Flash #34 Aug '24

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Flash Issue # 34 Aug 2024

Roberta Allen, Mikki Aronoff, Avitus B. Carle, Karen Crawford, Gary Fincke, Megan Hanlon, Kurt Luchs, Amy Marques, Dawn Miller, Thomas J. Misuraca, Richard Moriarty, Pamela Painter, Connor Douglas Rice, Catherine Roberts, Joanna Theiss, Emma Wells

The Flash Launch Reading will be rescheduled for a later date.

Roberta Allen

THE THREESOME

At a rather rundown singles hotel in the country, a man and two women doze in the sun on a
gently swaying raft in a large murky lake, the rumored home of water moccasins. The big
breasted woman, a teacher, smiles to herself, and casually throws her arm across the chest of her
lover lying next to her. She congratulates herself on her good fortune. The odds of four men to
fifteen women were not in her favor.
Her lover, a Southern engineer, lightly snores. The other woman, a chemist, thin as a
mannequin, wonders how her friend tolerates the engineer with his bulging belly, his sagging
chest and boring baseball talk. The engineer finds the chemist weird with her vegan diet, her
two-hour swims. The teacher’s Brooklyn accent irritates the chemist, but she needs company
from time to time and she finds the other guests even less agreeable. She admits to herself she
feels lonely without a lover. The engineer disturbs her thoughts when he lets out a yelp and leaps
into the lake, tipping the raft. The teacher giggles and daintily descends the ladder to join him.
The chemist, who doesn’t want to sunbathe alone, dives, and takes a long swim. When she
returns, the couple lie peacefully dozing in the sun. Awakened by the chemist, the teacher begins
to find her presence annoying. She talks about nothing but global warming and endangered
species which make the teacher yawn.
Only when the two women start whispering about sex—though neither one knows what
led to this topic—do they finally burst out laughing waking the engineer. The piercing high-
pitched laugher of the teacher begins to jar his nerves. He wishes he had brought another pint of
beer though he has consumed three so far. The teacher daydreams about a June wedding. The
chemist daydreams about having sex. In the lake, a water moccasin hides in the shade beneath
the raft, his dreams as secret as his presence.

A Tennessee Williams Fellow in Fiction and a Yaddo Fellow, Roberta Allen is the author of nine books, including three collections of short, flash, and micro fictions, a novella-in-flash, a novel, and an Amazon travel memoir. Her latest story collection is The Princess of Herself, Pelekinesis Press. She is also the author of the first flash fiction writing guide, Fast Fiction, and two other writing guides. She is also a visual artist in the collections of The Met and MoMA.

Mikki Aronoff

At the Zoo, As Your Mother Tires of Watching You Trying to Commune with a Shabby Animal, Hisses I’ll Be Back, and Slithers Off to Visit the Reptile House

Because you never questioned caging, not then. Because back then, it was the thing to do — to confine things, and not to question. Because that coyote, lonely in his cage with only the shed of his hair to keep him company, looked like Izzie, your old free-roaming scruffy dog. Because you stood, steadfast, willing him to cease his nervous pacing and notice you. Because you felt when he did — notice you, that is — your connection, your union, would be forever. That will have been the delusion of a child, you’ll think later, much later, and certainly you never thought in terms of union, not then, but back then you knew in your burgeoning bones he’d sense you had so much to give but nowhere to put it, and he’d offer himself to receive it. And because you held yourself calm and welcoming, that coyote put a stop to his frantic patrol, advanced towards you, curious, slid his feral snout out through the bars and sniffed. And because that moment was what you had been waiting for, what you needed, for so very long, you leaned over the guardrail and opened your hands to the skies.

Mikki Aronoff’s work appears in New World Writing, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Flash Boulevard, SoFloPoJo, Bending Genres, Milk Candy Review, Gone Lawn, 100 word story, Atlas and Alice, trampset, The Offing, Midway Journal, and elsewhere. She’s received Pushcart, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, Best American Short Stories, and Best Microfiction nominations.

