Category: flash fiction

Let me introduce you to a woman you’ve been sleeping with. Every so often for the last nine months. I wish I could say she’s pretty like she has soft lips, large, limpid eyes, or that she sways gently when she walks. Say some detail like that her nose crinkles when she smiles. But she’s not like that. It’s okay if you don’t know if you like her right away.

She’s sleeping now, lying on a thin gray pillow, cradling one wrist with the other palm. The light is early morning muddy. Her neck is long and rises far over her shoulders, her chin is fleshy underneath. You can see her collarbones and shoulder nubs and other parts you cannot name under the skin. At rest her mouth curves down like a rainbow, her eyes curve down, too. Inside she has a hollow space under her ribs, the pit of her, an empty-feeling crevice.

She’s waking up.

The mattress is swaying beneath you both as she shifts. She bows her head to your shoulder, so the fly-away hairs stand up, making your nostrils twitch. Your cat will probably start screaming for breakfast in two more minutes.

This woman starts scratching her cheek in a way that makes a soft rasping that is kind of irritating and kind of sweet. She lifts her face to you (someone she’s been fucking and just recently fucked) says good morning. Nudges your cheek with her nose.

After a pause, she tucks her chin in, scrunches her nose, draws down her eyebrows. Nudges you again and speaks from the side of her mouth saying, would you still be with me if my face looked like this?

Listen very carefully. What she means is will you stay with her even if her face gets chewed off by a dog, or she gains two hundred pounds, or her vagina gets stretched out from having four babies.

I know. What’s inside is what counts; but that’s more of her body. The slick organs pumping, that would come slithering out like a long live snake if a slit were made in the wrong place. Her body, the shape of her face, her bones, are who she is. Her brain and her face are wired together with an intricate system of the same nerves and blood vessels. Her sense of humor is the way her eyebrows rise, or how her face stretches when she laughs. She is in her eyeballs and how the lashes move and how her spine bends and how her breathing sounds. I know.

Turn toward the body in your bed, grab her padded hip bone, kiss her spiky shoulder.

Tell her you’ll love her no matter what.

---

Madeline Graham is a writer and Minnesotan. Her work is available or forthcoming in HAD, Southern Humanities Review, Redivider, Forge Literary Magazine, and Ghost Parachute, among others. Find her on Twitter @madelineRgraham.

The dead horse has more strength today. It can usually only muster enough energy to lift its head, from where it was euthanized, in the Campo, thirty years ago. But now, no invisible pressure stops it from contracting its throat muscles. No one can see the relief it feels, stretching, fully, after all this time. Even though it cannot breathe.

It’s just as well. The air quality is bad. Wildfires surround the town. The famous race, scheduled for the weekend, has just been cancelled. Everyone alive is upset, everyone dead has their own problems.

For example, how to make it over to the jockey, sitting in front of one of the cafes. He doesn’t look like a jockey, currently, but the dead horse instantly recognizes him as the man it threw off its back, decades ago, during the last Palio it ever ran.

While the dead horse tries to stand, the former jockey looks around the square, trying to identify which of the thirtyish year-old women sipping coffee, alone, could be his daughter. It may be none of them. He was supposed to meet her, Angie, yesterday. But he didn’t leave the mattress. He thought, if I don’t get out of bed, for real, then I can later say, I’m so sorry, I honestly stayed horizontal. He wasn’t sure he could do it. He had to pee, early. Luckily he had some dishware on the nightstand, which he could reach, and did reach, without touching the floor.

He changes his mind, often. He’s aware of this. He enjoys making plans, only to break them, and, conversely, likes showing up unannounced, creating spontaneous plans, where others must change their schedule to accommodate him. And people often do, accommodate him, because when he is not depressed and lying next to cappuccino cups filled with his own urine, he is charming.

