Flash #36 Feb '25

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Flash Issue #36 Feb 2025

featuring
Mehreen Ahmed, Swetha Amit, Eleonora Balsano, Vince Casaregola, Kim Chinquee, Susan Cobin, Tommy Dean, Jacqueline Doyle, Hallie Johnston, Lucinda Kempe, Jessica Klimesh, Jayne Martin, Ella Shively, Laura B. Weiss

Flash Reading Friday March 21, 2025 at 7 PM
Please Register in Advance
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/uQMjbDrOTGiuDlJeZfaTeA

Mehreen Ahmed

In the Name of Love

In the name of love, I lock you up in protective gear so you will not get exposed to the bitter, cold weather. I forbid you to meet with friends and sing them your rain song upon their insistence, one that they will listen to and then try to take over your art from you. Then they’ll dismiss you, and in the end leave you listless.

In the name of love, I try to befriend you, make love to you online so you would fall in love with me, recite poetry together with me, you and I, when the sun goes down in the evening then I get you to write some for me under my name, find me jobs, write my cv, buy me a plane ticket even, and give me all that you possess, your intellectual and material wealth, because you love me, totally and profoundly that you would happily make such sacrifices for me.

In the name of love, I yell at you when you make clumsy mistakes so you would perfect it the next time and build a character so strong that no evil could ever hurt you. So you would fare far better than now, and thank me later. I abuse you and I hurt you and want you to fail better now to learn better at some point in time. At that time, you may thank me.

In the name of love, I call you ugly and fat so you will eat less and I get to keep you indoors to save you from harmful sunlight. For the preservation of your skin and of your health, I call you so, so you would look a fine thing of beauty and bring me joy someday.

In the name of love, I chide you, even insult you to make you a better cook. So what you cook tastes and melts like divine food on my palette and yours too. So you can also enjoy and understand the delicacy of fine cuisine while I eat my platter of silver pies.

In the name of love, I ask you to be silly to serve my wishes only, so I can make you and break you hundred times, and keep you guessing, why? Until you and I, eat from the same plate and drink from the same glass; until I have completely galvanised you to prevent you from rotting outside.

In the name of love, I shall ask you to travel places, to give up your cushy job and come with me to make tea and coffee for others and be happy in the moment thinking that you are in the land of infinite freedom and infinite opportunity.

In the name of love, I shall put you in a pickle jar, so I can open the lid whenever I choose and relish you bit by bit until all of you becomes me and mine alone, until I put the empty jar back on the shelf one day, because you are all wasted now, I start to pickle another just like you in good time, and all in the name of love.

In the name of love, I built you a mausoleum, the Grand Taj Mahal the rarest of all to entomb our memory of eternal love. Lost in the fog of time, our love is housed within the sapphires, the rubies and the diamonds.

Mehreen Ahmed is a Bangladeshi-born Australian novelist. Her novels have been acclaimed/recognised by Midwest Book Review and Drunken Druid Editor's Choice. Her short stories have won contests, Pushcart, James Tait, and five BOTN nominations. BlazeVox, Litro UK, Chiron Review, Ellipses Zine, and many others have published her.

