The Uranium Bird

by Dennis Michael | Jan 30, 2025 | flash fiction, publications

The uranium bird has been picking seeds from my lawn. It’s easy to tell where it’s been; it leaves behind a trail of brown, wilted grass or shriveled tree leaves. It lives somewhere near the end of the road near the brook, I think. I’ve seen it there when I’ve been out jogging, marbled bright orange and pitch black, cooling off in the water. Little puffs of steam float up as it wades in. It’s supposed to be quite dense, uranium, so I don’t know how it is able to fly, but it does. We tried to photograph it once, but the images came out all white and overexposed. 

A local boy tried to steal one of its eggs, but his hand got burned badly and they had to take it off. When the eggs hatch, the babies always come out deformed. One had two beaks for eyes; another was born with a couple of tentacles dangling out of its stomach. It looked like some kind of hybrid octopus-bird creature, or at least so I’ve heard. The babies don’t last long; they usually live just long enough to hop out of the nest, and then they fall apart. Sometimes, you find little piles of uranium bird parts lying around, or even just a single leg or a head. 

I’ve been getting headaches. They start at the back of my head and make their way up to my ears. The doctors don’t help much; they just keep asking me if I grind my teeth at night. I  don’t know, I tell them. They say I should relax. Every spring, I used to wake up an extra 30 minutes early and just lay in bed and meditate, listening to chirping perched birds and the white noise of passing cars outside. A few years ago is when I started hearing the uranium bird; it has a very distinct sound. It starts out very high-pitched but then quickly drops down to bass frequencies. Sweeping the spectrum. It does this in under a second, like an accelerated Doppler effect. How such a low sound can come out of such a small mouth is beyond my understanding 

of acoustics. It might be a quantum effect. Anyway, now all I can hear when I wake up is this ungodly sound every few seconds, and I can’t meditate anymore. It’s hard enough to live in this area, having to worry about that little fucker flying around shooting alpha particles at us; moreover, I can’t even sit in bed and relax for a few minutes before I start my day. 

I’m honestly not sure why this bird needs to be eating my seeds. I don’t know why it even needs to eat at all; it should be able to naturally act as its own energy source, just due to the heat generated by radioactive decay. I mean, they make power plants out of the stuff. I need those seeds to grow a full lawn, and in addition to losing the seeds, the little brown patches it leaves behind always need to be fixed. I’ve been thinking of how to get rid of it, but it’s not easy.  I looked up the chemistry of how to dissolve uranium, and now I think I’m on some kind of government watchlist. I hear buzzing in the walls of my house, extra breathing on the phone. I’ve thought of ways to crush the bird, but it’s made of pure metal, harder than steel. You’d need something like titanium or diamond. I’ve thought of ways of trapping it in a box and starving it,  but it has a half-life of 4 billion years. 

I’m sitting on my lawn, reading a book and sipping a cold glass of sangria made with fresh fruit from our garden. Trying to relax. The uranium bird is just across the street in my neighbor’s yard. It seems to notice me and starts to walk towards me. It clinks as its little metal feet walk across the pavement. It pauses as it reaches the middle of the road, daring a car to come by and challenge it. It thinks it owns this whole neighborhood, the little piece of shit. It flies up and perches itself on the top of my fence. It’s just sitting there staring at me, not moving. I take a sip of my sangria and stare back. It hops down onto my lawn. I see the tips of the grass around it start to turn brown and curl. It flies over and pecks me on the shoulder, I bat it away. The sangria 

goes flying. The bird comes at my head, making its frequency-hopping, unnatural chirping sound as it darts in. I duck, swirl, and smash it to the ground by swinging my hardcover novel at it with both hands. It falls to the ground, and I pick it up with my bare hand. I stick its head into my mouth and bite into it, twisting and tearing as hard as I can. Its head somehow comes off. I try to chew it but I can’t, it’s made of solid metal. It tastes metalli,c and I start hearing noises, not in my ears but inside my head. I spit its head out and throw down its lifeless body onto the grass. My head is burning. Everything is spinning, and I fall to the ground. The grass is thick where I am laid out, beautiful and green. The noises in my head stop. I hear the other birds chirping in the distance, naturally. Cars are passing by with their white noise. I close my eyes and relax. 

The Hunt

by Kristin Jensen | Jan 27, 2025 | flash fiction, publications

We were in search of eggs. White ones like the moon, and some as big as newborn puppies in the palm. Biking wasn’t smart because you’d miss the little things hiding in the weeds and bushes, placed out there for us wives to find. It was the daddies of our men who told them what to do. And how to hold the eggs.