Avitus B. Carle

Photo by Ashley Alliano

To All the Boys We Never Kissed

What we had was never love. Affection. Infatuation. Lust. We are of an age where we can
distinguish between them all just as we know the ways our lips can part. Not for you, but for
them. For the boys we tried to love and those we did. For our husbands and lovers and
boyfriends. Don’t be sad, we remember you fondly. The boys with puckered lips while we
leaned away. You, who had the courage to be honest, say, I like you like you, or maybe I could be
that guy whispered on porch steps. As we pumped our legs on the swing set, our velocities never
synching. Spoken after we shared our misunderstandings of relationships and situationships and
friends with benefits-ships and believing we were the girlfriend when, really, we weren’t. You
who listened to us.

And we laughed when you told us you loved us. Like your honesty was a joke. And we playfully
punched your arms, slipped you into the friend zone as easily as we do with loose change into tip
jars at our favorite coffee shops, unaware we couldn’t afford to lose you. We are selfish in our
ways of needing. Selfish in our wanting and yes, we should have let you go. Should have been
happy when you found someone who wants to be kissed by you instead of wondering why you
stopped returning our calls or became busy with plans that no longer involved us. Why you
hesitate to hug us. Why you say sorry, we can’t do that anymore like spending the day together
or linking arms in public or you holding us as we cry about the guys we’ve hated to love is the
problem when, we know, the person you text when you think we can’t see, they are the problem.

Some of us learn how to be happy for you. For this new person you want to kiss. But some of us
grow into our jealousy. We lurk in the virtual crevices of your social media feeds and wonder
what do you see in our replacement? How their hips are too wide and their laugh is too loud and
we’ll remind you that, clearly, they’re fake because no one is ever that happy. And we won’t tell
you we dream about plucking the hairs from their scalp, their unibrow, their mustache, their
armpits, and legs and imagine the moment you return to us and tell us how our replacement has
changed. How you barely recognize them and we’ll tell you we know and that we understand.

And you’ll return to those of us who don’t understand that you deserve to be happy, blinded by
our love for you as a weapon to wield against the boys we’ve loved and wanted and kissed. You,
on our arm, as we pass them by, pretending they are strangers to us. Until we turn the corner and
you ask what’s wrong, unaware even after all this time, that when we look at you, we are using
you. To look to the boys we’ve kissed, to see if they’ve noticed how happy, carefree, and
unbothered we seem. If, in the way their body moves when they walk further away from us, if
their eyes still search for us, if we’ve proven to the boys we’ve kissed that we will always have
other options. To prove that, if we are still good enough for you, surely, we are good enough to
be loved.

Avitus B. Carle (she/her) lives and writes outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her stories have been published in a variety of places including The Commuter (Electric Lit.), Moon City Review, Fractured Lit., ASP Bulletin, and elsewhere. Her debut flash fiction collection, These Worn Bodies, will be published by Moon City Press in November 2024. She can be found online at avitusbcarle.com or online everywhere @avitusbcarle.

Karen Crawford

The Wanting

We want as soon as we breathe. The talcum powder of our mother’s skin. The bounty of her
bosom. The soft of her voice. We want a hand to have, words to hold, a band-aid after we fall.
We want to swallow our mother’s tears, smother our father’s sins. We want to grow up.

We want as soon as we bleed. The boy in the red sweater who wants the Breck girl next door.
The teacher that lingers a little too long. We want to get animal, physical. Wild cherry hot,
leopard print cool. We want to roar like our sisters before us. We want to be invincible.

We want as soon as our hair burns gray. To feel the glow of our children. To forget we were too
young to want them. To remember they haven’t. We want our husbands to drop the remote. We
want a taste of wild cherry. We want to breathe. We want to rock. We want to dance. We want to
roar. We want to keep wanting.

Karen Crawford lives and writes in the City of Angels. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and was included in Wigleaf's Top 50 Longlist 2023. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Okay Donkey, Heavy Feather Review, Five South, Roi Fainéant Literary Press, 100 Word Story, and elsewhere. You can find her on X @KarenCrawford_

Gary Fincke

The Bedroom Clowns

Without asking him, the boy’s mother has his room redecorated with clown wallpaper that fills two walls. After she drives him home from school, she says, “Surprise!” and the cars and motorcycles that seemed to drive right at him when he entered the room or lay in bed have vanished. “Everybody loves clowns,” she says. “It was time for a change, and the man who hung it was happy for the work.”

