Chelsea flash fiction

Felix on the Ceiling by Chris Scott

When I shuffle into his bedroom, Felix is sitting cross-legged on the ceiling, upside down, already in his PJ’s, his shaggy blonde hair dangling from his head. I stop in my tracks, lean against the doorframe. I thought we’d have more time.

“Oh buddy…” is all I can muster at first, my stomach sinking. I try again, not wanting to seem panicked or scared, not wanting to make my fear his fear. “How’s the view from up there?”

Felix doesn’t miss a beat. “Weird.”

“So much for cleaning your room before bed, I guess.”

Felix smiles at this, all teeth, and my chest warms. “Well technically it’s super clean up here!” he says, spreading his arms out. I laugh, seeing what he means. The floor is littered with all the usual controlled chaos of toys, books, art supplies. But the ceiling — his floor now — is almost totally bare, save for the bed I’d mounted up there just last week, anticipating this very thing. There’d been the signs. The growing moonbounce of his walk, his arms slightly levitating off the dinner table when we ate together. But I was hoping for a longer in-between stage before he inverted completely. I think of the videos Mark and Peggy sent of their twin girls giggling, floating around their living room, bouncing against one another like balloons.

“I can mount more stuff up there for you next weekend,” I tell Felix, my neck craned, trying to seem like it’s the most normal thing in the world talking to him like this. “Glad we got your bed done though. Oh wait! I have special sheets. And a pillow.”

“It’s okay, Dad,” Felix says, already groggily yawning. They say the first few days of the switch wear them out like nothing else.

“No, no, they have velcro so they stick to the bed. I’ll go get them.”

I watch Felix crawl across the ceiling, over the metal brackets keeping his bed suspended and secure, and onto the mattress. It’s heavily reinforced, but I still worry I didn’t do it right. I worry about everything.

Before I leave to get the sheets, I turn back to Felix, sprawled out on his bed and quickly drifting, eyelids heavy. “They’re going to figure this out, bud. They’re close. I was reading an article today,” I’m rambling.

“I know, Dad,” he says, his voice thick and drowsy.

Downstairs I sort through the stack of boxes, all the supplies they have for this now. An assortment of braces, tethers, harnesses. I ordered a little of everything, not really knowing what I was doing. Ashamed to be this clueless.

Felix is eight years old, and I have no idea how to keep him safe in this world. When a child’s gravity inverts the family has two choices, basically: Try to fight it and keep them earthbound with straps and leashes and even sometimes, like the McKinleys did with their twins, cartoonishly large suction cups. Option two is to try to make the house more accommodating for them. My coworker Rosa actually bought identicals of every piece of furniture in her house and had them mounted onto the ceiling, mirror-like, so her daughter would have the exact same experience after she flipped. I guess this is the route I’m taking, too, gradually. But it’s hard not to second-guess myself. I cock my head, trying to see everything from Felix’s new perspective.

I finally find the boxes with the sheets and pillow in them. Through the kitchen window, across the alley, I notice another house has put poles and netting up, enclosing their backyard. Lucky. I’m still on the waiting list for netting while they prioritize schools, daycare centers, playgrounds. At some point, if this goes on long enough, they’ll just cover the whole city with nets, or a giant cage, or something. I wish I could find more comfort in that, more hope. We’ve all seen the photos, the videos. We all know somebody or know somebody who knows somebody. There will always be a kid who slips away. There will always be a chance that kid will get scared, grab hold of another kid, take them into the sky with them, beyond the clouds.

I trudge back upstairs and find Felix already sound asleep and snoring gently in his ceiling bed, the northern lights projector I got him for his birthday spinning an array of violets, oranges, greens, pinks, and blues across his fragile body, his perfect face. I stand underneath him, reach up on my tiptoes and graze the tips of his golden locks with my fingers.

“You’ll be okay,” I whisper. “First they need to figure out why it’s happening to just kids, and then they can…” I trail off. I have no idea what I’m talking about, not really.

I suddenly remember I loaned our step ladder to Rosa. I have no way to get up to Felix and tuck him in. I scan his dark room, looking for a solution. Then I realize the solution is everywhere. Quietly I begin making a pile of Felix’s stuff. Ottoman, chair, boxes, cushions, up and up. Not totally secure, not perfectly stable, but good enough. I scale it slowly, sheets and pillow folded under my arm, until I’m up at his bed, right next to him. My son. I unfold the sheets and cover his body, velcroing the edges along the sides. I gently lift his head, tuck his pillow under it, carefully fastening it to the mattress cover.

Then, heart breaking with more love and fear than I know what to do with, I kick my leg up, above his bed, hoist my body up, leaving the floor behind, and swing myself over so I’m clinging onto the side of the bed next to him, gripping with all my strength, imagining for a moment that nothing has changed. Lying next to Felix, watching him dream, gravity be damned. Pretending I can hold on forever without falling.

 

 

Chris Scott’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, Okay Donkey, HAD, Flash Frog, ergot., MoonPark Review, New Flash Fiction Review, scaffold, Gone Lawn, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. His fiction has been selected for Best Small Fictions 2025, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He is a regular contributor for ClickHole, and an elementary school teacher in Washington, DC. You can read his writing at https://www.chrisscottwrites.com.

