Flash #37 May '25

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Flash Issue #37 May 2025

featuring
Tracie Adams, Mikki Aronoff, Cole Beauchamp, Kelli Short Borges, Laton Carter, Ya Lan Chang, Stephen Delaney, Gary Fincke, Ryan Griffith, Jad Josey, Davida Kilgore, Louella Lester, Glenn Orgias, Annabelle Taghinia, Kirby Michael Wright

Flash Reading Friday August 29, 2025 at 7:30 PM
Please Register in Advance
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/bqZ3avX1RkqN-Nb-m__GNQ

Tracie Adams

Tracie Adams writes flash memoir and fiction from her farm in rural Virginia. A retired educator and playwright, she now spends her time with five short people who call her Glamma. Her book, Our Lives in Pieces, debuts this spring. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appears in over fifty literary journals and anthologies including BULL, Cleaver, Trash Cat, Brevity Blog, Raw Lit, Sky Island, and more. Visit tracieadamswrites.com and follow her on X @1funnyfarmAdams.

Mikki Aronoff

Return

He said he was coming back but that was in ‘63 and here I wait, sleepy feet up, stiff fingers splayed across an open book, words flickering and dimming along with the lamp, wondering whether he’ll return as the slick fish he was back then, slippery creature of babble and splash. He’ll plunge and paddle around a bit, then bid adieu to the sea and swan on up the Hudson. He’ll get his wiggle tangled in some net, then find himself smoked and laid atop a slab of cream cheese smeared on a fresh-baked bialy. I’ll duck into the deli, wolf that swimmer down, chase the taste of him with a celery tonic—a Sunday treat after brisk walking a half block, which is about all I can manage these days. I could fill half a page with the flash of our dalliance, hours not squandered in splendid shagging. Ah, now, maybe that’s my Frankie come back, twitching my ears, curling my gnarly toes toward the skies.

Mikki Aronoff writes tiny stories and advocates for animals. Her work has been long-listed for the Wigleaf Top 50 and nominated for Pushcart, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, Best American Short Stories, and Best Microfiction. Mikki has stories in Best Microfiction 2024 and in Best Small Fictions 2024 and upcoming in Best Microfiction 2025. She lives in New Mexico.

Cole Beauchamp

The truths our bodies know

Here I am, bare skin against cotton sheets, muscles unfurling, light spooling from the window.
  Here I am. But who am I? Panic rises. A clutching in my throat. I dart through half-memories. The doctor. The crash. But I'm clawing through webs. The more I try to land on an image, a thought, the more tangled I become, threads tightening on tender flesh.
  Here I am with the doctor and his oaty breath. He assesses my injuries – head, leg – and offers condolences on the loss of my husband. Husband, I say? He frowns, shows me a plastic model of a brain, pink as a peony, and recites words like temporal lobe, hippocampus, amygdala as if this will help. His Adam’s apple bobs up and down as he speaks. I feign concentration, squinting at the plastic model, like the wrinkly shell of a walnut, compact halves tucked inside. Be patient, follow the process, he says.
  Here I am with the police, one fat and doughy, one bright beaked, pecking at me: can’t you remember anything? Nothing? Who was driving, you or your husband? Were you fighting? The doctor mentions old fractures on my X-rays. There’s a quickening in my chest. In the corner of my eye, a shadow. The yawning emptiness of a black hole. I grip the rails of my hospital bed, stare outside and focus on the bell-shaped flowers of honeysuckle, the stickiness of nectar. The doctor drones on about retrieval, repair, recovery. I close my eyes on this gray room while police boots thump down the hallway.
  Here I am with the physio as she demos exercises with her squat body. Grip, step, walk. Do it like this. No, like this. My toes curl and refuse to flatten. I push away the smells of liniment, disinfectant, bandages and train my eyes on a painting on the far wall: night, a tree spindling upward in the moonlight. Upward. Here are the things my body knows. I adore berries, the sweet flesh of apples, pears, grapes. I hate green beans. Chicken feels wrong in my mouth. My body is transforming but not in the way they want. It is retreating, compacting.
  Here I am with the doctor. Be patient, follow the process, he says. Your memories will come. Your strength will return. But my body is feverish for change; patience has not served me. When a ruby-colored rash appears on my throat, the doctor takes a swab and cautions me about excess fruit consumption - glucose intolerance, metabolic syndrome, digestive complaints. But my body yearns for jasmine, the red mash of cherries on the picnic table, the glitter of water over stones in the stream.
  Here I am with the physio, a hard lump between my shoulder blades, a rasping in my throat. I say nothing. I don’t want their fingers probing. The physio barks, you’re not even trying! and grabs my shoulder. At her touch, images flash: my hands on the steering wheel as it rotates, rotates. The glint of my wedding ring in the streetlight. Blackness. The physio makes me sip water that catches at the back of my throat. I stare at the painting, the oak, a low branch, perfect for nesting.
  Here I am with the doctor. He’s saying don’t give up now, we can rebuild you. But is this the rebuilding I want? I trust what my body knows. The texture of thistle and the fluted edges of lichen. The humming in my wrists. The comfort of fruit despite tut-tutting staff.
  Here I am, dreaming, shrinking. My spine fusing. Again my hands on the steering wheel as it rotates, rotates. The glint of my wedding ring in the streetlight. But this time, in the corner of my eye, I see his face. Distorted. Mouth like a black hole. His grip on my shoulder as I keep rotating the wheel, keep pressing the accelerator, my best chance of escape.
  Here I am, awake, a hot furnace in my abdomen. My limbs thrash as my mouth transforms into a slender bill. Panic rises. A clutching. A feathered heaviness where my arms used to be. Three black toes facing forward, one backward. I stretch my ruby throat toward the moonlight spilling through the open window, the air a soft licking. My wings unfurl.
  Here I am, flying, a blur of motion. Hovering above the bed, I drop, then hover again. My muscles sing, strong and defiant. And then I am rising, rising, to meet the jeweled night.

