Chelsea prose poetry

Maurice, Come Back, I’m Waiting Tonight at the Boathouse by Gordon Taylor

Here is a memory. Our feet had the floor in a bar lavatory. Sean and me in the locked stall. My bare calves hugged the toilet base as I sat. He stood before me. His white, untied sneakers faced my scuffed brown cowboy boots inside a bunched blue jean. Our moans stifled.

Here is early Sunday afternoon in the park. The grass is trammeled. An elderly couple practices salsa steps near an encampment of tents, and small purple balloon flowers grow at the base of an inoculated Ash, trunk bearing an orange spray painted number.

I notice felled timber from last week’s storm, when the internet dimmed, and the subway filled with river. We’re hitched to the shiny, flat world of our phones, sitting cross legged on navy blue terry towels. Our lunch is greasy sweet potato fries. I have a fear of blindness.

What is the difference between hope and denial? After marriage equality, after so many doomed queer heroes, after hiding in stories of clandestine spies, how dare we consider divorce? I guess that is the yang of freedom.

I’m angry when lovers part before the credits roll. Sean says I’m addicted to the light of others, but describes a true optimist as someone who accepts shade. My napkin blows away. Don’t worry, Sean says, I have another.

Do we love the way Maurice loved Alec, the gamekeeper in the movie of the Forster novel? Lust like a life was at stake. I first saw Maurice when AIDS was killing us, when sex was an epic. Sean says the film is privilege porn, a British aristocrat scratching his nails across a taut workingman’s back.

Here, we’re swarmed by wasps. Their faces are my mother freaking in a stiff Elizabethan collar when Sean and me waltzed at my cousin’s wedding. Later in bed at the hotel, he whispered into my neck that I was his.

Next to the park is a string of cars. I notice two birds on the street, one with beak nestled into the wing of the other. Our dog James, the coroner, assembles the puzzle of a battered body, running away and returning with mysteries hanging from his drooling mouth, gifts dropped at my side.

He can smell sadness, the way elephants smell rain from miles away. First, he brings me a severed wing, jagged line of blood at the bite mark, matted feathers, a hooked beak, then a sharp pink foot.

I change into the corpse, leathered skin receding to bone.

There are no eyes.

 

Gordon Taylor is a queer emerging poet who walks an ever-swaying braided wire of technology and poetry. A 2022 Pushcart Prize nominee, his poems have appeared in Narrative, Malahat Review, Poet Lore, Arc, and more. He writes to invite people into a world they may not have seen.

Chelsea prose poetry

The Service Dog is Really Uninterested in the Figure-Writing Session by Laurin Becker Macios

Two models sit uncomfortably on a table draped in a sheet to look like a bed, wishing they’d struck easier positions. Her: one knee bent to touch her chest, her spine spun into an S, but at least her chin rests on her fist, at least her maple-hued hair is held tight in a high bun away from her face. Him: halfway through movement, leaving the bed, maybe leaving her—actually, she has turned him away, spurned a shy advance just as shyly, or cut the tie of a years-long relationship by saying, “I just don’t love you anymore.” And his eyes are downcast, sad really, one hand with a light grip on his own skin (I am really here, this is not a dream) and about to say to a spot on the wall, “It’s not a light switch, that’s not how love works,” to which she won’t respond, will just look at the opposite wall until the silence over-churns and she gives finally to the butter of it and says, “It’s been happening for some time now,” and they both just stay there, like the glue of the moment is dry and neither can peel from the bed full of memories, like the day they bought it, their first joint-purchase, and she was wearing in fact these same pleated jean shorts because they are not a fad for her, she got them from her mother, one of the only things she had to leave her along with some trinkets and costume jewelry, and as he remembers them slipping down to her ankles someone calls, “One more minute,” and the dog lifts his head just slightly off the dusty floor to sigh, stretches a paw, scratches a claw against the wood, and suddenly the girl smiles, turns to the guy, but he stands up and, not looking back, walks out of the room.