Swetha Amit

Shooting Star

Like every other night, I am up again, standing by the window and staring at the night sky with the beaming moon. To distract myself, I began counting the stars, which was your favorite activity before bedtime. This one time, when you spotted a shooting star, you closed your eyes, made a wish, and asked if it would come true. I nodded, smiling while you snuggled in my arms, and drifted off to sleep. I felt your hot breath on my neck and your chest rising and contracting. That same rhythmic movement continues to keep my hopes alive today despite the doctor’s hopelessness after you slipped into a coma last month.
It was a Saturday afternoon, a week after you celebrated your sixth birthday. We were playing frisbee. I threw it a little further than usual, and you slipped on the grass while trying to sprint and hit your head against a stone. You barely cried despite your forehead bleeding profusely, and I lauded you for being a brave girl.
"It hurts, Mama,” your last words before you closed your eyes. I could still feel your hot breath and see your chest moving as I drove you to the hospital. The doctor said it could take either days, months, or years. He wasn’t sure. I was willing to wait. I knew you could never go far away from me for a long time. Who would make those cinnamon pancakes with maple syrup and whipped cream? Who would let you slurp your strawberry milkshake loudly? Who would sometimes let you eat breakfast in bed?
I brought you home and appointed a full-time nurse. How peaceful you looked, with your eyes closed and your wavy black hair spread over your fluffy pink below, with your favorite dolls by your side. Your forehead was still plastered with a band-aid. Every morning, I am by your side singing These are a few of my favorite things, along with Que Sara Sara. The nurse darts a sympathetic look at me. I want to prove her wrong like I want to prove to your father I wasn't a careless mother. He moved out the day you slipped into a coma and now calls only to ask about your well-being. The nurse mentions that he visits you at home while I am at work. The burden of guilt weighs on my shoulders like a sack of stones. If I had not hurled that frisbee so far, you’d now be standing beside me by the window and counting stars.
Just then, the moonlight falls like a white sheet on the garden, exposing some small stones. I thought I had cleared all the big and small stones in the yard. I step outside barefoot in my nightgown. The grass squelches under my feet, and goosebumps prick my skin. I pick up the stones and hurl them at the starry sky. They fall back in the yard, but I continue hurling them while the beaming moon watches me.

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, Oyez Review, and others. Her stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

Eleonora Balsano

Easy

We sit in circles around the embers and ashes of our campfires, nursing our drinks with both hands, and tell each other how far we’ve come, how easy we have it compared to our mothers, sniffing their husband’s coats for new scents, or our grandmothers, up before dawn to put on their faces, God forbid that their men should see them naked.
Everything’s easy, we say, smiling and nodding to each other. We’re not afraid to leave beds unmade, dishes unwashed, laundry unfolded. We’re not afraid to say no. We say no all the time, even when we know that increases the chances that someone else will say yes.
We have all the power. We carry men, birth them, raise them, whip them into gentler shapes than those of our fathers.
We’re sure we’ve done it right until our sons call a girl easy. What do you mean? we ask, hoping for a different answer than the one we know, the one that haunted us and our mothers and our grandmothers and all the women before them. She slept with her boyfriend after a week. Is he easy? We ask but they shrug, children in men’s bodies, and we sink because they are of us but not like us and no matter how far we’ve come, the measure of a woman’s worth is still her willingness to stamp out her fire.

Eleonora Balsano is an Italian-born writer based in Brussels. Her short fiction in English has been featured in Portland Review, Flash Boulevard, JMWW, and elsewhere. In 2024 and 2021, Eleonora was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize. In 2023, she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and long listed for the Wigleaf Top 50. She is the host and producer of Chosen Tongue, a podcast dedicated to translingual writers and their journeys. You can find her on Twitter @norami and on her website, eleonorabalsano.net

Vince Casaregola

Micro ― A Novella as Ten 6-Word Stories

“Divorced. Companionship desired. Height-weight proportional.”
“Does this make me look fat?”
Fondling her iPhone, she'd heard nothing.
He saved her voice in voicemail.
“When . . . will it be my turn?”
He waited alone, drinking burnt coffee.
Her nausea became her morning alarm.
Blood drops on clean white tile.
His old trousers carried new spots.
“These funeral flowers make me sneeze.”

Vince Casaregola teaches and writes in the St. Louis area, where he has lived for over 30 years. A collection of his poetry, Vital Signs, will be coming out from Finishing Line Press in July 2025. He has a particular fondness for old black-and-white films from the 40s and 50s.

