Chelsea flash fiction

Why I Stopped Tying My Shoes by Mitch James

I saw my first picture of spontaneous human combustion in fourth grade. A black and white photo of shoe and ash. Laces in bunny ears. Mom taught me the bunny ear song to help me learn to tie my shoes. She’d sing Blues Traveler in the shower too. The bunny ear song was the last she sang to me.

My father is an accountant. He wears dress shoes, sometimes with buckles but never laces. I wonder if his mother never taught him the bunny ear song. On my last visit, he flew me to Napa Valley to spend a weekend with him and his wife. There was so much to catch up on. Yet, after a bottle of wine split three ways, we found silence.

There were new creases on his face from smiling often.

I see him now, crossing one leg over the other, his lace-less shoe bouncing slightly to a rhythm I’ve never heard.

 

Mitch James is a Professor of Composition and Literature at Lakeland Community College in Kirtland, Ohio, the Editor-at-Large at Great Lakes Review, and the owner of The Write Methods (LLC), where he teaches therapeutic and creative writing modalities to guide others in experiencing the transformative power of the written word. Mitch is the author of the novel Seldom Seen: A Miner’s Tale (Sunbury Press) and was a finalist for the 2024 SmokeLong Quarterly Grand Micro and 2025 Blue Frog Flash Fiction Contests. He’s published works across the genres of short/flash/micro fiction, poetry, and academic scholarship. You can find his latest fiction in Bending Genres and SmokeLong Quarterly, his poetry at Shelia-Na-Gig, and his scholarship at the Journal of Creative Writing Studies and New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing. Keep up with Mitch at mitchjamesauthor.com and @mitchjamesauthor.bsky.social.

Chelsea flash nonfiction

Fireworks by Sharon Goldberg

The summer I turned fourteen, after I arrived in New York City from small town Ohio for the very first time, I wrote a letter to Ron Sobieski, my very first real boyfriend, to say I couldn’t see him anymore because he wasn’t Jewish. Before that, Mom and Dad announced they would not allow me to visit New York City, where I’d planned to eat kosher corned beef sandwiches with my cousins in Brooklyn, and shop for pierced earrings in Greenwich Village, and watch “Carousel” at Lincoln Center and “Man of La Mancha” on Broadway, unless I broke up with Ron. Before that, my father snaked along 30th Street and down Falbo Avenue in our 1959 canary yellow Edsel until he spotted Ron and me and yelled, “Get in the car.” Before that, Ron and I lay on our backs on a blanket amidst the crowd at George Daniel Stadium and watched Fourth of July fireworks, the crimson chrysanthemums, the cobalt comets, the red, white, and blue crackles, Ron and I holding hands, me aglow and aglitter with a joy I’d never before known. Did we kiss? I hope we kissed. We must have kissed, our virginal lips tasting first love. Before that, Ron and I conspired to secretly meet on Oberlin Avenue outside the stadium. Before that, at a corner store downtown on East Erie, I bought Ron a present for his fourteenth birthday, a seventy-five-cent, behind-the-counter Playboy Magazine with a centerfold whose body looked nothing like my barely-needing-a-bra one, a magazine I suspected the clerk would refuse to sell to an underage kid, but he didn’t, and I thought what a daring, spicy, bold as brass girl I am. Before that Ron and I talked on the phone and met up here and there, now and then, usually with his sidekick Tim. Before that, at a junior high school dance in the living room of an old home that housed the YWCA, the same room where four years earlier Mom and I sat through a class about getting one’s menstrual period and I asked “Can you get pregnant if you’re not married?” in that room, Ron, from Irving Junior High, asked me, from Hawthorne Junior High, to dance and we did dance, over and over to Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet,” Ron’s hand warm in the center of my back, my fingers hesitant resting on his shoulder, our bodies awkward then close and closer. Before that, from my gaggle of girls in knee-length pleated skirts or shirtwaist dresses, I noticed a boy among the gangly guys wearing slacks and button down plaid or checked shirts, a boy slim and loose, a boy whose dishwater blonde hair curled above steel blue eyes, a boy whose smile was framed by lips lush, plush, and yummy, a boy who I knew for sure was not Jewish.

