Month: June 2025

I left you there, in the hollow. What I mean is, the person who crawled out after me like the white rabbit from wonderland wasn’t you, though she looked like you and sounded like you and said she was you. I could tell the difference.

We took a few things with us into the hollow. I brought the picnic basket and you carried the blanket. That morning we’d smeared peanut butter over bread, picked the least bruised apples and shook out the brown fabric in the front yard, leaving the debris of every other year behind for the birds.

After we ate our fill in the hollow, you wanted to wade in the river. I told you I didn’t think that was a good idea because I’d never properly learned how to swim, and we hadn’t waited sixty minutes after finishing our sandwiches. You told me that was a silly story the grown ups only shared to get us to stay put, and I believed you even though I was nervous still.

I stayed close to the edge of river. I always had one hand within reach of the bank but you went farther, climbed up on a rock sticking out high and spun your arms around you.

“I’m Queen of the World!” you declared, and I believed it, in awe and the only smallest bit jealous that this meant I’d never become more than a princess.

I don’t know if you became the other person then, when your foot slipped, or when you were under water, or some other time between when I dragged you out by your slippery arms and when we finally exited the hollow. There was too much chaos for me to tell the exact moment it happened.

What I do know is, the person who crawled out after me was only a puddle of river water, the kind that might have dripped to the floor after we took a bath. Her eyes tremble when she looks at me. Her hugs don’t reach all the way around, and I know she would burst if poked with a stick.

Our parents know nothing. They spend all their time with that girl now, and never talk about you.

I’ve gone back to look for you plenty of times. The person that followed me out of the hollow never joins; I leave her behind.

I retrieved our blanket and basket, fully cleared of crumbs and cores by anything around alive. Sometimes I wonder if I should have left them, so you could remember which way we came in. But then I tell myself that you aren’t stupid, you know where home is.

With our things gone, I’m not always sure I’m looking in the right place. The hollow looks different in the springtime and I lost you in the fall. I wish I knew how to make a map. I wish I’d paid more attention when we were there, because everything now is fuzzy.

Mainly, I wait for you on the edge of the river, and I refuse to learn how to swim.

---

Catherine Buck lives in Jersey City with her partner, pets, and plants. She holds an MFA from Rutgers University Camden and was a member of the Tin House YA workshop. Her fiction has appeared in Cotton Xenomorph, Bending Genres, Vestal Review, CRAFT Literary, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for Best Microfiction.

My brother and I attempt awkward conversation at a Chinese restaurant near the dive motel where he lives. I try not to stare at his teeth: gray, chipped, missing. Dark, square caves in his mouth. How to get him to a dentist? He rarely leaves his motel room. I’ve been obsessed with those teeth since I saw him last month, first time in nearly a decade. After hospitalizations for his psychosis, after failed rehab treatments, after slides back into alcohol and drugs and living on the streets, I had to let go for a long time. We speak haltingly to each other over our scallion pancakes, Lo Mein, and eggplant. My brother is polite and hard to understand. I ask him if he still has his sci fi card deck. He pulls the ace of spades from his wallet and sets it on the table. Inside the ace, there is a mechanical bird in a cage, turquoise, gold, and purple, head held up, beak open. He pushes the card toward me. “Take a gander,” he says, then leaves briefly to use the restroom. Both wallet and card are grimy, torn.  My brother’s only forty-six, but he moves like he’s eighty.

***

When my brother was seventeen, he and a security guard hired by our parents played gin rummy all night in our home; the hospital wouldn’t have a bed free until morning. They played with his deck of sci fi cards, a birthday gift from way back when our parents were so proud of his sci fi obsession, those awards he won for his stories and art. That night I alternated between tossing in bed, having fitful dreams, and spying on my brother and the security guard. My exhausted parents’ door was locked. It had been so long since they’d had a decent night’s sleep. After the ambulance took my brother away the next morning, the security guard said, “Your brother’s got a great sense of humor. He said we should be playing Crazy Eights.”

***

When my brother refuses to let the motel management clean or enter his room, when county health removes most of his belongings, including his tattered sci fi book collection, when I learn that he has disappeared, when I put out feelers to the shelters and soup kitchens and no one has seen him, there is nothing to do but file a missing person report and wait. And wait. When the phone call comes—four months later— there is nothing to do but listen. His body: found in some blankets under bushes near a homeless encampment. “He was kind,” says the woman who found him. It was a heart attack. No drugs or alcohol in his system. No wallet or I.D. His childhood dental records identified him. In his pockets: loose change, a book of matches, and the ace of spades. The card is grimier than when I saw it earlier. The mechanical bird is faded and more worn than the rest of the card, as if a thumb rubbed its turquoise, gold, and purple feathers over and over again.

 

---

 

Claudia Monpere’s flash appears in Split Lip, SmokeLong Quarterly, Craft, Trampset, Milk Candy Review, The Forge, and elsewhere. Her poems appear in such journals as Cutleaf, The Cincinnati Review, Plume, and Hunger Mountain. She won the 2024 New Flash Fiction Prize from New Flash Fiction Review and the 2024 Refractions: Genre Flash Fiction Prize from Uncharted Magazine. She has a story in Best Small Fictions 2024 and a micro forthcoming in Best Microfiction 2025.