 

 

Laurin Becker Macios is the author of Calling Me Home, a Young Adult verse novel forthcoming from Holiday House in 2026; Somewhere to Go, winner of the 19th annual poetry award from Elixir Press; and I Almost Was Animal, winner of the 2018 Writer’s Relief WaterSedge Poetry Chapbook Contest. Her work has appeared in Gulf Stream Magazine, [PANK], and elsewhere, and is currently nominated for Best of the Net 2026. The former Executive Director of Mass Poetry and former Program Director of the Poetry Society of America, she earned her MFA in Creative Writing Poetry from the University of New Hampshire, where she taught on fellowship. She lives in Connecticut.

Chelsea flash fiction

The Solitude of the Conquered by Thomas Mixon

Howie didn’t like his eyedrops, though it prevented ulcers, which prevented further vision loss. I could have been gentler. I was holding his head with one hand, trying to get the cap unstuck with the other, when I no longer heard his nails scraping the floor.

We were off the floor. We were floating, a few feet above the linoleum. And then, after we were funneled outside, the Earth. It was painless. I felt fine. I didn’t need to pee or eat. I was scared, but I suppose they couldn’t do anything about that.

They definitely didn’t say “conquered.” They definitely didn’t say anything. You could see their lights, moving in a smooth pattern, somewhere between clouds and space. But they were completely silent.

Howie got used to the levitation before I did. He curled up, midair, and took a nap. I tried to “swim” toward him, like I’d seen astronauts do, but the physics weren’t right. We were separate. We were moving. Slowly, like them, above us. We were in the same rotation for the first day, but at some point he drifted. It didn’t feel accidental, and he was sleeping, so I didn’t call his name.

They made sure we didn’t get too hot or cold. A couple months had passed. It still didn’t feel natural, but I’d never been to Spain, which was nice. There was a lot of ocean, for a while, then land. I saw a sign that said “Bar Ciaboga.” It was a tourist area, but there were no tourists, apart from the thirty or so other folks I could see hovering above the street.

Some of them I knew a little. They mostly slept, occasionally cried. I traveled with the same neighbors for about a week before the rotation would shift. It was subtle. If there were rules, apart from being just out of arms reach, they weren’t explained.

The wind that pushed us along reminded me of Howie’s breath. It smelled like Doritos. It wasn’t wind, but what else could I call it? “Force” felt a little mean, though of course we were being moved against our will. Kept away from each other, street signs, anything we could easily grab.

One man, I’d like to believe as an act of resistance, masturbated continually. We could still grab ourselves. When he ejaculated, the substance lingered by his side a few minutes before evaporating. I knew he’d be gone within a day or so, but still. I was formulating the perfect phrase, to get him to stop, when I fell to the ground.

Which isn’t fair to say, because they made sure I landed softly on my ass. Something invisible held me to the sidewalk. They had commandeered an electronic billboard. I knew this because the screen read, “We have commandeered this electronic billboard.” Ivy obscured the edges. The graphics were not too good, but despite the poor quality, I could tell it was me, footage of me.

All my moments of grace, and mistakes. The big ones of course I remembered. But the majority, I didn’t. The everyday kindnesses and incivility. It lasted about two hours. I’m not sure how they compressed it. The scenes were fast. I should have expected that. They were, are, nothing if not efficient.

I was never good at math. This they did not seem to know, or care about. At the end, a big equation was displayed. Then I was, unceremoniously, back in the air.

The numbers were lopsided. They had made a calculation, but it felt too impersonal to be a judgement. Plus, there had been nothing about Howie, who I knew I could have been gentler with. Did they not consider dogs? If not, how intelligent could they be?

By the time I reached the end of the city, there was an amusement park. The attractions were still. There was a statue at the entrance of the rollercoaster. Of an alien, our idea of aliens, from before, holding its palm upward. You had to be that tall to ride the ride.

They didn’t say “conquered.” And they didn’t say anything, when I gripped the little green plastic hand.

