ISSUE 23 November 2021
Editor: Francine Witte
Editor: Francine Witte
FLASH
Brian Beatty. Paul Beckman. Patricia Bidar. Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar. Mark Crimmins. Subhravanu Das. Tommy Dean. Mary Grimm. Jennifer Schomburg Kanke. Louella Lester. Renuka Raghavan. Kenneth Robbins. Kristina T. Saccone. Angeline Schellenberg. Zoe Stanek.
Brian Beatty Saint Paul, MN
The Reunion
Hurley was at the barber shop sleepily awaiting his turn when another bored magazine
reader, a guy about his age Hurley didn’t recognize, mentioned their upcoming high school reunion.
“That must be why you’re here,” the wiseacre said. “Can’t show up looking like that.”
Hurley usually cut his own hair, using whatever sharp object was within reach when inspiration
struck. Behind his back, some neighbors called him Hillbilly Einstein, but not for his I.Q.
“Everybody knows Marjorie Phillips has divorced again,” the wiseacre continued.
It was true. Hurley had already heard about Marjorie’s latest divorce, at the grocery store or bar.
It was a small town, and any divorce made big news. A third divorce started folks for miles
checking their math.
Maybe Marjorie had nothing to do with him springing for a real haircut. Maybe he was here
now just because. Just because he enjoyed watching that candy cane barber pole out front twirl around.
Or just because the smell of the comb potions and neck powders reminded him of his childhood.
Or just because he owned a mirror or two and caught a good look at himself in them once in a while.
An old girlfriend’s divorce was a simple matter of coincidence.
Marjorie wouldn’t have much use for Hurley anyway. She owned the local yoga studio and
workout gym. He peddled junk at flea markets and played fumbling bluegrass banjo sometimes.
But when he was finished at the barber shop, Hurley headed straight to the Goodwill store
down the street a few doors. He needed a presentable suit coat to wear to that upcoming reunion.
After trying on all the suit coats that would button over his gut, Hurley decided on a brown
corduroy blazer with leather elbows that made him appear as smart as any college professor.
Even pulled over his favorite bib overalls.
With his store-bought haircut and secondhand jacket, he looked like he knew a thing or two
about the world in the Goodwill store’s cloudy mirror.
Hurley remembered the coat well. He’d donated it to the Goodwill a few years earlier
because he’d figured some charity case could use it more than him. Apparently, he’d been wrong.
Brian Beatty is the author of five poetry collections: Magpies and Crows; Borrowed Trouble; Dust and Stars: Miniatures; Brazil, Indiana: A Folk Poem; and Coyotes I Couldn’t See. His flash fictions have appeared in numerous publications, including Cowboy Jamboree, Floyd County Moonshine, Hobart, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Monkeybicycle, The Quarterly and Seventeen.
Paul Beckman
Fire & Ice
Sharon and Harold had been living large. Their 3000-sf colonial had a sunroom, two home
offices and an inground heated pool. They didn’t want to sell it but since they were both working
on commission and the markets were tanking they no longer had a choice so sell it they did and
moved to a third-floor walkup one-bedroom apartment. They promised each other they’d get
back to their salad days soon and be able to buy again with the market being so low.
Two years in and nothing happened except that each one thought the other should take a paying
job with benefits but neither would budge. Sharon wanted Harold to get out of commission real
estate and take a job at Home Depot and Harold wanted Sharon to leave pharmaceutical sales
and take a job as office manager for a medical practice.
They’d had another knock-down drag-out of a fight and hadn’t spoken in weeks. Harold felt
Sharon’s coldness all throughout their apartment but nowhere as much as in their bedroom.
Sharon felt the heat of Harold’s stubbornness and anger permeating each room and piece of
furniture. Each kept to their side of the king-sized bed which almost filled the room.
If they were speaking Harold would have told Sharon that come Monday he was starting a new
job with great benefits in the IT department of a large insurance company in Hartford, and
Sharon would’ve told Harold that she got a Help Desk supervisor’s job in another Hartford
insurance company and she was starting Monday also. It all came out Monday morning when
they arrived at the bus stop at the same time.
Paul Beckman’s latest flash collection, Kiss Kiss (Truth Serum Press) was a finalist for the 2019 Indie Book Awards. Some of his stories have appeared in Spelk, Anti-Heroin Chic, Necessary Fiction, Bending Genres, Fictive Dream, Pank, Playboy, WINK, and The Lost Balloon. He had a story selected for the 2020 National Flash Fiction Day Anthology and was short-listed in the Strands International Flash Fiction Competition. Paul curates the monthly KGB FBomb NY flash fiction reading series (currently virtual).
Patricia Q. Bidar San Leandro, CA
When I Think of Home
“What do Dorothy Gale, Holden Caulfield, and the members of the Breakfast Club have in
common?” Lars asks me. He and I are slouched in our hard velvet balcony seats at the Castro
Theatre. Up here it smells like Lars’s cologne and coffee. Two rows back, someone lights a joint.
“They’re all trapped by dumb adults?” I barely remember Holden Caulfield. A callow young man
in 1950’s New York, claiming to hate phonies and dreaming of being a hero.
“No! They’re dreaming of going home.”
“Huh? Dorothy, sure. The Breakfast Club kids went home because they had to. And Holden, oh
honestly, fuck that guy.”
Lars snuggles closer. His boyfriend, a basketball player from Sacramento, has dumped him. Our
first move today was to buy Lars an electric blanket at Sears on windy Geary. The second was to
come here, our home away from home, for a showing of Mildred Pierce.
“There was also Huck Finn,” Lars muses. “His thing was, Fuck going home.”
“Like us. Like everyone here.” I was born and raised in the Central Valley, not so far away. In
San Francisco, and especially in the Castro District, my friends found family in people unrelated
to them. Some are like me: preferring to spend holidays with one another instead of flying back
to San Diego or Missouri or Des Moines. Others were disowned by their families of origin.
In the 1980s, members of the media joked openly about AIDS, calling it the “gay plague.”
Ronald Reagan was president for nearly five years before he uttered the word “AIDS” in public,
nearly seven years before he gave a speech on a health crisis that would kill more than 650,000
Americans.
When our friends began getting sick, we did our best to care for them. Some died and it was
lingering and terrible to see. Afterward, a family member would arrive, in alien clothing and
hairstyle in our colorful apartments. We’d search for and find a thread of our friends’ faces in
theirs. They’d stay long enough to clean the deceased apartments and deal with landlords. Scrape
candle wax from windowsills; feathers from closet floors. Donate belongings to Community
Thrift or to us. When they were done, we’d send them off with a covered plate of food. The urn
of ashes. A photo of their family member fully alive at a party or rally or parade.
The Wurlitzer organ rises from the orchestra pit, sound swelling. Everyone cheers. Like Dorothy
and the Breakfast Club Kids and for all I remember, Holden Caulfield. The lucky among us
found our lives by venturing from home and getting into some colorful trouble.
Still, all these years later, the tragedy of lives cut cruelly short grabs me by the throat.
Green
My new housemate Clementine worked at a sex line. Our Haight-Ashbury Victorian had once
been the site of seances, she told me. This was new life, completely different from the one I’d
left behind. A fresh start. I was sold.
I had a little money saved from an ill-fated caregiver position. Should I be found, I’d be in
serious trouble. If mail arrived related to legal proceedings, I’d need to intercept it.
At night, I’d enter Clementine’s room. The air was thick with Shalimar and peppery sex. Feather
boas and jeweled masks adorned the surfaces. I’d try on her leather corset. It had cradled her
breasts, the curve of her ribs.
Clementine said she recommend me at the sex line. I was relieved. I was running out of money.
Life on the lam was a lonely existence. Besides, I was scared in the silent apartment at night.
On one side of a room divider sat the psychic hotliners. On the other were the sex operators.
They kept lollipops in baskets. The clients got off on the sound, Clementine explained. I had a
habit of forgetting myself and chewing mine, spoiling the effect.
I spent breaks chatting with the head psychic, Absinthe. For some reason, this really frosted
Clementine’s cookies. She would criticize Absinthe’s home manicures, her thick thighs. “She had a
son, before she lost custody,” she said, eyes shining with malice.
“Clementine? Our parents haven’t forgiven her for abandoning them,” Absinthe purred over her
dragon roll. Absinthe drove to San Bruno each night to iron their stepfather’s shirt. So, they were
sisters.
Absinthe made her green-outlined eyes thoughtful and continued. “So, let’s say I’m hiring. What
do you see?”
I quieted my mind. “A blonde boy. Somewhere beachy. He’s super happy,” I added.
“You’re hired,” Absinthe crowed, swiping her ginger across the wasabi.
Clementine beat me home. When I arrived, my belongings were stacked outside our apartment
door. Atop the pile sat the letters from a law office and the court.
