Flash Issue #35 Nov 2024
featuring
Swetha Amit, Elizabeth Burton, Christine H. Chen, Jess Golden, Stella Hayes, Brian Lynch, Carolyn Oliver, Robert Scotellaro, Maureen Sherbondy, Elena Zhang
Swetha Amit, Elizabeth Burton, Christine H. Chen, Jess Golden, Stella Hayes, Brian Lynch, Carolyn Oliver, Robert Scotellaro, Maureen Sherbondy, Elena Zhang
Swetha Amit
Undercurrents
After you drowned, I found myself walking by the river again. The water, a greenish-blue hue, flowed in a deceptively gentle manner. It felt like a sheet I could walk on. I could see the fish swimming inside, their scales glinting in the sunlight. They are in various sizes and colors. I remember you squealing in delight at these little treasures. It was what attracted you to dip your little feet into it. I warned you, but you bawled, saying I was being mean. I relented finally, unable to see those fat tears rolling down your scarlet red cheeks. I instructed you to hold my hand tight. You wanted to go deeper and touch the fish. But your grip loosened as you waded deeper, and that ghostly white water suddenly enticed you away. I immediately tried to swim fast, fighting the vicious currents, and almost got hold of your pink frock until another gush of that raging water split us. I helplessly watched you drift away as you waved your creamy brown hands, crying for help. At the same time, I was tossed on the banks- the deadly odor of the slimy mud torturing my nostrils as I spit out the tasteless river water from my mouth. Your screams continued to reverberate in my ears even two months after that accident. Your body was never found. I wonder what compelled me to come back here. Perhaps I hope you are somewhere out there, washed ashore, tired, hungry, and afraid but alive. Perhaps I dream that some neighborhood village dwellers would have miraculously found you, nursed you back to health, and brought you back home. As I continued walking, the sunlight faded behind a cascade of dark clouds suddenly gathering above me. The raindrops trickled down my face, merging with the salt-induced water gushing from my eyes. I watched the rain change the river into a raging slush of murky brown. I stood there, drenched to the hilt, staring at the two water bodies merging into one, trying to comprehend the volatility of the river I once loved, why it betrayed my trust and filled my life with gloom. |
Swetha Amit is the author of two chapbooks, Cotton Candy from the Sky and Mango Pickle in Summer. An MFA graduate from the University of San Francisco, her works appear in Had, Flash Fiction Magazine, Maudlin House, Barzakh, Oyez Review, and others (https://swethaamit.com). She has received three Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations. She lives in the Bay Area with her husband and daughter.
Elizabeth Burton
To the Woman Talking to Her Therapist on Speaker at Waffle House In another timeline, a bird would have flown into the window and you and I, both being moved by its plight, would have left our respective waffles (and you your phone call) and decided separately to go outside to check on it, where we would have struck up a conversation about the bird, causing us to search on our phones for wildlife rehabbers, leading us to take a road trip in the country together with the bird in a box, which would result in a conversation about how the men in our lives wouldn’t want to help the creature, how they’d driven us both into therapy and how we might be better off without them, as we leave the sanctuary fast friends and birdless.
In another timeline, we bicycle to Waffle House at the same moment, smile at each other, compliment one another’s outfits in the way women do. We laugh when we’re seated next to each other at the counter. You apologize when your phone rings, loudly, say It’s my therapist in a tone that suggests you have to take it even though it’s awkward. Your face turns red as you sputter, …but we’ve been together so long. When you hang up, you look at me with an apology for sharing too much in public, for making noise, for taking up space, and I smile reassuringly: I have one, too, and you joke, therapist or boyfriend? and we laugh, knowing I mean both.
In another timeline, our brains would have been telepathically linked from the moment he started dating both of us.
But in this timeline, I listen to you talk to your therapist about the man you love, arguing that he is a good one, not one of the ones people warn you about, that he really wants to help you find yourself.