Debra, crazy-eyed, found hers first – small and speckled, like a quail egg. She cracked it against the curb at 24th and Mission, and it cried. It cried as we hunched in our large pastel dresses with wicker baskets, also looking. We covered our ears because of the sound and what we were told would be our good and broken hearts. We’d be cracked open and in real love – a love that women who are not mommas just can’t know – like not knowing how big the universe is.

I didn’t find my egg but stole another’s. I pushed her into the street. A bus was coming. I wanted to see her yolk.

***

I woke in my husband’s arms. I turned onto my side, and he curled around me. Dotted my neck with kisses. I put him inside.

When I got up, I looked back at our blue sheet with its melted goo. The spot looked like pee. I wondered how much urine a baby would make. My sister’s seven-year-old son still pees in the bed, which seems absurd.

“You made a puddle,” I said to him, joking.

In the bathroom, I got the syringe, bent, and my husband did it in my freckled bum. I cried out. Yelp!

He kissed the part where he poked. His father had done this for his wife. His father is progressive. He is a socialist. He’d taught my husband as a boy about the names of the parts of a vagina that I don’t even know.

My husband had also done this for his first wife. It had worked – they made a son, then divorced. He tells me every other day how much – how boundlessly – he loves his son. Sometimes, my husband cries, telling me this. I hold him for some time. “You will feel this love too when you have a baby,” he says. He is ten years older and I am thirty-three.

The boy is an annoying child who I am trying to like more or love. The journey from dislike, to like, to love feels like mountains.

When the boy enters our home, he hugs me. I pat his silky, brown hair. Then he runs in loops around the kitchen, asking to be chased, but he will always win the game. I fear I am becoming a mean-hearted person. Something like rust.

When the boy is with us, I try motherhood. Then ask silently for childhood when the boy is not. The distance between my childhood and motherhood also feels like mountains.

***

After the shot, I wobbled, wavered, and limped dramatically into the kitchen to heat the water in the kettle. More water on the stove for soft-boiled eggs. Cold water to just drink. It was a quiet Saturday morning with just the two of us. I asked him to dance. It was how we had met. I felt like magic again, like I could conjure the little thing.

***

I used to be good, real good, at Easter egg hunts growing up. I’d always get more than my sister. I ran for the bushes at the edge of the grass and kicked down stones with sayings like Grandfather’s Garden. I knew what was inside the plastic eggs and what they would taste like. I knew how it would better my life.

“Can I have that?” My young sister had pointed to a small, chocolate rabbit in my basket. She had sweat on her forehead.

“This isn’t Halloween,” I told her.

My sister is smart now and tells me how dreams have to do with fear. She tells me of the fears she had before her son. Like, what if the baby just had one eye, shouted all the time, turned on you, turned into you, left, told you how you’re shit, or didn’t come at all?

***

Last week, my husband printed out an article and read it to me in bed. The house was quiet. Near empty. I pushed up against him and then wiggled over the hill of his body, sagging my full weight onto him, and then dropped off the other side. What I remember from the article is how babies are the size of gummy bears when they’ve been in there for a month. He seemed restless. He licked his lips.

Lying back to look at the ceiling, I thought of what candy I knew, for sure, that I liked, in my basket. Peeps, Robin Eggs, and Jelly Bellies. He put his hand on my empty, and mysterious, belly and smiled, wide, hopeful, and beautifully at me.

I fell asleep into a hunt, wearing a space suit with a spear, to shish-kabob planets.

White Trash

by Emily Hampson | Jan 23, 2025 | flash fiction, publications

Your perfume suffuses the hall, assaulting me before you do. Jo Malone Waterlily. You only wear it at night, a panther seducing a mate. Three days ago, I’d clocked the bottle on your vanity, drawn to its pale blue orb. Pressing my nose to the glass, I was 8000 miles away. Back home. Lychees and white tea.

Tonight, his hand clasps your elbow, wearing you like a purse. He likes it when you flaunt a skirt, likes to snake a finger up your pale thigh. Nibbling at your earlobe, he cocks an eye toward me. To him, everything is a performance. An audience to covet his shined shoes. Gold watch. Young lover.

You giggle, batting his hand away. Your evening bag swipes my cart, toppling the shampoos into the lotions. You mumble an apology that might be mistaken for shame, but you don’t glance back. I’m merely the pushcart, obstructing the hallway like a yellow caution sign that reads, “Slippery When Wet.”