Patricia Q. Bidar hails from San Pedro, California, with family roots in New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah. She is an alum of the U.C. Davis Graduate Writing Program and also holds a BA in Filmmaking. Patricia’s stories have appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Sou’wester, Little Patuxent Review, and Pidgeonholes, among other places. She lives with her DJ husband and unusual dog in the San Francisco Bay Area. Visit her at https://patriciaqbidar.com or on Twitter (@patriciabidar).
Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar
The Fifth Anniversary
After the guests leave and taillights fade, the unspoken hostility stays in the room, grown too
large for the two of us. You insisted on the fifth-anniversary party for your co-workers, then
grumbled at the too-spicy wings I’d ordered, the too-colorful balloons I’d taped to the walls, said
it wasn’t a child’s birthday. The child I can’t give you. Now, I hold a triangular piece of cake
with a sputtering candle on a plate between us—half of a strawberry, a ring of kiwi atop the
cream and sponge. Not a curve on your lips, not a flicker in your eyes, despite the candle. I pick
the strawberry off the cake and bring it to your taut lips—an attempt at resigned reconciliation.
You gaze into my eyes and take the fruit in, then, lick my thumb and finger hanging in the air
front of your face. Lips bridge the physical distance between us, the strawberry sweetness rolling
between our tongues, quenching an unspoken thirst. Desire, buried for long, flows from cheek to
cheek, chin to chin, neck to neck. Hands reach and rove, deflecting the specter of scathing
childlessness, domestic disagreements, and dissonance of personal choices. A fire flares in the
follicles, our bodies dissolve into the couch, the leather cold against sweltering skins. A red
balloon from the wall behind drops between us. I push it to the floor, it rises back up. I slide it
under the couch. Can’t risk anything popping between us. Not now.
Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar is an Indian American writer. Her work has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Reflex Press, Flash Fiction Online, and elsewhere. She is currently an editor at Janus Literary and a Submissions Editor at SmokeLong Quarterly. Her debut flash fiction collection Morsels of Purple is forthcoming in October 2021. More at https://saraspunyfingers.com. Reach her on Twitter @PunyFingers
The Reunion
Hurley was at the barber shop sleepily awaiting his turn when another bored magazine
reader, a guy about his age Hurley didn’t recognize, mentioned their upcoming high school reunion.
“That must be why you’re here,” the wiseacre said. “Can’t show up looking like that.”
Hurley usually cut his own hair, using whatever sharp object was within reach when inspiration
struck. Behind his back, some neighbors called him Hillbilly Einstein, but not for his I.Q.
“Everybody knows Marjorie Phillips has divorced again,” the wiseacre continued.
It was true. Hurley had already heard about Marjorie’s latest divorce, at the grocery store or bar.
It was a small town, and any divorce made big news. A third divorce started folks for miles
checking their math.
Maybe Marjorie had nothing to do with him springing for a real haircut. Maybe he was here
now just because. Just because he enjoyed watching that candy cane barber pole out front twirl around.
Or just because the smell of the comb potions and neck powders reminded him of his childhood.
Or just because he owned a mirror or two and caught a good look at himself in them once in a while.
An old girlfriend’s divorce was a simple matter of coincidence.
Marjorie wouldn’t have much use for Hurley anyway. She owned the local yoga studio and
workout gym. He peddled junk at flea markets and played fumbling bluegrass banjo sometimes.
But when he was finished at the barber shop, Hurley headed straight to the Goodwill store
down the street a few doors. He needed a presentable suit coat to wear to that upcoming reunion.
After trying on all the suit coats that would button over his gut, Hurley decided on a brown
corduroy blazer with leather elbows that made him appear as smart as any college professor.
Even pulled over his favorite bib overalls.
With his store-bought haircut and secondhand jacket, he looked like he knew a thing or two
about the world in the Goodwill store’s cloudy mirror.
Hurley remembered the coat well. He’d donated it to the Goodwill a few years earlier
because he’d figured some charity case could use it more than him. Apparently, he’d been wrong.
Brian Beatty is the author of five poetry collections: Magpies and Crows; Borrowed Trouble; Dust and Stars: Miniatures; Brazil, Indiana: A Folk Poem; and Coyotes I Couldn’t See. His flash fictions have appeared in numerous publications, including Cowboy Jamboree, Floyd County Moonshine, Hobart, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Monkeybicycle, The Quarterly and Seventeen.
Paul Beckman
Fire & Ice
Sharon and Harold had been living large. Their 3000-sf colonial had a sunroom, two home
offices and an inground heated pool. They didn’t want to sell it but since they were both working
on commission and the markets were tanking they no longer had a choice so sell it they did and
moved to a third-floor walkup one-bedroom apartment. They promised each other they’d get
back to their salad days soon and be able to buy again with the market being so low.
Two years in and nothing happened except that each one thought the other should take a paying
job with benefits but neither would budge. Sharon wanted Harold to get out of commission real
estate and take a job at Home Depot and Harold wanted Sharon to leave pharmaceutical sales
and take a job as office manager for a medical practice.
They’d had another knock-down drag-out of a fight and hadn’t spoken in weeks. Harold felt
Sharon’s coldness all throughout their apartment but nowhere as much as in their bedroom.
Sharon felt the heat of Harold’s stubbornness and anger permeating each room and piece of
furniture. Each kept to their side of the king-sized bed which almost filled the room.
If they were speaking Harold would have told Sharon that come Monday he was starting a new
job with great benefits in the IT department of a large insurance company in Hartford, and
Sharon would’ve told Harold that she got a Help Desk supervisor’s job in another Hartford
insurance company and she was starting Monday also. It all came out Monday morning when
they arrived at the bus stop at the same time.
Paul Beckman’s latest flash collection, Kiss Kiss (Truth Serum Press) was a finalist for the 2019 Indie Book Awards. Some of his stories have appeared in Spelk, Anti-Heroin Chic, Necessary Fiction, Bending Genres, Fictive Dream, Pank, Playboy, WINK, and The Lost Balloon. He had a story selected for the 2020 National Flash Fiction Day Anthology and was short-listed in the Strands International Flash Fiction Competition. Paul curates the monthly KGB FBomb NY flash fiction reading series (currently virtual).
Patricia Q. Bidar San Leandro, CA
When I Think of Home
“What do Dorothy Gale, Holden Caulfield, and the members of the Breakfast Club have in
common?” Lars asks me. He and I are slouched in our hard velvet balcony seats at the Castro
Theatre. Up here it smells like Lars’s cologne and coffee. Two rows back, someone lights a joint.
“They’re all trapped by dumb adults?” I barely remember Holden Caulfield. A callow young man
in 1950’s New York, claiming to hate phonies and dreaming of being a hero.
“No! They’re dreaming of going home.”
“Huh? Dorothy, sure. The Breakfast Club kids went home because they had to. And Holden, oh
honestly, fuck that guy.”
Lars snuggles closer. His boyfriend, a basketball player from Sacramento, has dumped him. Our
first move today was to buy Lars an electric blanket at Sears on windy Geary. The second was to
come here, our home away from home, for a showing of Mildred Pierce.
“There was also Huck Finn,” Lars muses. “His thing was, Fuck going home.”
“Like us. Like everyone here.” I was born and raised in the Central Valley, not so far away. In
San Francisco, and especially in the Castro District, my friends found family in people unrelated
to them. Some are like me: preferring to spend holidays with one another instead of flying back
to San Diego or Missouri or Des Moines. Others were disowned by their families of origin.
In the 1980s, members of the media joked openly about AIDS, calling it the “gay plague.”
Ronald Reagan was president for nearly five years before he uttered the word “AIDS” in public,
nearly seven years before he gave a speech on a health crisis that would kill more than 650,000
Americans.
When our friends began getting sick, we did our best to care for them. Some died and it was
lingering and terrible to see. Afterward, a family member would arrive, in alien clothing and
hairstyle in our colorful apartments. We’d search for and find a thread of our friends’ faces in
theirs. They’d stay long enough to clean the deceased apartments and deal with landlords. Scrape
candle wax from windowsills; feathers from closet floors. Donate belongings to Community
Thrift or to us. When they were done, we’d send them off with a covered plate of food. The urn
of ashes. A photo of their family member fully alive at a party or rally or parade.
The Wurlitzer organ rises from the orchestra pit, sound swelling. Everyone cheers. Like Dorothy
and the Breakfast Club Kids and for all I remember, Holden Caulfield. The lucky among us
found our lives by venturing from home and getting into some colorful trouble.
Still, all these years later, the tragedy of lives cut cruelly short grabs me by the throat.
Green
My new housemate Clementine worked at a sex line. Our Haight-Ashbury Victorian had once
been the site of seances, she told me. This was new life, completely different from the one I’d
left behind. A fresh start. I was sold.
I had a little money saved from an ill-fated caregiver position. Should I be found, I’d be in
serious trouble. If mail arrived related to legal proceedings, I’d need to intercept it.
At night, I’d enter Clementine’s room. The air was thick with Shalimar and peppery sex. Feather
boas and jeweled masks adorned the surfaces. I’d try on her leather corset. It had cradled her
breasts, the curve of her ribs.