It took a while to pull myself down, but whatever had formerly held me, gradually gave way. Someone nearby shouted. It was the masturbating man. He had already passed the roller coaster, but began kicking backward, in my direction. He stretched toward the ticket office, though it was clear the rotation was shifting again.

He screamed, “How?” I had no idea. It shouldn’t have been possible. Just like it couldn’t have been Howie, hovering over the concession stand, pointing his snout toward the tent.

It was him, though. I whistled. I kept saying his name. He cocked his head each time, but went back to sniffing eventually. Maybe he didn’t remember me, or just couldn’t see anymore.

It took a while before I could walk. I only made it to the concession stand before collapsing under this tent. There’s cotton candy here, prepackaged. I hadn’t realized I was hungry. After sunset, I feel mosquitoes, for the first time since we were conquered. They eat me, while I eat the sugar. Lots of things buzz in the dark. Has it always been so loud at night?

There are small campfires across the bay. Other escapees, but I hope not my dog. I hope he stays forever buoyant. Maybe all the dogs will. I’m already forgetting how I held his head. I do it to myself, seizing my own scruff. I fake howl into the void.

Someone howls back. It’s the masturbating man. He scurries under the tent. He asks for the cotton candy. While he tells me how he freed himself, I keep my nails dug into the back of my neck. And overhead, they don’t say a goddamn thing.

 

Thomas Mixon is a fiction reader for Short Story, Long. He has poems and prose in Pithead Chapel, Rattle, Eye to the Telescope, and elsewhere. He sometimes writes at https://inanorchardsoftwithrot.substack.com.

Chelsea flash fiction

Home Economics by Soramimi Hanarejima

After your mother sells the house, you return home one final time to help her pack up things for the movers. A couple days into boxing all the paraphernalia of decades spent living here, you’re emptying out the drawers of your mother’s desk and come upon a worn ledger. Curious how she managed the finances, you open this old notebook—and quickly find that it kept track of not money but time, with numbers that neatly slot hours and minutes into blue-lined columns. Beside them are descriptions that together read like a concise chronicle of shared moments—dinosaur exhibit, play rehearsal, dental cleaning, oboe lesson, slumber party prep—a long-running list that takes you back to that afternoon you found an old-fashioned stopwatch sitting atop this very desk, its inert hands reading 1 hour and 17 minutes.

“What lasted that long?” you asked.

Standing beside her by the kitchen sink, you held the stopwatch up to your mother, its white dial with bold numerals filling your palm like a little handful of time.

She wiped her wet hands on her apron, then answered, “That was our visit to the park yesterday.”

“It was over an hour?”

“It was! Remember all the things you did? Putting on your jacket and shoes, walking down the street, petting the neighbor’s old pug, playing on the swings and jungle gym and slide, having cheese and crackers at the picnic table. When you add up everything, even a simple visit to the park can take a while.”

“Why do you need know how long all that took?”

“Because it’s important to know how we use our time.”

Now, looking at the calculations in the ledger, you realize this is how she knew how to use her time. It’s why she was up late that night after taking you to the park—the light from her study surprising you when you got up to use the bathroom—and why she accepted all those playdate invitations from Elana’s mom on your behalf and why you went to art camp that summer before the wildlife cruise. In these pages, time spent with you was always paired with a measure of time set aside for her work.

Because “Discoveries take time,” your mother always said. And she was able to make some really good ones, thanks to this ledger.

In your hands now, it seems to have been waiting for you all these years, for you to add to its pages the gains and losses you’ve accrued as a result of the way she handled time. Several spring to mind: a childhood crush on the tween babysitter; a love-hate relationship with art; an adherence to doing chores regularly and thoroughly; a predilection for vapid video games with cartoony graphics. But an accurate accounting would involve delving into more than you could ever know about yourself and your past. And a distaste for inaccuracy is a quality you’ve long shared with your mother.

So you close the ledger and place it in the box next to you, the interior already half full with old letters, passports, journals and crayon drawings on newsprint.