The boy decides that all of the clowns on his new wallpaper are falling. He stares, counting and recounting how often each of the clowns is repeated. Three clowns are brilliant in solid colors—yellow, red, and orange. As if dressed in school colors, three are two-toned. Three are in stripes whose spirals make them appear to spin. All of their suits are baggy, each of them uselessly ballooned, their enormous shoes spread like helpless sails.

Just barely, the boy shudders, but his mother is worrying about his silence. “Don’t they all look happy?” she says. The clowns’ expressions are painted sunny and gleeful, but each one, the boy notices, wears the same white foundation of deletion.

“They look silly,” he finally says.

“Good,” his mother says, relieved. “That’s their job.”

The evening passes without the boy returning the grins of the nine clowns. What he begins to believe is that those that are splayed sideways are scudding across what appears to be a cloudless, wind-swept sky. That some who seem to be seated on nothing are plummeting from an unseen plane. Worse are the twisted, head-first clowns, their bright smiles lasting all the way to the carpet where their legs still pedal air as he feels the floor fall out from under him. Worst of all, he thinks before sleep, are the arms-extended clowns who are grinning as they concentrate on maintaining impossible flight. From behind them, inside the wall, the boy hears the scratching that accompanies their disguised fright.

In the morning, like she has since the accident, his mother drives him to school using a road that adds two miles to the trip. “The scenic road,” she calls it, as if the landscape had begun to matter now that he was in third grade. The boy, as he does each day, silently promises to ride his new bike on the old road as soon as he dares to disobey his mother’s “Sidewalks only.”

That afternoon, nearly finished with the scenic road home, the boy asks his mother about sky, where it begins. At the far edge of everything, she tells him. Like heaven. Where clear weather is always expected and no one you love ever leaves. The clowns, then, must fall from above the sun, he decides, but all day he has been thinking that they are being carried up by a violent wind.

When he returns to his room, he closes the door and presses the lock. The clowns are still tumbling, but the boy, this time, believes they are ascending, their half-seen bodies near the ceiling proof. When, standing in his father’s floppy shoes, he holds his smile exactly like theirs, he feels he might lift and rise if he doesn’t cry. That he would learn where his father has gone if he, too, could vanish.

Gary Fincke's new flash fiction collection The History of the Baker's Dozen will be published in August by Pelekinesis Press. His long-form story collections have won the Flannery O'Connor Prize and the Elixir Press Fiction Prize. He is co-editor of the annual anthology Best Microfiction.

Megan Hanlon

I Hope This Finds You

I hope this submission finds you.

If you're reading this, the green glass bottle didn't bash itself to pieces against a rock jetty, and the cork didn't swell and crumble. It floated full of hope twelve hundred miles to shore, where it was likely spotted by a lone figure standing on the beach on a gray day - the kind of day where the water and sky fade into one monotonous color, the kind of day that prompts a person to question her life choices.

My words stayed dry (or drier than usual) and found their way to you in your business office overlooking a crowded cross-street, or perhaps a home office where the only view is of your neighbor's nondescript beige siding. I appreciate your turning away from the window to read this.

I am an emerging writer of creative nonfiction, focusing on personal narratives and bits of memoir. Several literary magazines have published my pieces on subjects including my disillusionment at staying home with children and feeling constantly overwhelmed with all that needs my attention at home.

It's better here. Warm blue waters danced on the sugar-sand while I wrote this piece. Here, there are no hands always pulling on me, no voices making demands, no priorities that matter so much more than my own. The shade of this palm tree was the only place I could find enough quiet to hear myself think, to hear my pen scratch out those thoughts.

I should have brought more paper.

Enclosed for your consideration is my latest essay. I used the last smears of ink in my only pen to scribble out these turbulent words so that someone may read them. Many someones, I hope, though I suppose that's the gamble we writers take. Sometimes reaching just one person is enough.

I should have brought more pens.