Kim Chinquee

CLEAN

As children, my mom and her siblings weren’t allowed to bathe on a regular basis. They lived on a farm. My mom, on a regular basis, would remind me, when I was a child: her classmates would make fun of her, calling her dirty. She never seemed dirty to me, always making sure to clean the house, clean behind my ears, clean me of so much dirt that she would scrub me. We lived on a farm ourselves, and there’s lots of dirt involved. She sang songs to me when she cleaned me, always cheerful in her singsong. My dad wasn’t a singsong person. My dad was schizophrenic. His parents claimed to be clean in their church ways, going to services on Sundays. Preaching about the great news of the Lord. My grandfather looked clean on the surface, but he was dirty in his own ways. I clean my house on a regular basis. I bathe on a regular basis. I have three dogs. They make messes in the house. Growing up, our dogs weren’t allowed in the house. They ran away on a regular basis.

Kim Chinquee's eighth book Pipette was published with Ravenna Press. She has three books forthcoming in 2025 with MadHat Press and Baobab Press. She's Senior Editor of New World Writing Quarterly, Associate Editor of Midwest Review, Chief Editor of ELJ (Elm Leaves Journal), and co-coordinator of SUNY-Buffalo State University's writing major. She's the recipient of three Pushcart Prizes, a competitive triathlete, and lives with her two dogs in Tonawanda, NY.

Susan Cobin

Soon

Soon the buds will return. Branches will bulge with flowers, scents, and colors that will make you feel as though you need to come up for air. You will breathe a sigh of relief. Soon the leaves will turn bright orange and yellow; they will turn brittle and snap like broken bones. The lawns, sidewalks and streets will form new countries like road maps to nowhere. Soon all the bare trees will stand at attention, the cold air pushing through empty spaces like cupboards stripped of light. Soon you will be born—a baby girl with both no history and way too much of it. You get passed around like a plate of hors d’ oeuvres that everyone wants to devour. You will be wrapped in a scratchy white blanket for only so long. When they unwrap you, you make your presence known like a stranded bird on an island. You feed exclusively on lukewarm liquids. Soon you will be too big to be held high above the floor. You will figure out you have feet that work like wheels. You will use them to your advantage even though you have nowhere to go. At night you gaze through an open window at stars. Then you blink your eyes repeatedly to make them go away. You want to bring the night air in and cup it in your tiny hands. Soon someone’s big hands will shut the window, pick you up and bring you to a different dark room, the one with fuzzy animals with glossy eyes that are already asleep on a bed. Soon you will be too big for everything you have ever known. Words will topple out of your mouth like oblong pebbles. Soon you will have many responsibilities, and much will be expected of you. Some things you will excel at and others not so much. Soon you will awake with small breasts. New hair will appear like a rush of wind through a barely opened window. You almost think you like boys, but when they try to kiss you, you take off running as though you are trying to escape from a fire. Soon, though, you will find a boy you like, and he will like you, too. You will like the way he smells and enjoy being hidden under a blanket with him. Soon you expect you can shut out the whole world when you are with this boy. Colors you have admired take on a whole new meaning. This boy becomes another boy and another boy and another boy until you find what you believe to be the boy with whom you will always share both exquisite autumn colors and bare branches scratching the sky. You share hot sand you run on in bare feet. You share snow on shivering arms and rain inside shoes. Soon you will not live alone. This is what they expected of you all along: simply to be part of another. Soon you will feel like you are half of a person. You forget what you look like. You have forgotten your middle name. Your eyes will stare fixedly on a tiny dot in the distance. Your hair will change to two different colors. You will not remember who you are or where you have been. Soon you will pack a single suitcase, wrap a wrinkled scarf around your neck, and travel to a new city where you know nobody. You may even change your name to one with more than two syllables—one with a silent letter. You will move to the outskirts to a cottage in a row of identical cottages. You paint a large orange sun on your front door that soon fades to what appears to be a smudge. A fingerprint. Memories rush in like ripples on water; you need to gather them up in two hands, pore over them as though they mean something important and lasting to you. Soon you forget the little that is left to remember. Soon you plant flowers that shrivel up and die. You sweep and sweep outside your front door, but there is nothing there to gather. You walk to the end of the block and marvel at the wisps of silence all around you. You turn around and return to your cottage, your hands full of emptiness.

