Category: flash fiction

Ichi, ni, san, shi… Benny’s only been a Wal-Mart stockboy a couple of weeks, part time after school, and he’s already managed to screw it up. He grinds his teeth, literally bites his tongue, listening to the dweeby Assistant Manager spout words like “progressive discipline” and “termination” and “reimburse us for our property.” How many jobs has he been fired from the past year? Two, but really it’s three if he counts the deli he quit before getting fired. Of course, he still threw a full Boar’s Head bologna tube (and a couple of punches) at the assistant manager’s face on his way out, but at least he wasn’t officially a deli employee when he did it. Progress, right? Whatever. He only works because his mom says she needs help with the bills. He breathes in deep that particular Wal-Mart scent of body odor and cheap plastic, and silently repeats, Ichi, ni, san, shi…

Counting in Japanese is the only thing that has stuck so far in a month’s worth of free karate lessons on Tuesday nights. He looks across the desk at the Assistant Manager’s stupid face, his dumb mustache, idiot necktie, and doesn’t think it would be difficult to karate chop the moronic look off his face. Ichi, ni, san, shi…Benny’s mom thought karate would help with his anger issues. Same as when she came upon Groupons for yoga. Or meditation. Or scream therapy. He doesn’t want to admit it, but he does feel less angry after karate. He hasn’t been tempted to punch any of the other stockboys, and not just because one of his knuckles might still be broken from his last fight (again, the deli assistant manager). His mom says it’s nice to see his smile. After all, it’s been over a year since his dad ran off with a pool tech at the Pinch-A-Penny he managed. Ichi, ni, san, shi…

Benny’s not really listening to the Wal-Mart Assistant Manager. He can practically feel the snug fit of the foam gloves he wore as Sensei counted off his punches on the practice dummy.  He hears the numbers in Sensei’s voice. Ichi, ni, san, shi… He told his mom about Sensei. About how Sensei is teaching him to count to ten in Japanese. Sensei is Japanese for “good father.” He thinks. He’s not sure. But he’s probably right. He’ll most likely ask his mom to sign him up for paid karate lessons once the free trial is over. He wants to feel like he feels after karate on Tuesdays all the time. Ichi, ni, san, shi… The Assistant Manager is still talking about how “pallet jacks aren’t toys” and “ghost riding company equipment off a loading dock” is a level three infraction. Ichi, ni, san, shi…

Manager is derived from the old English “bad father.” Benny only remembers how to count to four in Japanese. But soon he’ll learn how to count all the way to ten. He’ll get there. Eventually. If he keeps up with karate. “Who raised you to act like this?” the Wal-Mart Assistant Manager wants to know. Oh, Benny forgot, he learned one other thing from Sensei. Benny stands up. Tilts forward at the waist. Before a fight, you bow to your opponent.

---

 

Mario Aliberto III is the author of All the Dead We Have Yet to Bury (Chestnut Review, 2025), and his short fiction has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Fractured Lit, The Pinch, and other fine journals. A graduate with a Creative Writing degree from the University of South Florida, he lives in Tampa Bay with his wife and daughters, and yet the dog still runs the house. Find him online at marioaliberto3.com

Charlotte babysat her three young cousins after school until their parents got home from work. She was only 16, but to the children, she was a grown-up. She made them play quietly while she did her homework. Then the fun began. Arts and crafts, dress-up time, all sorts of games.

After playtime, they would all sit on the floral sofa, one child on Charlotte’s lap, one up close on either side, inhaling her scent of Jergen’s lotion and Juicy Fruit gum. There they watched Star Trek. The children loved Kirk and Spock, but they cheered when they saw Lt. Uhura.  She looked like them. She was smart. She was an astronaut. She was beautiful, just like Cousin Charlotte.

One day, the youngest said to her cousin, “You smell different.” Charlotte turned the TV on early. There was no dress-up, there were no games. She sat at the dining room table, head down on her closed books. She didn’t get up even when Uhura was on the screen.

A few days later, their parents said that Charlotte had to go away, and Mrs. Washington would look after them from now on.

“Is Cousin Charlotte sick?” one of the children asked. Their parents looked at one another.

“Yes, she’s sick,” their mother said. “She’ll come home when she’s better.”

Mrs. Washington wouldn’t let them watch TV; she said it was the devil’s work. She didn’t play games. She thought arts and crafts were too messy. She had no interest in getting the costumes out for dress-up.

Sometimes, the children would sneak into their parents’ room and watch Star Trek while Mrs. Washington slept in the easy chair. One child said Charlotte must have gone away in a spaceship like Uhura. One said she had gotten married to Spock. One child said, “No, she’s sick for real, or she wouldn’t have left us.”