Clementine said she recommend me at the sex line. I was relieved. I was running out of money.
Life on the lam was a lonely existence. Besides, I was scared in the silent apartment at night.
On one side of a room divider sat the psychic hotliners. On the other were the sex operators.
They kept lollipops in baskets. The clients got off on the sound, Clementine explained. I had a
habit of forgetting myself and chewing mine, spoiling the effect.
I spent breaks chatting with the head psychic, Absinthe. For some reason, this really frosted
Clementine’s cookies. She would criticize Absinthe’s home manicures, her thick thighs. “She had a
son, before she lost custody,” she said, eyes shining with malice.
“Clementine? Our parents haven’t forgiven her for abandoning them,” Absinthe purred over her
dragon roll. Absinthe drove to San Bruno each night to iron their stepfather’s shirt. So, they were
sisters.
Absinthe made her green-outlined eyes thoughtful and continued. “So, let’s say I’m hiring. What
do you see?”
I quieted my mind. “A blonde boy. Somewhere beachy. He’s super happy,” I added.
“You’re hired,” Absinthe crowed, swiping her ginger across the wasabi.
Clementine beat me home. When I arrived, my belongings were stacked outside our apartment
door. Atop the pile sat the letters from a law office and the court.
Patricia Q. Bidar hails from San Pedro, California, with family roots in New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah. She is an alum of the U.C. Davis Graduate Writing Program and also holds a BA in Filmmaking. Patricia’s stories have appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Sou’wester, Little Patuxent Review, and Pidgeonholes, among other places. She lives with her DJ husband and unusual dog in the San Francisco Bay Area. Visit her at https://patriciaqbidar.com or on Twitter (@patriciabidar).
Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar
The Fifth Anniversary
After the guests leave and taillights fade, the unspoken hostility stays in the room, grown too
large for the two of us. You insisted on the fifth-anniversary party for your co-workers, then
grumbled at the too-spicy wings I’d ordered, the too-colorful balloons I’d taped to the walls, said
it wasn’t a child’s birthday. The child I can’t give you. Now, I hold a triangular piece of cake
with a sputtering candle on a plate between us—half of a strawberry, a ring of kiwi atop the
cream and sponge. Not a curve on your lips, not a flicker in your eyes, despite the candle. I pick
the strawberry off the cake and bring it to your taut lips—an attempt at resigned reconciliation.
You gaze into my eyes and take the fruit in, then, lick my thumb and finger hanging in the air
front of your face. Lips bridge the physical distance between us, the strawberry sweetness rolling
between our tongues, quenching an unspoken thirst. Desire, buried for long, flows from cheek to
cheek, chin to chin, neck to neck. Hands reach and rove, deflecting the specter of scathing
childlessness, domestic disagreements, and dissonance of personal choices. A fire flares in the
follicles, our bodies dissolve into the couch, the leather cold against sweltering skins. A red
balloon from the wall behind drops between us. I push it to the floor, it rises back up. I slide it
under the couch. Can’t risk anything popping between us. Not now.
Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar is an Indian American writer. Her work has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Reflex Press, Flash Fiction Online, and elsewhere. She is currently an editor at Janus Literary and a Submissions Editor at SmokeLong Quarterly. Her debut flash fiction collection Morsels of Purple is forthcoming in October 2021. More at https://saraspunyfingers.com. Reach her on Twitter @PunyFingers
Mark Crimmins Hong Kong
Woman’s Brain Sees Man
Woman’s Brain Sees Man
Woman comes home. Woman slams door. Woman says: Goddammit! Man says: Don’t slam the goddam door! Woman says: Huh? Man kicks coffee table. Woman says: Huh! Woman tears pile of mail down middle. Woman throws pieces of mail up in air. Man throws It’s Not About the Bike at woman. Woman ducks. It’s Not About the Bike knocks portrait of woman’s dead mother off mantelpiece. Frame of portrait of woman’s dead mother breaks. Woman looks at broken glass. Woman looks at torn picture. Woman gets look in eye. Man sees look in woman’s eye. Man hesitates. Woman stands still. Cogs in woman’s brain start turning. Man tries to stop cogs in woman’s brain. Man says: Look. Woman says nothing. Man says: Look, I’m sorry. Woman marches out of room. Man follows. Woman stomps up hardwood stairs in pointy boots. Man says: Look. Woman moves up stairs like zombie. Man follows woman up stairs. Woman turns around. Man keeps eye on missiles woman might hurl. Woman’s mouth says: I can’t fucking believe it! Man lurches forward to hug woman. Woman’s brain thinks man might hit woman. Woman’s brain remembers moves from kickboxing class. Woman’s mouth says: Don’t touch me. Man slows down. Woman’s mouth says: Don’t touch me, Frankie! Man slows down some more. Woman’s mouth says: I swear to fucking God, Frankie, if you touch me I’m gonna defend myself! Man stops. Man looks at woman. Woman looks at man. Woman rotates on axis. Woman adopts defensive posture. Woman raises fist. Man says: Look. Man reaches forward. Man says: Honey. Man grabs woman’s left elbow. Woman unleashes right hook! Woman hits man! Woman’s fist goes straight into man’s face! Man raises hands to head. Man says: Jeezus Christ! Woman says: I warned you, Frankie. Man says: You bitch! Man says: You fucking bitch! Man says: I can’t believe you just did that! Man says: You hit me! Man says: You assaulted me! Man’s face starts to twist. Man picks up metal bust of Elvis from windowsill at top of stairs. Man lifts Elvis above his head. Shaft of sunlight comes through window. Shaft of light illuminates man with upheld Elvis. Woman’s brain sees cinematic still of man holding Elvis. Woman’s brain’s visual cortex compiles graphic matches. Man holding Elvis momentarily reminds woman’s brain of Statue of Liberty holding torch. But then woman’s brain sees armed man through history raising weapon to hit defenseless woman. Woman’s motor cortex tells woman’s left leg to prepare high kick. Woman’s hippocampus produces image of Croatian kickboxing champion Mirko Crocop’s left high kick as template. Man moves forward with Elvis as if in trance. Woman moves left leg back. Woman presents right side towards advancing man so attackable surface area of woman is reduced. Man says nothing. Woman says: Don’t do it, Frankie. Man edges forward. Woman says: I’ll defend myself, Frankie! Woman says: I swear to God, Frankie! Man is silent. Man moves forward jerkily like Frankenstein’s monster. Man’s frontal lobes select target on woman’s right temple. Woman’s brain tells woman’s leg to disable man’s motor function. Woman’s brain tells woman’s left leg to make high kick to right side of man’s head. Man moves forward. Woman moves to side. Man starts to yell. Woman lets out kiai. Woman pivots onto right heel. Woman’s left leg shoots up into air! Man starts to bring Elvis down towards woman’s head! Woman’s left leg accelerates towards man’s head! Elvis arcs towards woman’s temple! Woman’s head dodges Elvis! Pointy boot on woman’s left foot connects with right side of man’s head! Woman’s instinct follows up kick with right uppercut to tip of man’s chin! Man stumbles backwards! Man out on feet! Man on edge of stairs! Woman says: Frankie? Man starts to fall. Man falling backwards. Woman reaching forwards. Woman can’t stop man falling. Man crashes back onto hardwood stairs. Man’s neck snaps with sickening crack! Woman shouts: Frankie! Gravity pulls man down stairs very violently indeed. Stairs seem to rise up to greet man. Man keeps falling. Woman shouts: Frankie! Man falls in heap at bottom of stairs. Woman rushes down stairs. Woman’s voice says: Frankie!? Man does not move. Man’s mouth does not speak. Man’s eyes roll into top of man’s head. Red and white foam oozes from man’s lips. Woman starts sobbing. Woman slumps to floor. Torn up mail lies around man and woman like big confetti.
|
Mark Crimmins's first book, psychogeographical travel memoir Sydneyside Reflections, was published by Australia's Everytime Press in 2020. His flash fictions have been published in Columbia Journal, Cortland Review, Tampa Review, Apalachee Review, Tampa Review, Atticus Review, Portland Review, Kyoto Journal, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Flash Frontier, Pure Slush, Fiction Southeast, and Flash: The international Short Short Story Magazine. More at https://www.markcrimmins.com.
Subhravanu Das Bhubaneswar, India
To Desire
To desire was to marvel at the tree’s height, a height it had attained long before my moving
van broke down in front of it. The signboard lounging by its roots warned, “Do Not Loiter.
Coconuts May Fall On Your Head.” I didn’t loiter. I didn’t spiral up its trunk. I rented a room
in the house whose wall was cracking under the tree’s shadow. I built a styrofoam bridge
from the roof to the tree. I crossed the bridge and dived into the green blades it passed off as
leaves. It shared all that it bore. Hammering in nail after nail, I drained its green coconuts of
their sweetness and scuttled away with my treasure. Back in my room, I froze what had been
the tree’s into popsicles and fed the they who loved me—they, about whom I’d hoped I’d
never have to speak to the tree. Stooping down to my window, the tree saw what transpired. It
didn’t throw the bridge off. I returned to it and straddled its bruises.