Cole Beauchamp (she/her) is a queer writer based in London. Her stories have been in the Wigleaf Top 50, nominated for awards and shortlisted for the Bath, Bridport, Oxford and WestWord prizes for flash fiction. She's been widely published in lit mags including New Flash Fiction Review, Ghost Parachute, The Hooghly Review, Gooseberry Pie, and others. She lives with her girlfriend and has two children. You can find her on bluesky at @nomad-sw18.bsky.social

Kelli Short Borges

Russet and Ochre

We had a fight, he tells them. That much he remembers. After, he’d left the house and gone shopping for mulch. He couldn’t remember much else, couldn’t remember what the fight was about, but he remembers the mulch. After his purchase he left the garden center. He decided to pop in to the Blue Bottle Café for a coffee on his way home. He would need the caffeine, he told himself, there was a lot to do. When he opened the door to the cafe a bell announced his presence. He didn’t feel very present. In fact, he felt a bit-off kilter as he ordered his Americano, extra hot. He always ordered things extra hot, even on extra hot days like the day was shaping out to be, a day he would spend spreading mulch in the garden. Gardening was his “thing." It would be the soundtrack to his life if his life had a soundtrack. He was thinking about this as he sipped his Americano, feeling a bit strange. Thinking about this so-called gardening soundtrack. Thinking about the high-pitched whistle of blackbirds and the wind yawning through the Maples that umbrella-ed over his yard, their leaves just starting to turn russet and ochre. And it seemed that even the russet was part of the soundtrack, even the ochre. Colors weren’t sounds, he knew that, but nothing was logical, really, when you got down to it, especially on a morning when everything seemed a bit strange, a bit off-kilter. So, yes, russet and ochre had a tone, and if he was being honest, it was a tone you might hear at a funeral. No one could refute that, could they? The leaves would soon wither and curl in on themselves and fall from the tree and then they would finally decompose and that would be the end of the leaves. So, yes, the leaves, the colors, were part of this gardenly symphony, part of the soundtrack to life. The thud of a shovel would be the baritone, followed by a crunch as it sliced through the earth. And tears made a sound, didn’t they? The staccato of his falling tears would be the percussion, a sort of plink, plink as they landed on the shovel, as they dripped onto the mulch he used to fill the hole, as they fell onto the lilies he would plant. Tears are part of the symphony, a small but crucial part, is what he said, now, at the station. They showed that he cared. And he knew she loved lilies. She would have approved.

Kelli Short Borges writes from her home in Phoenix, Arizona, where her family has lived for six generations. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Peatsmoke, Fictive Dream, Flash Boulevard, Lost Balloon, Moon City Review, and elsewhere. Kelli’s work has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and the Pushcart Prize. Recently, her work was chosen the Best Microfiction 2024 and 2025 anthologies, and the Wigleaf Top 50 longlist. She is currently working on her first novel.

Laton Carter

Joyce Carol Oates Is Not Joyce Carol Oates, But She Is Joyce Carol Oates

The creek wasn’t wet until her hand was in it, and her hand wasn’t cold until the creek water made it that way. An encapsulated world lived inside a creek. Literally a world—even if “literally” was nonbinding, having been abused into oblivion—with protozoa and other cellular forms, and then there was the other world, the one that was far more thrilling to live in: the world of fiction.

Was fiction lying? Or was lying just a form of fiction? The two might be interchangeable wheels on one side of a go-cart. Lying carried a negative connotation, but when finessed with care, it was actually capable of revealing appreciable truth. Lying was truth if it was done right. Fiction was only fiction—made up stuff. Joyce wondered if she’d lied to her brain about the creek not being cold. It wasn’t nice to lie to a brain.