Please note that this is not a simultaneous submission. I realize that some literary magazines frown on the practice, that I'm not allowed to be in two places at once. It's the same impossibility of trying to exist in two minds - both a creator and a mother-wife, both solitary and surrounded with love. No matter where one is, she may wonder if it’s better somewhere else. But everyone wants exclusive rights.

I chose your publication because I find myself in many of its poignant and conflicted spaces, when I find myself at all. Full of voices more prominent than mine, I understand your magazine is a bit of a reach for me. But I hold hope you won't pass on this work like a stranger floating by.

From time to time, unfamiliar boats pass here. Stretched cargo ships stuffed full of daily essentials have chugged by, and occasionally I've spied a lavish yacht in the distance. I’ve half-considered trying to draw their attention, but rescue is often ambiguous.

Last week I saw a raft of tree trunks, held together with braided leaf-ropes, piloted by a slightly disheveled woman wearing dark circles under her eyes. When our gazes met, startled and guilty, we shared a slight nod of understanding and appreciation.

I hope her submission finds you, too.

Megan Hanlon is a podcast producer who sometimes writes. Her words have appeared in Raw Lit, Variant Literature, Gordon Square Review, and other publications both online and print. Her blog, Sugar Pig, is known for relentlessly honest essays that are equal parts tragedy and comedy.

Kurt Luchs

My Idiot Son

My mother died screaming in agony in a nursing home where they refused to give her enough pain medication to make her final moments peaceful. I hope you won’t be too quick to judge me when I say she had it coming. She was a horrible person and a terrible mother who despised all of her children, some more than others. She became even nastier as she grew older, which made caring for her toward the end almost unbearable.
But the end came at last. We, her five sons and two daughters, breathed a sigh of relief and got on with the business of settling her meagre estate. While most of her funds had been spent in arranging a place for her to live out her declining years, there was a little left over and we looked forward to receiving some small token in reward for our dutifulness (it couldn’t be called love).
The reading of the will was a shock. It turned out none of her children would receive any money. Unbeknownst to any of us, she had spent decades polishing a memoir. The entire balance of her estate was to be spent in publishing and promoting this book, which she gave the title, My Idiot Son. It was all about me, her firstborn.
Well, need I say this was hurtful? She had five sons after all, and I was by far the least idiotic. Why she kept popping out babies after the monumental disappointment of me, I have no idea.
Not only were we disinherited, we spent a good deal of our own money trying to block publication of the book. However, it was her book and her money and her instructions were quite clear. It should have been sold as a novel, because the narrator’s viewpoint was so hateful and twisted that it had almost no connection with reality. The worst part is it became a bestseller. It even sparked a whole new publishing trend of parents writing bitter exposés on their children before their children could write any on them. You might think some of the profits would be allowed to come to her offspring, but you’d be wrong. Every penny went to a no-kill cat shelter she had set up called The Whole Kitten Kaboodle.
Of course, none of this was anything I wanted or even suspected. Still, my siblings blamed me, and who can blame them? I became estranged from the few who were still speaking to me when our mother died. Oddly enough, the debacle of the will and the book reunited the six of them. They even started giving interviews on behalf of My Idiot Son, further boosting sales. They also approved production of the made-for-TV movie. The scene where my mother tries to drown me while giving me a bath at age three earned an Emmy for the actress who played her.
Eventually it all came full circle. My siblings collaborated on a sequel to the book called My Idiot Brother, each of them contributing a chapter of nonstop whining. I’m pleased to report that it sold very poorly. The reading public had by now tired of the trend, and frankly none of my brothers and sisters had our mother’s ungodly gift for invective.
As for me, there is no truth to the rumor that I have surrendered to the inevitable and am spending my own declining years helping my mother’s publisher prepare a fully annotated edition of My Idiot Son, though the proprietors of The Whole Kitten Kaboodle remain eternally hopeful.