To desire is to hire a diviner who slits open the belly of the sun and engorges the tree with
rain. I massage suds of compost into the tree’s jugular veins. As it droops, I try to sneak
away, only for its now-brown coconuts to weave a coir rope around my ankles. I use the rope
to bat-hang from the basket on its head. I echo the chorus of its coconuts and extract their
matured flesh, which I chew, cough up, massage, till my fingers drip with its oil. A smear,
and I slip out of its knots. I slide down the bridge. In my room, still dripping, I fry salted
fritters in its oil and feed the they I love—they, who no longer speak to me of the tree. The
tree almost barges in through the window and winces, as if in pain. It gets a storm to replace
the rain. It wrecks the bridge and adds yet another to its rings of betrayal. Its heart in brine, it
retreats behind a veil of vultures. I board up my window.
To desire will be futile.
Subhravanu Das is an Indian writer living in Bhubaneswar. His work has appeared in Gone Lawn, No Contact, Popshot Quarterly, and elsewhere.
Tommy Dean
Smoldering
She picks up each cigarette butt with a pair of tweezers. She blows on them softly, dirt
and grass clinging.
In the living room, her father rests on the couch, left arm flung toward the carpet,
clutching. Last cigarette smoldering in the porcelain ashtray. The suss of the air conditioning
lifting the soft hairs near his temple. He offers no resistance.
The pine tree already rooted there by the garage before she was born spires the sky, while
its needles ring around its base—a king nearly uncrowned.
The TV cycles through sports—soccer, billiards, women’s beach volleyball, and
NASCAR—speakers blaring the announcers’ marketing copy like carnival barkers. She fled
before turning it off and now the sound greets her each time she tries to cross the threshold of the
porch.
The boys used to pee behind the garage. They called it watering the daisies. She squats,
knees bulging like twin cantaloupes that are starting to sour, bees agitated by the sweat of her
skin, flitting from flower to throat. She’s pissed, still, at the boys’ luxury of standing, of their
dwarfing of nature.
Inside, the picture frames dusty with disuse stand guard across the old secretary desk. Ink
on paper, they are idle threats of possible ghosts. He promised to haunt, but she felt only
absence—a space she had invaded with her blush of breath. She fled to the outside where she
was less alive.
The bee stings and she watches it wilt. Well, hell, she thinks as she plants herself into the
grass. The swelling another heartbeat, a pregnancy. She scuttles away from the flowers, the smell
of urine and pollen buzzing around her nose. The car or the house. Her phone is a forgotten
accessory in the bottom of her purse in the passenger seat.
She stops in the kitchen. Table cluttered with yesterday’s lunch—blackening banana peel,
crust of baked beans, the limp remains of lettuce, a dried paint dap of mustard. The must of the
molding basement, the tang of frescoed smoke. She sees herself in the tableau of a Hopper
painting, arms braced against the sink, the moon spotlighted out the window, something lurking
in the darkness outside of the frame.
Inside the refrigerator, there is ice for her throbbing neck, but she wants something
sweeter, a dot of nostalgia on her tongue. A respite of childhood, before the duty of phone calls,
the flap of winged grief from siblings and parents. In the crisper, a can of Pepsi and the orange
wrappers of Reese’s. The pop and sizzle of the can opening. That first taste of soda clearing
everything from her tongue, her mind, sugar crashing like a wave, chased by the sour of
chocolate.
Tommy Dean is the author of two flash fiction chapbooks Special Like the People on TV (Redbird Chapbooks, 2014) and Covenants (ELJ Editions, 2021). He is the Editor at Fractured Lit and Uncharted Magazine. A graduate of the Queens University of Charlotte MFA program, he is currently working on a novel. A recipient of the 2019 Lascaux Prize in Short Fiction, his writing can be found in Best Microfiction 2019 and 2020, Monkeybicycle, and the Atticus Review. Find him at tommydeanwriter.com and on Twitter @TommyDeanWriter.
Mary Grimm Cleveland, OH
Boundary Object
Once during that year she went to a party at her cousin’s house. Her husband had died
several months before. She wore a white skirt and a red blouse, both of them too big because she
had lost weight.
She drove her new used car. She had only had her driver’s license for three weeks and
she misjudged her cousin’s narrow driveway, clipping the corner of the house. When she showed
it to her cousin’s husband, he laughed. Together they touched it up with some paint he found in
the garage. He held the can and she dabbed with a paper towel dipped into the paint. Our little
secret, he said. He was high, but not unfunctional. When they finished he set the paint can down
on the ground and they washed their hands under the outdoor faucet.
The party was in the backyard. Her cousin’s husband sat down with her, which was OK –
he already knew that her husband was dead, and so nothing had to be said. He had his own thing
he didn’t want to talk about - his sad mother, living in an institution. Instead, they listened to
vintage rock, blaring from the car radio. The car was running, to protect the battery. As it started
to get dark, someone put the headlights on, which made the tiny backyard dramatic and shadowy,
as if it were larger than it was.
Her husband had never been inside the house, and for this reason (even though it was a
silly reason) she didn’t want to go in there.
She and her cousin had always been close in a weird way. They were the outsiders in the
family, the slightly bad girls. Her cousin liked to pretend that they had a kind of ESP, and she
pretended to believe this. They had the same nose, that couldn’t be denied.
Her cousin’s husband took her hand while they sat in the dark of the backyard. “You can
ask me for anything,” he said. “I’m here for you.” He kissed her on the mouth, just the corner,
because she pulled away. “Do you want to dance?” he said.
She shook her head and he stared at her sadly. “Let me know when you want a real kiss,”
he said. “I’m leaving that up to you.” He went to stand in the light of the car headlights.
Her cousin had taught her to drive in that car, after her husband died. “It’s something you
need to know,” she’d said. “Now that you’re on your own.”
Where she sat the shadows seemed to gather and thicken. Her cousin’s husband was
dancing to a fast song with a woman in a long skirt that dragged on the ground. The air was
heavy. Every sound was shrill. Under her feet, the sand from a child’s sandbox gritted and
shifted. Anyone could touch her now. The hole cut in the world for her was shrinking.
Her cousin’s husband’s long arms and legs cut through the air as he danced. Her cousin
stood at the backdoor, outlined by the kitchen’s yellow light, watching.
Mary Grimm has had two books published, Left to Themselves (novel) and Stealing Time (story collection) - both by Random House. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Antioch Review, and the Mississippi Review, as well as in a number of journals that publish flash fiction. Currently, she is working on a historical novel set in 1930s Cleveland. She teaches fiction writing at Case Western Reserve University.
Jennifer Schomburg Kanke Tallahassee, FL
Things People Do
Do not move. You are perfectly situated in your small desk and chair in this beige room with
blue and peach flecks on the shiny tile floor.
The professor has launched into another story about dating his former students. This one is about
sitting on a couch in the girl’s apartment directly under a picture of Jason Momoa. Awk-ward, he
says like it’s still 2012, but people are laughing. This must be funny. This must be a thing people
do.
He is waiting for the class to get into five groups of five and then circle up, as instructed.
You are already in your circle because you are a good and righteous girl, so far as anyone in
Wilson Hall room 214 knows.
What do they know. They are all bastards.
Look around your circle and remind yourself of that. This is your daily ritual. This is what you
do when class gets boring. It is often boring.
This is the professor who has a habit of starting sentences America is a classless society, so,
drawing out the o in so before launching into some bullshit analysis or other.
Circle up, please. He interrupts himself to remind you all of the task at hand.
Look at the girl across from you, the one with the pointy chin who is most certainly either a
witch or a New England aristocrat. An awitchtocrat. Haha! You’re funny, probably the funniest
one in this class. You met the girl once through your ex-friend Sasha. You have a lot of ex-
friends now. Bastards.
Circle up, please. His story is over and he is focused again, wants everyone in the room to be
too.
Look at the boy beside you. The Black boy who always wears button downs. He went to private
school with the boy with the sharp chin who looks like a hot version of Count von Count from
Sesame Street sitting to the other side of the awitchtocrat. It wasn’t a private school private
school, just a little Catholic day school, they say. Your school had science textbooks that said
someday man may walk on the moon and had a section on climate change that called it Global
Warming, acted like something could still be done. Bastards.
Circle up, please. The professor is more insistent now.
There’s one other guy in your group, but he’s to your right and slightly behind you. You can’t
make eye contact with him, which doesn’t bother you. It’s Ned, from your creative writing class
last spring. He wrote thirty-page stories about drinking at beach houses and crashing his new
Audi into a friend’s pool just to see what would happen. You’d chalked it up to Freudian wish
fulfillment, wrote snarky notes to him in your feedback. That was before you overheard him at a
party telling some girl from Sasha’s sorority the same stories with less structure and more details.