Cousin Charlotte came home in the spring. She was thinner and walked with her head down. The children saw her at their grandparents’ house, and they ran to her shouting questions. She smiled and hugged them all.

“Yes, I’m much better,” she answered the eldest. “No, I didn’t live on a spaceship,” she told the middle child. And to the youngest she said “No, I can’t babysit you anymore.”

The next day after school, the children heard Mrs. Washington talking on their parents’ phone.

“A good girl wouldn’t have got herself in that situation,” she said. “Well, I know she won’t never set foot in my house.”

The children didn’t understand, so they slipped quietly up the stairs, turned the volume low, and watched Uhura among the stars.

 

---

 

Claudia Wair is a Black American writer whose work is forthcoming or has appeared in Vestal Review, Pithead Chapel, Astrolabe, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. You can read more at claudiawair.com, or find her on Bluesky @CWTellsTales.bsky.social and on Instagram @CWTellsTales.

A curl of a woman pouring a curl of water onto a garden patch. A square yard of soil that yields up some tiny shoots. Seed, then plant, then seed again. She tells herself this is the cycle of life. She stands in front of her trailer, and the trailer has windows like eyes that watch and watch. It is some kind of summer, and we know this by her dress, all cotton and flower, the sun shadows on a flap of laundry on the line, a caged-up bird that has forgotten how to fly. A stick of a man sits behind her. He holds up a fishpole, the kind he might have used when he was younger, before old age caged him in.

In a minute, a storm will whisper. The man will say, that figures. It is, he will say, some kind of summer and storms are gonna be. Now he can stop pretending he was going fishing and he and the woman, who has stopped her watering, go in the trailer. Outside the wind is building, and we know this by the punch flap in the sheet still hanging on the line. We know this by the creak of the birdcage swinging back and forth. Once inside, the man and the woman look at one another. Maybe he will love me again, she thinks. She wants to think. But a man is not a garden, a man is not a shoot.

After the storm, which will be much bigger than summer, bigger than firefly and bird chirp and wind coming out of the east, their turned over trailer with its blinded windows will be half a mile down. Rolled over and over, spun and died and died again. No cycle left for them here, the two of them flung onto the ground, fallen laundry. Near them, a birdcage broken, a bird that has flown.

---

 

Francine Witte is a flash fiction writer and poet, and the author of the flash collection RADIO WATER. Her newest poetry book, Some Distant Pin of Light, has just been published by Cervena Barva Press. Her work has been widely published, and she is a recent recipient of a Pushcart Prize. She lives in New York City. Please visit her website francinewitte.com. She can be found on social media @francinewitte. (Photo credit: Mark Strodl)

 

Jessa watched as the funeral procession piled into the limo. The widow remarked it was “a sign” that the driver had parked beneath the willow tree, since her late Ralph frequented the arboretum and willows were his favorite. But, as groundskeeper, Jessa knew better. The limo would idle there tomorrow and every day after. 

As the mourners departed, Jessa heard rustling stir from the grave. Four raccoons had perched upon Ralph’s casket, blueberries in hand. Inky jam smeared across the nameplate, pawprints streaked the mahogany. There were no signs. Only raccoons and blueberries, and the dead men trapped beneath them.

---

I was waiting with the other parents in the corner of the parking lot when our preschoolers floated out of the school. We collectively gasped, surprised to see the whole class, twelve children, shrieking in delight, bodies lifted, each with a brand new pair of wings. I scanned the crowd for Molly, imagining her wings were a soft, buttery yellow, her favorite color. The students fluttered about, each one behaving how you’d expect them to – the two besties with matching wings holding hands and flying in a circle; Juniper, the cryer, already sitting on the ground and sobbing, his wings drooping behind him; Rigger, kicking up near the roofline, wings beating furiously, trying to make it over; and then here she was, my dear sweet Molly, hovering near my shoulder with delicate yellow wings threaded with blue and purple, reaching to hold my hand. The two teachers followed them out, practically buzzing with excitement. “The time has come,” the lead teacher Erica announced. “We didn’t expect it to happen so early in the year, but one student’s wings emerged and then soon everyone’s wings were sprouting.” “How do we take care of them?” asked the parent who questioned everything at every school meeting. “We’ve put a handout in your student’s backpack,” said Erica and both teachers held up bunches of backpacks in their hands, because the children couldn’t wear backpacks. I looked at Molly, her blue eyes at my eye level, and then beyond to where her new wings were gently working. It was a not-rainy spring day and the sun’s rays caught the wings’ shimmer, creating an iridescent aura that was breathtaking. Her wings beat a little faster and Molly lifted a few inches. We smiled at each other. “Do you like my wings, Mama?” she asked.