 

Soramimi Hanarejima is the author of the neuropunk story collection Literary Devices For Coping. Soramimi’s recent work appears in Pulp Literature, The Offing, Black Warrior Review, and The Cincinnati Review.

Chelsea flash nonfiction

Slam by Sam Moe

When I return from a thirty-hour travel day my back feels feverish. I cannot figure out what is wrong with me. Why is my skin like needles? I ask my partner. I always ask questions that remind people I’m unlovable. Such as, why are we friends and why do you love me and will I die and can you tell me if my toe looks wrong. France was too green. I couldn’t focus on the lake beyond. Spent days wondering if the light reflection was tinfoil or skirt hems or coins. My stomach dissolved. People slammed kitchen doors. Basement doors. Arms on tables. Hands into hands. I grew up in an angry home. I sat after the slamming of the faux-gold front door set my heart in the path of a red drill and thought about dying. Every day everyone asked if I was okay. Twenty-four hours after returning home I packed my bags for Virginia. I was sobbing again because things kept falling to shit and a man was brutal and he wasn’t sorry. Not really. Suddenly I remembered. While we were watching television my partner slammed the length of his arm against my back. As a joke. He often play-punches me. Hard. My brain ate the memory for sixteen hours. Upon arriving in Virginia I seek out a bruise but find none. I call my partner and accidentally interrupted him so he ends the call. I call back to ask what his problem is and he hangs up again. This happens six times. There is another man who joked about saving me. I can’t elaborate right now. What else does this body remember when pain blooms beneath my skin? One day at residency I couldn’t eat and someone brought me a single slice of turkey. He asked, “Can you eat this?” I should have taken a picture as proof. I seek out evidence like a blood hound. This really happened to me. You must believe me because I’m covered in blood. Then I remember when my mother first grabbed my red arm and screamed until my skull changed shape. I would make the worst detective. I imagine inviting entire truckloads of evidence into a case. I go up against men who don’t believe my evidence and I spend the rest of my life trying to convince them. This doesn’t matter. It hurt. It was real. I’ve spent the summer disappearing into my skeleton but you have not yet seen my bones so you don’t believe I have a second situation. One day I might be wire. That’s not what I want to tell you. Once, I thought you were my home. Something, something, I’ll make my own damn home. Something, something, tire fire. Rage-red May. Death-try in June. I hate you in July. You reveal yourself in August but I’m already a dead egg. Nothing could have been done.

 

Sam Moe is the author of eight books. Her most recent poetry collection, RED HALCYON, is forthcoming from Querencia Press in 2026. Her debut short story collection, I MIGHT TRUST YOU, is out from Experiments in Fiction (2025). She has attended the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and received fellowships from the Longleaf Writer’s conference and the Key West Literary Seminar. Sam has also attended residencies at The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, VCCA, and Château d’Orquevau.

Chelsea prose poetry

Opening a Door by Tessa McHattie

I longed for memories and I have begun to receive them. Like exotic birds flying through nondescript Toronto skies. Grade six and going to sleep away camp, breaking up with my boyfriend at the beginning of the trip and finding a new one by the end, enthralled by the drama of it all. The boy I broke up with is still cute, I don’t know what happened to the second.

I remember being four years old and enraptured with my babysitter, Sylvia. She was sixteen, approximately the age that I imagined all my dolls to be. She was the only teenager I knew and just knowing her was like being in on a secret. We watched girlie movies together, the kind my brother would protest to, but with Sylvia on my side, we would watch them anyway. She’s living in New York, I think. I wonder if it would be strange for me to contact her. I wonder if I’m ready to take the beat of seeing her almost 40. I guess if I waited, she would only be older. The beat comes whether you like it or not. Swing sets make me nauseous now. I buried my dog and I wish I didn’t have to, but the fact is, I did.

 

Tessa McHattie is a Canadian writer living in Brooklyn, New York.  Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Shoegaze Lit, Eunoia Review, and Star*Line, among others.