A thirst unexpectedly overtook her. Did thirst arise in the mouth or the brain? It probably didn’t matter—Joyce was thirsty. No one was looking, so she knelt down by the creek, lowered her head, ejected her tongue, and lapped the moving creek water much like she had seen her cat Lilith do from the broad leaves of the Frances Williams hosta after a night of heavy rain. Joyce was now Lilith, enjoying water with her face in a creek.

Water reflects the light that hits it, but when cold creek water moves as the water in Joyce’s creek did, reflection becomes disturbed. Joyce couldn’t see Joyce in the water as she was lapping it. She didn’t need to see herself, but she recognized that the idea of reflection was worth lingering on. It could be tossed into the usual lot of identity and metaphor, but Joyce was more patient than that. To Joyce, water was something that could be inscrutable at any moment. Inscrutable was important because it forced a person to always try to understand. The point of course was that some things can never finally be understood.

Cottage cheese isn’t aged. In the Odyssey, Polyphemus produces cheese by storing it in the stomachs of freshly deceased animals. How the ungainly cyclops was aware that the stomach lining of animals is pro-coagulant, and therefore a perfect Petry dish for milk to curdle, was a footnote Homer decided to leave out. Joyce put some in her mouth. Had she spent all her non-writing hours today by placing things in her mouth? First water and now cottage cheese. It was oral, that was for sure. Empirically, in the Tupperware in her palm, the pearled lump appeared simply as cheese. Semantically the lump was more allusive—a cottage where cheese was manufactured. She’d felt the cottage slide down her esophagus toward her stomach. She was carrying it inside her like a bird or a countryside.

Oh Joyce, said Joyce, and she realized in those two syllables that she rarely addressed herself by name. What Joyce was about to say to Joyce drifted away. This was a problem that attended being a person who was excellent at making things up. Your brain was always running, and sometimes you forgot what you were going to say. But the sooner a person forgave time for its ravages, the sooner they could get back to however much time they had left.

A hamster runs on a wheel and doesn’t get anywhere—this is only an assumption. Because there’s no forward motion doesn’t mean psychological headway is absent. Hamsters calm themselves without having to realize they should do it. Joyce was no hamster, but she’d borrowed some of their skill set. She breathed evenly. It was constructive to be walking up a hill. It meant she was a person traveling the periphery of the earth, her sneakers in direct contact with the fertile land. My name is Joyce and I live on Planet Earth. This is what Joyce said to the air hovering around her mouth. The air dislodged, making room for Joyce’s exhalation.

Laton Carter's fiction appears in The Boiler, Invisible City, Necessary Fiction, New Flash Fiction Review, and was recently selected for the Best Microfiction 2025 anthology.

Ya Lan Chang

It’s Been A While

You’ve agreed to meet him at the bar.
At dusk, lit by rust-orange streetlamps, the city is unfamiliar. You haven’t been out at this time, what-would-have-been-bedtime, in a while. In unaccustomed heels, you totter along and navigate with your phone. You’ve traded your M&S hoodie and joggers for a little black dress. It clings to your already-borne-children hips, its neckline hinting at a long-forgotten cleavage.
  The children are with your parents. They’re safe. You keep repeating this as you open the door to the bar. It’s buzzing with young people looking effortlessly cool in ripped jeans and oversized sweaters, laughing and drinking like you’d done in your previous life. You can’t remember the last time your Friday night didn’t involve dishes to wash up, dirty bath water splashing out of the tub, piled-up clothes to fold, put away.
  You spot him at the back, in the corner. You square your shoulders and try not to think about how ridiculous you look, a woman your age, dressed as if a decade younger, overdoing it with your too-short hemline. Try not to think about Jo and Rachel without Mummy to put on different voices for Mouse, Fox, Owl, Snake and Gruffalo. Try not to think about who you’re meeting, and why.
  He looks up, embraces you, kissing you once on the cheek. He smells like you remember: smoky, musky. His white shirt, crease-free, hugs his body, shows off his broad shoulders. They were the first thing you’d noticed about him, six years ago, even before his pale blue eyes, his imposing height, his Aussie accent. His solid body’s become looser, softer, around the waist. Is he thinking the same about the flesh around your hips?
  You sit opposite him. He’s already ordered something you like, a Merlot. He used to know you, after all.
  He talks about his long train journey into the city, the excuses he’d had to make to get here on time. His eyes dart back and forth between yours and his whiskey. He’s tapping his foot, shifting in his seat. A ring on his left hand glares at you. You stare, dead-eyed, wondering what he thinks of how you look. It’s been a while since he’s seen you like this. You can’t pinpoint exactly how long – most likely sometime before your firstborn tore apart the woman he used to know.
  And suddenly, he stops talking about the stuffy train, its patchy Wi-Fi. Suddenly, he’s fixing his eyes on you, and he’s saying you look amazing, even better than before, so hot in that dress. Don’t feel ridiculous, he counters, every woman here would kill to have that body after two children. He leans in and whispers he’d like to hike up your skirt and bend you over, tapping the hotel keycard on the table.
  You tremble under his gaze, close to tears. It’s been a while since you’ve heard these words. They’ve been scrambled and transmuted over the years into fighting ones about the bank account, the children, his working late, the bedroom on its last breath. You’ve missed those words. So much.
  The knot in your chest loosens. You look, really look, at him, and remember he’d worn a white shirt just like this one on the first date. How you’d both flirted: his touching you on the knee, your giggling at his jokes, the two of you conversing in mangled French and collapsing in laughter. And the sex that followed. And followed, and followed.
  You uncross your arms, place your elbows on the table, lean towards him. You tell him, I want you to go hard, really hard, like you used to.
  He smiles. So do you. He takes your hand, and you lace your fingers through his. Your matching wedding bands glinting.