Originally from Los Angeles, Susan Cobin now lives in Lexington, KY. She has published poems in dozens of literary magazines, including The Malahat Review, Kayak, Poetry East, Permafrost, Cimarron Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review, and short fiction in Allium, a Journal of Poetry and Prose. Her poetry collection, What You Choose, was published by Broadstone Books.

Tommy Dean

Already Echoing

They had always talked about renewing their vows, but the timing was never right. Kids in the hospital recovering from addiction or disease, a hurricane washing away a favorite beach, the vagaries of jobs and their absence policies, the planning and the cost, each of them afraid they didn’t know enough people to invite, the way their bones ached during a spring rain. Car accidents, eclipses, bird flu, and the swarm of cicadas every five to seventeen years. She wanted him to love her again like he did when he was twenty-one, while he wanted to love her like when she was forty-two; the congruence of these ages was something that was too vulnerable to mention, so while they each planned something in their own private moments, it never happened.

When they were younger, she was something to chase; a ticket ripped from his hand by the wind, feet from the entrance to the show. He’s spent his entire life knowing he’d never be allowed in without her presence. She was the charm he was missing, the wink and a smile that worked better than currency traded surreptitiously through a clutching of palms.

She deserved better. She always had. If the order had been reversed, she would have done it for him. One last warm afternoon. A last hurrah.

Hours on the phone, googling, punching in numbers, explaining, being put on hold, the Cubs on in the background, sun sharp on wooden bats, they explained to him the legalese, the regulations, and laws that prevented him from shipping a body to a vacation destination. Cruises, too, were out. Ashes, they recommended, until he hung up.

The mortician, a fellow Rotary club member, promised to keep her settled until he was ready. He was reminded of how, in the past, they’d wait for months for the ground to thaw. You’ve got your reasons, the mortician said, shaking his hand.

They whispered, his kids and their spouses prompting each other to intervene. They reminded him about the house, the bills, the car, and its maintenance, his ability to feed and wash himself, all lyrics to an old song of which he forgets more words with each day, but the rhythm is always there. How can he make them understand this? None of that mattered. He’d live wherever they wanted, sign over what little he had left if they’d just let him sing this last song. Soon, he said, you’ll have your own melodies to protect.

So see him in the church, the torture of Jesus on looming paintings, his eldest daughter officiating, them standing at the bottom of the stage, awaiting his sons and their sons guiding his wife down the aisle, her casket gleaming, the right wheel of the cart chirping, the smattering of guests laughing. The sting of flowers, so many bouquets, from the elementary school where she taught for thirty years, the women’s league, the dentist office, surrounding them, his eyes itching, his daughter’s freckles no longer on her face, but over the backs of her hands as she fidgeted with her speech. They refused him the sand, the potted palm trees, but they cranked the heat to eighty-five degrees, and he sweated happily in his linen suit.

The ceremony is short, his daughter reading a few words. Ending by saying, "Forget the songs, the books and the movies. This is love. I see that now.”

It’s all an illusion, he wanted to tell her, to turn to this small clutch of people, to tell them that now that the planning was over, now that his hands grasped the cold handles of the casket, he didn’t know how he’d replace her heat, the tempo of her breathing that allowed him to fall asleep first, the soft clutch of her hand? Or the way she could call him stupid with a glance, and how to his chagrin she was always right, and who would stop him now from his own bad ideas? And how many did he have left?

Spring in Indiana was always unforgiving, so when they left the over-warm church for its cemetery, he was met with a bracing chill, the wind an adversary he’d never bested. He reached for her phantom arm, only to find his daughter there, goosebumps across her arms. “You know what your mother would say,” he said. “I’d hate to change now,” his daughter said, leading him toward the out-of-place tent.