Your therapist says You need to leave him before you lose yourself too. You hang up in tears and immediately call someone you refer to as “Honey.” This time, you take it off speaker and I can’t hear his voice. I feel for you, imagine what kind of man your boyfriend must be to have your therapist so on edge. I’m thankful for my own man, even though my therapist isn’t too thrilled about him either, based on the number of times I can’t reach him. I tap "Boyfriend" on my phone, hear it go straight to voicemail. I look over at you, hear you say Do you have to go? and wonder if we are the same. |
Elizabeth Burton writes and teaches in far Western Kentucky. She holds an MFA from the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University and her work has appeared in The Louisville Review, Chautauqua, The MacGuffin, Split Lip, JMWW, Bending Genres, and others. She has a fiction chapbook forthcoming from Appalachia Book Company.
Christine H. Chen
photo by A Mathiowetz
Where is Home?
Is it the smell of fried fish balls, of soft tofu simmered with scallions in bone broth, the hubbub of the midnight merchants shouting their offerings to the wind while you stare at the scintillating lights on the streets down below from a Hong Kong high-rise window, wishing you were old enough to stay up late like the Ma-Jong players, or the African sun on your face, your steps on the sand the color of rust you tread carefully to avoid the mound the pyramid ants built, the puff of dust you kick to scatter chickens and crows swirling above a holed up carcass, the shadow of a baobab tree, a sudden drop of rain on your nose, your Ma’s shouting, get back right now, then you remember the drying bed sheets and clothes in the backyard, and rushed to help your Ba unpin and grab them instead, or the blanket of fog swaddling the Golden Gate bridge on your morning Sunday runs from the university campus, the steam rising from onions and hot pots drifting from Chinatown you return to over and over again, letting yourself submerge in nostalgic scents, biting on tapioca pearls swimming in milk, or the maple tree turning blood red in your garden behind your New England cottage when the crisp Autumn air hit, the crinkling of a rug of oak leaves under your boots when you fail to catch the sight of a cardinal standing still for a breath as elusive as home? |
Christine H. Chen was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Madagascar before settling in Boston where she worked as a research chemist. Her fiction has been published in SmokeLong Quarterly, Atticus Review, Fractured Lit, trampset, Space & Time magazine, among others. Her work has received Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best American Food Writing nominations and was selected for inclusion in Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions 2023, Best Microfiction 2024, and Best Small Fictions 2024. www.christinehchen.com
Recent publication: translation of Mon citronnier by Samantha Barendson;
translation My Lemon Tree by Christine H. Chen & M. Jaime Zuckerman (Spuyten Duyvil 2023)
Recent publication: translation of Mon citronnier by Samantha Barendson;
translation My Lemon Tree by Christine H. Chen & M. Jaime Zuckerman (Spuyten Duyvil 2023)
Jess Golden
Routines We Build Around Ever-Impending Disasters
Since Scott and I retired twelve years ago and moved here for the beach walks and the sunrises, we’ve also lived through hurricanes and tropical storms every summer, every autumn. Each time another passes through, people up and down the coast from us appear on the news, talking about their damage. The camera pans over fresh piles of splintered wood and plaster, over slumped roofs and tree roots turned over, scratching at the sky. A new round of defeated voices say they don’t know what they’ll do now. Most of the neighbors get nervous during the lead-up to big storms. Modern tracking can tell us when another is on its way but not exactly who it’ll strike. But Scott and I aren’t panickers. At this point, we’re used to dramatic weather, and ever since I went back into remission, we’ve been making a special effort to choose enjoyment whenever possible. So while the others fight over the last pack of batteries and the last can of beans, while they stand in front of predictable bald spots on the shelves and wave their arms at tired store employees, we attend to our own rituals. We chat with the deli counter butcher and pick out just the right cut of meat. We test stone fruit with our thumbs, choose the most