Chelsea flash fiction

The Box by Rachel M. Hollis

The jury summons arrives in the mail while I’m at my twenty-week scan, watching the curve of my boy’s spine.

I show up Monday, expecting to be excused. The judge disagrees. Six months’ postponement would only mean showing up with a newborn “on the outside.”

When I’m called to the box, I push my belly out as I sit, exaggerating the effort.

“Please state your name, where you live, what you do, any kids in your home.”

“Not yet,” I say, pointing to my stomach. No reaction. No dismissal.

Juror after juror is questioned. I’m still in. I panic, listing every excuse: ultrasounds, sciatica, peeing when I sneeze. The judge gives me a look. The bailiff calls the next name.

We’re sworn in.

The defendant wears an orange jumpsuit. “His choice,” the judge explains. He fires his lawyer before opening statements, then spends the morning scratching his eyebrow raw. Like he’s trying to erase himself.

“Those weren’t my drugs,” the man blurts, tugging at his sleeve as he cross-examines the officer.

The judge sighs. “That’s not a question.” His first of many warnings. We shift in our seats, eyes down.

“Did you know they weren’t mine?”

The officer doesn’t blink. “They were in your pocket.” I wonder how often that’s all it takes.

By week three, his eyebrow is red and swollen, his jumpsuit stained and wrinkled. I scan the courtroom for anyone watching him, worried about him, rooting for him. No one. He lowers his head to the desk, like he’s already been sentenced. As the judge reads instructions, I catch fragments: evidence, burden, credibility.

The twelve of us are sent to a small, windowless room that smells like sweat and sanitizer. I sit quietly as they debate the case, the testimony, his mental state.

The foreperson passes out slips of paper. I write guilty and slide it forward. They all match and the room exhales. Then empties.

I rest my hand on my belly, a hard kick beneath my palm. Like he felt the weight of it, too.

 

Rachel M. Hollis lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, child, and a deeply unmotivated dog. Her work appears or is forthcoming in River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, Midway Journal, Gone Lawn, Funicular, and elsewhere.

 

Chelsea prose poetry

Maurice, Come Back, I’m Waiting Tonight at the Boathouse by Gordon Taylor

Here is a memory. Our feet had the floor in a bar lavatory. Sean and me in the locked stall. My bare calves hugged the toilet base as I sat. He stood before me. His white, untied sneakers faced my scuffed brown cowboy boots inside a bunched blue jean. Our moans stifled.

Here is early Sunday afternoon in the park. The grass is trammeled. An elderly couple practices salsa steps near an encampment of tents, and small purple balloon flowers grow at the base of an inoculated Ash, trunk bearing an orange spray painted number.

I notice felled timber from last week’s storm, when the internet dimmed, and the subway filled with river. We’re hitched to the shiny, flat world of our phones, sitting cross legged on navy blue terry towels. Our lunch is greasy sweet potato fries. I have a fear of blindness.

What is the difference between hope and denial? After marriage equality, after so many doomed queer heroes, after hiding in stories of clandestine spies, how dare we consider divorce? I guess that is the yang of freedom.

I’m angry when lovers part before the credits roll. Sean says I’m addicted to the light of others, but describes a true optimist as someone who accepts shade. My napkin blows away. Don’t worry, Sean says, I have another.

Do we love the way Maurice loved Alec, the gamekeeper in the movie of the Forster novel? Lust like a life was at stake. I first saw Maurice when AIDS was killing us, when sex was an epic. Sean says the film is privilege porn, a British aristocrat scratching his nails across a taut workingman’s back.

Here, we’re swarmed by wasps. Their faces are my mother freaking in a stiff Elizabethan collar when Sean and me waltzed at my cousin’s wedding. Later in bed at the hotel, he whispered into my neck that I was his.

Next to the park is a string of cars. I notice two birds on the street, one with beak nestled into the wing of the other. Our dog James, the coroner, assembles the puzzle of a battered body, running away and returning with mysteries hanging from his drooling mouth, gifts dropped at my side.

He can smell sadness, the way elephants smell rain from miles away. First, he brings me a severed wing, jagged line of blood at the bite mark, matted feathers, a hooked beak, then a sharp pink foot.

I change into the corpse, leathered skin receding to bone.

There are no eyes.

 

Gordon Taylor is a queer emerging poet who walks an ever-swaying braided wire of technology and poetry. A 2022 Pushcart Prize nominee, his poems have appeared in Narrative, Malahat Review, Poet Lore, Arc, and more. He writes to invite people into a world they may not have seen.

Chelsea prose poetry

The Service Dog is Really Uninterested in the Figure-Writing Session by Laurin Becker Macios

Two models sit uncomfortably on a table draped in a sheet to look like a bed, wishing they’d struck easier positions. Her: one knee bent to touch her chest, her spine spun into an S, but at least her chin rests on her fist, at least her maple-hued hair is held tight in a high bun away from her face. Him: halfway through movement, leaving the bed, maybe leaving her—actually, she has turned him away, spurned a shy advance just as shyly, or cut the tie of a years-long relationship by saying, “I just don’t love you anymore.” And his eyes are downcast, sad really, one hand with a light grip on his own skin (I am really here, this is not a dream) and about to say to a spot on the wall, “It’s not a light switch, that’s not how love works,” to which she won’t respond, will just look at the opposite wall until the silence over-churns and she gives finally to the butter of it and says, “It’s been happening for some time now,” and they both just stay there, like the glue of the moment is dry and neither can peel from the bed full of memories, like the day they bought it, their first joint-purchase, and she was wearing in fact these same pleated jean shorts because they are not a fad for her, she got them from her mother, one of the only things she had to leave her along with some trinkets and costume jewelry, and as he remembers them slipping down to her ankles someone calls, “One more minute,” and the dog lifts his head just slightly off the dusty floor to sigh, stretches a paw, scratches a claw against the wood, and suddenly the girl smiles, turns to the guy, but he stands up and, not looking back, walks out of the room.

