Chelsea flash fiction

The Birds Will Line Their Nests by Belinda Rowe

Dad and I pass a packet of liquorice Allsorts between us at the kitchen table. It’s drizzling outside. Flowers from the pōhutukawa tree cover the lawn in a carpet of scarlet. A nest falls from the tree. She’s left again, dad says quietly. I tug at the loose skin at the edge of my fingernail until a prick of blood beads. I wipe it on my corduroys.

I don’t tell dad that when I was poking around in mum’s make-up drawer, I found two business cards under her eye-shadow palette. One from a psychiatrist, with an appointment time, the other from Todd’s Car Dealership, a penned message on the back: ‘Call me.’ I don’t tell him about the letter I wrote. How I painted my lips with her orange lipstick, pressed them to the back of the envelope in a childish seal, how I placed the envelope in her underwear drawer where I knew she’d find it. That she never replied.

The next day, after school, dad hands me a shoebox. New sneakers, he smiles. I open the lid. Nestled in a bed of shredded newspaper is a duckling. Its downy feathers dreamy like fairy floss. We’ll build a hutch, he says. I skip behind him to the shed. My job is passing, which he says is an important job, passing him tin snips, hammer, saw, measuring-tape, U-nails, hinges, lengths of salvaged timber, wire.

Do you think the duckling will miss its mother? I ask.

He snips and bends the wire around the wooden frame, not if you look after it, he says.

Every morning, I collect aphids and worms and crickets before school. At night I place the duckling in a shoebox, put it next to me on my bed, read to it in words that are brittle and brassy in all the right places. I jot down quotes in my journal in spidery running-writing, like, ‘I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.’

Mum turns up again a few weeks later. She’s in the kitchen staring out the window at the hutch, hair hacked to her skull. She’s wiping her nose and eyes with the back of her hand. Her long blonde hair is heaped in a plastic bag on the bench. A pair of scissors next to it. I tell her about the duckling, how its little bill nibbles and tickles, how it snuggles in my lap.

After school, I find the duckling’s body limp on the straw. Dad strokes my hair, says that he’s sorry. He buries it in the vegetable garden, his eyes resolute but red-rimmed. After dinner, I creep with a torch and trowel to poke and dig amongst parsley and lettuce. My heart splinters when I unearth a yellow wing. I cradle the duckling as if its tiny heart is still beating. Mum is wilting in front of the news, eyelids fluttering.

In my bedroom, I settle the duckling on my best handkerchief, light thirteen candles, grip my magic wand and repeat, come back to life little duckling. I draw an infinity symbol in the air and the wind gusts and the candles flicker and crackle like tiny imploding stars. My breath catches as the duckling’s feathers ruffle, but when I pick it up, its head swings like a pendulum.

I tiptoe to the lounge, stand over mum. Hold my breath. I lay my hand in the centre of her chest where I know her heart is hiding. Her pulse is weak. I sweep the magic wand in an urgent flurry around her head. Come back to life, come back to life, I whisper. Her arms are crossed as if she’s laid out for burial. A yellow tatter is wedged under her fingernail.

In the garden, a ruru turns its head, cries more-pork as I lower the duckling into the grave, fill it in, pat it smooth. A dog barks at a shooting star. A gang of boys smash bottles on the road. I fling the magic wand over the back fence, hear it clatter on the neighbour’s roof.

I drift through the garden like a spectre in my white nightdress, plucking handfuls of mum’s hair from the plastic bag, tossing it to the wind, broadcasting it around towering tree ferns, the pōhutukawa, the tamarillo with its strange fruit hanging like eggs. Clouds scud across the black sky. Her hair falls like snow.

 

Belinda Rowe is an emerging short fiction writer and English teacher. Born in New Zealand she now lives in Western Australia. She has words published by Night Parrot Press, Flash Frontier, Gone Lawn, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, and Ghost Parachute. She is a SmokeLong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow 2025.

Chelsea flash nonfiction

My Mother Was Always Tall by Elizabeth Koster

I.

Photo 1

My mother perches with spoon to my infant mouth that forms an expectant o.

Photo 2

I am two, twisted in my mother’s lap to hold a translucent grape to her lips. Her eyes close and she smiles into the sun. I’m wearing a blue bikini I call my zucchini. I interchange superman and supermarket; being and bean.

“I’m a human bean,” I announce.

 

II.

“Was I always tall?” my mother asks one day. Just shy of seventy, her breast cancer has spread. I bring her bags of eggplant parmesan, garlic artichoke hearts, fresh tomato with basil, wedding soup.

At the kitchen table, she stares straight ahead. I fix her a plate, place it in front of her.

“Which one is artichoke?” She taps the top of a tomato. “This one?”

“No, this one,” I say, guide her hand.

 

III.

One week before she dies, I stand at my parents’ bedroom door with freshly-boiled eggs quivering on a plate.

Her swollen legs dangle over the side of the bed. She shakes her head.

“No? Do you want a peach?”

She nods. In the kitchen, I slice a peach into small, pulpy pieces, return to my mother, her eyes closed.

“Mom,” she says to me.

The plate hangs in my hand. “No. You’re my mom,” I say.

“Oh.”

“You’re my mom and I’m your daughter.” I hold up a speared peach slice. Her mouth opens.

“Mmmmm,” she says, shoulders hunched, mashing the fruit on her tongue. Somehow, I believe the peach will transform her into who she once was.

 

Elizabeth Koster’s work has appeared in Fourth Genre, River Teeth, Split Lip, Sweet, Hobart, Five Minutes, and The New York Times “Modern Love” column. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Columbia University and teaches writing in New York City.

Chelsea flash nonfiction

The same virus that causes chickenpox by Brooke Middlebrook

Watched a couple passionately make out in front of the Randall’s on Westheimer today. I say passionately because I saw him put his hand behind her head as they kissed, a.k.a., the best move ever invented, something that should be bottled and sold. Ninety-seven degrees out on a day gray like a donkey’s back and they sat thigh to thigh at a picnic table next to a gently swaying sign that said You can prevent shingles. Actually, a sign can’t say anything, you have to read it. I learned that from a PBS show for kids about math, spoken (I think) by a ventriloquist’s dummy. Put a hand behind his head and his mouth will move. I watched this couple from the other side of the strip mall as I ate my plain frozen yogurt with chocolate chips – a boring order, I know, but the vastness of possible flavor and topping combinations stresses me out, mathematically. These two found each other so that has to count for something. It’s been so long for us, years since the humid night we met when you used the best move ever invented, that I worry you now find me boring, or insufferable. My voice in your mouth. Your kiss in my nerves. Sometimes we don’t say much at all and sometimes when I’m being insufferable you place your hand on the hollow of my back, the spot that sometimes itches that I can’t reach, and (I think) I can feel something dormant begin to stir.

 

 

Brooke Middlebrook grew up in the hills of western Massachusetts. She’s currently an MFA student in nonfiction at Bennington College and a reader for The Maine Review. Recent work appears in Fugue, The Cincinnati Review’s miCRo series, and Hunger Mountain.