Chelsea flash nonfiction

At Young Writers Camp Six Weeks After My Second Laparoscopy by Emma Bolden

Eighteen and sunstruck and sweating, my body was a wave that crashed and crashed. On the way to the picnic, I peeled a secret path away from the others to stand alone by the lake and consider my intentions to end it. Me, I meant. No waves licked the shore. I wore jeans with pockets but didn’t bother to search for stones: my will alone was strong enough. I was certain. I didn’t want to think any more. About the pain cresting through my gut, the dark spotted swarms of endometriosis, tissue gone bad, gone stubborn as fish refusing to give up the taste of the worm along with the hook. Of course I cried. Everything was messy. I hoped and didn’t hope someone would see me, save me from my self and the body in which I lived, which was also the self. Unfortunately. It wasn’t a lake, to be honest, more like a pond, and one so shallow I could almost see the sun in its center reaching gold down to the muck-clogged bottom. Ridiculous, I told my self, and my self couldn’t do anything but agree. I wiped my eyes and nose with the back of my shirt and rejoined the group, who in their kind politeness pretended I had never left. We ate charred hot dogs and drank warm Diet Cokes, ashed our menthols into empty cans. I wasn’t happy or relieved but I felt better, golder. I had made a decision and I had decided to walk away from it, too, and save something a little like my life.

 

Emma Bolden is the author of a memoir, The Tiger and the Cage (Soft Skull), and the poetry collections House Is an Enigma, medi(t)ations, and Maleficae. Her fourth poetry collection, God Elegy, is forthcoming from BOA Editions. The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, she is an editor of Screen Door Review: Literary Voices of the Queer South.

 

Chelsea flash fiction

Wintering by Divya Kernan

My neighbor shouldn’t live on his own. Not once in the four weeks since I moved in, have I seen a soul enter his apartment—no friend, no family, no girl—and yet, the boy cannot be older than seventeen.

Grey skin, overcast eyes, an odd edge to his shadow. We never talk.

When I leave for work, straight in my stiff collar and high heels, I feel him stare at me from his dirty window. I come home after dark to his breathing under the door and the smell of old carpeting. With the languor of winter’s dreamless slumber, I press the key into my lock, lingering in the unheated corridor for a bite of his voice. I get nothing.

***

One Friday night, after a tall, lonely glass of coke on the rocks, I lose it.

“Hey you, in there,” I call out, mouth to the wall. “I’m new here. Care to say hi?”

No answers but a blank breath, and by my thigh, a spot of tepid plaster where on the other side he lays his cheek.

I startle at my own imaginings and let out a curse.

What is there here but me, a weekend of too many empty hours and sugar to rot my teeth?

Nothing, indeed. Under my palm the wall is so cool, wetness coats the length of my fingers. I step back.

Fresh out of college, I long to be a girl a while further, a somewhat child, close to what the boy is. Truth is, I should have gone home after all, stuck with mom and dad and the soul-numbing local job. Except I’m still holding out for something out here—the gold, the fleece, the prince, the big opportunity, who knows?—something beyond the black pair of overpriced pumps and sullen pencil skirt that bind me into this pretense that I am worth minding. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do for yourself—go get the world, hold out, be worth minding—before you skitter back home with your tail between your legs?

I bet the boy’s in college, getting the world, or the next best thing.

***

Sunday morning, I knock.

“Hey kid, wanna have lunch with me?”

You can come out, I don’t bite.

For my troubles, I get shushed footsteps padding away from me.

At noon, I leave steaming beet soup in front of his door with a quick, quiet rap. Seven days it remains there, as I watch for him to pick it up, clean it out, the bright stew, garnet as wine, curdled cold and lumpy.

By next Sunday, the forgotten food has grown a hairy coat of green and white, a delicate doormat at his shut door.

***

Days pass; I find myself pondering his unnatural aloneness as I fall asleep in my single bed, nails bothering white blisters off the wall. Why doesn’t he answer? Why is he watching me? How does he spend his days? I’ve had a belly full of ice cubes since I moved in.

One night, I am on the balcony, having a smoke, stalking the moon’s slow rise, fingers croaky in the December air, when I hear it: a milky whisper, unnerving as the damp look that licks my neck every morning.

“Cold,” he says.

For a stretch, I think I’m dreaming, the texture of his voice grainy in my ears next to my own thoughts. Is someone missing me at home? Where are all the friends you’re supposed to make in college? Did sweet Danny Frost from middle school get married? What about the dude who promised he’d French kiss me if by thirty no one else had?

The tip of my tongue meets the bitter end of the cigarette and curls away.

“It’s going to snow,” I say.

I don’t see him across the black chasm between our balconies but there’s no one else.

“I wish I could see it,” he says. Or maybe that’s not what he says, only what I hear. It doesn’t matter: he doesn’t care to be reached.

Still, my mind probes the darkness for him.

“You will, soon.”

The snow will be down before dawn.

“So much cold,” I hear once more.

***

Next morning, the snow starts as I walk out. Watching his empty window, waiting, I stick my tongue out and catch a shaving of falling ice. He doesn’t show.

I wonder who he is. A lost kid. A ghost in a stony city. A kin.

***

On my way home, I grab ice cream for two. Cold on cold. I’m about to knock when his door sways open an inch or two.

“Hey there, kiddo? Everything OK?”

I push in, no warmth puffing out of his place, no light either.

Inside, his apartment mirrors mine in all things but furniture. The sharp, straight lines of white walls cocoon a small expanse of nothing much but dusty air. No heater, no lightbulbs dangling from lonely ceiling wires, no boy. A tiny box of absence.

And too much ice for one person.

***

Outside, the snow blankets everything. Ice on ice, the extra chill gloved in bittersweet quietness. Sugar rots my teeth; I fall asleep, lips to the wall, holding out for his soft breath—my too-young, grey shadow, my kin. The boy no one misses.

Let me hold out.

 

Divya Kernan (she/her) is a biracial and neurodivergent speculative fiction writer, a French native and an alumna of the Short Story Incubator at GrubStreet, Boston. Her work has appeared in Baffling Magazine. You can find her on Bluesky: @divyakernan.bsky.social.