Originally from Singapore, Ya Lan Chang (Yalan) lives in Cambridge, United Kingdom, with her husband and son. Her work has been published in Northern Gravy, Every Day Fiction, Litro Magazine, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. She works as a law lecturer and is a writer at heart.

Stephen Delaney

Breakup Stories

(dramatic scene)
It’s between the wall and the fridge: beady black eyes and gray snout. Tim’s tone final as John sips his gin, falls into those almond-shaped depths. White glints dulling, it creeps back in shadow; its whiskers, tips barely visible, faintly tremble.
  “Jesus,” Tim scowls, face huge. “You don’t even care.”

(story as game)
  We leave each other notes on scraps. Hearts, chicken drumsticks, dollar bills and praying hands. Cat with dish, Cat with mouse, Cat in shit. “Trouble” over “Nothing.” Signs for No Coffee, No Beer, No Cigs. “Gone Fishing.” JAUNT without ‘U.’ Loops like barbed wire. Like chains, like twisters. Smoke.

(dream narrative)
  I’m inside a grocery store eager to get home. The checker—my ex—opens a white box from my basket, pats the spider-shaped pastry inside. When I say “That’s not mine,” he points behind him: You Try It, You Buy It. I taste cream.

(unresolved ending)
  The thing’s behind the sink, behind the dryer—heard but never seen. In the wall are soft patters, at night dull scratches overhead.
  Now it’s close, John’s breathing so steady Tim can’t move. Now it’s here, Tim’s silence so weary John will rest.

Since receiving an MFA from Wichita State University, Stephen Delaney has taught English and writing and currently works as a freelance editor. His short stories and prose poems have been featured in, among other places, Lines + Stars, Euphony, Miracle Monocle, and Bending Genres, and his writing has been nominated for The Best Small Fictions.

Gary Fincke

In the Heart

After the pandemic began, Dale awakened screaming once or twice a week. He told his wife Cilla that his nightmares always included him or her or their daughter Kayla threatened by bombs, madmen, and falls from great heights. “There are more nights than you think there are when you scream,” Cilla said. “It’s worse when you don’t wake up. Your screams are more like whimpers. Like whatever was going on, you’d given up.” Dale frowned, but didn’t argue.

Months of the virus made them quieter. More careful. After the grocery delivered, Cilla sanitized their produce as if they were hospitalized. They were riding this out, she told him, as if they’d paid in advance for a season pass next year when everything would be normal.

“Japan is already reopening amusement parks,” Dale said. “The news showed a clip while you were in the shower.”

“They don’t have cases anymore?” Cilla was busy with her election stuff. When Dale had said it was summer, months yet, until voting, she’d reminded him it was never too soon to keep the town safe from fools.

“Fewer than last month. Enough for people to ride,” he said. “To prevent the spread of the virus, the government is telling all those riders, ‘Please, scream in your heart.’”

“Like that ice cream song,” Cilla said. “I scream, you scream, we all scream in our hearts.” She shoved the list of phone numbers and addresses to the side and stood. “And we do, don’t we? Even with the safety bars of distancing and isolation and masks.”

Since the last borough council meeting, Cilla seemed constantly angry. “You asked for this,” Dale reminded her. “You knocked on doors. Paid for signs.”

“There are people on the board who are afraid of thinking.” The argument had been about the cost of recycling, how the price of each pull and haul had been raised yet the majority resisted adding a small assessment on each property owner. “If people have to pay, more might actually do it,” Cilla said.

“You could quit.”

“Impossible. I think they’d vote for a landfill on that vacant lot near the grade school if I wasn’t there. It’s terrifying what some people are capable of.”

“Tell those people about the glacier that’s disappeared in Iceland. They held a funeral for it. Mourners gathered, and there were old photographs of it when it was enormous. You know, like people have at viewings.”

“That’s more like it,” Cilla said. “They were thinking local. That’s where terrifying lives. They were making sure they were remembering what indestructible had been said to look like. Winter is going extinct.”