Chelsea flash fiction

Felix on the Ceiling by Chris Scott

When I shuffle into his bedroom, Felix is sitting cross-legged on the ceiling, upside down, already in his PJ’s, his shaggy blonde hair dangling from his head. I stop in my tracks, lean against the doorframe. I thought we’d have more time.

“Oh buddy…” is all I can muster at first, my stomach sinking. I try again, not wanting to seem panicked or scared, not wanting to make my fear his fear. “How’s the view from up there?”

Felix doesn’t miss a beat. “Weird.”

“So much for cleaning your room before bed, I guess.”

Felix smiles at this, all teeth, and my chest warms. “Well technically it’s super clean up here!” he says, spreading his arms out. I laugh, seeing what he means. The floor is littered with all the usual controlled chaos of toys, books, art supplies. But the ceiling — his floor now — is almost totally bare, save for the bed I’d mounted up there just last week, anticipating this very thing. There’d been the signs. The growing moonbounce of his walk, his arms slightly levitating off the dinner table when we ate together. But I was hoping for a longer in-between stage before he inverted completely. I think of the videos Mark and Peggy sent of their twin girls giggling, floating around their living room, bouncing against one another like balloons.

“I can mount more stuff up there for you next weekend,” I tell Felix, my neck craned, trying to seem like it’s the most normal thing in the world talking to him like this. “Glad we got your bed done though. Oh wait! I have special sheets. And a pillow.”

“It’s okay, Dad,” Felix says, already groggily yawning. They say the first few days of the switch wear them out like nothing else.

“No, no, they have velcro so they stick to the bed. I’ll go get them.”

I watch Felix crawl across the ceiling, over the metal brackets keeping his bed suspended and secure, and onto the mattress. It’s heavily reinforced, but I still worry I didn’t do it right. I worry about everything.

Before I leave to get the sheets, I turn back to Felix, sprawled out on his bed and quickly drifting, eyelids heavy. “They’re going to figure this out, bud. They’re close. I was reading an article today,” I’m rambling.

“I know, Dad,” he says, his voice thick and drowsy.

Downstairs I sort through the stack of boxes, all the supplies they have for this now. An assortment of braces, tethers, harnesses. I ordered a little of everything, not really knowing what I was doing. Ashamed to be this clueless.

Felix is eight years old, and I have no idea how to keep him safe in this world. When a child’s gravity inverts the family has two choices, basically: Try to fight it and keep them earthbound with straps and leashes and even sometimes, like the McKinleys did with their twins, cartoonishly large suction cups. Option two is to try to make the house more accommodating for them. My coworker Rosa actually bought identicals of every piece of furniture in her house and had them mounted onto the ceiling, mirror-like, so her daughter would have the exact same experience after she flipped. I guess this is the route I’m taking, too, gradually. But it’s hard not to second-guess myself. I cock my head, trying to see everything from Felix’s new perspective.

I finally find the boxes with the sheets and pillow in them. Through the kitchen window, across the alley, I notice another house has put poles and netting up, enclosing their backyard. Lucky. I’m still on the waiting list for netting while they prioritize schools, daycare centers, playgrounds. At some point, if this goes on long enough, they’ll just cover the whole city with nets, or a giant cage, or something. I wish I could find more comfort in that, more hope. We’ve all seen the photos, the videos. We all know somebody or know somebody who knows somebody. There will always be a kid who slips away. There will always be a chance that kid will get scared, grab hold of another kid, take them into the sky with them, beyond the clouds.

I trudge back upstairs and find Felix already sound asleep and snoring gently in his ceiling bed, the northern lights projector I got him for his birthday spinning an array of violets, oranges, greens, pinks, and blues across his fragile body, his perfect face. I stand underneath him, reach up on my tiptoes and graze the tips of his golden locks with my fingers.

“You’ll be okay,” I whisper. “First they need to figure out why it’s happening to just kids, and then they can…” I trail off. I have no idea what I’m talking about, not really.

