Chelsea flash fiction

Petrichor by Jessie Carver

 Three days after Eli stopped living, Talia saw him in a dream, wearing his old black hoodie and jeans and Converse sneakers, walking slowly toward her through the glass graveyard along the Rio Grande Bosque with a sea of shattered glass glinting at his feet, like Jesus walking on water. She wanted him to tell her to not be afraid, but he said nothing, his eyes fixed on the horizon, unaware of—or indifferent to—her presence.

As teenagers, she and Eli would get stoned there, wandering through the acres of dirt-encrusted glass to unearth old medicine bottles that survived the decades and weather and wildlife. It was a century-old landfill, but “graveyard” suited it better. Where glass goes to die, serene in its brokenness. There was a holiness to it, the garbage made beautiful in that fleeting golden light.

It was monsoon season, when the desert came alive from the violence of extreme heat, downburst winds, lightning, thunderstorms, flash floods. When she woke from her nap, she waited till the afternoon downpour subsided before driving to the South Valley. In the glass graveyard, the air bloomed, breathing out the fresh memory of rain-soaked earth—the scent of thirst quenched, dryness replenished, pungent with resinous creosote displaced by heavy droplets.

And she saw that, no, Eli was not there, of course, he was still dead, her brother as ephemeral as the petrichor that emanated from the soil, and Talia was alone, kneeling in the glass shards, dull now in the fading light of dusk, her hands burrowing in the ground like she might find his bones there among the weeds and broken bottles.

Jessie_Carver

Jessie Carver is a queer writer and editor who grew up on a farm in the borderlands of New Mexico. Her short stories and poems have appeared in journals that include Entropy, Barren, The Normal School, HAD, and Watershed Review, and in the anthology Love Is the Drug & Other Dark Poems. She also co-authored the book Rethinking Paper & Ink: The Sustainable Publishing Revolution. You can find her online at www.jessiecarver.com.

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Jessie Carver is a queer writer and editor who grew up on a farm in the borderlands of New Mexico. Her short stories and poems have appeared in journals that include Entropy, Barren, The Normal School, HAD, and Watershed Review, and in the anthology Love Is the Drug & Other Dark Poems. She also co-authored the book Rethinking Paper & Ink: The Sustainable Publishing Revolution. You can find her online at www.jessiecarver.com.

Chelsea flash fiction

The Grenade by EJ Green

The American pawpaw takes six or seven years to produce fruit. You may wait for the fruit to fall, or you can shake the tree if you’re impatient, or if you doubt the tree’s ability to know when it’s time, which must be the case sometimes since everything is so deeply confused what with the scorching summers, the smashing records. So, you shake and shake because it’s his favorite fruit and the dumb tree is finally ready and how much time does anyone really have, anyway? You hear the backdoor whine open and slam shut but all the pawpaws are down, so you are too busy to acknowledge. Pawpaws taste a little like mango and have small, shiny black pits inside of them. The fruit is so malleable, you can scoop out the meat with a spoon. You hear her calling you but you are gathering them in your shirt and oh my god it’s going to be so amazing when you bring them inside and scoop out the meat and you wonder if you could make pawpaw ice cream out of this and feel super earthy, like you’ve got everything by the balls for once and you’re the one driving. You hear it in her voice, the phone call. The prognosis. A pawpaw slips out of its shirt hammock, and you revel in the act of picking it back up, this little green bomb, about as big as a grenade. But she has the real grenade, doesn’t she? No matter how much life you bring into the house, the call came through, and now she knows. But you know too by the crumbling structure of her voice, the quiet care when she says, What are you doing? And you hold the pawpaws so tightly in their hammock, so safe. The American pawpaw is rich in vitamins A, C, P, K—basically all the letters. The pawpaw is life. If you could just bring them into the house…. It isn’t good. It isn’t good. You knew this wouldn’t be good. You hold them so tightly they all fall out but one, which remains stuck and squished against your rib cage and wrist. You will lose him. Soon, you will lose him. The American pawpaw produces the largest native edible fruit in North America. You let her hug you, and even though the fruit is smashed, you can’t let go of it. It remains between you, permeating your t-shirt, your hands, your fingernails until you don’t know where you end, and it begins.

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EJ Green’s short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Hobart, HAD, Wigleaf, Juked, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and others. They live just outside of Philadelphia with their partner and two cats where they read for Philadelphia Stories, practice martial arts, and try not to kill everything in their veggie garden.

Chelsea flash fiction

Shallow by Madeline Graham

Let me introduce you to a woman you’ve been sleeping with. Every so often for the last nine months. I wish I could say she’s pretty like she has soft lips, large, limpid eyes, or that she sways gently when she walks. Say some detail like that her nose crinkles when she smiles. But she’s not like that. It’s okay if you don’t know if you like her right away.

She’s sleeping now, lying on a thin gray pillow, cradling one wrist with the other palm. The light is early morning muddy. Her neck is long and rises far over her shoulders, her chin is fleshy underneath. You can see her collarbones and shoulder nubs and other parts you cannot name under the skin. At rest her mouth curves down like a rainbow, her eyes curve down, too. Inside she has a hollow space under her ribs, the pit of her, an empty-feeling crevice.

She’s waking up.