Since it was Friday, they stayed up to make sure their daughter Kayla and her two girls were finished with dinner in Los Angeles before their weekly Face-Time. In January, as if she’d made a resolution she needed to keep, she’d kicked her husband out. Her daughters were ten and seven, young enough for Kayla to shoo them to the room they shared so she could have “private time” at the end of each call.

This time, Kayla barely waited for their door to close. “Teddy has started sending texts every night,” she said. “He drinks until he can type how much he wants to get back together. He wants to see the girls.”

“Don’t answer,” Cilla said.

“I tried that. Then he sends ugly texts, mean and full of name-calling.”

“Never respond,” Cilla said. “Some things are unacceptable.”

“I know what unacceptable is. There are dozens of words for it.” Kayla turned away from the camera and said, “I’ve got to go.”

Cilla closed the laptop and said, “The older one looked so sad.”

“She seemed fine.”

“If you’re not paying attention,” Cilla said. “Good thing you never had a classroom full of kids to tend to. Reading their expressions is part of teaching, and despair is all over her face. Even the way she sits. She looks like a girl whose father has forced her onto a Japanese coaster. She’s screaming in her heart.”

“Everybody is these days.”

“Listen to yourself.”

“There are worse ways to be unacceptable,” Dale said.

“Like hitting her? Like hitting the girls?”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, tell me. What could be worse?”

“The nights you hear me whimper,” Dale said. “When screaming isn’t enough,” and Cilla went so pale that he was terrified by her translation, as if it included a cowardice so thorough that she already blamed him for the future.

Gary Fincke's latest flash collection is The History of the Baker's Dozen (Pelekinesis 2024). He is co-editor of the annual anthology Best Microfiction.

Ryan Griffith

The End of Grammar

1

Before the invasion they planted their most beloved objects in their gardens. When the city was blasted, new roots fed on the past. The heartwood of trees was filled with pocket watches, dolls’ heads, love letters inked in cursive. Flowers bloomed with baby teeth.

5

Her voice like the jangle of a toy piano broken and eerie and beautiful. A scar like spilt wax down her shoulder and arm. A reporter asks what happened. If you want the truth, she says, ask the cemeteries.

7

Every bouquet she disarranges into wilder forms of color. Poppies mean eternal sleep. Gladiolus means you pierce my heart. Asphodel means my regrets follow you to the grave. Each flower a hammer to the nervous system of the world.

10

This stoneheavy town, the houses pocked by weather and war and time. Inside the coffin of her room, a shattered mirror, a butcher’s knife, a hat that says fuck off. A Christ on the wall with his lips stitched shut, all his cries lost inside him.

13

She remembers her lover, all the angles of desire as she circled him naked, his body an island of fire. He said it was her silence he liked. The nimbus of mystery, softening all her edges. No small talk, no empty maxims. Just quiet and the winged shadows of her eyes, a bird of prey at rest.

14

In the mirror she rubs astringent in the corners of her eyes, removes the purpleblack pigment with cotton balls. The cotton, her fingers are inked with it, her eyes suddenly sober with the world, the timidity of a creature stepping into firelight from the anonymous dark.

18

Chimneys antennaes mouldering stone. A spiral of hair. A lost bauble glitters in the light. All the blasted optics and phantoms and palaces and ruined books receding into earth. Unmasked her eyes seem ancient, stunned, black as oil.

20

The night train slows and chuffs and unfurls for boarding. All the metallic despair in motion, the pistons and rods and the greeneyed conductor with his hanging watch. So many acres of flesh pack the station, sorrowed and broken and gloomwounded.

23

Her hands are cold with morning and she warms them over stovetop burners, dreams melting blue from her head. Once she loved a man who wrote fiction. Fiction we don’t need here, she told him. Of fiction we have had enough.

25

Warm orange peels in the bed to scent it for sleep. Stockings warmed by the fire which her mother pulls over her feet, the frozen air and the dead with their hair still combed, toenails growing underground.

29

It was the end of grammar. Only animal sounds bandaged in vowels. The wind grieved through courtyards and corridors and codes. The reporter asked a final question but only her hands were speaking now, moving deranged in shapes beyond language.

Ryan Griffith's work has appeared in Best Microfiction and The Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions.