Kurt Luchs (kurtluchs.com and https://www.facebook.com/kurt.luchs/) won a 2022 Pushcart Prize, a 2021 James Tate Poetry Prize, the 2021 Eyelands Book Award for Short Stories, and the 2019 Atlanta Review International Poetry Contest. He is a Contributing Editor of Exacting Clam. His humor collection, It’s Funny Until Someone Loses an Eye (Then It’s Really Funny) (2017), and his new poetry collection, Death Row Row Row Your Boat (2024), are published by Sagging Meniscus Press. He lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Amy Marques

Dear Goldilocks,

Of course I remember you. One doesn’t soon forget coming home to half eaten food and a girl sleeping in the baby’s bed.
Yes. We are well. My son grew larger than his late father and found a nice upstream bear. They’ve set up house together and are expecting cubs in the spring. I’m looking forward to being a grandmother, as you might imagine.
I was surprised by your letter and your questions. I’m sorry to hear that motherhood has been difficult for you and that your own mother has been away for most of your life. I can appreciate how hard that must be.
How did you put it? How did I master “just right”?
What an interesting perception. If you’d asked me, I’d have told you that I could never get anything right in those days. My own porridge was always cold because I never seemed to get to it in time to eat it hot. I learned the trick of overnight oats when my son was older and took to reheating it for myself only when I knew I’d have enough time to enjoy it before it cooled again. But that took years.
In the early days I was always tired. Always a little behind. Maybe a little unhinged.
It gets better. I can promise you that.
In the meantime, it gets lonely in the house now and I would love to have you and your baby come for a visit. I will make you honey’d porridge and I can hold the baby while you take a nap in the bed you remember so well. Yes, the same blanket is still there. I’ll wash it in anticipation of your visit.

With open arms and doors,

Mama Bear

Amy Marques has been known to call books friends and is on a first name basis with many fictional characters. She's been nominated for multiple awards and has visual art, poetry, and prose published in journals such as Streetcake Magazine, South Florida Poetry Journal, Fictive Dream, Ghost Parachute, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Gone Lawn. She is the editor and visual artist for Duets anthology and has an erasure poetry book coming out in 2024 with Full Mood Publishing. More at https://amybookwhisperer.wordpress.com.

Dawn Miller

A Family Sampler

Before the next time, there are tears. Confessions. Days of apology that dodge up and down my spine. Even so, there is love at times. Flutter-in-the-heart kind of love. Glad-to-be-alive kind of love. How can Ronny unstitch me like this?

I never meant to hurt you, he says, even though I’ve heard those words a hundred times before.
Jesus says a marriage is made of three people: Ronny, me, and God—that’s what Ma told me. Keep your mouth shut and your head down, she said after the first time. Love is a battlefield like some singer said. Ma knows what she’s talking about—her and Da’s love is full of knocks and punches, tiptoe-days, and days after.

Nan says she didn’t raise Ma to be a fool, and now there are two fools in the family. Only I was there years ago when Grandad shoved Nan’s head in the toilet, his face as red as his fist that held her under. Phoned 911—an act that got me grounded after Nan promised the police Grandad was just joking around.

Quick to listen, slow to speak, Nan warned me later, quoting James from the bible, a bruise like moldy bread spreading across her forehead. Remember that.

Sunday, Pastor Williams thunders when my two young ones giggle and kick the back of the pew during his sermon, Ronny’s face a brewing storm. Their tender limbs, so soft, so unknowing, break my heart.

Under the sycamore tree, I wait until Ronny finishes, then go inside to wipe their tiny tear-streaked faces. Voices inside me say this isn’t right, but Ronny’s and Ma’s and Da’s and Nan’s and Jesus’ and God’s and Pastor Williams’ words are so much louder. Warbling in my ear like a mutation of thrushes.

Exalt and worship our God on his holy mountain, Pastor Williams warns when I tell him I can’t take much more, that I need to escape, or I’ll break.
You must humble yourself to me, Ronny hisses when I threaten again to leave—to go where, I don’t know.

Zaccheaus fell out of a tree trying to see the truth, Ma whispers, using a hot needle and spool of thread to stitch my lip, one large and two small suitcases stored under a tarp in the garage, so why do you think you’ll be any luckier?

Dawn Miller is a Pushcart Prize nominee, Best Small Fictions nominee, and a winner of Best Microfiction 2024. She is the 2024 winner of the Toronto Star Short Story Contest and a recipient of The SmokeLong Quarterly Fellowship for Emerging Writers 2024. Her work appears The Cincinnati Review, The Forge Literary Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly, Fractured Lit, Vestal Review, Atticus Review, and elsewhere. She lives and writes in Picton, Ontario, Canada.