Back home, your father used to let you borrow his 2004 Corolla to drive to work, but only on
sunny days. It spun out if stopped on wet inclines. Bastard.
Erin Meyers, I said circle up.
You look around. You don’t understand. You are in a circle. You are fine.
He comes over to your group and stands behind you.
Can’t you hear me? He is upset. You are upset. He has falsely accused you. You have taken
great care to line your chair up with the boy in the button down.
He grips the back of your seat and hoists it (and you) into the air. Not much, but more than is
necessary. He moves you back half an inch to form an arc between Button Down and Count
Hottie.
Don’t cry. Don’t get up and throw your chair through the window. This isn’t that kind of place.
Don’t let it rattle you. The class is laughing. This must be funny. This must be a thing people do.
Jennifer Schomburg Kanke, originally from Columbus, Ohio, lives in Tallahassee, Florida, where she edits confidential documents for the government. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Nimrod, Massachusetts Review, and Salamander. Her chapbook, Fine, Considering, about her experiences undergoing chemotherapy for ovarian cancer, is available from Rinky Dink Press. She serves on the board of directors for Anhinga Press.
Louella Lester Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
And Eating Them, Too
The health kick was Jack’s idea. He’d been having trouble performing and blamed it on
the weight Bailey had gained over the years, though she pointed out that he’d put on a few
pounds himself. Still, she went along with the plan, though she didn’t really mind that he never
touched her much anymore.
Three weeks in, Jack bought a bicycle and joined the village cycling club. Bailey bought
new recipe books at the health food store, but never got rid of her old cookbooks. While Jack
was out cycling or running, which he’d also taken up, Bailey leafed through the old cookbooks,
ripping out photos of baguettes which she slathered in virgin olive oil and stuffed in her mouth
until her cheeks bulged. Pulling out photos of oysters which she dampened and slurped up in one
go. Sprinkling cinnamon on apple pie photos before forking them into her mouth.
One evening, right after she’d laid out and salted two photos of french fries, her husband
arrived home early from a run. The poof of air, as he closed the door, sent the photos sailing
from the counter. “I’m going for a shower before we eat,” Jack said. Then he headed for the
stairs, unaware that a photo now clung to his sweaty thigh, salt fanning out down his knee. But
Bailey was all too aware. She followed him up the stairs, saliva pooling in her mouth,
threatening to drip from the corner of her lips. Before he made it to the bedroom she shoved him
to the floor, licking the back of his knee, chewing the photo as she gurgled her way up his thigh.
“See,” he said, as they later rested on the carpet, “I was right about this health plan.”
“Hmmmm,” she said, before sliding down the stairs to find that second photo of fries.
Louella Lester is a writer and amateur photographer in Winnipeg, Canada. Her Flash-CNF book, Glass Bricks (At Bay Press, April 2021) is out now. Her work has appeared/is forthcoming in The Daily Drunk, Dribble Drabble, The Odd Magazine, Grey Sparrow Journal, New Flash Fiction, Spelk, Vallum, Prairie Fire, The Antigonish Review, CBC News Manitoba Online, and in the anthologies Gush: menstrual manifestos, (Frontenac House, 2018), A Girl’s Guide to Fly Fishing (Reflex Press, 2020), Wrong Way Go Back, (Pure Slush, 2020).
Renuka Raghavan
Fur Babies
The weird religious couple next door had a hard-on for babies but couldn’t have any of their
own, so they ordered some from a mail catalog. Not really, but when one day the wife explained
that they picked a pair of siblings from Lima who “looked so cute and perfect,” I imagined them
flipping through a catalog, turning their noses up at the ugly ones before finding the angelic pair
they finally chose. A few months later, a delivery truck backed into their driveway, only instead
of children, they got two juvenile alpacas. Everyone from the neighborhood laughed at the
SNAFU. Kids wanted to pet them, ride on them, take selfies with them. The wife and husband
didn’t mind. They loved those animals as if they were human children. She knit sweater vests for
them in the fall, beanies in the winter. He would walk them before and after work, took them to
the vet for shots. God had a grander plan for us. We must not fault or doubt His will. Any life
given to us is a blessing, the wife said. And for a while, they were all very happy.
When the noise at all hours of the night became unbearable, and the lawns all over the
neighborhood were eaten, shat, and trampled upon, the wife and husband were charged with
negligence. Everyone from the neighborhood agreed they had been better off before they got
their children. Not everyone is cut out to be a parent, after all. When the authorities raided their
house to ship the beasts to a farm, everyone from the neighborhood gathered to watch. The
animals were found sitting quietly in their own beds wearing clean pajamas, listening to NPR,
their eyes—dark pools of longing.
Author of Out of the Blue (Big Table Publishing, 2017) and The Face I Desire, (Nixes Mate, 2019) Renuka Raghavan writes short-form prose and poetry. Her previous work has been featured in Bending Genres, Boston Literary Magazine, Star 82 Review, and The Drabble, among others. For a complete list of her previous publications, visit her at www.renukaraghavan.com
Kenneth Robbins Ruston, LA
Birdcage
Martin Wanski, artist, had been here. A minor miracle.
Martin Wanski, c: 2018.
What he left when he left here: two faces in hardened clay, stuck in the wiring of a
birdcage, one face with eyes open, the other with eyes not.
An ordinary birdcage. This one--suspended from a tree in the garden, with two faces
entwined--canary size, a solo song, a cage used in pet shops to solo the birds, thin metal strips on
all six sides and a small wire handle defining the top.
Two faces, stuck, struggling to be freed.
Two faces, stuck, trying to get in.
Two faces. Flat, smashed perhaps, or carelessly rendered. Flattened.
Enigma. No backs of heads. Only faces. Two dissimilar.
Enigma. An artist, viewing the world backward.
Martin Wanski, the artist on Christmas break, topside on a double-decker, through the
streets of London, alive with the cool, damp breeze, elated to be in the city of Shakespeare and
Dryden, of Dickens and Pope, of Eliot and Woolf. First day elation. First day with flakes of ice
and the promise of a Christmas well spent.
Atop the double-decker, oblivious, thanks to Christmas joy. Feet braced to the sides, fists
clinching the rail, butt to the future, face, pressed to his past.
The warning, unheard. Unattended. Joy was all, too exhilarating.
Warning again, not heard. Beware. The low-hanging overpass, of concrete, hardened
clay, gray, severe. Lifeless. Crudely shaped. Sharp. Brittle.
Martin Wanski stood, back to the wind. An artist. An enigma.
Half his head, the back part, not the part he needed, decorated the sallow concrete.
Hardened clay, gray, severe. Lifeless. Crudely shaped. Sharp. Brittle.
His face, shoved into the wires of his cage. Let me in. Let me be with you. Let me
know when to sit and when to stand, when to lean and when to leap. I want in, with
the canary that isn’t there and its song that no one hears.
Martin Wanski had been here. The artists’ retreat. Had left his mark as artists before had
done. There, suspended in the sculpture garden of a place far removed, hangs the minor miracle.
The birdcage. No bird. Two faces. Striving to get out. Struggling to get in.
Kenneth Robbins is the author of six published novels, thirty-two published plays, and numerous essays, stories, and memoirs on-line and in peer-reviewed journals. His fiction has received the Toni Morrison Prize and the Associated Writing Programs Novel Award. His plays have been recognized by receiving the Charles Getchell Award, the Festival of Southern Theatre Award, and the Gabrielle Society Humanitarian Award. He lives in Ruston, Louisiana.
Kristina T. Saccone Washington, DC
Why She Sings
The time she sang a lullaby over your crib, probably “You Are My Sunshine,” and you felt her
fingers lightly rubbing your back. The time she taught you the words to “Yellow Submarine”
because you loved the tune but couldn’t read the lyrics on the back of the record yet. The time
she sang along to an aria on the classical station coming home from soccer practice, and you
just wished she’d shut up. The time she sang at the top of her lungs in church, sitting right there
next to you, because she said no one could hear her over all those other voices, but you heard
her and it was enough to make you turn away. When you realized she had stopped singing the
songs she loved because she knew it annoyed you and loved you more. The time she sang in
the kitchen when you came home from college after the divorce to clean out your bedroom and
realized for the first time she had a beautiful voice. The time she sang “Joy to the World” at the
holidays, and your toddler pinched your arm and asked, “Why is grandma so loud?” so you told
him, in an equally audible voice, “She sings because she is happy.”
Kristina T. Saccone crafts flash fiction and creative nonfiction. Her work has appeared in 365 Tomorrows, The Bangor Literary Journal, Emerge Literary Journal, and Unearthed, and she curates Flash Roundup, featuring the latest releases in flash fiction. Find her on Twitter at @kristinasaccone or haunting small independent bookstores in the Washington, DC, area.
Angeline Schellenberg Winnipeg, Canada
Nesting
Harmon had issues, some of which could not be solved with dynamite. Call him just plain
frightening, he didn’t care. The chickens in his neighbour’s yard might feel differently. Had
anyone actually proven birds have feelings? He would google it later.
