Fractured Lit believes that Black Lives Matter, that Black Voices Matter, that Black Art Matters. We believe that the power of stories and art serves as a medium to help us empathize and learn from others. This is a worthwhile pursuit as we strive to build an...
Mother is desperate. Baby will not stop crying. Her toothless maw quivers, her eyes slit, her cheeks squinch red. Mother is desperate. She tries everything Doctor recommends—bicycling Baby’s plump legs, massaging her rotund tummy. She...
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...
That the dog didn’t bark was the first sign. Who acts like that, who, tell me who acts like that at a parent’s wedding? He was a Texas Holdem player and I’m Five Card Draw. His saxophone rode the piano, drums, and bass like a surfer on giant waves at Nazare....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,”...
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...