fragrant bundles of cilantro and tarragon. And then, when the time comes, we have a cozy night in. We make braised lamb or beef bourguignon. We drink lots of red wine and play board games, fold ourselves around each other to rewatch our favorite movies while the generator hums and the rain clobbers the windows and walls. Of course, we’ve given in and hunkered down in inland motels to wait the most memorable names out, but for the most part, that hasn’t felt necessary. We’ve been quite comfortable at home. It’s never truly felt like the outside could reach us in here. So when the generator clicks to a stop and the power cuts in the middle of a game of Scrabble, wind and water tearing slash-shaped noises into the air outside, Scott and I aren’t among the best prepared. I try to tell myself that sounds just feel different in the dark, but it really seems like it’s getting worse outside. There’s an earsplitting howl, like a train is seconds away from running us over. A slow creak at top volume. We scramble for our phones, looking for a way to light the room back up. My hands find abandoned wooden tiles—T and X, based on the shape of their grooves. A chenille throw blanket, the iron ridges of Scott’s keyring. He finds a handful of coins, a tangle of charging cables, a lotion bottle that pumps vanilla slime onto the floor. We stub a lot of toes and jam a lot of fingers, and eventually, we give up on finding our phones. They say you should brace yourself in a situation like this. But if there’s any chance these will be my last moments, I don’t want to spend them cowering under a table, joints on fire. I find my way back to the couch and take shelter in its corduroy. Scott joins me and wraps both arms around my shoulders. I lean into the hollow between his collarbone and neck. Everything is probably going to be fine. It’s been fine countless times before. Outside, the white noise screams. Something breaks. I try my best not to remember the people on the news. The man with the crinkled gray eyes, standing in front of what used to be a home, searching fruitlessly for words. The woman who’d lost her husband to a fallen beam, standing in a yard among broken walls and unbroken teacups. That spacey look on her face. I breathe slow and heavy through the fabric of Scott’s sweatshirt—sandalwood and rosemary and laundry detergent and skin. He rubs circles into my shoulder blade, and I try to shut my eyes against the images in my head, try to ignore the roar of the outside, try not to imagine that the deafening split we’re hearing is the sound of a roof peeling off, disappearing into the night. |
Jess Golden is an American fiction writer with a preference for flash and a tendency to move around a lot. At the moment, she can be found in Istanbul. Her stories have previously appeared in Pithead Chapel, Passages North, Fictive Dream, Maudlin House, Wigleaf's Top 50, and elsewhere.
Stella Hayes
LUDA, THE GIRL WHO WAS MY BEST FRIEND
Dressed in school uniforms, finely ironed by each of our mothers. Detachable starched stiff white Victorian collars around our necks. We would skip on a fresco of hopscotch. New concrete, erasing a small-town dirt road. We’d pick bright-colored chalk from a box of cardboard, our fingers covered in radioactive ash. How streaks of it end up on our faces, giving our nightly baths a painterly glow. Every day after school I’d go up to see her. I remember her a year or so older. A blond girl. I had more pupsiki, small rubbery Germanmade dolls — intricate, free. In their underwear & wardrobe of tiny dresses, sweaters, hats, shoes. We undressed & dressed them. Small choices in a country dispossessed of the I. In her home, voices were hushed, plans were made in daylight. When my parents confided in 9-year-old me the dangerous news that we were leaving, I couldn’t tell her. We played, combed & rearranged each other’s hair into monarchal braids. I wanted to leave my plastic friends for her but if I did, she would tell her parents. Maybe it started then, in Brovary, Ukraine, I liked blue eyes more than brown. Diaspora, my love |
Stella Hayes is the author of two poetry collections, Father Elegies (What Books Press, 2024) and One Strange Country (What Books Press, 2020). She grew up in Brovary, a suburb outside of Kyiv, Ukraine, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Hayes earned an MFA. in poetry from NYU, where she taught in the undergraduate creative writing program and served as poetry editor and assistant fiction editor of Washington Square Review.