Thomas J. Misuraca

DATE MYSELF

            I swipe right on my own picture.
            Myself swipes back.
            I initiate a conversation. Avoiding basic questions like “How are you?” and “Do you have any pets?” Instead asking the more probing question: “What are you passionate about?”
            It takes myself a moment to answer. “Good books. Powerful art. The city on a hot summer day.”
            It’s nice how I don’t sound like everybody else.
            “I’m tired of being single,” I tell myself. “But have made too many mistakes dating out of desperation. I need to slow down and find somebody I feel comfortable with.”
            I’m finally being honest with myself.
            I suggest going to Artie’s Pub for dinner so I can continue getting to know me.
            For once, I’m happy eating in a restaurant with myself. It doesn’t feel like everybody is watching and judging me as a poor, lonely soul. I brag to myself about all my accomplishments in life: leaving my abusive family, working to pay for college, finding a great apartment in the heart of the city. I’m proud of myself.
            After a satisfying meal, I take myself back home for a night cap. I open that bottle of wine I’d been saving for a special occasion. There’s nothing more special than me.
            I enjoy the wine and the warm summer breeze blowing through the window. The symphony of a busy city street fills the apartment. It’s nice that I can sit quietly with myself.
            The wine makes me amorous. I take a chance and touch myself, surprised how quickly I’m aroused. I caress myself tenderly. I feel good.
            Time to take this into the bedroom. I undress myself and slide under the covers. Things are heating up as I run my hands all over my body. I know exactly how to give myself ultimate ecstasy. No rushed sloppiness, just slow and gentle pleasure.
            When I make myself climax, every inch of my body shivers.
            Exhausted, I cuddle myself into a ball. I’m so warm and comfortable and content to spend the night with myself.
            As I drift off, I think about making myself blueberry pancakes in the morning.

Tom Misuraca studied Writing, Publishing and Literature at Emerson College in his home town of Boston before moving to Los Angeles. Over 130 of his short stories and two novels have been published. His story, "Giving Up The Ghosts," was published in Constellations Journal, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2021. His work has recently appeared in voidspace, Art Block, and Speakeasy Mag. He is also a multi-award winning playwright with over 150 short plays and 14 full-lengths produced globally.

Richard Moriarty

Fighting Weight

“Fighting weight,” Nate’s dad says as he steps off the scale. 160 pounds. Forty down from the year before. Nate pictures his father in red gloves and shiny shorts instead of a gown. Back in the hospital room, they watch football like it’s any other Sunday in any other November. Their team is on. In the game’s final seconds, the opposing team’s kicker lines up a game-winning field goal and nails it―until the last few yards of the kick’s trajectory, when the ball veers left as if yanked by a puppet string, clanking off the upright and dribbling to rest in the end zone. Their team scores a quick touchdown in overtime and their belief in miracles―if only for the evening―is reaffirmed. A panoramic window frames the sinking sun, its last light splayed out over the horizon.
            In a week, Nate’s father will be gone from the Earth. Everything beyond this sterile room will look blurry to Nate, as if the whole world is covered in slush ice and mud.
            After another week, everything will be bright, the sun casting blinding reflections off the snow that is everywhere.
            In a month, the silence will be piercing: Nate will feel as if he could hear the sound of a leaf bud emerging from a freshly thawed branch.
            After a year, his father’s voice will remain a metallic whisper in his head, a crackling voice from a radio that he is always straining himself to hear.

Richard Moriarty lives in Durham, North Carolina. He teaches writing and literature at Alamance Community College. His stories have appeared in Watershed Review, Stymie Magazine, and The Twin Bill.

Pamela Painter

A WALK IN THE WOODS

“Let’s take a walk in the woods,” is what Mr. Aldrich says to me when I arrive at his Cape house to find exactly where he wants his Natchez Crepe Myrtle planted and to mark the spot. He asks my name―I tell him, Polly―and he nods approval that I have worn high top boots. “Follow me,” he says, then he sets off with a walking stick. I drop my hands to my knees and bend over to catch my breath, forcing myself not to scream or cry or remember. I tell myself he’s harmless. An old man. Then I follow him into his woods.