Bible verses, Amazing Grace, a prayer, and traditions that numbed him. He shoveled into his memories: cinnamon-glazed shoulders, the ease of untying a bikini string, the smell of apricots, the touch of a pregnant stomach, the sparkle of honey-brown eyes in the pre-dawn light, a laugh already echoing.

The half-frozen ground ices his feet, the flower petals already curling though the sun is brilliant, his poker-dark sunglasses hiding his eyes. They touch his elbow, his back, the young ones getting as near as they dare, feeling for the peppermints in his pockets. On the walk back to his son’s car, the ground was hilly and soft, each step a hazard, one that might welcome his own fall back to the earth.

Later, he needed to ask his son to help him out the sodden and stinking suit, embarrassed by his bird-like legs, how each step had already become a hazard, how what they didn’t tell you about death, these widowers who came before, that this stretch, after the ceremony and the tears, after the return of grown children to their lives, the mortician and his soft-voiced wisdom was gone, that the house would speak to him in its silences, that some burdens would never lighten, how he and his wife had trampled their fair share of dirt and grass, each step erased before they could look back at from where they came, a blankness surrounding them, enveloped in a particular kind of love.

Tommy Dean is the author of two flash fiction chapbooks Special Like the People on TV (Redbird Chapbooks, 2014) and Covenants (ELJ Editions, 2021), and a full flash collection, Hollows (Alternating Current Press 2022). He is the editor of Fractured Lit and Uncharted Magazine. A recipient of the 2019 Lascaux Prize in Short Fiction, his writing can be found in Best Microfiction 2019 and 2020, Best Small Fiction 2019 and 2022, and numerous litmags. Find him at tommydeanwriter.com and on Twitter @TommyDeanWriter.

Jacqueline Doyle

The Chair

She remembers the light from the windows that morning. Andrew was talking about his coworkers and she was barely listening, absorbed in the crossword puzzle, when he told her. She had to ask him to repeat it. He was sitting across from her, where he always did, in the wingback chair. He’d finished the newspaper, which was folded in his lap. She didn’t know why he’d decided to tell her then, at that particular moment. But when do you share something like that? She remembers the couch, the flowered wingback chair, the light from the windows. She’d been planning to reupholster the chair for years, but hadn’t gotten around to it. “I have something to tell you,” he said. Or maybe he said, “I need to tell you something.” She hadn’t been paying attention. She thought it was something he’d read in the newspaper. They often read headlines to each other, or snatches of articles. They often commented on the world news, or local crime. This was different news. It turned out she’d been robbed and she hadn’t even noticed. She remembers the blue couch, the flowered wingback chair, the morning light from the windows. The windows needed to be washed. It was a big job and she’d been putting it off. “I’ve been seeing someone,” he said. She didn’t get it at first. “Seeing someone?” Did he mean he saw someone he knew in the newspaper? A picture? He cleared his throat. “It just happened,” he said. “It’s not anyone’s fault. I still care about you.” She remembers the blue couch, where she always sat, Andrew’s wingback chair, the morning light from the windows. The chill in the room. She’d been wondering whether she should get up and turn on the heat, but Andrew was talking and looked very serious. She didn’t get it. Of course he still cared about her. “I think it would be best if I moved out. Felicity and I want to spend more time together. You’ve probably noticed all my late nights at work.” She remembers the couch, the chair, the morning light. The chill in the room. How it all began to look unfamiliar. How unexpectedly serious Andrew looked. The sudden tightening in her chest, how breathless she felt. “We don’t have to make any decisions right now,” he said. What did he mean? What decisions? She waited until he left before she started to cry. How stupid she’d been, how much she’d overlooked. She remembers the couch, Andrew’s old chair, the harsh morning light. The chill in the room. Her uncontrollable trembling. She wondered what she regretted the most—losing Andrew, or being stupid. It was such a familiar story, a man leaving his wife of twenty-five years for a younger woman at work. Felicity! Thirty-something at most. She’d never considered her a threat. Never considered any other women as threats. Even Felicity’s name was ridiculous. She wore false eyelashes! Did Andrew really believe they’d be happy? She remembers sitting on the couch for hours after Andrew left, staring at his empty chair. She remembers the gray morning light brightening into afternoon and then shading into dusk. She decided she’d get rid of the chair. She’d never liked it.