Brian Lynch
Pedestrians, or How to Stand in Traffic
She said she wanted to know what really scared me, what kept me from sleeping the way I was supposed to. What is it, she said. Babies or clowns? The endless expanse of space? Your father suddenly dying? We had never spoke like this before. We were supposed to be at dinner. We were standing out in the middle of traffic, halfway between two interstate exits, and no one was stopping. Truth or Dare, my fiancée said. I want your biggest fears. It was already night, so the cars weren’t much of anything but yellow pairs of headlights getting bigger and bigger until they were right on top of us, and then it was their rushing wind, foul-mouthed voices, and the flash-snap glimpses of going-by faces. I was being put out of breath out there in between the lanes. My fiancée was holding onto my hand. She was in dark clothing, barefoot. She was a telephone-psychic for work, a tarot card-reader, voodoo doll-maker, an adamant believer in reincarnation, too, and she was giving me this chance here to speak the truth, to come out clean. She was saying, I know what happens next now. There was an 18-wheeler coming down on us, its big nose sticking out in front, and all those tires bumping, skipping, wobbling off the road behind it. My fiancée squeezed her fingers into mine, that extra bit of pressure. Don’t flinch, she said. You don’t get hit, she said. I was praying for catastrophe elsewhere. I was wanting a car crash, a real bad one, and I had my fingers crossed for pile-ups, t-bones, and side-swipes, something on the road that turned heads and took eyes, a crash so big it would make me small and less than and so that I could be forgiven. I could say, Look, see, I’m no murderer. Why would I lie, my fiancée said. What reason do I have to hurt you? Won’t you please believe me? Isn’t that the vow, she said, and I tore my hand out away from hers and made for the emergency shoulder, landing on my knees in the crumbled-up pavement. I knew it, she said. You’re hollow, she said. See-through. Faithless. My fiancée made her fists at the sky and cursed me over the tops of cars. She put a pox on me and my kind. She said, Don’t come looking after me. She said, That’s not how this works, and the truck had her head on now in its double-headlight glow. My fiancée put her back to what was coming. Her face was made half of what it was, her one showing eye turned towards me. She said, Believe this: I am laughing at you. |
Brian Lynch is a writer from New York, living in Washington State. He has work forthcoming in Inkfish Magazine.
Carolyn Oliver
photo by Benjamin Oliver
Madonna of the Rocks
When seawater sluiced over the feathered edges of her gills for the first time, bathing the new organs in her throat and chest, the opera singer realized that despite her meticulous planning—years studying cetology, fluid dynamics, thermoregulation; a thousand memorized harbor topographies; patrons carefully cultivated; whole seasons spent off-stage, cold, in pools, in bays, in rivers, in surgical recovery wards, brutal hours made bearable only by the consolation that she was the mother of a new artistic discipline whose methods would one day bear her name, whose composers and critics would school in her wake—yes, despite all these preparations, she had failed to account for the physical effect of environmental inputs (instinctively she’d cataloged temperature, density, salinity) on her new senses. Pleasure: she had not anticipated it. Would not have expected her extreme reluctance to give it up, even for a moment. The cool, full kiss of the water . . . how flimsy the humid air seemed in comparison, when the mezzo’s last patron pulled her, unwilling, from the tidepool. Champagne, cameras, some soprano aria from Pearl Fishers blaring from the grotesque yacht anchored offshore: his lack of imagination in the bedroom could be matched only by his predictability outside its confines. Once she could have sighed. Instead, like the coquette she’d rarely played, she tilted her neck just enough to let him slice his mouth on her new gills, noting with mild interest a change in rage’s resonance. It was nothing to drag him under the waves. Of course, as a professional, she understood that in later centuries the scene would be played quite differently. Fins and scales, a shipwreck, vaguely exotic allurements. Not a hint of farce. Nothing at all about her exceptionally keen teeth. |
Carolyn Oliver is the author of The Alcestis Machine (Acre Books, 2024), Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble (University of Utah Press, 2022; winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize), and three chapbooks. Her very short prose and prose poetry has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Indiana Review, No Contact, Tin House (online), Exposition Review, Midway Journal, and Miracle Monocle, among other journals.