I suddenly remember I loaned our step ladder to Rosa. I have no way to get up to Felix and tuck him in. I scan his dark room, looking for a solution. Then I realize the solution is everywhere. Quietly I begin making a pile of Felix’s stuff. Ottoman, chair, boxes, cushions, up and up. Not totally secure, not perfectly stable, but good enough. I scale it slowly, sheets and pillow folded under my arm, until I’m up at his bed, right next to him. My son. I unfold the sheets and cover his body, velcroing the edges along the sides. I gently lift his head, tuck his pillow under it, carefully fastening it to the mattress cover.

Then, heart breaking with more love and fear than I know what to do with, I kick my leg up, above his bed, hoist my body up, leaving the floor behind, and swing myself over so I’m clinging onto the side of the bed next to him, gripping with all my strength, imagining for a moment that nothing has changed. Lying next to Felix, watching him dream, gravity be damned. Pretending I can hold on forever without falling.

 

 

Chris Scott’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, Okay Donkey, HAD, Flash Frog, ergot., MoonPark Review, New Flash Fiction Review, scaffold, Gone Lawn, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. His fiction has been selected for Best Small Fictions 2025, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He is a regular contributor for ClickHole, and an elementary school teacher in Washington, DC. You can read his writing at https://www.chrisscottwrites.com.

Chelsea flash nonfiction

At Young Writers Camp Six Weeks After My Second Laparoscopy by Emma Bolden

Eighteen and sunstruck and sweating, my body was a wave that crashed and crashed. On the way to the picnic, I peeled a secret path away from the others to stand alone by the lake and consider my intentions to end it. Me, I meant. No waves licked the shore. I wore jeans with pockets but didn’t bother to search for stones: my will alone was strong enough. I was certain. I didn’t want to think any more. About the pain cresting through my gut, the dark spotted swarms of endometriosis, tissue gone bad, gone stubborn as fish refusing to give up the taste of the worm along with the hook. Of course I cried. Everything was messy. I hoped and didn’t hope someone would see me, save me from my self and the body in which I lived, which was also the self. Unfortunately. It wasn’t a lake, to be honest, more like a pond, and one so shallow I could almost see the sun in its center reaching gold down to the muck-clogged bottom. Ridiculous, I told my self, and my self couldn’t do anything but agree. I wiped my eyes and nose with the back of my shirt and rejoined the group, who in their kind politeness pretended I had never left. We ate charred hot dogs and drank warm Diet Cokes, ashed our menthols into empty cans. I wasn’t happy or relieved but I felt better, golder. I had made a decision and I had decided to walk away from it, too, and save something a little like my life.

 

Emma Bolden is the author of a memoir, The Tiger and the Cage (Soft Skull), and the poetry collections House Is an Enigma, medi(t)ations, and Maleficae. Her fourth poetry collection, God Elegy, is forthcoming from BOA Editions. The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, she is an editor of Screen Door Review: Literary Voices of the Queer South.

 

Chelsea flash fiction

Wintering by Divya Kernan

My neighbor shouldn’t live on his own. Not once in the four weeks since I moved in, have I seen a soul enter his apartment—no friend, no family, no girl—and yet, the boy cannot be older than seventeen.

Grey skin, overcast eyes, an odd edge to his shadow. We never talk.

When I leave for work, straight in my stiff collar and high heels, I feel him stare at me from his dirty window. I come home after dark to his breathing under the door and the smell of old carpeting. With the languor of winter’s dreamless slumber, I press the key into my lock, lingering in the unheated corridor for a bite of his voice. I get nothing.

***

One Friday night, after a tall, lonely glass of coke on the rocks, I lose it.

“Hey you, in there,” I call out, mouth to the wall. “I’m new here. Care to say hi?”

No answers but a blank breath, and by my thigh, a spot of tepid plaster where on the other side he lays his cheek.

I startle at my own imaginings and let out a curse.

What is there here but me, a weekend of too many empty hours and sugar to rot my teeth?