In fact, he’s charming the waitstaff, currently. Minutes earlier they were moping around, coughing, complaining about the smoke. But now, they are laughing. He’s making a big enough scene that Angie, sitting across the plaza, notices him, and wonders if he is her father. It was a relief, his absence, growing up. The fathers of all her friends were either too nice or too mean. She didn’t have to deal with any of that. Her mother dated, but none of them lasted. They all looked like tofu. The ones that worked inside, at desks, were soft and deformed. The ones that labored outside were gritty and burned. They all reeked entirely of their surroundings. Were, actually, nothing, inside. They all crumbled before she learned their names.

The dead horse hobbles toward the former jockey. Antonio, Angelo? Something like that. What it remembers is how great it felt, to whip the idiot to the ground. It fell, too. But it was worth it, to see him, in pain, before someone called for the needle. It wanted the earth to swallow him. But the guy landed near the edge of the crowd, and a woman pulled him out of the way. Oh well, at least the man’s legs were twisted, surely broken, thought the horse, just before it died.

Something jostles the former jockey’s table. He shrugs, and continues talking to the waitstaff about the benefits of his tofu scramble. He’s espousing its flexibility, how it takes on the taste of everything around it. How that’s exactly what life should be. That we don’t need keys. We need bendiness. That the spatula to happiness is rubber, not metal.

As she orders another coffee, Angie sees the man, across the plaza, become confused. Waving his hands while his chair, with him in it, scoots around the Campo. He must be her father. He looks exactly how he sounded, on the phone, outwardly jovial, but totally vacuous. Not just lacking any depth but completely unaware there could be depth, that there could be something other than the present moment. Exactly the kind of person that would get thrown off a horse, and have sex with the tourist who pulled him out of harm’s way, and then disappear. Angie had tracked him down, and contacted him, this past Christmas. Not because she wanted a relationship, but money. She had just had a child, her husband was out of work. She thought, why not? The worst he can say is no, and, if so, nothing changes.

When the chair topples over, the former jockey goes with it. He stands up, but continues moving forward. If he had any interiority, Angie thinks, she would call it “against his will.” But he goes with it, propelled by some force, which everyone around the Campo is commenting about, but which nobody intervenes in.

What made her mother, thirty years ago, intervene? Angie imagines her father, back then, falling, and looking placid, on the dirt. No, whatever caused her mother to rescue her father came from her, not him.

Its undetectable bones don’t ache. The dead horse pushes, and keeps pushing the man with its ghost muzzle. It doesn’t think about where it’s pushing, only that it wants to move the former jockey till it can’t anymore, till whatever well of disembodied energy runs dry.

Angie stays where she is. She puts a ceramic mug to her lips, but doesn’t drink. On the cup is a detailed representation of flames. Her flight has been delayed. Her father arrives, at her table, just as ash begins to fall upon the square. Just as the dead horse stumbles. It slips through the cracks between cobblestones, into the center of the planet, where it, at last, inhales. Its lungs are full of liquid iron. It gallops in place. It wins the race.

---

Thomas Mixon is a Kenyon Review workshop alum, and a Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee. He has poetry and fiction in miniskirt magazine, Radon Journal, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. He’s trying to write a few books.

In these last dregs of winter, day and night hold each other close. Dusk lasts for hours as light brushes cool against darkness, and sunrise clings to the last sprinkling of stars. The cold brings with it its own silence, a silence that defies even the wind, raw and damp and searching, sinking so deep into the landscape that it ceases to shiver. Sometimes it’s impossible to believe that there’s anything other than this heavy quiet, but when she looks out to the lake, she hears things. The prickle of ice against water. The hushed lick of water against rushes. The glide of feathers.

The swans always come at this time of year, when it seems impossible that winter will ever end. Only then will she see them, slow white streaks against the bone-grey of the sky. They fly low and land on the lake, its water still pewter, its breath still mist that curls and condenses in the chill. Two of them, the same pair every year, defying her expectation that they will have forgotten her.