 

 

Laurin Becker Macios is the author of Calling Me Home, a Young Adult verse novel forthcoming from Holiday House in 2026; Somewhere to Go, winner of the 19th annual poetry award from Elixir Press; and I Almost Was Animal, winner of the 2018 Writer’s Relief WaterSedge Poetry Chapbook Contest. Her work has appeared in Gulf Stream Magazine, [PANK], and elsewhere, and is currently nominated for Best of the Net 2026. The former Executive Director of Mass Poetry and former Program Director of the Poetry Society of America, she earned her MFA in Creative Writing Poetry from the University of New Hampshire, where she taught on fellowship. She lives in Connecticut.

Chelsea flash fiction

The Solitude of the Conquered by Thomas Mixon

Howie didn’t like his eyedrops, though it prevented ulcers, which prevented further vision loss. I could have been gentler. I was holding his head with one hand, trying to get the cap unstuck with the other, when I no longer heard his nails scraping the floor.

We were off the floor. We were floating, a few feet above the linoleum. And then, after we were funneled outside, the Earth. It was painless. I felt fine. I didn’t need to pee or eat. I was scared, but I suppose they couldn’t do anything about that.

They definitely didn’t say “conquered.” They definitely didn’t say anything. You could see their lights, moving in a smooth pattern, somewhere between clouds and space. But they were completely silent.

Howie got used to the levitation before I did. He curled up, midair, and took a nap. I tried to “swim” toward him, like I’d seen astronauts do, but the physics weren’t right. We were separate. We were moving. Slowly, like them, above us. We were in the same rotation for the first day, but at some point he drifted. It didn’t feel accidental, and he was sleeping, so I didn’t call his name.

They made sure we didn’t get too hot or cold. A couple months had passed. It still didn’t feel natural, but I’d never been to Spain, which was nice. There was a lot of ocean, for a while, then land. I saw a sign that said “Bar Ciaboga.” It was a tourist area, but there were no tourists, apart from the thirty or so other folks I could see hovering above the street.

Some of them I knew a little. They mostly slept, occasionally cried. I traveled with the same neighbors for about a week before the rotation would shift. It was subtle. If there were rules, apart from being just out of arms reach, they weren’t explained.

The wind that pushed us along reminded me of Howie’s breath. It smelled like Doritos. It wasn’t wind, but what else could I call it? “Force” felt a little mean, though of course we were being moved against our will. Kept away from each other, street signs, anything we could easily grab.

One man, I’d like to believe as an act of resistance, masturbated continually. We could still grab ourselves. When he ejaculated, the substance lingered by his side a few minutes before evaporating. I knew he’d be gone within a day or so, but still. I was formulating the perfect phrase, to get him to stop, when I fell to the ground.

Which isn’t fair to say, because they made sure I landed softly on my ass. Something invisible held me to the sidewalk. They had commandeered an electronic billboard. I knew this because the screen read, “We have commandeered this electronic billboard.” Ivy obscured the edges. The graphics were not too good, but despite the poor quality, I could tell it was me, footage of me.

All my moments of grace, and mistakes. The big ones of course I remembered. But the majority, I didn’t. The everyday kindnesses and incivility. It lasted about two hours. I’m not sure how they compressed it. The scenes were fast. I should have expected that. They were, are, nothing if not efficient.

I was never good at math. This they did not seem to know, or care about. At the end, a big equation was displayed. Then I was, unceremoniously, back in the air.

The numbers were lopsided. They had made a calculation, but it felt too impersonal to be a judgement. Plus, there had been nothing about Howie, who I knew I could have been gentler with. Did they not consider dogs? If not, how intelligent could they be?

By the time I reached the end of the city, there was an amusement park. The attractions were still. There was a statue at the entrance of the rollercoaster. Of an alien, our idea of aliens, from before, holding its palm upward. You had to be that tall to ride the ride.

They didn’t say “conquered.” And they didn’t say anything, when I gripped the little green plastic hand.

It took a while to pull myself down, but whatever had formerly held me, gradually gave way. Someone nearby shouted. It was the masturbating man. He had already passed the roller coaster, but began kicking backward, in my direction. He stretched toward the ticket office, though it was clear the rotation was shifting again.

He screamed, “How?” I had no idea. It shouldn’t have been possible. Just like it couldn’t have been Howie, hovering over the concession stand, pointing his snout toward the tent.

It was him, though. I whistled. I kept saying his name. He cocked his head each time, but went back to sniffing eventually. Maybe he didn’t remember me, or just couldn’t see anymore.

It took a while before I could walk. I only made it to the concession stand before collapsing under this tent. There’s cotton candy here, prepackaged. I hadn’t realized I was hungry. After sunset, I feel mosquitoes, for the first time since we were conquered. They eat me, while I eat the sugar. Lots of things buzz in the dark. Has it always been so loud at night?

There are small campfires across the bay. Other escapees, but I hope not my dog. I hope he stays forever buoyant. Maybe all the dogs will. I’m already forgetting how I held his head. I do it to myself, seizing my own scruff. I fake howl into the void.

Someone howls back. It’s the masturbating man. He scurries under the tent. He asks for the cotton candy. While he tells me how he freed himself, I keep my nails dug into the back of my neck. And overhead, they don’t say a goddamn thing.

 

Thomas Mixon is a fiction reader for Short Story, Long. He has poems and prose in Pithead Chapel, Rattle, Eye to the Telescope, and elsewhere. He sometimes writes at https://inanorchardsoftwithrot.substack.com.