The dreams started the night of his first 911 call: images of a fireball rolling over fences and
cars, lighting boulevard leaves cherry red.
Give him credit for holding back as much as he did. That stockpile in his garage could have
flown the whole coop to city hall and back. He slammed down his coffee mug and the bottles on
the counter clattered to the floor.
After retrieving the fallen inhaler from his wool lining, he tucked his feet into the boots. Harmon
heaved on the rusted garage door until there was just enough room for him to duck inside. His
sole captive blinked at him from the box of grass clippings. Harmon put down a fresh batch of
oatmeal cookies and the grasshoppers he’d caught on today’s walk to the playground.
The bird pecked at his palm. Truth be told, he hadn’t blown up anything since the fireworks he’d
put on for the neighbourhood last New Year’s, before the brisk air had become too much for his
daughter’s burning lungs. But in his dreams, feathers fell around them like snowflakes—the tiny
jewels catching in her thinning hair.
Angeline Schellenberg’s debut about raising children on the autism spectrum, Tell Them It Was Mozart (Brick Books, 2016), won three Manitoba Book Awards and was a finalist for a ReLit Award for poetry. In 2019, she published three chapbooks and was nominated for The Pushcart Prize and Arc Poetry Magazine’s Poem of the Year. Angeline hosts Speaking Crow—Winnipeg’s longest-running poetry open mic. Her latest book is Fields of Light and Stone (University of Alberta Press, 2020).
Zoe Stanek
The Toast is Jammed
Mornings are cold; dew drops and splintered sunlight dance between the canopy of trees.
The tide is low but rising quickly, families of sand dollars getting eclipsed by dark waters. A
loon howls and forest folk scitter by. The world is waking.
A house stands tall among the trees, its body enveloped in moss and vines. Shutters hang
open and smoke bellows from a stone chimney. It smells of burning wood and wet grass. The
porch creaks and the house cracks when the wind blows, its body worn by age and the elements.
The front door is red with wood detailing and a brass handle reminiscent of the sun.
The house is warm with smooth oak floors and creamy walls. There are shelves of books
with faded bindings and speckles of mold. Walls are adorned with art and greenery, the outside
making its way in. At every window are pots of plants reaching for the sun and soothed by the
sound of music. Up the crooked stairs is an open space occupied by art supplies and open
windows. By far the most important feature is the kitchen. It is illuminated by sunlight or
starlight, both of which shine brightly through big white window frames. There are cabinets with
driftwood handles and brass pots and pans that hang on the walls and above the island. Wood
counters full of grooves and knicks tell stories and worn patches on the floor match worn patches
on the counter, each step a memory of a recipe, a meal, a person, or all three. One wall is
occupied by a grand brick fireplace that functions as a stove or a stove that functions as a
fireplace. It is the hearth and the heart. When its flames beat, the house lives.
The kettle is on and the toast is jammed. Breakfast will be eaten outside, between the
trees and near the garden. The house sits in a small clearing, the only circle of land touched by
man on an otherwise wild and untamed island. Beyond the line of trees are creatures and peaks
and caves, they are the darkest and the brightest but the circle is both. Mermaids’ songs sound at
twilight and goblins exchange gifts for things that wash onto the beach. Forest spirits glow
between trees until they disappear in the thick and from the thick is the rhythmic sound of troll
drums. Fairies zig zag through the sky and elves bake cookies in trees and on holidays everyone
gathers for grand festivities.
Boots worn through tall grass keep watch for snails, slugs, and whatever else might exist
among the green. There is a hand-me-down quilt with floral patterns and images of boats at sea
laying on the ground, awaiting a breakfast picnic. The sea calls to the boats, its cries sounding as
waves are carried in and out. After breakfast there will be piles of treasures along the sand,
things to admire and trade.
Caterpillars hang on blades of grass and the nearby ocean laps against the shore and you
are alone in the serenity.
Born in Nebraska and raised in Western Colorado, Zoe Stanek has found her place among the trees in Oregon’s Pacific Northwest. There, she attends Pacific University as a Creative Writing major with a double minor in Editing & Publishing and Fine Arts. She is a fiction author who takes inspiration from nature, women, and different regions across the United States. She will graduate with a BA in 2022.
To Desire
To desire was to marvel at the tree’s height, a height it had attained long before my moving
van broke down in front of it. The signboard lounging by its roots warned, “Do Not Loiter.
Coconuts May Fall On Your Head.” I didn’t loiter. I didn’t spiral up its trunk. I rented a room
in the house whose wall was cracking under the tree’s shadow. I built a styrofoam bridge
from the roof to the tree. I crossed the bridge and dived into the green blades it passed off as
leaves. It shared all that it bore. Hammering in nail after nail, I drained its green coconuts of
their sweetness and scuttled away with my treasure. Back in my room, I froze what had been
the tree’s into popsicles and fed the they who loved me—they, about whom I’d hoped I’d
never have to speak to the tree. Stooping down to my window, the tree saw what transpired. It
didn’t throw the bridge off. I returned to it and straddled its bruises.
To desire is to hire a diviner who slits open the belly of the sun and engorges the tree with
rain. I massage suds of compost into the tree’s jugular veins. As it droops, I try to sneak
away, only for its now-brown coconuts to weave a coir rope around my ankles. I use the rope
to bat-hang from the basket on its head. I echo the chorus of its coconuts and extract their
matured flesh, which I chew, cough up, massage, till my fingers drip with its oil. A smear,
and I slip out of its knots. I slide down the bridge. In my room, still dripping, I fry salted
fritters in its oil and feed the they I love—they, who no longer speak to me of the tree. The
tree almost barges in through the window and winces, as if in pain. It gets a storm to replace
the rain. It wrecks the bridge and adds yet another to its rings of betrayal. Its heart in brine, it
retreats behind a veil of vultures. I board up my window.
To desire will be futile.
Subhravanu Das is an Indian writer living in Bhubaneswar. His work has appeared in Gone Lawn, No Contact, Popshot Quarterly, and elsewhere.
Tommy Dean
Smoldering
She picks up each cigarette butt with a pair of tweezers. She blows on them softly, dirt
and grass clinging.
In the living room, her father rests on the couch, left arm flung toward the carpet,
clutching. Last cigarette smoldering in the porcelain ashtray. The suss of the air conditioning
lifting the soft hairs near his temple. He offers no resistance.
The pine tree already rooted there by the garage before she was born spires the sky, while
its needles ring around its base—a king nearly uncrowned.
The TV cycles through sports—soccer, billiards, women’s beach volleyball, and
NASCAR—speakers blaring the announcers’ marketing copy like carnival barkers. She fled
before turning it off and now the sound greets her each time she tries to cross the threshold of the
porch.
The boys used to pee behind the garage. They called it watering the daisies. She squats,
knees bulging like twin cantaloupes that are starting to sour, bees agitated by the sweat of her
skin, flitting from flower to throat. She’s pissed, still, at the boys’ luxury of standing, of their
dwarfing of nature.
Inside, the picture frames dusty with disuse stand guard across the old secretary desk. Ink
on paper, they are idle threats of possible ghosts. He promised to haunt, but she felt only
absence—a space she had invaded with her blush of breath. She fled to the outside where she
was less alive.
The bee stings and she watches it wilt. Well, hell, she thinks as she plants herself into the
grass. The swelling another heartbeat, a pregnancy. She scuttles away from the flowers, the smell
of urine and pollen buzzing around her nose. The car or the house. Her phone is a forgotten
accessory in the bottom of her purse in the passenger seat.
She stops in the kitchen. Table cluttered with yesterday’s lunch—blackening banana peel,
crust of baked beans, the limp remains of lettuce, a dried paint dap of mustard. The must of the
molding basement, the tang of frescoed smoke. She sees herself in the tableau of a Hopper
painting, arms braced against the sink, the moon spotlighted out the window, something lurking
in the darkness outside of the frame.
Inside the refrigerator, there is ice for her throbbing neck, but she wants something
sweeter, a dot of nostalgia on her tongue. A respite of childhood, before the duty of phone calls,
the flap of winged grief from siblings and parents. In the crisper, a can of Pepsi and the orange
wrappers of Reese’s. The pop and sizzle of the can opening. That first taste of soda clearing
everything from her tongue, her mind, sugar crashing like a wave, chased by the sour of
chocolate.
Tommy Dean is the author of two flash fiction chapbooks Special Like the People on TV (Redbird Chapbooks, 2014) and Covenants (ELJ Editions, 2021). He is the Editor at Fractured Lit and Uncharted Magazine. A graduate of the Queens University of Charlotte MFA program, he is currently working on a novel. A recipient of the 2019 Lascaux Prize in Short Fiction, his writing can be found in Best Microfiction 2019 and 2020, Monkeybicycle, and the Atticus Review. Find him at tommydeanwriter.com and on Twitter @TommyDeanWriter.
Mary Grimm Cleveland, OH
Boundary Object
Once during that year she went to a party at her cousin’s house. Her husband had died
several months before. She wore a white skirt and a red blouse, both of them too big because she
had lost weight.
