Month: March 2024

While she was babysitting me, she used to put load after load in the washing machine, sweep before lunch and after lunch, wash the dishes, dry the laundry, vacuum, get on her knees to sponge the bathroom floors, iron our clothes while watching soap operas all afternoon. I remember how she smelled of dishwater and the almond hand moisturizer by the sink and how, when I said, “But you just sweeped!” because I wanted her to play with me, not sweep the kitchen again, she pinched my cheeks with her slippery fingers. I don’t believe in Heaven, don’t believe she’s up ship-shaping it, polishing the gates, tsk-tsking those who come through them with mud on their boots, sweeping angel feathers into a dustpan, pinching the fat cheeks of the cherubim. No: I don’t think she believed in God any more than I do. I think she liked going to church because everything there was so clean: the floors, the pews, the windows, the light. I see her rocketing into space, though. Grandma the astronaut, leaving the galaxy on her ironing board, the dishtowel tucked in her apron waving behind her. There she is, a little woman polishing the stars, mopping up the spill of the Milky Way, washing the yolk of the Big Bang from the walls of the long hallway of eternity…

Amber Burke is graduate of Yale and the Writing Seminars MFA program at Johns Hopkins University. These days, she teaches writing and leads the 200-hour yoga teacher training at the University of New Mexico in Taos. She has written over 100 articles for Yoga International, and her creative work can be found in swamp pink, The Sun, Michigan Quarterly Review, Flyway, Mslexia, Superstition Review, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and Quarterly West, and on her website: https://amberburke3.wixsite.com/amberburkewriting.

The dress rack at the Goodwill is packed today. The crimson, sapphire, and emerald prom dresses, sway awkwardly side to side across the gymnasium floor, the smell of roses off her wrist, the hopeful condom in his pocket. The hangers click click as they are pushed down the greasy poles of the rack. Five dusty rose bridesmaid dresses, crinkling organza, a champagne stain on a skirt, slightly slurring, stumbling across the dance floor, all joined together in I’ll never wear this again. A royal velvet evening gown, a slit up the side, bourbon, cigarette smoke, and perfume, holding court at the bar. The silver and black sequined party dress, flashing and winking, wrinkled from the sweaty back seat of a taxi ride. Then the queen, the frosted confection, sweetheart neckline, pearl encrusted bodice, cap sleeves, tulle skirt, smelling like lilies, virginal, pure, as if it had never been worn, a dress left at the altar.

Norma Zimmermann worked for many years as a medical technologist. She is now retired and loves to write flash fiction, prose poetry, and poetry. Her work has appeared in BrightFlash Literary Review and Turtle Way. She lives with her husband of forty-eight years in Massachusetts.

When the ice age strikes, I grow an extra limb, then two, then three. They spring from my body, rows of suckers popping up along their muscular length, wiggling in the air like newborn tongues. My husband stands there in the kitchen and shouts at me, his face turning coral pink, goddammit Beth you stop this nonsense right now, but his words freeze in mid-air, his grubby, creaking fingers snatching fruitlessly at my powerful swirling tentacles. By then, I am already slipping out the door, my new limbs slapping wetly on the pavement, and the last I see of him through the window is his gaping fish mouth as his eyes burst open with ice crystals. Down down down I surge into the ocean, escaping sub-zero temperatures, escaping oxygen, shooting water through the holes in my body like a rocket as I gurgle out salt bubble laughter. I am classified as a dumbo octopus, I can fly, I can fly, I’m soaring. The colder it gets, the faster I propulse. In the dark, I become gelatinous, the purple bruises dotting my skin now just a part of my shimmering chromatophore camouflage, and I live there in the abyss for thousands of years, because down in the midnight zone, you can be soft-bodied and still be a predator.

Elena Zhang is a Chinese American writer and mother living in Chicago. Her work can be found in HAD, JAKE, Exposition Review, Your Impossible Voice, and Gone Lawn, among other publications, and has been nominated for Best Microfiction 2024. You can find her on Twitter @ezhang77.