her watch as she picked out the red squares and peeled the wrappers off in the eight precious minutes before her start time. There was no father to conspire with, nor a sister to compete against, nor a candy man with his fanciful packets of sugar, nor a manual street sweeper to pick up the litter. Reeya threw her torn wrappers into the garbage bin on the corner, and she did not have to see or think about the landfill they would end up in this civilized nation. And with that slight sugar rush, she stepped into her office.
by Jisun Park | Feb 6, 2025 | flash fiction, publications
I trace a line from the top of her forehead to the tip of her nose, a peachy pink so delicate it has the silken texture of a rose petal at the peak of its bloom. Her tiny lips pucker, and her fingers flex open, revealing a hand in its most miniature form, more doll than human. I marvel at this creature, so untouched and unbruised that she seems unearthly. “Are you of this world?” I whisper. And so small. So, so small. I watch her, lying on the bed, and I go over the notes from my pre-natal baby care class in my head.
Make sure she eats every two to three hours, or she won’t put on weight and may die.
Make sure she is peeing four to six times a day; if not, she isn’t getting enough to eat and may die.
Make sure to wash your hands before you touch her; she could get sick from harmful bacteria and die.
Make sure she doesn’t put anything too small in her mouth; she could choke on it and die.
Make sure she sleeps on her back with nothing in the crib, or she could stop breathing and die.
It occurs to me that there are an infinite number of ways that my baby could die, and it is up to me, an untrained civilian with no prior experience whatsoever, to anticipate them all. They say babies, children, people are hardy. “Stronger than you think!” But only the parents of those who have already mastered living say that.
I think of the ways that I could kill my baby: I could drop her, roll onto her in my sleep, sit on her, feed her something that chokes her.
I think of the ways that others could kill my baby: she could get hit by a car; she could be in a car that gets hit by another car; she could get kidnapped and murdered; she could be shot at school.
I think of the ways that my baby’s own body could kill her: cancer, that could be growing inside of her in the dark even now, in her bones or in her blood.
I think of how my baby could just die on her own for no reason at all. Her heart could just stop beating. She could just stop breathing. And that would be it.
And none of this is close to an exhaustive list.
I watch the news and see pictures of children in their posed photos, gap-toothed and shiny-eyed, the last school photos they got to take before they died, and the faces of those children morph into the face of my own child. I wonder about the mothers of those children. How do they survive it? How do they go on? It seems impossible. It seems absurd. I think that if it happened to me, if my baby died, I would just collapse on the spot and fold into the dirt and not ever want to move again. But having lived on this earth for a while, I know that’s not what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to keep going. You’re supposed to live on. People sympathize for a while, but after too long of a time, they get annoyed. If I continued to lie in the dirt, that would be attention-seeking and melodramatic. People only have so much patience for grief.
So I practice the hard thing that I don’t think I can do so that I can do it one day if I have to. I imagine that my baby has died. I imagine the cold shock of the news. I imagine the disorienting nausea, the ringing in my ears, my tears. The prickling sweat on the soles of my feet that only comes when something incredibly terrible happens. It’s difficult, but I can do it. Then I imagine the funeral. The people who come with their gray faces. This is very difficult. There is something about having your grief mirrored in someone else’s face that magnifies it. And when I get to the burial, a small box suspended over a hole of the same size in the ground, that is when I lose it. I know I can’t let them put her down there. My heart is on fire, and I can’t let them do it because she would be alone and scared, and it is so so dark in the earth, in that box, and if I let them put her in the ground, she would really be dead and I lied when I said I could do the part where I found out she died because I don’t think I can and I might not ever stop crying and I might just drown in my own tears. But that might be okay if that means I could go with her. We could be in the box together and in the ground together and neither of us would be alone or scared. We would just be. Together.
At this point, I am heaving with sobs, congested with snot, and I have to shake myself out of it. What am I doing? Stop being an idiot and thinking these stupid and crazy things. Take a breath. And another. And another. I lie down next to her, the summer sunlight reflecting off the white walls and wrapping us in gold, her quick, soft breath cooling the dampness on my face. I watch the tick-tock of her chest, the silent metronome of her beating heart. I slide my finger under hers and she grasps it, curling her fingers around mine, her grip surprisingly strong and tenacious. No one told me about this, that love could be so stricken, that it could make my own life feel so precarious. That love could tie my pulse to another’s. We’ll just have to keep each other alive, I tell her. Your life is in my hands, but now my life is in yours, too.
by Claudia Monpere | Feb 3, 2025 | flash fiction, publications
Your best friend, Meg, is scared for you. She wants to accompany you to the lake, but you need to be alone, so you drive there and wander the aspen grove, leaves trembling in the light wind. You touch the smooth, greenish-white bark, the rough, eye-shaped branch scars. You hold your hand among the leaves, feeling them flicker in the light wind. You touch the coarse granite boulders. You walk along the shore to your favorite granite slab, remove your clothes, and feel its polished surface on your cheek, tummy, arms, and legs. You dive into the water, welcoming its chill, and then you drive home, where your ex-boyfriend, who still has a key, surprises you.
He wants to make love one last time, and although you hate him now—you’d begun feeling this way even before he reported you— he’s a man with influence who could make things worse for you, and maybe, just maybe, his touch will be tender, and linger in the dismal time ahead. But his eyes are glacial as he touches your neck. You apologize and say this was a mistake, completely your fault. You ask him to please leave, apologizing again and again.
After he leaves, you touch your body. You have no interest in an orgasm. You realize how much of your body you’ve never touched with intention: the satiny inside of your arms, your knuckles’ bony hills– Why did you never notice how irregular they are?– the helix of your ear, the smooth fleshy texture of your mouth’s soft palate, the firm ridges of the hard palate. You pluck a hair and marvel. Only one hair, yet you can feel its silky texture.
Meg comes over and cooks for you: snapper ceviche with jicama, lime, and toasted pumpkin seeds; fresh chickpeas with feta and roasted red pepper sauce; scallops with parsnip puree, fruit tart. Tender, crumbly, crunchy, buttery, creamy, crispy, velvety. You eat and weep at the glorious textures. You and Meg hug throughout dinner. She’s stopped coaxing you to flee. You both know what happens to women who are caught. After dinner, Meg massages your feet with lotion. You object, but she tells you this is what best friends do.
The car pulls up at exactly 7:30 pm, and some official and his driver take you to the hospital, where you change and are led to the chapel, lit with candles, packed with journalists, politicians, and people waving signs. The senator stands at the pulpit in a halo of light. He commands silence. You stand in your hospital gown, facing him. “Touch,” says the senator, “is the first sense felt in the womb. Even before sight and hearing.” He pauses, looking directly at you, then continues. “Your baby will never feel your loving arms holding her. You’ll never feel her petal soft cheeks. You took her life as she bloomed in your womb.” Silence. Then he roars, accompanied by others in the chapel, chanting: “Your pleasure in touch will be no more. The culture of death—you opened that door.”
Flanked by two doctors, you leave the chapel and walk toward the operating room. You’ll be able to feel pain after the surgery. Heat. No other sensation of touch. Ever. The idea is suffering, not death. The nurse prepping you explains the steps of the operation in a gentle, halting voice. Her eyes tear up when she tells you what to expect after. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I’m new here.” Just before inserting the IV that will put you under, she asks if you’d like to touch her hair. “I used my best conditioner, so it feels extra soft.” “No, thank you,” you say. You raise your palms to your face and stroke your cheeks. You blink rapidly a few times, feeling your lids go down and up, down and up. You kiss every other finger, slowly, then close your eyes.
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