Three days ago, Mr. Aldrich came to our garden center and said he wanted a tree with a good canopy to shield his place from a neighbor’s unsightly studio. He found a tree he liked and we tagged it. I’m here today to mark the spot for planting. In two days, I’ll return with Georgio or Marek to help dig the hole, haul the tree out of the truck bed, unwrap the burlap, give it a new home. Mr. Aldrich’s woods surround his house and stretch at least 500 yards in all directions. The spindly limbs of tall pitch pines sway far above what brochures call “a soft pine needle floor.” It only looks soft.

Gregory’s Garden Center has been in our family for over fifty years. Uncle Greg, my mother’s oldest brother, ran it until he had a heart attack four years ago, when I was thirteen. And good riddance. His Will left one-half share to my mother who talked Dad into leaving his job at the town assessor’s office to handle the Center’s books. My two brothers are good with trimming and watering, but they are too young to drive, so deliveries are left to me and whoever else works for us come summer. I grew up loving the labyrinths of flowers and trees spread over our two acres and surrounded by an immense pine forest. I know the name of every flower, tree, and herb. Even weeds. I know their touch and smell. I know which flowers are annuals and which are perennials and their blooming period. For a while, I loved them less. I am in love once again.

“Watch out for poison ivy,” Mr. Aldrich calls over his shoulder. “These woods are full of it.” I know. Brambles in his path are brushed aside. When Mr. Aldrich says “woods” he is talking about pine trees and poison ivy and the amount of sun coming through the canopy. But when he ushered me into his woods just now his invitation conjured up a different time. Pine needles threading my hair, torn Tshirt, stones digging into my shoulder blades, sap sticking to my skin, skin scraped and bruised. My Uncle Greg squinting into the sun, smoothing the bib of his overalls, saying, “Come, Polly. Time for a break. Let’s take a walk in the woods.”

PAMELA PAINTER is the award-winning author of five story collections. Her stories have appeared in Flash Boulevard, Harper’s, NWW, Smokelong Quarterly, Vestal Review, and XRAY, among others, and in Sudden Fiction, Flash Fiction, and recently in Flash Fiction America, Best Microfiction of 2023, and Best Small Fictions 2023. Painter’s stories have received three Pushcart Prizes and have been staged by Word Theatre in LA, London and NYC. Her story “Doors” is being made into a short film.

Connor Douglas Rice

Soul Vultures

I.

I remember being carried by a bird. I was brand new. I was nothing but light. Going to my life. Through such vast darkness.

II.

Sheila lies splayed in bed, not her bed, a bed brought into her room to take the place of her bed, the kind that lifts and folds, gripping the handrails and writhing, trying to lift herself and folding. Her skin is soft as paper; I have never touched it as much as I have today. Her mouth, open like a fish, is doing all of the breathing, hoarsely. Her eyes that said, when I came in, shit, this is it, are closed for the moment.

I couldn't see them then, the birds. I did not know to look. It is said that their feathers are bright black like oil slicks, curving the light around them.

Vultures cannot pierce the hide; they enter through the mouth, the eyes. Piece by piece, they take her away. They are the only ones who will take every part of the soul. I take only what I can, which is little and random: a nightgown, a manikin, a book on Aphrodite. I have a flight to catch.

When I land, in that city of her birth, I get the call.

Connor Douglas Rice (he/they) is a South Florida-born, New York City-based poet, speculative writer and artist whose work has appeared in Oyster River Pages, Queen Mob’s Tea House, DUM DUM Zine, 3Elements Literary Review, Moss Puppy Magazine, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter/X @CDouglasRice.

Catherine Roberts

Night Fall

The day settles heavy on your back, falls like a parachute around your feet. You spread your sleeping bag unzipped on the sidewalk in near–dark. The parking lot empties. Almost. Your eyes are gritted, bones creak like bamboo. You kick off your shoes with the soles missing and place them at the foot of your bed as you did as a child. The street vendor packs away a tray of dragonfruit, leaves you their cup of tips. You thank them and close your eyes to the sky, to the pangs of coyote–calls, under a rose-print blanket patched in stains, from a home you once shared with family when your dreams had little weight to them, when you swore you had more than just the well-worn ground to stop you from falling through sky.