The mattress is swaying beneath you both as she shifts. She bows her head to your shoulder, so the fly-away hairs stand up, making your nostrils twitch. Your cat will probably start screaming for breakfast in two more minutes.

This woman starts scratching her cheek in a way that makes a soft rasping that is kind of irritating and kind of sweet. She lifts her face to you (someone she’s been fucking and just recently fucked) says good morning. Nudges your cheek with her nose.

After a pause, she tucks her chin in, scrunches her nose, draws down her eyebrows. Nudges you again and speaks from the side of her mouth saying, would you still be with me if my face looked like this?

Listen very carefully. What she means is will you stay with her even if her face gets chewed off by a dog, or she gains two hundred pounds, or her vagina gets stretched out from having four babies.

I know. What’s inside is what counts; but that’s more of her body. The slick organs pumping, that would come slithering out like a long live snake if a slit were made in the wrong place. Her body, the shape of her face, her bones, are who she is. Her brain and her face are wired together with an intricate system of the same nerves and blood vessels. Her sense of humor is the way her eyebrows rise, or how her face stretches when she laughs. She is in her eyeballs and how the lashes move and how her spine bends and how her breathing sounds. I know.

Turn toward the body in your bed, grab her padded hip bone, kiss her spiky shoulder.

Tell her you’ll love her no matter what.

Madeline-Graham-headshot

Madeline Graham is a writer and Minnesotan. Her work is available or forthcoming in HAD, Southern Humanities Review, Redivider, Forge Literary Magazine, and Ghost Parachute, among others. Find her on Twitter @madelineRgraham.

Chelsea flash nonfiction

A Collection of Parts by Lori Yeghiayan Friedman

It’s the taste of your diet bars, chocolate but also rebellion, that she sneaks by twos and threes from the kitchen cabinet, unwrapping and swallowing them, unchewed; it’s the comment after a big meal about how you’re “never going to eat again”; it’s your worry that her two-year-old is too fat and suggesting that she maybe take her to the doctor to have her checked out; it’s the way that you say, about other women: “she’s so tall,” “she’s so striking,” “she’s so slender”; it’s the way you talk about yourself and your “too wide” hips; it’s the way you never want to give her “a complex” but the whole out-loud worry itself gives has the same effect of giving her “a complex”; it’s you noting that her friend is “so tall, thin, and beautiful’ that “maybe you shouldn’t go out with her when trying to meet men”; it’s the way you respond―or don’t respond―when a male relative says she “used to be so cute and then she…” and then he mimes a body blowing up like a balloon to indicate that she got bigger; it’s the way she is not supposed to get bigger.

It’s the way that a boy in her 3rd-grade class mouths “You should lose…” and then holds up the words “10 lbs,” cut from a magazine cover; it’s the way that a boy in her 8th-grade class writes in her yearbook: “Fatness is a pig; a pig is fatness, but you’re just a cool duder;” it’s the way you circle the areas of her body that are the most problematic, with a black sharpie in front of the mirror; it’s the taste of peanut butter and butter sandwiches, the slickness of the fat on her tongue, the feeling of partially-masticated bread, so soft against the roof of her mouth, like a cloud, like cotton candy, like cotton balls, like a comforter, like comfort; it’s her friends wondering aloud why they crave such soft things when they are binge-ing―bread, cupcakes, twinkies, Hostess pies―not celery, not carrots; it’s the taste of chocolate covered raisins from the Costco-sized container that her college roommate’s parents send, how she can’t eat just a handful, but instead handful after guilty handful, and still she never feels like it’s enough; there’s never a moment where she says to herself I’ve had enough; it’s the way she thinks that if her body looks a certain way, then she’ll be happy; if she fits into a certain size, then she’ll be happy; if she look in the mirror and likes what she sees, she’ll be happy; it’s the way she never sees you look in the mirror and like what you see; it’s the way that you are never happy.

It’s the way she sculpts her life’s goal from the silence of those smoked-filled car rides during family trips, oh please please make me only smart enough to be happy; it’s the way you wonder how she could still be a child in her mid-20s, like she was supposed to just grow up on her own without any sunlight, any effort like she’s a weed; it’s the way she doesn’t even need much, could have lived on little; it’s the way there is no abuse, not even neglect in the traditional sense, just no care for her emotions, since how could you have cared about her emotions if you never cared about your own?; It’s the way she snuffs them out with cereal, with peanut butter sandwiches, with diet bar after diet bar; it’s the way she wants to be good, be erased so she will not feel so much, be so much; it’s the way she takes her revenge or protects herself, like in the fantasy she has where everyone’s hands all over her; it’s the way she understands, how can she possibly miss it, that her body isn’t hers, it is a public service announcement that―like advertisements showing women in parts, an arm, a leg, a belly button, an exposed neck, a collection of parts, lying supine―communicates that the best possible thing she can be is dead.

Friedman

Lori Yeghiayan Friedman’s most recent work has appeared in Longleaf Review, Autofocus Lit, Pithead Chapel, Memoir Monthly, and the Los Angeles Times. Her creative nonfiction has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She earned an MFA in Theatre from UC San Diego and attended the Tin House Winter Workshop 2023. You can find her on Twitter @loriyeg