Her mother’s shadow also flies low. Unmoored by thin, barely-there days, it stretches over the kitchen and out into the garden, across the living room and up the stairs. It quivers in the wind but never disintegrates, its edges bolstered by the wan sunlight that trickles in through the windows and pools on the floors. Her mother’s shadow, a body swimming. She’s tried telling her mother about the swans, but her mother and the shadow both tell her that she’s making it up. How can she be, how can her mother not have seen them? But her mother will say that she reads too much and has too vivid an imagination, and the shadow will nod in agreement and the whole house will ripple with it. Look out of the window, her mother will say. There’s not even a lake.

But there is a lake, and she’s seen them building their nest in a clump of reeds, the same spot every year. She can hear that too. The thick rustle of twig against twig, a huge mound of them matted together until nothing can get in or out. She’s seen them with the eggs. How protective they are, how they nurture them through the spring storms that are fiercer than winter. What would it be like, to be held so safely? She doesn’t know. She doesn’t think her mother has ever held her at all.

There are lots of things her mother doesn’t seem to do or to see, things that glimmer at the edges of vision like dust motes caught in a strand of light. Things that are just as easy as dust for her mother to sweep away. She’s given up asking her mother to look properly. Can’t you see them? she used to say, pointing to the lake and the swans. You must be able to see them, holding out her arm, her cheek, her heart, still bruised with her mother’s fingers even after so many years, still beating like the steady drip of water from a tap. Drip, drip. Her own body, finally thawing into spring. But her mother says it’s still winter. Her mother says that the bruises aren’t bruises at all. How could they be? she’ll ask, and the shadow will shake its head in puzzlement and the foundations of the house will feel like they’re shifting.

But each year there’s one less egg. Each year there is one less cygnet gliding in their wake. There is a gap in the nest that swells larger each year, but it’s not a quiet gap. There, too, she can hear things. A feather-touch of body against air. A whispering that she thinks must come from the swans. Each year it draws her closer, and last year, she knows, there was only one egg. This year there are none, and the noises from the nest are louder than ever.

She makes her way out to the lake. There is blue in the sky today. There is blue in the water too, pale shimmers of it that drift between the greys. She walks along the path that slides between ice and mud, and she feels her mother’s eyes on her back, feels the lingering fingers of her mother’s shadow. She ignores them. Out here, she is no longer her mother’s daughter. She is swan-call, lake-rustle, a soft feathery shade of grey, and she can hear the singing as she wades through the reeds, water falling away from her body and her feet webbing against the silt. She curls up inside the nest, cocooned suddenly from everything except the sky. The feathers that cover her are breast-warm and damp. She forgets her mother, forgets the bruises, forgets that the lake isn’t supposed to be there at all.

She closes her eyes. The nest, now, is silent.

---

Elodie Barnes is a writer and editor. Her writing is born at the edges
of nature, memory, trauma and the body, and is published regularly in
online and print journals including the Best Small Fictions anthology of
2022. Find her online at elodierosebarnes.weebly.com.

The girl, undeterred by my watching, adds raspberry-frosted Pop-Tarts to a shopping cart. An aisle later, her mom finds the box, grabs her daughter by the arm, grumbles something in her ear, and places the Pop-Tarts on a shelf next to a box of gluten-free crackers. The girl, whose name I discovered on social media is Sophie, turns to me, crosses her eyes, and sticks out her tongue.

I watch as the white fingermarks on Sophie’s arm pink up, and I see her mother, my lover’s wife, the wife he never told me about, the wife who appeared one morning as a blue bubble of text on his phone, pick out his favorite 82% dark chocolate bar, the one that donates to endangered species, the same one I buy for him. The wife is wearing Lululemon leggings that accentuate her lithe frame and has her blonde hair pulled back into a careless ponytail. He told me he loved me for my curves and raven hair and the laugh lines around my eyes.

When I turn the corner in the dairy aisle, Sophie is opening a single-serving size of Organic Valley chocolate milk. She drains it and drops the empty carton next to a selection of organic, free-range eggs while my lover’s wife—I refuse to learn her name—reads the ingredients on a tub of Greek yogurt. Sophie flies me the bird and turns with a saucy flair of her private school skirt. When I told him I couldn’t have kids, he said he didn’t want any.