Robert Scotellaro
Forest Nuns in the Wild
I am raised by a band of forest nuns who have made their own way. Take refuge in hidden treehouses among the squirrels and woodpeckers. The Bible stories they tell are a mishmash of invention and tangled canon: the parable of The Boy Who Tickled Trees, and the story of Moses parting the field of red wildflowers… Sister Shrimp sometimes sleeps in the hollow of a great tree struck by lightning and Sister Much can lift large boulders over her head. We are kindly and pray over the small animals we eat, what we consider prayer. Our habits are made of leaves and we are all masters of camouflage and stillness, but the hunters rarely go this far in, and then we do not exist. God is the leaf, the soil, the moon, the worm… At night we drink juniper berry wine and play connect-the-dots with the stars and see things, fuss, of course, and even fight at times. Sister Shrimp is a biter. Afterwards, Sister Smart reminds us of the story of The Tree of Knowledge and how it was chopped down by a demented diamond merchant and used for mulch, and how we’ve been stupid ever since. The campfire we circle is a watchful eye gazing sideways in all directions and gazing skyward, and sometimes we look up too: sing sweetly to the heavens. Expect nothing in return. |
Robert Scotellaro is the author of 8 flash collections. Breath and Shadow: Six-Sentence Stories (with Meg Pokrass) is forthcoming by MadHat Press, as well as a solo collection of prose poems: The Weight of Certain Moments (Červená Barva Press). He has co-edited New Micro with James Thomas (W.W. Norton). His work has appeared in the Norton anthologies: Flash Fiction International and Flash Fiction America, and in 5 Best Small Fictions and 2 Best Microfiction award anthologies. Visit him at: www.robertscotellaro.com
Maureen Sherbondy
High School Geometry
When my math instructor returned to the convent seeking quiet and God, a substitute appeared to teach geometry. Mr. Kushner resembled Woody Allen and spoke of paranoia and anxiety instead of vectors, angles, and equations. Once he said, If I shit in the woods I’d get caught. Paranoid, he made a bee-line toward me in the library for counsel, seeking advice about the principal who was searching for flaws and sharp edges. In the midst of drafting a term paper on mental disorders in American novels, I shrugged. At home, my mother spun inside her own anxieties by downing Valium and hiding under dark covers from a bank account she couldn’t balance and the fallout from divorce. My father managed his own anger by imbibing liquid of the Stoli brand. I shrugged, I’m sixteen. Figure it out. Who would educate me about points, lines, planes? College was my only escape from the lack of symmetry or consistency in my teenage life. Beyond the perimeter of my home, neighbors couldn’t see human shapes burning inside. So much is blocked in suburbia by perimeters of hedges and trees. Who would shape me, flatten these crooked lines? I searched every angle but came up short. A + B never added up. Near the end, Kushner covered all windows so he could hold a séance. Maybe he believed that a deceased geometry teacher would appear and perform the task assigned to him. In the end, when word got out, they forced Kushner to resign. Freshman year of college after drinking too much beer, I stooped in the woods to pee. That’s when I looked around and thought of him. |
Maureen Sherbondy's work has appeared in Litro, Upstreet, Calyx, and other journals. She lives in Durham, NC. www.maureensherbondy.com
Elena Zhang
Field Guide to Small Desires
The Seahorse I met Lewis when he was a seahorse. God couldn’t make him an Eve out of his ribs; he had no ribs. But Lewis eventually blessed the sea with his progeny. Well, what did he expect when he fucked the ocean? I ate Lewis so I could have a baby. That was the last time I saw him. I wondered if I would ever know that he was okay. The Spider Suzy grabbed the firefly and lit up his ass like a beacon because she was hungry but didn’t want to leave home. What a sticky word. A web filled with corpses and people she loved. But I knew they were one and the same. The firefly wiggled in Suzy’s arms and she felt her hairs stand on end, electrified with longing. “Maybe I’ll keep this one,” she said, and snuffed out the light. The Stingray I finally had a baby. She was born in a devil’s purse. She came away from me like bubble from a wand. Waterlogged with memory and horn-tipped wings. There were so many things I wanted to ask her. When she took her first breath of seawater, I swallowed the salt of her absence. Once, I touched my stinger to the mirrored surface of my face. It dissolved into the shape of her, clear and blue and endless as the sky. |
Elena Zhang is a Chinese American writer and mother living in Chicago. Her work can be found in HAD, The Citron Review, Ghost Parachute, and Lost Balloon, among other publications. She is a Best of the Net nominee and was selected for Best Microfiction 2024. She’s on Twitter @ezhang77.