Before walking away, he snatches a turndown mint, drunk on his own charm, and says to you, “What are you always apologizing for?”

I bite my tongue, a trained pet licking salt off your salacious secrets. Used condoms strewn across the carpet. Bloody maxi pads. Room service trays shouldering mutilated omelets and pumpernickel toast. Shopping bags and clipped price tags dangling over the trash bin. Unflushed turds, floating in the toilet bowl like dog kibble—evidence that your Michelin meals deprive you both of fiber. Souffles and sauces. Confits and caviar. Even $500 dinners turn to shit.

Before, I’d pant with excitement at the Armani suits and Dior handbags hanging in the walk-ins like marionettes ready to perform. Business trips lapping into tidal pools of leisure. But I know better now. I know your five-inch heels and cappuccinos with extra foam. I know your disdain for cheap cantaloupe and insistence on feather pillows. I know your toothpaste globs and the vibrator you stash in the nightstand drawer beside the hotel Bible. You’re all the same. Penthouse tips are never as sizeable as the orgasms. 

Neither of you speak to me. Not one hello. For the full two weeks. You barely look.

Still, I nod, a contrite bow, as you breeze by, day after day, with the same disregard you bestow the Ficus plants. There are two on every floor, starving for sunlight – dark green sentinels guarding the elevators. Management pays some lady to water and exercise them every Tuesday, like hospital patients in need of PT. Sometimes, I pause in the hall to watch, pretending to search my cart for towels or French-milled seashell soaps. I focus on the woman’s fingers caressing the broad, glossy leaves and count back the months since I was touched.

On your final morning, you sleep in past check-out, the Privacy sign askew on the doorknob. The manager reluctantly calls the room. I knock four times before you answer, bloodshot eyes and tangled hair. You blink at me, your nipples straining against your white t-shirt like another pair of eyes. I stare down at your bare feet and your toenail polish is the exact shade of dragon fruit.

Twenty minutes later, I knock again, ready with my master key, but you’re already gone.

The suite is warm and sticky, with humidity pooling from the shower. White powder clings to the coffee table. My eyes dart to the bed. I can’t help it. Hope blooms like mushrooms after rain. Nothing. Only soiled sheets and a twisted duvet. My teeth clench. I count $1.63 in coins on the nightstand and pocket the change. I empty the trash, dust the windowsills, and vacuum. I inspect the closet and replace three wooden hangers. To you, everything was already yours.

During my break, I wander down to the newsstand and buy a pack of Bubblicious. I crack my knuckles and sit in the alley, watching a cockroach scurry beneath a pallet of rental chairs. When it disappears, I chew each piece of gum, one after another, sucking on the sweet bursts of artificial watermelon, letting the syrup leak down my chin, thinking about how $1.63 would pay for a day’s worth of food for my mom and five sisters back home.

Rice. Curry. Medicine.

America, The Free.

I gnaw until it runs out of flavor and then spit wads onto the concrete—pink phlegm pocking the pavement like a rash.

For a long while, I stare at the carnage, satiated on the seductive gluttony of wasting something.

Reel

by Diane Glancy | Jan 21, 2025 | flash fiction, publications

A dream is a film happening while you watch.

A boy running with a flowered pillowcase flying from his hand like a cape. Where did he get it?

The boy in a space like a dog-trot— the open space between the two sides of a house. But this space between houses. The pillowcase a sail. How the boat got to Patmos to depart from John. Banished for preaching Christ. How in dreams things are the same and also their upward counterpart.

I was in a hefty place. A ditch by the road. Watching the boy running. Then I was awake, and he was gone. A bully is the waking part. 

This is the line of grief we must bear.

I heard later the wind blew down the Taco Bueno sign.  It fell into Burger King, shutting them both down until the windows could be replaced. Where would we eat?

I could imagine I was with John the Drifter. The one banished to Patmos Island where there was not tree or any provision. Volcanic in origin.

I had questions for which I was in trouble. Until I sat on the back row. I asked how John wrote on Patmos. Had he thought to bring parchment and pen? His wax tablet and stylus? Did parchment drop from heaven like manna? Had authorities allowed him a travel bag to exile? A rucksack?

At night, John gathered stones to place on the edges of his outer cloak. To hold it down. So he could cover himself, sleep, and not chase the cloak blowing in the night wind that peeled off the sea.  

A man with the wind in his hand. You know the tomato-stand on the corner?

Is the Aegean Sea salty?  I asked the teachers at the Church of the Risen Lord. Was there a well on the island?  How did John get water as he wrote on the island without a tree to shade him?  Did he make a booth with his outer cloak?  What did he prop it on?  Did he bring tent poles?  Did authorities make a make-shift tent before they left him on the island?