In the produce department, my lover’s wife gushes over the selection of kale—curly kale, dinosaur kale. The red Russian kale gets her hands flapping and her mouth orgasming. She chats with another yoga-clad shopper, discussing how sweet and tender the red Russian is, how beautiful its oak-shaped leaves, its colors ranging from blue-green to purple-red.

Meanwhile, Sophie switches the price tags of sweet potatoes and Okinawan sweet potatoes. Cucumbers and zucchini. She sidles up to me behind the pyramid of apples, and I can’t resist leaning in to catch a whiff of young adolescence-like onion wafting off her. She takes a bite out of a Honeycrisp and hisses, “Don’t think I won’t tell on you.”

But she won’t. She likes the game too much. This isn’t the first time I’ve followed Sophie and my lover’s wife around the grocery store and Sophie knows it. She’s getting more daring, more sassy with each visit and, still, I cannot stop imagining her as mine. My life as her mother. I imagine us going to the contemporary art museum. Playing tennis. Training a puppy to walk on a leash in the park. I’d be a good mother, I think, and she’d be a good daughter.

In line, eyes on mine, Sophie snags a Snickers off the rack at checkout and slides it onto the belt under a bunch of red Russian kale. I watch as my lover’s wife runs her credit card, smiles as the cashier hands her the receipt, and I see a woman, a wife, a mother. The Snickers is bagged without my lover’s wife seeing it, and, for a second, I think about ratting out Sophie. But I don’t, and Sophie smirks as she grabs the paper bag. When she gets to the door at the front of the store, Sophie turns to me and mouths, Perv.

The cashier has to call next twice before I place Lay’s potato chips, Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Therapy, and Hostess Donettes on the belt. At the last go, I add a Snickers bar. When the cashier asks for a phone number to qualify for Safeway Club discounts, I give his—my soon-to-be ex-lover’s.

The cashier looks at the readout on her register and says, “Thank you, Mrs. Wilcox.”

---

Kim Steutermann Rogers lives with her husband and 16-year-old dog Lulu in Hawaii. Her essay, “Following the Albatross Home” was recognized as notable in Best American Travel Writing. Her journalism has published in National Geographic, Audubon, and Smithsonian; and her prose in Gone Lawn, The Citron Review, Atticus Review, CHEAP POP, Hippocampus, and elsewhere. She was awarded residencies at Storyknife Writers Retreat in Alaska in 2016 and 2021 and Dorland Mountain Arts in 2022. Find her @kimsrogers.

Aaron Sandberg has appeared or is forthcoming in Flash Frog, Phantom Kangaroo, Qu, Asimov’s, No Contact, Alien Magazine, The Shore, The Offing, Sporklet, Crow & Cross Keys, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. A multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, you can see him—and his writing—on Instagram @aarondsandberg.

The highway was slick and iridescent, bleeding red from brake lights scattered on either side of our car. Mac had hit something small, a raccoon or maybe a possum. I squeezed my eyes shut and turned my head. But when a voice shot out of our radio—a voice that sounded like a jumble of sentient vibrations—I winked one eye open in case a claw pushed through our janky AM radio and grabbed Mac by the throat.

“Hello? Anybody there?” Mac asked.

A muffled echo on the other side of the air waves mumbled a reply, which Mac treated like a friendly greeting.

“Could be some trucker on a CB radio,” I suggested.

“Going north?” Mac asked.

The response was a staccato of static and dead space before one of our fan belts drowned out all other sound with whirs and thudding.

Mac balled up his right fist and pounded the dashboard.

“Goddamn’t I told you to get that fixed, didn’t I?”

I stared out the window and drew imaginary lines between droplets and runnels. Mac’s question was for me.

The last twenty miles had felt like a painful endurance test: the murderous thump, the squeak of the wipers, scattered riffs of dance music by artists we were too old to recognize. Flood season had come early. Rain beat against the windshield, leaving a wet curtain the wipers try in vain to beat away.