Jacqueline Doyle's flash has been published in Wigleaf, trampset, Flash Boulevard, and Aquifer: Florida Review Online, among others. She lives in Castro Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area. Find her online at www.jacquelinedoyle.com and on twitter @doylejacq.

Hallie Johnston

‘93 Blue LeBaron

It wasn’t the car she wanted for her sixteenth, but it was what she got. Her parents bought it from Big Bama Bob’s used car lot in town. They said when she’s older and paid her own insurance she could buy herself any car she wanted. She said she would. She said, “I’ll get something new and nice and drive right out of Alabama.” Her parents sighed, rolled their eyes when she said things like this, and sometimes it was irritating to watch and sometimes hopeful the way for a moment they were each other’s mirror.

“And me,” her little brother would say. “Can I go?” He was always asking to ride in the passenger seat when the girl went driving to drive. He was eight and lived in his imagination, saying the blue and chipped paint made him feel like he was inside a Robin’s egg.

“Shotgun,” he’d yell even though he was the only one—her parents said no friends, no radio for the first three months. So she and her brother rode around in silence, especially late afternoon on Saturdays when her parents started cocktail hour an hour before usual so the fighting began an hour before usual.

Drinks and the evening news—a ritual her parents began when they first married. “BC” her dad would say then tell another “before children” story, their favorites to go on about, it seemed to the girl.

One Saturday, the Saturday her parents told them they’d be separating, her brother wanted to go to Taco Bell—he’d seen a commercial for a new gordita. She remembered the commercial because there was a talking chihuahua and it played right before her parents turned off the TV to talk.

She’d never taken the LeBaron through a drive-thru, but her parents didn’t say anything about drive-thrus.

As she rounded the curve, slowing at just the right spot to talk into the speaker box without craning out the window, she felt grown. Accomplished. That she had herself and everything would be fine.

She placed the order in a voice clear and crisp as a newscaster and began to pull forward, trying to edge the curb but cutting too hard, too sharp. Scrape. Crunch.

“Go,” her brother yelled. “Go, go, go!”

As though they were on the run, as though what she’d done was a crime and maybe it was, she didn’t know. In the next moment, she swerved the LeBaron out of line and hopped the curb. They sped away in quiet stillness until her brother cracked it open with a snort and started laughing and didn’t stop. He laughed so hard he farted and then he laughed at that. The girl was laughing too but now she groaned and rolled down the windows. She looked in the rearview mirror, watched the fluorescent lights of the fast-food restaurant dim and shrink into nothing.

Ahead the setting sun glowed atomic, and she thought she’d like a tattoo of something like that. A fiery sun or another star or planet. Something else she could keep from her parents because the secret of this one thing already felt like power.

Winding through the neighborhood, she took the long way home. Her brother laughed himself tired and fell asleep with head pressed against window as they passed shrubs and birchwoods and kudzu. Then the street opened up and she could see their house at the end of the road. The silhouettes of her parents inside, lamplight and two bodies orbiting one another like flies, and she wished she were one too—wings and big eyes that could see everything, almost everything.

Hallie Johnston is a writer from the South. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Miami. Her work has appeared in the Southern Humanities Review, The Louisville Review, and The Citron Review. She currently lives in Birmingham, Alabama.