Jad Josey

The Sea Will Swallow Your Wreckage

The sea took her away that morning. The sky a level gray, untouched by blue. She was touched by blue, scooping sand dollars while tears dropped from her freckled cheeks into the coarse sand. Water roped round her ankles, then her knees. Her feet sank deeper, the sand dollars disappearing, reappearing, unbroken, unpecked. The pockets of her dress grew heavy with skeletons, darkened with wet. If there were other people on the beach, she did not see them. There were other people on the beach. A small boy raised a sticky finger and pointed. His mother pushed his arm down gently, shushed softly. A three-legged terrier waded into the ocean nearby, black eyes searching, nose quivering, then turned away and did not look back. When the rain started to fall, she was already soaked to her waist, dress coiling around her like tentacles. There may have been lightning, but she did not hear thunder. Her nails were all broken. The sea swept away everything she bled. Behind that gray sky, the sun worked harder than ever. If she tucked light into her pockets, no one saw it. In her ears there was singing. In her throat, on her tongue. She could have reached up and torn down the clouds, but she kept the song in her mouth. The sea lifted her necklace, a rope of black pearls. They clattered against her teeth. Raindrops tapped the top of her head, then drummed the darkness as the ocean folded around her. Sweet distance, there was no bottom. Her song became the sea, her tears became the ocean, the sky no longer belonged to her. Sweet distance, there was hardly anywhere left to go. She emptied her pockets, creature bones compassing her feet, white medallions wheeling down. The song swirled to the surface, collected by pelicans turning quietly across the water. They carried it back into the sky as the sun broke through, wings cloaked against the gleaming, hollow bones strong enough to bear the burden.

Jad Josey’s work has appeared in CutBank, Glimmer Train, Ninth Letter, Passages North, and elsewhere. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions, and his story, “It Finally Happened,” was selected for inclusion in the Best Microfiction 2021 anthology. Jad is currently working on a novella, myriad poems, and a collection of short stories. Read more at www.jadjosey.com or reach out on Twitter @jadjosey.

Davida Kilgore

Maybe It Comes Like This

The AC doesn’t work. It’s 95 degrees in the city, feels like 100 degrees down in the
bowels of the subway. Manhattan stinks.
            Long passages of time. Too long, too many. It wasn’t my intention, but I managed to dodge pieces of the impatient sky. I caught a shard, it left a deep gash in my right hand. The one I write with. And damn, my Medicare Part B won’t be activated until July 1st. I have no health insurance. I’m bleeding. I can’t afford stitches. So, I’ll go to the ER and plead poverty.
            There’s a designer bottle in my bathroom medicine cabinet, next to the witch hazel. There’s a note inside. I corked the bottle years ago to protect my desires. A genie sleeps near the bottom of the bottle. I’ll release him a thousand years from now.
            And so, the night arrives wearing its finest silk. The silk swishes, shimmy shimmy coco-pop all over my skin. Shimmy, shimmy pop! Shimmy, shimmy coco-pop, shimmy, shimmy pop!
            And so, the day arrives like an arthritic couple. Us. Maybe we, you and I, are young. Maybe we, you and I, are old. We’ve been both. And neither. The sheet on your side of the bed isn’t rumpled, you say you can’t sleep next to my snores. You say this as you stride into the bathroom to brush your teeth then smear that green mash on your face. You’ll sleep in it. I don’t want you anymore!
            And so, the world arrives on broken promises while over in the darkened corner a turntable spits out gospel, hip-hop, and rhythm-and-blues. Singing. I once was lost, but now I’m found, Was blind, but now I see … How easy it would be to belt out a chorus of ‘cuz, if I don’t praise Him the rock’s gonna cry out glory and honor, glory and honor, ain’t got no time to die.
            I am a tambourine, erasable bond stretches over my belly. The gargantuan sistah in the third pew holds me in her left hand, beats a mean rhythm with her right. My jingles, jangle. I convince myself that I’m ready. (yes, I’m ready). I’m ready ( yes, I’m ready). To fall in love, to fall in love. With you. I never imagined such could be true.
            Skin always looks for patterns. And yet, I observe my life from afar instead of living in the day. Evenings I write 6,000-word essays with a dripping quill. I can’t afford the Etoile de Mont Blanc Etoile Précieuse Fountain Pen with the diamond. As I write, the words commit treason. That’s not what I meant to say. Not at all! But still the world continues to rotate. As it moves, I stumble and sometimes fall off. It’s not far down. And at the end there’s you, your arms outstretched to catch me.
            And in the end, maybe it comes like this: we are humbled by too many drive-bys, too many stick ‘em ups, too many rapes, too many people overdosing, too many babies left in garbage cans.
            And in the end, maybe it comes like this: too many identifications of bodies, too many valiums afterward, too many obituaries, too many wakes, too many stretch limos, too many cars that didn’t make the cut on Pimp My Ride but should have, following the limos, too many drawn out funeral services, too many words spit out by the Right Reverend Dr. who really had nothing to say, too many eulogies, too many tears, too many runny noses, too many watering eyes, too many gravesites, too many congregants shouting take me Lord, takeme, takeme, take … me! They don’t really mean it; they’re kicking and screaming and scratching each other’s eyes out to remain among the living.
            Maybe it comes like this: too many my condolences accompanied by too many hams, too many fried chickens, too many collard and turnip greens mixed with onions vinegar on the side, too many trays of macaroni and cheese, too many bowls of potato salad, too many rum cakes, too many pound cakes, too many pies, too many bottles of Alize, E & J, Grey Goose, Makers’ Mark, Heinekens, liquid corn, Tanqueray, and Tom Collins bottles of mixers.
  Too many mourners playing whist: rise ‘n fly, seven-and-out, and four to open on the card table in the corner of the living room. We find this amazing, Grace.
  Your name is Grace. Mine’s Theo.