By the time Mac killed something small and nocturnal, we were two hours away from his parents’ house and his brother’s house and a river that left most of the backyards and driveways ankle-deep in water. Mac wanted to move back home.  He spent our first hour on the road telling me why we needed to live near family—which meant his family. I spent the last forty minutes telling him why I didn’t want to buy a two-flat with his fifty-something uncle who smelled like weed but knew how to “fix things.” After our last stop for gas about twenty miles ago, we’d settled into stubborn silence. Then a stranger crackled through the air waves.

“Hello? Hello?”  The voice on the other side of the radio was clear, curious, feminine.

“Holy crap!  You can hear me?” Mac slapped the steering wheel and scooted higher in his seat the way he did whenever he got to the good part in a story.

“Yes,” she answered. She sounded impatient.

Mac wiggled his eyebrows and grinned at me like we were in cahoots, like hearing some stranger acknowledge us over a car radio on a rainy stretch of highway was some big victory. I uncrossed my arms.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

The reply was a distorted collection of syllables.

Mac shouted the question a second time. I fiddled with the radio, but he pushed my hand away and adjusted the knobs himself.

“Help…Help.”

“Help? Do you need help?” Mac shouted.

“Maybe she thinks we need help,” I offered. Mac shushed me and fiddled with the knobs again.

“How can we help?” By then Mac had resorted to a kind of slow yelling like he was translating his thoughts for someone who was hard of hearing.

The response was a crackle that could’ve been sailboat or salesman. Mac persisted, determined to let this faceless, disembodied stranger know we were there to provide whatever assistance she required. I pressed my eyes closed. The darkness only magnified the hiss of the radio static and the sound of the rain pounding the windshield and the roof.

My eyes opened in time to see a vanload of college kids speed past us fast enough to hydroplane. Their tires spit an angry torrent of water across the driver’s side of the Camry. Mac swore at them before apologizing to the voice from the radio. She repeated a word that sounded like a question—who? through?—while I watched the van fishtail across the road, narrowly missing a Cadillac and a truck hauling gasoline. I mourned all the creatures they must’ve crushed beneath their wheels that night. Mac wouldn’t stop talking. He clutched the steering wheel with both hands and went on about the rain and the flood and the long drive home from St. Charles. His cheeks were frozen in the perma-grin he plastered across his face for family get-togethers and work events. He complained about gas prices and loneliness and settling.

“I think we missed our last turn,” he said.

“Yes,” she answered.

Mac told her about the car he wanted and the house he planned to buy two hundred miles away from the house we already owned. I wanted to talk to the voice too, but there was no room. I wanted to tell her that Mac is the kind of man who eats out of boxes and cans instead of dinner plates and serving bowls. That Mac sits in the same chair every Sunday; that he doesn’t look at me when I walk in a room. That he only says my name when he needs something, and he drags out the second syllable for too long. 

“Help is on the way,” the voice said, only this time she spoke with robotic clarity.

The steering locked. Mac was hairy elbows, clawing fingers, a string of strangled profanities. Our car skidded off the road, and we flipped over into a sloppy ravine. The chassis cracked with painful violence.

“Hello?” I ask. Between the angry hum of the busted windshield wipers, the car draws in tiny, ragged breaths. A fresh pressure throbs through the narrow folds in my brain. I want to reach over and feel his face with my fingers, but I can’t move. My chest and neck are a shimmering mosaic of shattered glass.

“Mac?” I whisper. His reply is a garbled groan, and I know it’s too late. I know that whichever way we turn, we won’t see what’s headed our direction until it runs us over and leaves us both broken and grieving.

---

 

Martha (Marty) Keller’s short stories have appeared in Cagibi, Midway Journal, Roanoke Review, Bridge Eight Literary Magazine, Brilliant Flash Fiction, and elsewhere. She is also a reader for Flash Fiction Magazine. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart and Best Short Fiction anthologies. Over the years, she’s worked in strip malls, skyscrapers, and high school classrooms. She lives with her family at the end of a long trail somewhere outside of Chicago.