Catherine Roberts lives and writes in the UK. She has work published/forthcoming in Flash Frog, trampset, Emerge Literary Journal, and New Flash Fiction Review — among other places. Her stories have been nominated for Best Small Fictions and shortlisted by Bath Flash Fiction Award. Find her on Twitter/X: @CRobertsWriter

Joanna Theiss

When She Asks How Daddy Proposed

Don’t say: In my sketchbook, I only preserved parts of them. One man became a nuzzle of chest hair, another a gullet clenched in orgasm, another a flat, clumsy tongue. The guy from my psychology class boiled down to three jagged toenails. I was secretly proud of these drawings until my father found the sketchbook under my mattress and the reduction of so many men to nothing but their parts confirmed what he suspected, that instead of preparing for wifely submission I was collecting men as if they were pelts and claws. To erase the chewed-up look my father got around the mouth when he hit me with the truth of myself, I showed him my sketch of Philip―black-framed glasses and a bulging vein running down his forehead―and announced we were engaged. I told Philip our news over text and married him six months later, all the while knowing he wasn’t worth the permanent ink. Do say: He got down on one knee. It was so romantic.

Joanna Theiss is a writer living in Washington, DC. Her stories have appeared in Chautauqua, Peatsmoke Journal, and Milk Candy Review, among others, and she is an associate editor at Five South. In a past life, Joanna worked as a lawyer, practicing criminal defense and international trade law. You can find book reviews, links to her published works, and her mosaic collages at www.joannatheiss.com. Twitter @joannavtheiss Instagram @joannatheisswrites

Emma Wells

Blue

It had failed.

Coming alive to the wrench of bleach-washed floors, my eyes travel to bandaged wrists. Wrapped like presents. Above them, a baby blue sky, dotted with candy-floss white. Had I ever seen such a breathtaking view? Perhaps, my eyes used to be blinkered. Like a horse. Before.

A nurse wheels steaming urns of tea and coffee into the ward. Her squeaky shoes smile at me from a leathery darkness. I smile back. She takes it for an order.

“Tea or coffee?” sir, she questions, stitching a fake smile into the folds of her own face. I see the needle machinations churn behind her eyes. A rigmarole. The same every morning. Such a farcical display of meaningless goodwill.

Eyeing my safety-pinned bandages, her eyes flutter away; flares of discomfort tremble. Try to remain hidden.

Buried.

She feels sorry for me. A waster. A waster of life.

How could I do such a thing when a Monet-painted sky greets me from the open window? Summer verdancy flutters in, stirring the curtains like restless wings. I sigh, reminding her to cast a smile back into her eyes for me. Hope is what she represents. This will make her happy. This is the right thing for her to do, for me. A hare-brained patient struggling to cling onto slippery tendrils of life.

Teethed eels. Razor sharp.

How does she evade the fall? Run from the slippery suckers? What’s her secret? I should ask her. She might coax my wrists, soothing me to unconsciousness. Dispensing like a pharmacist. I long for her invisible glue to reformat me. How much glue would she need to make a pretty portrait out of my fractured soul?

I dread to think.

She places a lifeless styrofoam cup on the bedside cabinet. Not wanting to touch my wounds.

The cabinet is brown. Not fleshed. Formatted like a soldier. Heartless.

She turns away. Done with me. On to the next.

My chance of fixing scars flies free - out the window, smothered by a hospital blanket of blue.

Emma Wells is a mother and English teacher. She has poetry and prose published with various literary journals and magazines. She is currently writing her fifth novel. Emma won Wingless Dreamer’s Bird Poetry Contest of 2022 and her short story, ‘Virginia Creeper,’ was selected as a winning title by WriteFluence Singles Contest in 2021. Recently, Emma won Dipity Literary Magazine’s 2024 Best of the Net Nominations for Fiction with a short story entitled ‘The Voice of a Wildling.’