Lucinda Kempe

Roo

You saw the kangaroo in Whole Foods by the cereal aisle. You were buying black beans and Indian curry trying to decide what you’d do for dinner when you saw the funny short front legs like a T Rex but cuter. It stood there eyeing the colored boxes and then began pushing the boxes to the back of the shelf causing them to spill on the floor. Strangely, people didn’t seem to see the kangaroo. But it saw you and bounced over and poked you with its front paw as if it wanted to box. So, you positioned your cart between the two of you to see what would happen when it bounced up and into your cart smashing the eggs and flattening the Brie you’d bought to have as a treat. You thought about screaming, but instead treated it as if it were your son when he was a wild defiant toddler prone to fits. You spoke to it softly telling the roo that you’d detour at the ice-cream section, which you did. Then you gave it a vanilla with chocolate almonds that you opened. You watched as the face of the roo became the face of your little son so prone to tantrums as his mouth sucked on the sweets he pawed from the container with his digits. The roo did a roo smile, and you rushed him through the line paying for everything, including the roo, with your Apple Pay. You got roo into the back of the Mazda with little or no effort, which surprised you. As you drove home with roo in the back so mesmerized by the ice cream that it was eating the cardboard, you realized you’d have to explain to your husband why you didn’t have a clue about dinner.

Lucinda Kempe’s work has been published or is forthcoming in Gooseberry Pie, New Flash Fiction Review, Centaur, The Disappointed Housewife, Unbroken Journal, New South Journal, Southampton Review, and the Summerset Review. An excerpt of her memoir was shortlisted for the Fish Memoir Prize in April 2021. Nominated for Best of the Net in 2024 by Boudin Magazine (the McNeese Review).

Jessica Klimesh

Transformation

The first time she said no, stood up for herself, Loretta didn’t feel anything, no dip or rise in temperature, no pain in her joints like she’d heard might happen. But the second time she said no, this time with the confidence of a mean uncle, her skin flushed conch-shell pink, just for a brief moment. It’s happening, her trainer at the gym said, her smile radiant. Just keep doing what you’re doing. So Loretta did. She refused to say sorry for things that weren’t her fault and refused to defer to the loudest voice in the room. And when she was told that she’d be prettier if she smiled more, she said fuck you, and soon her biceps popped and her calf muscles became more defined. She even became taller. You’re doing great, her trainer said. This is how men do it.

Jessica Klimesh (she/her) is a writer and editor whose creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Flash Frog, Cleaver, Gone Lawn, Ghost Parachute, Bending Genres, trampset, and Does It Have Pockets, among others. She lives in Sylvania, Ohio, and is currently trying her hand at playwriting. Learn more at jessicaklimesh.com.

Jayne Martin

Good People

“Last minute Lil” they called her. Time management had never been her strong suit. Still one would think she could manage to arrive on time to her own funeral. The mourners shifted their butts on the hard chapel benches, fans waving and flapping in all manner of attempts to cool themselves in the Alabama heat. At least there would be no need to fake tears as sweat snaked downward from their brows in abundance. Lillian had never been a town favorite. Her kids showing up to school still pulling on their clothes, hair all a tangle. Everyone knew not to count on her for bake sales, lest she show up with a box of Oreos and another excuse. Last to volunteer, first to complain. Still, they came here today out of respect for their neighbor. And when the casket finally arrived and was carried down the aisle to the front of the small chapel, they all stood. Because that’s what good people do.

Jayne Martin is a Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfictions nominee, and recipient of Vestal Review’s VERA award. She is the author of Tender Cuts, a collection of microfiction from Vine Leaves Press, and The Daddy Chronicles-Memoir of a Fatherless Daughter, published by Whiskey Tit Books. She lives in California, but dreams of living in Paris. Website: www.jaynemartin-writer.com Facebook: Jayne Martin-Auteur. Twitter: @Jayne_Martin