And the sweet teacher at the Church of Risen Lord who had cupcakes for brains did not answer.

How did John start a fire to cook a fish? Did he bring a pole?  A hook?  And bait?  Wait. All of them were fishermen of the patrol of miracles. They called the fish to jump on the shore.  In the heat, a fish could cook on a hot stone in the sun.

John was told to write what he saw. And the film began. The little beasts around the throne with their bleatings and mooings and howls, saying blessing and honor and glory and power to the Lamb forever.

We thought of running from the church. There was a wide field beyond the tree-line. They would not miss us. The first turn past the Dry Goods Store.

Once, the island of Patmos was called Letois. Named after Artemis. It was at the bottom of the sea. But when the moon shined upon the water, Artemis saw the island and wanted it for her own. She asked Zeus, who was god at the time, to raise the island to the surface of the sea.

Or there is the story that Orestes, after murdering Clytemnestra, his mother, fled to Patmos when Erynies was after him.

The boy with the flying pillowcase trailing off his hand. The narrow space to run between.

The elders up there on their benches watching us.

These two-pronged stories, whose histories don’t match but overlap, sometimes contradicting one another.

They found us hiding in the ditch. We returned to the place we ran from. We were not punished.  Only watched. If we moved. A shackle lifted on the bird of prey. The wistfulness that screeched before each breath. We would have floated over time.

We are walking the shore in penance. Not full of beasts and elders and the sea upheaving and the mountains dismantled. The excess of our lives independent of the mooring it takes. 

How many stories do you have going on, the critics asked?

There are multiple projects, I answered. It seems now the stories mixed. I could not tell one from another. Or in which story they belonged. But braided together the way traffic waits around every corner. We sat at the curb watching. The truck arriving with the large plate-glass windows to repair Burger King. The Taco Bueno sign still askew. Farther down the road, the large, tin rooster on the old Mi Casa van on its side.

What is the real story? They kept asking. What point of view are you in? 

Didn’t they know we lived in several parallel worlds? Not set aright. One level missing another.  Left to fend. To tend this sweet side of bliss.

Subtext and subtitle

To Rem35mm

In the forest. On the forehead of leaves. A projector unrolls its story.

A spool from which moving images move to the sub-spool below the lens.

The story comes from the earliest critical theory. Of voices in a flood of narration in the coherence of the layered grasses of the will.

A dream presents the surreal edgings of the real.

I found the road-markers in the film. The onward-going structure was disrupted by thoughts of struggle tied to memory.

To mark with transitive contrariness. Outside of which could not be understood. Two spools turning on a projector unrolling and rolling past the lens.

Banished to a barren island. Until the stones could not hold down the island and it rose.

Snow

by Mary Elizabeth Dubois | Jan 13, 2025 | flash fiction, publications

Still, nobody knows if it’s better to write about snow on a country road from an apartment in the middle of an urban sprawl, in a small cabin several miles away from the country road, or on the country road itself. Still, nobody knows if love can exist only in time, like most concepts and biological processes, or if love is independent of time, because it is a more mysterious form of experience that existed before metaphysics and Euclidean geometry, as we understand them in the human sense. Nobody knows. Sometimes I like to listen to the birds and children through the open window (European), but sometimes I resist the Stoßlüften because I want to feel sealed inside of my atomized identity (American). Nobody knows which of these actions inadvertently represents a nonpartisan conservative ideology. Still!

***

Reproductive futurism is unsexy, but so is the revelation that you might never make a choice about having a child. The day might come when you are too old. I try to remember certain things about my relatives, my friends from high school, or girls I knew who went to the school one town over from mine. People tiptoe in and out of view. You have no choice; you chop more vegetables. Even as I try to remember that girl, the girl I liked with the light brown hair, the non-obviousness of memory reminds me that I will only ever remember her fully in dreams. She wore under-eye eyeliner. She resisted the mandatory, tri-county beauty pageant by cutting a hole in her dress, at the crotch.

***

Santal. I’m alive to breathe in the candle. I’m alive to warm up the chicken, eat it in a bedroom, then open the windows and spray the room with scented linen spray. On the windowsill, a plant from my boyfriend brightens inside a beam of sunlight. Sometimes, I imagine the plant is my boyfriend. It helps me sleep. But sometimes I wake in the night shivering from the desire for solace of a different kind, the kind that comes from novels, old quilts, and ideas about the future that involve women, solitude, oceans. My boyfriend still exists in that fantasy, but he is far away on a different continent, taking care of our children, or building wooden sailboats by hand, or having a quiet but passionate affair with the son of the woman who owns the seaside tavern. We write each other letters. We live our lives apart. The attention of the other in memory is comfort enough.