She drove her new used car. She had only had her driver’s license for three weeks and
she misjudged her cousin’s narrow driveway, clipping the corner of the house. When she showed
it to her cousin’s husband, he laughed. Together they touched it up with some paint he found in
the garage. He held the can and she dabbed with a paper towel dipped into the paint. Our little
secret, he said. He was high, but not unfunctional. When they finished he set the paint can down
on the ground and they washed their hands under the outdoor faucet.
The party was in the backyard. Her cousin’s husband sat down with her, which was OK –
he already knew that her husband was dead, and so nothing had to be said. He had his own thing
he didn’t want to talk about - his sad mother, living in an institution. Instead, they listened to
vintage rock, blaring from the car radio. The car was running, to protect the battery. As it started
to get dark, someone put the headlights on, which made the tiny backyard dramatic and shadowy,
as if it were larger than it was.
Her husband had never been inside the house, and for this reason (even though it was a
silly reason) she didn’t want to go in there.
She and her cousin had always been close in a weird way. They were the outsiders in the
family, the slightly bad girls. Her cousin liked to pretend that they had a kind of ESP, and she
pretended to believe this. They had the same nose, that couldn’t be denied.
Her cousin’s husband took her hand while they sat in the dark of the backyard. “You can
ask me for anything,” he said. “I’m here for you.” He kissed her on the mouth, just the corner,
because she pulled away. “Do you want to dance?” he said.
She shook her head and he stared at her sadly. “Let me know when you want a real kiss,”
he said. “I’m leaving that up to you.” He went to stand in the light of the car headlights.
Her cousin had taught her to drive in that car, after her husband died. “It’s something you
need to know,” she’d said. “Now that you’re on your own.”
Where she sat the shadows seemed to gather and thicken. Her cousin’s husband was
dancing to a fast song with a woman in a long skirt that dragged on the ground. The air was
heavy. Every sound was shrill. Under her feet, the sand from a child’s sandbox gritted and
shifted. Anyone could touch her now. The hole cut in the world for her was shrinking.
Her cousin’s husband’s long arms and legs cut through the air as he danced. Her cousin
stood at the backdoor, outlined by the kitchen’s yellow light, watching.
Mary Grimm has had two books published, Left to Themselves (novel) and Stealing Time (story collection) - both by Random House. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Antioch Review, and the Mississippi Review, as well as in a number of journals that publish flash fiction. Currently, she is working on a historical novel set in 1930s Cleveland. She teaches fiction writing at Case Western Reserve University.
Jennifer Schomburg Kanke Tallahassee, FL
Things People Do
Do not move. You are perfectly situated in your small desk and chair in this beige room with
blue and peach flecks on the shiny tile floor.
The professor has launched into another story about dating his former students. This one is about
sitting on a couch in the girl’s apartment directly under a picture of Jason Momoa. Awk-ward, he
says like it’s still 2012, but people are laughing. This must be funny. This must be a thing people
do.
He is waiting for the class to get into five groups of five and then circle up, as instructed.
You are already in your circle because you are a good and righteous girl, so far as anyone in
Wilson Hall room 214 knows.
What do they know. They are all bastards.
Look around your circle and remind yourself of that. This is your daily ritual. This is what you
do when class gets boring. It is often boring.
This is the professor who has a habit of starting sentences America is a classless society, so,
drawing out the o in so before launching into some bullshit analysis or other.
Circle up, please. He interrupts himself to remind you all of the task at hand.
Look at the girl across from you, the one with the pointy chin who is most certainly either a
witch or a New England aristocrat. An awitchtocrat. Haha! You’re funny, probably the funniest
one in this class. You met the girl once through your ex-friend Sasha. You have a lot of ex-
friends now. Bastards.
Circle up, please. His story is over and he is focused again, wants everyone in the room to be
too.
Look at the boy beside you. The Black boy who always wears button downs. He went to private
school with the boy with the sharp chin who looks like a hot version of Count von Count from
Sesame Street sitting to the other side of the awitchtocrat. It wasn’t a private school private
school, just a little Catholic day school, they say. Your school had science textbooks that said
someday man may walk on the moon and had a section on climate change that called it Global
Warming, acted like something could still be done. Bastards.
Circle up, please. The professor is more insistent now.
There’s one other guy in your group, but he’s to your right and slightly behind you. You can’t
make eye contact with him, which doesn’t bother you. It’s Ned, from your creative writing class
last spring. He wrote thirty-page stories about drinking at beach houses and crashing his new
Audi into a friend’s pool just to see what would happen. You’d chalked it up to Freudian wish
fulfillment, wrote snarky notes to him in your feedback. That was before you overheard him at a
party telling some girl from Sasha’s sorority the same stories with less structure and more details.
Back home, your father used to let you borrow his 2004 Corolla to drive to work, but only on
sunny days. It spun out if stopped on wet inclines. Bastard.
Erin Meyers, I said circle up.
You look around. You don’t understand. You are in a circle. You are fine.
He comes over to your group and stands behind you.
Can’t you hear me? He is upset. You are upset. He has falsely accused you. You have taken
great care to line your chair up with the boy in the button down.
He grips the back of your seat and hoists it (and you) into the air. Not much, but more than is
necessary. He moves you back half an inch to form an arc between Button Down and Count
Hottie.
Don’t cry. Don’t get up and throw your chair through the window. This isn’t that kind of place.
Don’t let it rattle you. The class is laughing. This must be funny. This must be a thing people do.
Jennifer Schomburg Kanke, originally from Columbus, Ohio, lives in Tallahassee, Florida, where she edits confidential documents for the government. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Nimrod, Massachusetts Review, and Salamander. Her chapbook, Fine, Considering, about her experiences undergoing chemotherapy for ovarian cancer, is available from Rinky Dink Press. She serves on the board of directors for Anhinga Press.
Louella Lester Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
And Eating Them, Too
The health kick was Jack’s idea. He’d been having trouble performing and blamed it on
the weight Bailey had gained over the years, though she pointed out that he’d put on a few
pounds himself. Still, she went along with the plan, though she didn’t really mind that he never
touched her much anymore.
Three weeks in, Jack bought a bicycle and joined the village cycling club. Bailey bought
new recipe books at the health food store, but never got rid of her old cookbooks. While Jack
was out cycling or running, which he’d also taken up, Bailey leafed through the old cookbooks,
ripping out photos of baguettes which she slathered in virgin olive oil and stuffed in her mouth
until her cheeks bulged. Pulling out photos of oysters which she dampened and slurped up in one
go. Sprinkling cinnamon on apple pie photos before forking them into her mouth.
One evening, right after she’d laid out and salted two photos of french fries, her husband
arrived home early from a run. The poof of air, as he closed the door, sent the photos sailing
from the counter. “I’m going for a shower before we eat,” Jack said. Then he headed for the
stairs, unaware that a photo now clung to his sweaty thigh, salt fanning out down his knee. But
Bailey was all too aware. She followed him up the stairs, saliva pooling in her mouth,
threatening to drip from the corner of her lips. Before he made it to the bedroom she shoved him
to the floor, licking the back of his knee, chewing the photo as she gurgled her way up his thigh.
“See,” he said, as they later rested on the carpet, “I was right about this health plan.”
“Hmmmm,” she said, before sliding down the stairs to find that second photo of fries.
Louella Lester is a writer and amateur photographer in Winnipeg, Canada. Her Flash-CNF book, Glass Bricks (At Bay Press, April 2021) is out now. Her work has appeared/is forthcoming in The Daily Drunk, Dribble Drabble, The Odd Magazine, Grey Sparrow Journal, New Flash Fiction, Spelk, Vallum, Prairie Fire, The Antigonish Review, CBC News Manitoba Online, and in the anthologies Gush: menstrual manifestos, (Frontenac House, 2018), A Girl’s Guide to Fly Fishing (Reflex Press, 2020), Wrong Way Go Back, (Pure Slush, 2020).
Renuka Raghavan
Fur Babies
The weird religious couple next door had a hard-on for babies but couldn’t have any of their
own, so they ordered some from a mail catalog. Not really, but when one day the wife explained
that they picked a pair of siblings from Lima who “looked so cute and perfect,” I imagined them
flipping through a catalog, turning their noses up at the ugly ones before finding the angelic pair
they finally chose. A few months later, a delivery truck backed into their driveway, only instead
of children, they got two juvenile alpacas. Everyone from the neighborhood laughed at the
SNAFU. Kids wanted to pet them, ride on them, take selfies with them. The wife and husband
didn’t mind. They loved those animals as if they were human children. She knit sweater vests for
them in the fall, beanies in the winter. He would walk them before and after work, took them to
the vet for shots. God had a grander plan for us. We must not fault or doubt His will. Any life
given to us is a blessing, the wife said. And for a while, they were all very happy.