 

I was our city-island’s 303rd Atlas, I tell my Tinder date on our first outing at a seaside tavern. I expect him to look suitably impressed at me for holding up our whole town, our whole world for a full year. Never once faltering, nor dropping all its citizens to their watery waste.

Do you have a shellfish allergy? he asks as he peruses the salt-laminated menu.

No, I reply. When I held our city up on my shoulders, the seagulls would often deposit little morsels of mussels in my waiting mouth. The guards administered a new saline injection into my veins every night but the birds, oh the birds wanted me to have the first catch of the day, to not subsist on bare sustenance, but savor the salt of the living.

What was your first kiss like? he asks once our food arrives, and I tell him how my former classmates—they in high school, me randomly chosen to hold the groaning city on my growing shoulders—would slip past the guards after class. They would take turns kissing me—free practice for their older crushes—and I could not let go of the world long enough to push them away. Only once did I resist: my bite led to a slap, which caused a minor earthquake across the city’s lower tiers.

Did you ever want to let the city go? he asks next, sky-eyes clouded as they look out to sea. Did you wish to let us fall and sink in the water forever? His mouth twists, an unspoken “after everything, I would” in the furrow of his brow. I don’t reply, instead asking a question of my own.

Did you know I carried you too?

He makes a sound, questioning, like the boy he once was. I tell him I remember the exact frequency of his pulse, and all the times he almost succeeded in snuffing it out. His heart used to be the heaviest of them all.

In the intruding years, I have ceased to intuit the intricate mechanics of my city. I don’t know who the 313^th Atlas is, what they look like, if the seagulls favor them with treats and secrets the way they once favored me. I have long since fulfilled my duty to my cursed city-island. But my arms are still corded with muscles like twisted tree limbs. When I sleep, I don’t dream in words, but in heartbeats.

I reach across the white-clad table and put his scarred hands on my shoulders. Let him feel along adamantine muscles, under a button-down shirt that can never close all the way. His touch slides down until he takes my hand and I let him lead me down to the waterfront, shellfish lunch a long-overdue offering to the seagulls flying watch overhead.

We enter the sea in our first-date clothes, and he lays me out in the cool water. Warm palms under my muscle-roped back, holding me up, up, up until I am one with sea and sky, buoyed by saltwater.

---

Avra Margariti is a queer author and poet from Greece. Avra’s work haunts publications such as SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fictions. You can find Avra on twitter (@avramargariti).

It was the most ordinary Tuesday in September when the fire hydrant on our street burst open. Some nozzle or cap had simply had enough of doing its job – we could all relate – and water came gushing out. No one had ever paid any mind to the yellow fire hydrant before, and a little water wasn’t going to change that on this particular Tuesday.

By Wednesday however, there was a small current flowing down our gutters. It clearly ran east towards Kensington Court despite previous claims that ours was the flattest street in town, unbiased toward any one direction. We soon began building popsicle stick boats and raced them feverishly. It started innocent enough with little Jimmy Bigelow dropping a twig into the water and racing it on foot. But soon wagers were made, and then came boat spec regulations, qualifying heats, and a Competition Committee was formed.

By Friday, the water filled the entire street as the fire hydrant continued to shoot out a steady stream like projectile vomit. So we threw on our swimsuits and waded waist deep to bring casseroles to the Widow Johnson, or we floated on our backs to go attend Carol’s surprise 40^th birthday party. It was also on this afternoon that the Fire Department arrived. They spent an hour trying to cap the hydrant but were unsuccessful and left, citing something about tax money allocation and limited resources. They were good looking, though, as firemen tend to be, and offered their condolences. “Good luck,” they said with pearly white smiles. “We wish you nothing but the best in this situation.”