“I love them,” I said, and I really did. This was the reason I chose this preschool, after all. When we moved to the area we didn’t know anyone, and a parent in a park near our house recommended it. I didn’t fully agree with all of its philosophy when I checked out the website, but the wings development spoke to my heart. How I longed for my own wings when I was younger, a strong pair to lift me up and away, high into the tree canopy. Unfortunately David didn’t agree with any of it, and it became the first major discord in our parenting philosophy, a bifurcation that only grew until we decided to separate. I squeezed Molly’s hand as I wondered what David would have to say about her wings. “Look, Mama, a bird!” said Molly, letting go of my hand. She got that determined look on her face and stretched her arms up and wide. Her wings beat faster and faster, her body jerking in a zig zag as she rose to the crown of a vine maple. I held my breath as I watched her, knowing practice would smooth out the roughness, like watching her take her first steps all over again. She got to the top and reached for a little black and white chickadee. The bird flitted off and Molly’s wings stopped. She started falling and I ran forward, ready to catch her in my arms. Just as quickly, they started beating again. I felt Erica there, standing next to me, her hand on my shoulder as Molly slowly lowered herself to the ground. “Molly!” I cried. I crouched down, enveloping her. I could feel her wings vibrating through the sleeves of my fleece jacket, the structure of them more rigid than I thought they would be. “You scared me.” “The bird flew away and I fell,” said Molly. Erica was still next to us, I think she was waiting for me to say something, but when I couldn’t get the words out she gently talked to Molly about staying safe with her new wings. Erica knew all about David and me; she had to, because a different one of us might be at pickup or Molly might forget something at David’s that needed to come to school. She also knew his stance on wings. I was grateful for her talking to Molly and for her talking to David too, when the time came. I stood up and took Molly’s backpack from Erica and gave her a hug. Molly rose again as we moved to the car. My daughter was flying.

---

Ellie Larsen writes stories about people who (usually) live in Oregon. Ellie also lives in Oregon, just outside of Portland, with her family. She’s currently working on her first novel. 

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.

 

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.

After your mother sells the house, you return home one final time to help her pack up things for the movers. A couple days into boxing all the paraphernalia of decades spent living here, you’re emptying out the drawers of your mother’s desk and come upon a worn ledger. Curious how she managed the finances, you open this old notebook—and quickly find that it kept track of not money but time, with numbers that neatly slot hours and minutes into blue-lined columns. Beside them are descriptions that together read like a concise chronicle of shared moments—dinosaur exhibit, play rehearsal, dental cleaning, oboe lesson, slumber party prep—a long-running list that takes you back to that afternoon you found an old-fashioned stopwatch sitting atop this very desk, its inert hands reading 1 hour and 17 minutes.

“What lasted that long?” you asked.

Standing beside her by the kitchen sink, you held the stopwatch up to your mother, its white dial with bold numerals filling your palm like a little handful of time.

She wiped her wet hands on her apron, then answered, “That was our visit to the park yesterday.”

“It was over an hour?”

“It was! Remember all the things you did? Putting on your jacket and shoes, walking down the street, petting the neighbor’s old pug, playing on the swings and jungle gym and slide, having cheese and crackers at the picnic table. When you add up everything, even a simple visit to the park can take a while.”

“Why do you need know how long all that took?”

“Because it’s important to know how we use our time.”

Now, looking at the calculations in the ledger, you realize this is how she knew how to use her time. It’s why she was up late that night after taking you to the park—the light from her study surprising you when you got up to use the bathroom—and why she accepted all those playdate invitations from Elana’s mom on your behalf and why you went to art camp that summer before the wildlife cruise. In these pages, time spent with you was always paired with a measure of time set aside for her work.

Because “Discoveries take time,” your mother always said. And she was able to make some really good ones, thanks to this ledger.

In your hands now, it seems to have been waiting for you all these years, for you to add to its pages the gains and losses you’ve accrued as a result of the way she handled time. Several spring to mind: a childhood crush on the tween babysitter; a love-hate relationship with art; an adherence to doing chores regularly and thoroughly; a predilection for vapid video games with cartoony graphics. But an accurate accounting would involve delving into more than you could ever know about yourself and your past. And a distaste for inaccuracy is a quality you’ve long shared with your mother.

So you close the ledger and place it in the box next to you, the interior already half full with old letters, passports, journals and crayon drawings on newsprint.

---

 

Soramimi Hanarejima is the author of the neuropunk story collection Literary Devices For Coping. Soramimi’s recent work appears in Pulp Literature, The Offing, Black Warrior Review, and The Cincinnati Review.

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.

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.