When the noise at all hours of the night became unbearable, and the lawns all over the
neighborhood were eaten, shat, and trampled upon, the wife and husband were charged with
negligence. Everyone from the neighborhood agreed they had been better off before they got
their children. Not everyone is cut out to be a parent, after all. When the authorities raided their
house to ship the beasts to a farm, everyone from the neighborhood gathered to watch. The
animals were found sitting quietly in their own beds wearing clean pajamas, listening to NPR,
their eyes—dark pools of longing.
Author of Out of the Blue (Big Table Publishing, 2017) and The Face I Desire, (Nixes Mate, 2019) Renuka Raghavan writes short-form prose and poetry. Her previous work has been featured in Bending Genres, Boston Literary Magazine, Star 82 Review, and The Drabble, among others. For a complete list of her previous publications, visit her at www.renukaraghavan.com
Kenneth Robbins Ruston, LA
Birdcage
Martin Wanski, artist, had been here. A minor miracle.
Martin Wanski, c: 2018.
What he left when he left here: two faces in hardened clay, stuck in the wiring of a
birdcage, one face with eyes open, the other with eyes not.
An ordinary birdcage. This one--suspended from a tree in the garden, with two faces
entwined--canary size, a solo song, a cage used in pet shops to solo the birds, thin metal strips on
all six sides and a small wire handle defining the top.
Two faces, stuck, struggling to be freed.
Two faces, stuck, trying to get in.
Two faces. Flat, smashed perhaps, or carelessly rendered. Flattened.
Enigma. No backs of heads. Only faces. Two dissimilar.
Enigma. An artist, viewing the world backward.
Martin Wanski, the artist on Christmas break, topside on a double-decker, through the
streets of London, alive with the cool, damp breeze, elated to be in the city of Shakespeare and
Dryden, of Dickens and Pope, of Eliot and Woolf. First day elation. First day with flakes of ice
and the promise of a Christmas well spent.
Atop the double-decker, oblivious, thanks to Christmas joy. Feet braced to the sides, fists
clinching the rail, butt to the future, face, pressed to his past.
The warning, unheard. Unattended. Joy was all, too exhilarating.
Warning again, not heard. Beware. The low-hanging overpass, of concrete, hardened
clay, gray, severe. Lifeless. Crudely shaped. Sharp. Brittle.
Martin Wanski stood, back to the wind. An artist. An enigma.
Half his head, the back part, not the part he needed, decorated the sallow concrete.
Hardened clay, gray, severe. Lifeless. Crudely shaped. Sharp. Brittle.
His face, shoved into the wires of his cage. Let me in. Let me be with you. Let me
know when to sit and when to stand, when to lean and when to leap. I want in, with
the canary that isn’t there and its song that no one hears.
Martin Wanski had been here. The artists’ retreat. Had left his mark as artists before had
done. There, suspended in the sculpture garden of a place far removed, hangs the minor miracle.
The birdcage. No bird. Two faces. Striving to get out. Struggling to get in.
Kenneth Robbins is the author of six published novels, thirty-two published plays, and numerous essays, stories, and memoirs on-line and in peer-reviewed journals. His fiction has received the Toni Morrison Prize and the Associated Writing Programs Novel Award. His plays have been recognized by receiving the Charles Getchell Award, the Festival of Southern Theatre Award, and the Gabrielle Society Humanitarian Award. He lives in Ruston, Louisiana.
Kristina T. Saccone Washington, DC
Why She Sings
The time she sang a lullaby over your crib, probably “You Are My Sunshine,” and you felt her
fingers lightly rubbing your back. The time she taught you the words to “Yellow Submarine”
because you loved the tune but couldn’t read the lyrics on the back of the record yet. The time
she sang along to an aria on the classical station coming home from soccer practice, and you
just wished she’d shut up. The time she sang at the top of her lungs in church, sitting right there
next to you, because she said no one could hear her over all those other voices, but you heard
her and it was enough to make you turn away. When you realized she had stopped singing the
songs she loved because she knew it annoyed you and loved you more. The time she sang in
the kitchen when you came home from college after the divorce to clean out your bedroom and
realized for the first time she had a beautiful voice. The time she sang “Joy to the World” at the
holidays, and your toddler pinched your arm and asked, “Why is grandma so loud?” so you told
him, in an equally audible voice, “She sings because she is happy.”
Kristina T. Saccone crafts flash fiction and creative nonfiction. Her work has appeared in 365 Tomorrows, The Bangor Literary Journal, Emerge Literary Journal, and Unearthed, and she curates Flash Roundup, featuring the latest releases in flash fiction. Find her on Twitter at @kristinasaccone or haunting small independent bookstores in the Washington, DC, area.
Angeline Schellenberg Winnipeg, Canada
Nesting
Harmon had issues, some of which could not be solved with dynamite. Call him just plain
frightening, he didn’t care. The chickens in his neighbour’s yard might feel differently. Had
anyone actually proven birds have feelings? He would google it later.
The dreams started the night of his first 911 call: images of a fireball rolling over fences and
cars, lighting boulevard leaves cherry red.
Give him credit for holding back as much as he did. That stockpile in his garage could have
flown the whole coop to city hall and back. He slammed down his coffee mug and the bottles on
the counter clattered to the floor.
After retrieving the fallen inhaler from his wool lining, he tucked his feet into the boots. Harmon
heaved on the rusted garage door until there was just enough room for him to duck inside. His
sole captive blinked at him from the box of grass clippings. Harmon put down a fresh batch of
oatmeal cookies and the grasshoppers he’d caught on today’s walk to the playground.
The bird pecked at his palm. Truth be told, he hadn’t blown up anything since the fireworks he’d
put on for the neighbourhood last New Year’s, before the brisk air had become too much for his
daughter’s burning lungs. But in his dreams, feathers fell around them like snowflakes—the tiny
jewels catching in her thinning hair.
Angeline Schellenberg’s debut about raising children on the autism spectrum, Tell Them It Was Mozart (Brick Books, 2016), won three Manitoba Book Awards and was a finalist for a ReLit Award for poetry. In 2019, she published three chapbooks and was nominated for The Pushcart Prize and Arc Poetry Magazine’s Poem of the Year. Angeline hosts Speaking Crow—Winnipeg’s longest-running poetry open mic. Her latest book is Fields of Light and Stone (University of Alberta Press, 2020).
Zoe Stanek
The Toast is Jammed
Mornings are cold; dew drops and splintered sunlight dance between the canopy of trees.
The tide is low but rising quickly, families of sand dollars getting eclipsed by dark waters. A
loon howls and forest folk scitter by. The world is waking.
A house stands tall among the trees, its body enveloped in moss and vines. Shutters hang
open and smoke bellows from a stone chimney. It smells of burning wood and wet grass. The
porch creaks and the house cracks when the wind blows, its body worn by age and the elements.
The front door is red with wood detailing and a brass handle reminiscent of the sun.
The house is warm with smooth oak floors and creamy walls. There are shelves of books
with faded bindings and speckles of mold. Walls are adorned with art and greenery, the outside
making its way in. At every window are pots of plants reaching for the sun and soothed by the
sound of music. Up the crooked stairs is an open space occupied by art supplies and open
windows. By far the most important feature is the kitchen. It is illuminated by sunlight or
starlight, both of which shine brightly through big white window frames. There are cabinets with
driftwood handles and brass pots and pans that hang on the walls and above the island. Wood
counters full of grooves and knicks tell stories and worn patches on the floor match worn patches
on the counter, each step a memory of a recipe, a meal, a person, or all three. One wall is
occupied by a grand brick fireplace that functions as a stove or a stove that functions as a
fireplace. It is the hearth and the heart. When its flames beat, the house lives.
The kettle is on and the toast is jammed. Breakfast will be eaten outside, between the
trees and near the garden. The house sits in a small clearing, the only circle of land touched by
man on an otherwise wild and untamed island. Beyond the line of trees are creatures and peaks
and caves, they are the darkest and the brightest but the circle is both. Mermaids’ songs sound at
twilight and goblins exchange gifts for things that wash onto the beach. Forest spirits glow
between trees until they disappear in the thick and from the thick is the rhythmic sound of troll
drums. Fairies zig zag through the sky and elves bake cookies in trees and on holidays everyone
gathers for grand festivities.
Boots worn through tall grass keep watch for snails, slugs, and whatever else might exist
among the green. There is a hand-me-down quilt with floral patterns and images of boats at sea
laying on the ground, awaiting a breakfast picnic. The sea calls to the boats, its cries sounding as
waves are carried in and out. After breakfast there will be piles of treasures along the sand,
things to admire and trade.
Caterpillars hang on blades of grass and the nearby ocean laps against the shore and you
are alone in the serenity.
Born in Nebraska and raised in Western Colorado, Zoe Stanek has found her place among the trees in Oregon’s Pacific Northwest. There, she attends Pacific University as a Creative Writing major with a double minor in Editing & Publishing and Fine Arts. She is a fiction author who takes inspiration from nature, women, and different regions across the United States. She will graduate with a BA in 2022.