By the following Tuesday, the water had reached the top of our front doors. We could no longer tell whose doors were bright red with brass knockers and whose were just tired brown wood. We thought we had them memorized, but turns out it wasn’t as easy as you might think. We exited second story windows and dog paddled to each other’s houses. Borrowed olive oil. Traded for toilet paper. Mr. Callahan showed off his mastery of the breast stroke. Kicking like a frog and gulping air like a fish, but none of us liked him very much, and so we gave him the one-ply.

When the news helicopters arrived and hovered overhead like curious looky-loos, Mr. Jones fired up his 24’ MasterCraft and taught the kids how to waterski. And when Declan Santori brought out his wakeboard and started showing off for the girls – just as he did every football season, three-time state champ – we all hung out of our bedroom windows and chanted, “Jump! the! wake! Jump! the! wake!” We hadn’t felt such community since the last 4^th of July block party when Mrs. McMillan made her famous potato salad and we all chipped in to get the good fireworks. But soon the helicopters scattered like pigeons as there was a school shooting at Crossroads Middle School. Plus it turns out that looking at a street under water isn’t as good for ratings as one might hope. So without the allure of the news copters, the boat was anchored, and we all retreated into our houses and closed the windows as water slowly filled our rooms like in the second hour of Titanic.

Now we sit on rooftops. We dangle our toes in the water and reminisce about backyard barbeques, evening bike rides, and the smell of a freshly mowed yard. Food is getting a little scarce, but we aren’t worried. We used to finger-scroll past headlines about floods in places like Sudan and Indonesia, but our street is nothing like those places. We have smart homes, Ninja blenders, and HBO Max.

Mr. Jones spends most of his time fishing even though we tell him there are no fish on Montgomery Lane, silly. So far he has only snagged a Bon Appetit magazine and the Willoughbys’ cat. We used to still talk to one another, yelling from rooftop to rooftop, but our throats have gone dry and the gossip has run thin. Declan and his buddy Mark Lydell spend their days throwing the football back and forth. They live five houses apart, but man does Declan have a rocket for an arm. The rest of us barely notice the ball whizzing overhead anymore. We haven’t seen Widow Johnson yet. We all knew climbing onto her roof was too much for those old bones, but no one knew who was responsible for her. So no one went. It’s getting harder to keep track of the days, of how many America’s Got Talent episodes we have missed or if Mr. McMillian had his teeth cleaning scheduled for today or tomorrow.

Now we sit on rooftops. We dangle our toes in the water and we wait. Though we’re not sure what for. For someone to come get us? Or for us to go get someone? Or maybe for the water to just go away, go away as quickly as it came. Sometimes we wonder about the nozzle that just stopped working, and whether the fire hydrant was red or yellow, we can’t remember anymore, but then our feet grow numb as the water continues to rise.

---

Eric Scot Tryon is a writer from San Francisco. His work was recently selected for the Best Microfiction 2023 anthology and has appeared in Glimmer Train, Ninth Letter, Willow Springs, Los Angeles Review, Sonora Review, and elsewhere. Eric is also the Founding Editor of Flash Frog. Find more information at http://www.ericscottryon.com or on Twitter @EricScotTryon.

i.

They meet in the summer camp where they are told there’s still time to return to the path to righteousness again, the girl with the knitting needles and the farm girl with the green rain boots. They giggle and listen to each other instead of to the Bible verses about becoming good wives someday to faceless men neither of them want. The instructor tells the girls to be quiet. They ignore her—always a her—because they see the other girls just like them sent here as punishment, and they understand they are not alone. After prayers, the farm girl asks the girl who smuggled in red yarn and knitting needles whether she can make socks for her. Needle girl says she will make the finest socks and finds a tape measure. At her light touch, the farm girl forgets every verse.

ii.

The morning their parents return to drive them back on cornfield-lined roads to homes that are not their homes, the farm girl pulls her boots back on for the mud-slick gravel paths to the parking lot. Before her parents’ truck pulls in and they ask if she’s ready to be a good girl again, needle girl gives her a hat of red yarn, a perfect fit on her head and soft like her cheek against farm girl’s calluses. The two of them promise to stay in contact. But this is how it goes: one email a week becomes one email a month, then two months, then half a year. Needle girl’s family moves to somewhere called the mainland, a land where every word has one of four tones and good girls are called guai yet the word for the strange or the off-kilter is guai with a different tone. Needle girl promises she will return for college, a fancy school with ivy crawling up red bricks that is as far away for the farm girl as the moon.

iii.