***

I want what two other women I know want. Expensive sheets. A black iPhone without a case, spinning on a larger piece of translucent circular glass. Flowers and jewelry, given to you by lesbian lovers. Affairs. First-person narratives and confessional poetry, written for, about, and with us. Dreaming without analysis. I want to escape the dirty house I live in, where my roommates are two boys. But I want the boys to visit me in my new house, which, in the fantasy, is sparklingly clean. I will wash them in the bath. I will soap them up like children, then let them watch the largest bubble. It will float towards the ceiling. It will not pop.

Dead Things I Gave Birth To

by Michelle Brady | Jan 9, 2025 | flash fiction, publications

The first person I killed didn’t run. I never knew his name, just his crime, so I called him One. “I didn’t know I should run because I couldn’t hear the rotor blades chop-chop-chopping,” he said, sitting beside me on the porch—not the way I left him; the way I met him: whole, covered in Afghan dirt and barefoot, hot from digging.

We could only see heat, so I don’t know what color his clothes were or if he was sweating, but I knew he was hot, alive. I sipped my G&T and nodded. My soldiers made a t‑shirt to that effect. Don’t run; you’ll only die tired. The Apache helicopter on it had eyes and teeth. They didn’t think it was funny exactly. That would be too simple, and people are never that easy. Still, I thought it was best not to mention it to One. “Drink?” I said instead.

He laughed. “I am not sure that would work.”

I smiled. “You’re the first dead person I’ve talked to, so I don’t really know the rules.” And the first ghost I created, I didn’t say.

“I have to say I am disappointed to have been gunned down by a woman. No offense, of course,” One said.

I didn’t reply. I was done proving myself to my fellow soldiers, and I had no intention of proving myself to a dead guy.

He looked around and added, “This place is so different from home, so green and bright and clean.”

I’d thought the same thing many times. The unspoken parts, I mean. Why was I born here and not there? Why did I leave it for the gray-brown of Afghanistan? I took a deep breath and asked the one thing I tried never to think about. “Did you have kids?”

One looked out across our South Georgia neighborhood from his rocking chair. “I do not remember my name, but I will not let myself forget theirs,” he said.

I went inside and closed the front door between us so he wouldn’t hear me cry. It wouldn’t have done him any good.

***

One and I met on a dusty night in 2013. To me, he was a white human outline on a green background that I could see through the monocle over my right eye. My left eye never saw him. To him, I didn’t exist. The area my attack helicopter company patrolled was monitored by huge balloons tethered to infantry positions, like blimps. A ground unit had been watching One lay explosive lines to kill US forces for over a day before calling it into us. But he was my first, so I watched, too, taking nothing for granted. I watched until we were low on fuel, and it was time to act.

Afterward, my commander invited the rest of the leadership outside his tent for cigars to celebrate my successful first engagement. Someone offered to nominate me for a combat action badge, and several others expressed their relief that I could do it. “Because, well, you know,” they said. “Women need to be nurturing to be good mothers. It’s just science.”

***

He started visiting me after my first miscarriage, always after dinner on the porch. “One for one,” he said. “Kind of ironic, right? Is that the word?”

I turned sharply to him, regretting telling him about the baby, but just sighed and said, “I guess it is.” Anger would have been too hypocritical even for me.

“At least you get another chance,” he said thoughtfully.

“Tell me about them. Your kids.”

He didn’t say anything for a minute. “Girls,” he said. “Afhak and Adiam. I do not know how old they would be now. How long have I been—”

I didn’t hear the rest as the door slammed between us, and I took up my familiar crying position on the entryway bench. Two girls. Girls without a father to protect them in a place where girls needed a father to protect them.

For the first time, One followed me in. “They will be okay. They are survivors,” he said quietly.

I ignored him, choking on my breath, my face buried where I couldn’t see his.

“It is better that you killed me. If I’d been supporting the US, they would all be dead now. This way, they have a chance.”

I didn’t really believe him, but I looked up. Eyes I never actually saw held something like pity. “I won’t have another chance. I can’t have children.”

He nodded slowly. “One for one,” he said.

But, of course, he didn’t know that he was the first person I killed, not the only one. He wouldn’t have thought it was comforting, otherwise.