Davida's work has been performed on Broadway through Selected Shorts at Symphony Space and published nationally and internationally. Her debut poetry chapbook, A Litany of SHE Poems was published by Finishing Line Press, August 2024, and her art and poetry book titled TIME was published by Dog Eye Press, October 2024. Davida’s fiction and poetry has appeared in midnight & indigo, Water~Stone Review, Blue Collar Review, and I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like: The Voice and Vision of Black Women Writers.

Louella Lester

The Nice One

I’m that person who everyone in the office loves. The one who remembers birthdays. Remembers favourite restaurants and orders food in. Buys the cakes. The gifts. Sneaks about the building to get the cards signed, even by those who didn’t contribute any money. I’ll keep on doing that until this spring, when I retire. They won’t know that they’ve had my birthdate wrong all along. That I hate the bunch of lilacs a colleague brings in from her garden every year and plunks on my desk as my special birthday gift for spring, when sunflowers would be more fitting for my actual fall birthday. I’ll just keep smiling and eat the sushi, when I long for a curry. I’ll tear up as I read the card signed only once: Love, from us all. They won’t know that I use petty cash to buy their gifts, the cards, the food, even though I keep collecting from them as usual. That I spit into the food delivery containers. That I’m much better at working the office’s computer system than I pretend, so it’s not just the day of my birth that’s wrong, but also the year, and I’m much too young to be retiring this spring with a full pension that I’ll take in a lump sum. And even if someone eventually figures it out, when they notice the other money that’s missing, it won’t matter because I’ll be long gone and they don’t know my real name.

Louella Lester is a writer/photographer in Winnipeg, Canada, author of Glass Bricks (At Bay Press 2021), contributing editor at New Flash Fiction Review, and is included in Best Microfiction 2024. Her writing/photos appear in variety of journals/anthologies.
http://louellalesterblog.wordpress.com

Glenn Orgias

2 Samuel 18

Ben called our dad Gene Donor. I was three when Gene Donor went to “live in jail.” We lived with our foster parents, but Ben was my family. He was six, so he said he was in charge. I didn’t know until later that he wasn’t.

  When I was five, Gene Donor got out of jail. He stayed at our foster parent’s home for several nights. He’d been born again in prison, and was now a Christian man, and he was going to take me and Ben to Hawaii.

  I didn’t want to go, but the idea made Ben happy.

  Ben and I slept in the same room, and we woke the night Gene Donor was sneaking off without us. He put a finger to his lips. He took one-hundred-and-six-dollars from Ben’s piggy bank. A change of plan, he told Ben, no more Hawaii. Gene Donor had a big smile, his face was as big as the moon and his teeth capped with metal. Who loves you? he said.

  I don’t know, said Ben.

  Who loves you, boy? said Gene Donor.

  You? said Ben.

  Jesus, he said, Jesus loves you.

  Later that day, Ben and me sat outside until our foster parents left us alone, and he cried. I sat with him, not crying.

  It’s okay, I said.

  Sorry Mini, he said.

  Why? I said, why Ben?

  He didn’t say, but maybe in that moment he didn’t feel he was the brother I needed.

  Gene Donor left us a copy of the bible, signed “from Dad.” He probably stole it from a motel room. Ben liked to read it. He was smart, and in things like that he could go deep.

  By the time Ben was eighteen he was a heroin addict. After serving six months in Juvenile detention, my foster parents let him come home as long as he entered a methadone program.

  Methadone, Ben informed me, was invented by Nazis. It was designed to give soldiers a boost during combat; however, soldiers on methadone were dispirited and no more trouble than sandbags when it came to bayoneting them. Methadone didn’t help Ben either. It left him bored and joyless.

  Not long after this, I found Ben lying on the road. He’d been smoking cigarettes with two angels with thick, muscular wings and shiny white feathers. He’d asked them for a dollar. They flew at me, he said. And tried to peck out my guts, he said, lifting up his shirt to show me his entrails. I slipped a hand behind his head, told him it was okay. I helped him get back to his bedroom. The angels had tried to devour him, like eagles on a fish; that was his version, that’d he’d been prey.

  Two days before his birthday, Ben killed himself in his room. I wasn’t allowed to see his body, but I got to keep his copy of the bible and a black t-shirt with a grey rainbow on it.