Once a year, the woman who was once a girl from a farm flies. She packs a red hat in her fraying suitcase and flies to a town by the sea, Boeing 737 soaring like a metal albatross. Always on July 7th, because she only has enough paid time off to extend her July 4 holiday each year and still have enough days left to visit her parents over the holidays. Every year is the same: farm girl hopes and hopes—they talk and talk over coffee and dinner, shoulders close enough to brush—then needle girl never makes a move. This year needle girl vents about a breakup, a failed relationship with a woman farm girl knows only as a pretty face in the magazines. Needle girl is a somebody, someone who clothes the powerful. Farm girl is a nobody, a nameless paralegal in a nameless law firm in a nameless small town surrounded by cornfields who sends most of her paycheck to keep her parents’ farm afloat amidst crashing crop prices and drought.

Farm girl promises herself this will be the last time. Yet she cannot bring herself to say so, and after needle girl kisses her goodbye and the scent of fake roses lingers on her cheek, she clutches the red hat to her chest at the airport gate, calculating how much to budget for next year’s trip.

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Tina S. Zhu is a Chinese American writer who lives in California. When she’s not writing prose, she sometimes also writes code. Her words have appeared in Pidgeonholes, X-R-A-Y, and Tor.com, among others. Find her on Twitter @tinaszhu or at tinaszhu.com.

The car crash happened in a nano second, in a stab of light. For years the boy would describe what had happened as a near-death experience to strangers in run-down piano bars, but the boy knew words wouldn’t do it justice; how they were empty vessels compared to what had happened on that frenzied Philadelphia thoroughfare.

It wasn’t just that the crash had felled acres of neuron-branches across the forest of the boy’s brain, having rattled his skull with vertiginous migraines and permanent memory loss. It wasn’t the uncontrollable rage the boy couldn’t keep a lid on in every serious relationship thereafter. The two divorces, the revolving door of therapists, the weight gain by virtue of his primordial hankering for chocolate milkshakes.

It wasn’t the fact that Ruthie Halpern, the boy’s best friend’s mother and semi-famous jazz pianist, who’d graciously agreed to schlep the boy to his travel soccer practice that morning while his own parents were off hiking Machu Picchu, had momentarily taken her eyes off the road, suffering fractured ribs and broken fingers, thereby shattering Halpern’s career and forcing her to hang up the ivory keys for good.

It wasn’t the fact that the clichéd expression life will flash before your eyes suddenly earned a fresh pelt of meaning as they tooled toward collision, each small triumph and remorse populating out of thin air like a kind of pretzeled mobius strip.

This story really starts now, a generation after the crash. After preschool teacher Madison Dust drummed at her wheel with restless glee, zig zagging lanes to catch her impending flight to Portland. The pregnant daughter in Portland whose water had just burst, and who’d be in labor bearing Madison Dust’s first grandchild. The baby girl who’d soon become her grandmother’s namesake. And later, decades later, the beloved girl who’d grow up wondering about her provenance, snooping through old boxes in the basement to discover the newspaper article with a browning photo of her late grandmother’s fatal crash.

The plume of smoke mushrooming over her grandmother’s totaled carmine-red Toyota Avalon; her flaccid body being lifted onto a stretcher by three first responders; an unidentified boy squeezing her swollen hands, a willowy boy whose mouth was ajar, as though adrenaline had flung him into an exclamation point, as though he’d tried his best to tell the soon-to-be grandmother both hello and goodbye.

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Ezra is a poet and journalist who writes in Philadelphia. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, his work has appeared in Philadelphia Stories, Identity Theory, and Bending Genres, among others. You can follow his writings on Twitter @SolwayEzra