Ella Shively

The Front Porch Inheritance

            There are stories my Grandma Casey only tells on the creaky old porch of the farmhouse back in Iowa, when all the men are napping and the children are playing in the barn. I am the oldest granddaughter, home from graduate school in California. I take a paper bag full of sweet corn and join my aunties on the porch. I shuck quickly and quietly, hoping to go unnoticed. Between our house and the neighbor’s, an empty gravel road and an army of soybean plants. The air smells like ripe kernels and corn silk. The hot breath of a million green mouths. We are waiting for a green bean casserole to bake.
            The aunts say Newkirk Hawarden OrangeCity Granville, all the churchy little towns in northwest Iowa where they used to live. Grandma Casey says farm accidents and birthday handkerchiefs. Grandma says, before you girls were born. Grandma says Roe v. Wade, so softly I think I’m the only one who hears. Grandma says the chicken coop, the traveling circus, the minister and the minister’s daughter’s sins.
            Aunt Betty asks Grandma if she remembers a woman named Deborah from the church in Hawarden.
            Grandma says they grew up together in SiouxCenter Lester Larchwood Melvin.
            Grandma says, she was different, though, after she drowned her newborn in the pond.
            Grandma says, I never told anyone. Well, except for you kids now.
            She says, Deborah loved that baby. She just loved her other babies more.
            Dust rises. The neighbor across the street is cruising home in his pickup truck. We all wave.
            Grandma says, I suppose it’s time we take that casserole out of the oven.

Ella Shively is a writer and naturalist from the American Midwest. She is currently working toward her MFA in Poetry at Cornell University. Her writing has been published in RockPaperPoem, Bracken, Runestone Journal, and elsewhere. You can find her on Instagram @shivelywrites.

Laura B. Weiss

Daughter Witch

            After the cops call again, pain razors through my chest. I dial 911. The ambulance carries me past a witness tree where a witch perches in the midnight branches. The cops are after my daughter. There was a fight with a teacher about a grade. Her knife plowed into his spongy stomach.
            Poof, my girl crawled through a window. Poof, she was gone.
            When she was five, she pinched nickels from my purse.
            “The cat ate them,” she said.
            I smelled her lie.
            When she was ten, diamond studs vanished from my jewelry box.
            “It’s the witch’s trick,” she said. “She sits in the tree outside my window.”
            I heard her darkness bellow.
            When she was fifteen, the cops, in too-tight suits, arrested her for dealing cocaine. They tracked mud into my living room, left behind the smell of wet earth.
            My daughter is Satan’s cleaver, hacking my heart.
            After my girl killed Mr. Millhouse, she vanished into the woods. And now, the cops are closing in. They say she chopped off her hair. They say she dyed it orange. But that girl can’t be my girl. She hates orange, the flinty smell of marigolds, the leer of Halloween pumpkins, the pulpy breakfast fruit pocked with pits.
            The ambulance pulls up to the hospital, the siren roaring a rusty refrain. Orderlies deposit me in a hospital room three floors above Mr. Millhouse’s drawer in the morgue. The orderlies whisper She’s the mother of the teacher-murderer. Through the open window, the sky unfolds, rough like tree bark. I pull the bedcovers over my head.
            The surgeon waltzes in. He must mistake my weeping for fear. “You need a catheterization,” he says. “Don’t worry, we do them all the time.”
            I sit up. “I need two hearts fixed. Mine and my daughter’s. As soon as she comes home, do hers.”
            The doctor tap, tap, taps on a keyboard, and when he looks up, his eyes pulse blue neon like my bedside beeping machine.
            “What are you talking about?” he asks.
            He doesn’t see the nimbus of orange float through the open window. He doesn’t hear me call out.

Laura B. Weiss is a fiction writer and journalist with work in JMWW, Flash Boulevard, Bright Flash Literary Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Five on the Fifth, 10 x 10 Flash, NY Times, NPR, among others. She was a Publishers Weekly book reviewer and author of Ice Cream: A Global History (Reaktion Books/University of Chicago Press). She’s also a Virginia Center for Creative Arts Fellow.