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flash fiction

housekeeping

housekeeping

Call your mother at 3 am, and when she asks why you are awake so late, tell her you recently learned that drain flies are fuzzier than fruit flies, even though both have made a home out of your sink. It’s important to keep people on their toes, so follow up this fun...

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Mother, False

Mother, False

The girl grows overnight after her mother dies–two extra hands emerge from her back, like the Hindu goddess Durga. Her forehead is lashed with lines, her mother’s curses roll on the surface of her tongue. They fall and clog the drains. The girl’s extra hands work as a...

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The Clay of It

The Clay of It

When he walked into her studio, Elodie was sculpting her seventh ceramic penis of the week. This one had antlers. She didn’t look up. “Custom or classic?” The man hesitated. He was tall, with nervous shoulders and a brown paper envelope clutched like it contained his...

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Cotton Mouth

Cotton Mouth

I A cottonmouth swallows me when I am seven. It waits for me just outside my front door, stretched out along the walkway. When I step into the concrete space, it opens its mouth wide. Hemmed in by coquina walls and boxwood bushes, the only place to go is within the...

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Child

Child

I look down at my phone and it says Baba and I realize I haven’t seen him since that time I was at home on the couch reading and my mom was sitting at the dining table on a chair cracking pine nuts one by one, gently placing them in her mouth and slightly biting down...

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Baby Goat on the Roof

Baby Goat on the Roof

“You’re dead to me,” Cas says when I dart back inside the house and catch her dancing through the living room in her red string bikini. Cinnamon scents the room as she waitresses a plate of oatmeal cookies—hot, no raisins—and rotates for her boyfriend Earl, bending...

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The Flavours We’ll Lose

The Flavours We’ll Lose

My daughter, Chiara, turns five today. I get up when it’s still dark because, if I wait until after the Tuscan sun rises, it will be too hot to bake a cake. I pour myself cold coffee, then I close the windows and shutters to trap the fresh night air in the house. In...

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Pushed

Pushed

When I was a girl, a woman in my town died in suspicious circumstances. I still think about the day of the funeral; the spice of the incense as the priest swung the smoking thurible over the closed coffin; my mother’s black skirt, tight on me and the way she plucked...

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Moon Rabbit

Moon Rabbit

Mother first told me the myth of the rabbit on the moon when I was still small enough to listen. How when the moon goddess, dressed in rags, begged the rabbit for food, it twitched, then threw its body into the fire at her feet. The goddess, grateful, drew the...

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