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flash fiction

White Trash

White Trash

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...

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Reel

Reel

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...

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Snow

Snow

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,...

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The Syntax of Silk

The Syntax of Silk

In the small hours of the morning, I forage, taking care to nibble leaves both fibrous and tender, for the stories of a world are woven not only from what is young, what is hopeful, or what is easy. When the sun is high, and the air is thick and hot with blossoms, I...

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Blessed

Blessed

The priest still has a mouth full of cake, crumbs stuck to his lips, when the mom presents a doll with clumps of hair missing, a book with crayon scribbled across the cover, a blanket still warm from the girl’s grip and says, “Bless them?” The girl cries for her...

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THE MIGRATION OF DEAD BIRDS

THE MIGRATION OF DEAD BIRDS

Elena cried for the sparrow, for how it slipped a squeal before it hit the front window, a sound that awfully resembled fear. I knew even then that Elena saw something in that bird, a part of herself that wanted to be free and alive, free of everything that crippled...

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Jumping Off and Falling Out

Jumping Off and Falling Out

I felt like television static that year—glossy-eyed afternoons at The Bitter End with a magazine straddling my lap, ears straining to dissect the waves: people chattering, milk steaming, door opening and closing—I was shimmery around the edges.  Most evenings, I...

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Horsebroken

Horsebroken

Handcuffs  On the way to see our boy in the detention centre I was wearing invisible handcuffs. “Don’t try to make them like you this time,” my husband said. He was talking about the guards. The bus lurched and my lunch wanted to become free of its cage. A sense of...

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The Life of the Mother

The Life of the Mother

Content Warning: Miscarriage, abortion Following the meeting with the doctor, there was no thought of a baby shower. Too much rage. Too much grief. The two were indistinguishable, separate ropes twisted into a single noose. Bullshit about stages of grief, the mother...

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 Where I Come From . . .

 Where I Come From . . .

the house had jasmine bushes that scented the backyard, veiling the odors from our rubbish bins. It's where my sisters screeched with laughter every time I read the lines “Sing Mother Sing, Can Mother Sing, Mother Can Sing,” from The Radiant Reader because our Ma had...

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