Nothing, indeed. Under my palm the wall is so cool, wetness coats the length of my fingers. I step back.

Fresh out of college, I long to be a girl a while further, a somewhat child, close to what the boy is. Truth is, I should have gone home after all, stuck with mom and dad and the soul-numbing local job. Except I’m still holding out for something out here—the gold, the fleece, the prince, the big opportunity, who knows?—something beyond the black pair of overpriced pumps and sullen pencil skirt that bind me into this pretense that I am worth minding. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do for yourself—go get the world, hold out, be worth minding—before you skitter back home with your tail between your legs?

I bet the boy’s in college, getting the world, or the next best thing.

***

Sunday morning, I knock.

“Hey kid, wanna have lunch with me?”

You can come out, I don’t bite.

For my troubles, I get shushed footsteps padding away from me.

At noon, I leave steaming beet soup in front of his door with a quick, quiet rap. Seven days it remains there, as I watch for him to pick it up, clean it out, the bright stew, garnet as wine, curdled cold and lumpy.

By next Sunday, the forgotten food has grown a hairy coat of green and white, a delicate doormat at his shut door.

***

Days pass; I find myself pondering his unnatural aloneness as I fall asleep in my single bed, nails bothering white blisters off the wall. Why doesn’t he answer? Why is he watching me? How does he spend his days? I’ve had a belly full of ice cubes since I moved in.

One night, I am on the balcony, having a smoke, stalking the moon’s slow rise, fingers croaky in the December air, when I hear it: a milky whisper, unnerving as the damp look that licks my neck every morning.

“Cold,” he says.

For a stretch, I think I’m dreaming, the texture of his voice grainy in my ears next to my own thoughts. Is someone missing me at home? Where are all the friends you’re supposed to make in college? Did sweet Danny Frost from middle school get married? What about the dude who promised he’d French kiss me if by thirty no one else had?

The tip of my tongue meets the bitter end of the cigarette and curls away.

“It’s going to snow,” I say.

I don’t see him across the black chasm between our balconies but there’s no one else.

“I wish I could see it,” he says. Or maybe that’s not what he says, only what I hear. It doesn’t matter: he doesn’t care to be reached.

Still, my mind probes the darkness for him.

“You will, soon.”

The snow will be down before dawn.

“So much cold,” I hear once more.

***

Next morning, the snow starts as I walk out. Watching his empty window, waiting, I stick my tongue out and catch a shaving of falling ice. He doesn’t show.

I wonder who he is. A lost kid. A ghost in a stony city. A kin.

***

On my way home, I grab ice cream for two. Cold on cold. I’m about to knock when his door sways open an inch or two.

“Hey there, kiddo? Everything OK?”

I push in, no warmth puffing out of his place, no light either.

Inside, his apartment mirrors mine in all things but furniture. The sharp, straight lines of white walls cocoon a small expanse of nothing much but dusty air. No heater, no lightbulbs dangling from lonely ceiling wires, no boy. A tiny box of absence.

And too much ice for one person.

***

Outside, the snow blankets everything. Ice on ice, the extra chill gloved in bittersweet quietness. Sugar rots my teeth; I fall asleep, lips to the wall, holding out for his soft breath—my too-young, grey shadow, my kin. The boy no one misses.

Let me hold out.

 

Divya Kernan (she/her) is a biracial and neurodivergent speculative fiction writer, a French native and an alumna of the Short Story Incubator at GrubStreet, Boston. Her work has appeared in Baffling Magazine. You can find her on Bluesky: @divyakernan.bsky.social.

Chelsea flash nonfiction

The Dust Comes by Christopher Scammel

The urn arrived unceremoniously, lighter than expected. It looked out of place wherever he set it down. All her clothes already sent to charity, leaving the closet empty; he put her on a shelf there, away from the yellow sunlight. Another wish he ignored, holding the rest of us hostage. The dust comes as it does.

Christopher Scammell is a writer based in Port Saint Lucie, Florida. Their work explores memory, loss, and the quiet fractures in human relationships.