Sharon Goldberg is a Seattle writer whose work has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, New Letters, The Louisville Review, Cold Mountain Review, River Teeth, Green Mountains Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Southern Indiana Review, The Jellyfish Review, Gargoyle, Best Small Fictions, and elsewhere. Sharon won second place in the On the Premises 2012 Humor Contest and Fiction Attic Press’s 2013 Flash in the Attic Contest. She is an avid but cautious skier and enthusiastic world traveler.

Chelsea flash fiction

The Town Is Not Saved by Brandon Forinash

After the hostage townsfolk are freed, the bandits run off or gunned down in the street, and a fine speech given by the rotund mayor, after one last ‘adios’ dropped to a freckled/gap-toothed adolescent before the hero rides into the sunset, the town remains. The woman waving her handkerchief turns away at last, goes back to hanging her laundry on the line or shilling slop to her hogs or takes her place again beside the stooped piano player and sings a song slightly off-key to nobody in particular. Her man feels a pang of guilt for his empty pockets or embarrassment with his back turned at the piano or cultivates a hard root vegetable of resentment in the arid earth; leans on the hoe, the piano board, leans on the bartop and asks if his tab will cover another. And the dirty/freckle-faced kid grows up hard. His father hits him and doesn’t remember hitting him, never remembers hitting him. He is sixteen and tells his mother that he is leaving for good, and his mother doesn’t stop him, packs for him some jars of preserves and pickled vegetables, or his mother doesn’t stop him but she does take from him the old revolver he had wedged down his waist front, slaps him across/kisses his cheek before she sends him off, but everywhere he goes it seems the problems are the same. They chase after him and then arrive ahead of him. There is trouble at the mine between the union and the mine-owner. There is trouble between the sharecroppers and migrant workers. When the first national bank opens in town it invents as dialogic pairs the bank robber, the pinkerton agent, the insurance adjuster, the insured. Barbed wire closes the cattle trails, the cow herds pack the earth, each on their separate acreage.

And they don’t predict that when the rain doesn’t come, and the rain doesn’t come, the land would turn to dust, immense clouds of dust that would roll through and cover everything but for that freckle-faced/gap-toothed kid, not that freckle-faced kid, but some other dirty/freckle-faced/gap-toothed kid from some other town, now grown to manhood, working for an alphabet agency laying asphalt, breathing in the tar, baking in the sun, it becomes a way home. The asphalt takes him home, brings him home, finds him at home in this new town that is altogether a different town with different people, but somehow the same. The mine is dead. His father is dead. His mother is dying. He takes a job at the Sears store, drives his mother for treatments at the hospital another county over. He marries a woman with a very young child. The Sears closes after the town is bypassed by the highway. He drives so many miles in a day, between work and home and hospice. The town hasn’t moved, hasn’t gone anywhere, but he feels out of place or maybe out of time. At night he watches science fiction on TV and tries to nurse the terrible pang in his back, feels a terrible pang at this particular road that he has paved, as if it was not his own life he had lived up to now, but someone else’s. And though he is happy, happy to be with his wife, happy to have this daughter that has chosen him as a father, some part of him aches for the time, a time, when the town could be “saved.”

 

Brandon Forinash is a writer living in San Antonio, Texas with his wife and one-year old daughter. His stories and flash fiction have appeared in X-R-A-Y, Wigleaf, Flash Frog, most recently in Short Story, Long, and other indie zines.

Chelsea flash fiction

The Wins I Can Afford at 40 by Titi Kusumandari

He slapped me three plastic bullets and a gun. “Aim at the prize,” a toothpick danced between his lips as he spoke. I took the gun and aimed at the sheep doll across the counter.

Aim. Hit. Miss.

From behind, thrill-seeking children swung and screamed. Overdosed neon, red and yellow, like warning signs against the fall’s pitch-dark sky. The greasy scent of apple fries and corndogs. Parents on standby.

Bang. Another miss.

My week ahead loomed over me: divorce lawyers at 9, movers at 11, lease, biopsy, unemployment agency.

My fingers tightened on the trigger. One more bullet to go.

I need this win.

Bang.

 

 

Titi Kusumandari is an Indonesian writer navigating corporate slide decks by day and existential prose by night. Based in Brussels, Belgium, their work has appeared in InsideIndonesia.org, forthcoming in Porch lit mag. Her sheep toy still hangs in her room.