My monster fits in my pocket, but when we’re relaxing in the evening, watching TV, he sleeps on my chest. I like police procedurals where they catch murderers. (I like the American ones especially.) He likes my breathing and heart rate when I’m quietly satisfied.

At work, when I’m agitated, and largely out of place, that’s when the monster prefers my pocket, away from my heart, still near the warmth of me. I venture he is cold-blooded, but I haven’t asked him, and I’m not sure if he would say. Mostly, he quotes poetry.

His favorite poet is Alexander Pope, and often he says to me, “Oh, ever beauteous, ever friendly!” And while that is a kind thing to say, it’s from a poem about an “Unfortunate Lady,” and I don’t think she was unfortunate only for her death (in the poem, you see), so there is some insult there.

“Spare your censure,” is another one of his go-tos. But I don’t know if he has the level of intelligence required to draw out lines from the poems of Pope and connect them to my life, not in an entirely appropriate way, not for the situations I find myself in. I often wonder, Was I censuring? Though overall, again, I like the sentiment, because I should not waste my time on others, or on negativity. I should not censure, generally speaking.

I could be thinking happy thoughts, memories from my childhood perhaps. I do sometimes. I reflect. And when I do, I idly stroke my monster’s head, to which he says, “that noble seat of thought.”

From his love of Pope, and his accent, I assume my monster is British, and I wonder if he is as old as the poems. I wonder if he could be yet another thing to mock my American-ness, as I build this new life.

Though that’s a negative thought. I recognize that. If I make myself think more positively about him, I think that he’s here to help me, to help me adjust and fit in. He could do that, maybe, if he didn’t only speak lines of poetry. I often get into trouble with the different words we have for things, and there aren’t many lines of poetry about that.

I told someone, I like suspenders, and here, that’s how they refer to garter belts, as if I were talking about my negligée.

Braces, they told me. You like braces.

I do? I said, thinking about how I didn’t ever like anything I’d braced myself against in my life.

They nodded.

I wanted to laugh, but in my pocket, the monster bit my finger, and my eyes filled with tears.

They went, No, no, no, it’s not a big deal.

And I said, No, no, no, I’m okay.

But they didn’t believe me, and I wouldn’t have either, faced with a small, crying woman, whose face went red and eyes shined like they could take in all the light in the world and shove that light into stretched triangles of the brightest white, moving this way and that with the movements of my eyes.

I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. Perhaps my monster was teaching me how to accept help and show my vulnerabilities.

I can say, with certainty, that since my monster came into my life, I have not seen one spider in my house. No ants. Not even a field mouse in the yard.

I didn’t realize it was him at first. I mentioned it to a neighbor, and they said they had noticed the same thing in their yard. Eventually, I put two and two together. Now I wonder about the reach of my monster, how far he roams when I’m asleep, how many mice until he’s full.

Of course, with this new knowledge, I came to realize that he is not cold-blooded, if he can travel from me at night, if he has the energy to hunt. The first thought I had—Why have I been assuming he has blood at all? I have no idea what’s underneath his skin or running through his flesh, ever beauteous thing.

The hunger is revealing though. If he needs to eat, he needs energy, and maybe he has cells. But if he only wants to eat—that’s revealing in another way. And then consumption is merely the easiest way to clean up after himself. With everything tidied and away, he can continue with this hushed life, which he has built with me.

---

Sarah Blake’s debut novel Naamah is a retelling of The Great Flood from the perspective of Noah’s wife, published by Riverhead Books in 2019 and winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Debut Fiction. Her most recent novel Clean Air was published by Algonquin Books in 2022. It was selected as an Apple Books Best Book of the Month, an Editors’ Pick at Amazon, and Oprah Daily called it “a cli-fi novel for our times.” Blake is also the author of three collections of poetry, In Springtime, Let’s Not Live on Earth, and Mr. West, all published by Wesleyan University Press. She is the recipient of a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and holds her MFA from The Pennsylvania State University. She currently lives in the U.K.

In February, the creek flooded the fields forty yards on either side from the tracks to the freeway. That was the last of the rain.

The men in charge set the burn ban in June, but that didn’t stop them from striking us like matchsticks in the dry beds. Our blood, like a fresh, wet spring.

Our prayers cracked the corners of our mouths as a sheen of dust settled in September. The burn ban held even as the nights grew cold. We vaporized, hovered just above our bodies through the fall, followed our husks like swollen clouds.

For all our prayers, heaven never answered. But something did.

The night we turned back the clocks, a dark disc descended. The sky lit like a million suns. A theft, or a mercy? It culled us, body and soul, up, up with the water.

---

Vic Nogay is a writer from Ohio. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Naming a Dying Thing (Yellow Arrow 2025) and under fire under water (tiny wren 2022), and is the Micro Editor of Identity Theory. Find her at vicnogay.com or haunting rural roadsides where the wildflowers grow.