  I read Ben’s bible on the bus to school. Studied his illustrations in the margins: infinity symbols, Optimus Prime, marijuana leaves, haloes. At 2 Samuel 18, where heartless King David waits for news of the son he’s sent out forces against, Ben had obliterated the page with cross-hatching, leaving just two lines of David’s anguish: O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee.

  Ben, probably he wanted Gene Donor to know the same kind of pain as that and to blame himself for his son’s death. But I don’t know that Gene Donor ever even found out about Ben. The shame of it was that the pain that Ben wanted Gene Donor to feel was felt, but just not by Gene Donor, but by me instead.

  I’m old enough now that my children are older than Ben was when he died. I can look back on Ben as if he were my son. I think I’ve become the guy we both needed back then. And I could’ve saved him, I know how it could have been done. But it’s so stupid, that daydream, because there was only the time that there was, there was only the time we had. But only if I could’ve saved him, then Oh, my God.

  When I was a very young Ben would hold my hand at road crossings. I remember him as the guy who would ollie over me on his bike when I laid down on the road for him.

  That is enough.

Glenn Orgias is an Australian writer. His memoir, Man In A Grey Suit, was published by Viking in 2012. He's been nominated for Best Small Fictions and the Pushcart Prize in 2024, his writing can be found at X-R-A-Y, SmokeLong, Wigleaf, Pithead Chapel, and other places.

Annabelle Taghinia

Hill of Purple Flowers

A hill. A breeze ruffled the grass. A woman crested the ridge. She was holding a large wicker basket and singing softly. Her dress was brown and patched at the waist and underarm. Her red hair was wild and thin, wind-whipped. Behind her, three children followed in a line, laughing and talking. They were young. Behind them, in the valley where the hills met, was a small house and a large pasture overtaken by weeds. They reached the top of the hill, where clusters of small purple flowers grew in the shade of a large tree. They sat in the shade. The eldest child hesitated, picking around the flowers until a spot of bare grass was uncovered. They sat there, stiff, knees pulled up to their chest. The mother uncovered the basket, and the children looked at her, astonished. The eldest said, “Mother, is this all of our food?”
“Shh,” the mother said. Her expression was tender and sad. “Eat.”
The children ate. The mother did too. Potatoes. One bruised apple the mother split into four chunks. A small, charred loaf of bread. They bit into it, passed it around. Hand to hand. The inside of the bread was dense. The youngest struggled to break the crust. The mother took it from the pink, searching mouth, ripped softness out of the middle of the loaf and fed her child. The middle child dropped a chunk of potato on the ground. It rolled across a bed of the purple flowers. The eldest kicked it away.
Their small bodies were hunched and thin. Ribs and spines rippled under coarse skin. Bellies swollen. Mouths open. Rotting teeth. Clean, sunburnt skin. Small, calloused hands. The carved, grim face of a mother.
“Go play,” she said.
The children played.
Gap-toothed smiles. Wind in their thin hair. Grass-stained soles of bare feet. They climbed the tree and ran around the grass. They went to the side of the hill where the white flowers grew and made a crown for their mother. They batted the youngest’s hands away from the purple flowers. They chased each other up and down the hill. They marveled at how strong they felt. They ran to their mother and collapsed on her skirts, poked bony fingers into the flower crown in her hair and closed their eyes as she brought them close. My darlings, she mouthed. My lambs.
The sun dipped closer to the horizon and the children sighed. They could stay there forever, they told her. She said, “Never say a thing like that.”
The youngest grew drowsy. The eldest said, “We had better be leaving.”
The mother stood up. “Yes, we had better, hadn’t we?”
The children nodded.
She said, “Before we leave, I would like some flowers. The purple ones.”
The children frowned. They picked flowers.
She said, “Share them.”
The children shared them. They gave a small bunch to their mother.
The mother said, “Eat some.”
The mother said, “I’m sorry. I lied.”
The mother said, “The flowers are sweet. Eat some.”
The children ate. The children chewed. The children swallowed. And as the children fell, the mother raised the flowers to her mouth. A hill of purple flowers.

Annabelle Taghinia is an Iranian-American writer from New England. She is a junior in high school and spends her free time writing fiction and poetry. Her work has been recognized by Scholastic Art and Writing, and has appeared or is forthcoming in BULL, Yellow Arrow Journal, and Levitate.

Kirby Michael Wright

BARK

Big rooms make me feel empty. Small rooms turn me into a cat stuffed in a cage. There’s no comfort big or small. ER wheels me into a holding tank chaired with no-maskers—this sick brigade makes the room shrink. A dark man swinging a gold cross prays in Spanish over his mother.

I am a boomer sans mate. When the walls close in everything inside turns tiny except for my heart. It grows, beating out barks that vibrate my throat. My barks are fueled by sorrow. They remind me of a coyote calling for mates in the dark.

Kirby Michael Wright lives beside the track in San Diego with his wife Darcy and a cat named Gatsby.