Category: flash nonfiction

I don’t have a tattoo because I don’t want one, I tell everyone. That’s a lie. I have wanted a tattoo since I first saw a person up close with a tattoo of their choice instead of “Amarendu’s wife” scribbled in Hindi on the right arm of Kanti’s mother, packing her nameless being into a husband-shaped box, locking it up, and tossing away the key. A tattoo of belonging, but not to herself, never to herself. I had not wanted a tattoo because I never found out what Kanti’s mother’s name was.

But I flew the nest and landed in college to find a kind friend who decorated her body with art, she said. When I asked what the thorny bush on her ankle meant, she told me it was a reminder of a phase where she lay flatlined in a torture chamber and realised the hard way that seemingly lush bushes have thorns more often than not. I gazed at her and then at my bare skin with no art to dedicate to it, and she smiled and said, “a tattoo can mean what you want it to mean.”

I don’t have a tattoo because I quit a well-paying prestige job right around my earliest panic attacks after I overheard a boss admonish a red-eyed employee, who shook off her shaking and entered the meeting room after drawing a sharp breath. I never learned to shake off my shaking, so I fainted instead and sat wordlessly in the doctor’s office less than a week into my new job.

I don’t have a tattoo because my parents didn’t quite understand why I quit a job just because I fainted once, yet booked me tickets home anyway. They took me along on their pre-planned trip to Dalhousie and did not get me a separate room. My father said “why would you even think that” and left when I suggested I could book myself another room to give them their space, an insult I now know to be of the highest order. My mother and I slept on the cozy double bed while he pulled out the extra mattress and plonked himself on it way before his bedtime, way before I could begin to timidly assert any protest. On a walk to the market the next morning, we passed by a group of foreigners, the tallest among them flaunting a tattoo sleeve while also flaunting some weak-looking yoga moves. My father shook his head and smiled at me wryly, and I knew he hated tattoos as much as he hated weak-looking yoga moves.

My god-fearing mother came around to accepting and then defending my interfaith relationship despite her brother demanding an explanation for why her blood does not boil. Her only query, over an unscheduled cup of ginger chai on an unexpectedly bitter winter morning, was whether the guy I chose is a smoker. I don’t have a tattoo because I said an emphatic “no, not at all” while digging my nails into my palms under the table.

My tattoo would have been on my left arm, and I would have asked the tattoo artist to choose the spot that hurt the least. “There is no pain; you are receding” it would have said, because a tattoo can mean what I want it to mean. I would have made sure to use a semicolon instead of a comma because I once deducted two marks from a junior copyeditor’s review for allowing the grave error of a comma splice to pass. Wearing a Pink Floyd t-shirt my friend got for me from a street market in Chicago, I would have played the song while getting its lyrics etched onto my body. In the moments culminating into decorating my body with art, I would have slipped into a dreamless void and meandered into the recesses of my buried desires to greet them with a knowing, lingering affection.

I don’t have a tattoo because I see my parents getting older than when I last saw them, I notice them take longer to pluck coriander stems, and I leave home anyway. We pretend our eyes are not glassy and there are no globe-sized lumps in our throats as I wave at them after getting my boarding pass verified at the airport gate. I see them waving back a tireless goodbye until they think I am not visible anymore, and I duck behind the side windows as I catch them look at each other for a second longer than usual before stepping inside the car. Tattoos hurt, don’t they?

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Stuti Srivastava is a writer who looks to the earth before calling herself one. She likes to explore themes related to gender and relationship dynamics, inner worlds, and inequalities. When not binge-watching grisly crime thrillers, she will be found curled up with a book, lost in her world. Her writing has been published in MeanPepperVine and Unruly Dialogues.

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

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

Before she knew Pollock, she was Lena. Lena changed her name to Lenore, then shortened it to Lee. Lee Krasner. Do you want to know what Lena-Lenore-Lee looked like? Why?

When her sister died, Lee didn’t marry her brother-in-law, to become a mother to Rose’s motherless two. She didn’t compromise her adolescence with a ring or end her story with a mop and pail. She set up her easel and painted. She painted herself—steady-handed, steady-eyed, by the woods’ fitful light. There was art school, then a Russian lover, her work, always the work, avant-garde, cubism, abstraction. And there were connections. Pollock was one. She called his paintings “wild enthusiasm.” This artist she loved.

Do you want to know more about the man she married? The painter she nurtured? You’ll have to read something else then. I’m not saying Jackson Pollock wasn’t good, but I’ll tell you this: After the painters bought a house, Jackson turned the barn into his studio and used the expansive floor as an easel, so he could stand over the supine canvas and create from a towering angle. Meanwhile, Lee composed inside the house—small pieces crafted in a small bedroom. She even gave them a small name: Little Image. In this series of thirty-one paintings, she covered the canvases in grids of diminutive blocks, individual containers for vitality, squiggles, signs, swirls, like hieroglyphs, those symbols that line a tomb. An enclosed language, yet untranslatable, unheard. Enclosed. Yes, entombed.

Still want to know what she looked like? She looked like genius, eclipsed.

But then, of course, the husband eclipsed his own genius. Addiction, attention, infidelity, attention, anger, attention, unpredictability. He didn’t paint at all the last year of his life.

Lee did. Before Pollock, she painted. After Pollock, she painted. For the thirty post-Pollock years, Lee kept working, experimenting, growing. If there was chaos, it wasn’t splattered. She controlled it.

Some of her paintings came from old pieces she tore up and reassembled. She called one of these collages Milkweed: black pieces like detached petals, overlaid with spears, elegant and white, and a backdrop of greens suggesting vegetation. A broken sphere centers the piece, like a sun tucked into a forest. But my favorite aspect of this work is the streak of orange. It cuts a vertical path. Such a dynamic swath of color. It surprises. I think it must be a Monarch taking flight.

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Melissa Ostrom is the author of The Beloved Wild (Feiwel & Friends, 2018), a Junior Library Guild book and an Amelia Bloomer Award selection, and Unleaving (Feiwel & Friends, 2019). Her stories have appeared in many journals and been selected for Best Small Fictions 2019 and 2021, Best Microfiction 2020 and 2021, and Wigleaf Top 50 2022. She lives with her husband, children, and dog Mocha in Holley, New York. Learn more at www.melissaostrom.com or find her on Twitter or Bluesky @melostrom.

Mommy, when someone turns 100, they die, right?

If only it worked that way. If only each of us, on the eve of our century, climbed into bed for the last time, having filled our bellies with chocolate cake and red wine, gifted our gold earrings and dog-eared books, dolled out pithy wisdoms and Werther’s candies, hugged the necks of everyone we loved, kissed our children’s cheeks, felt the rain on our wrinkles, watched the sun rise and the sun set, planted an apple tree or three. One day, you’ll learn all the ways people die young. One day, I’ll have to tell you.

Mommy, when you die do I get a new mom?

If the sun burns out, the world freezes in darkness. If gravity ceases, everyone and everything not-rooted releases. If all water disappears, nothing can replace it. “You only get one mom,” I say. Which is both true and not true. Someone else could kiss your sticky cheeks, sing “Hush Little Baby,” make you pancakes and honey, could teach you how to ride your blue bike, how to tie your bunny-eared shoelaces, how to spell G-O-N-E. You might even call this person Mom.

 

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Bethany Jarmul is an Appalachian writer and poet. She’s the author of two chapbooks, including a mini-memoir Take Me Home from Belle Point Press. Her debut poetry collection Lightning Is a Mother is forthcoming with ELJ Editions in 2025. Her work has been published in many magazines including Rattle, Brevity, Salamander, and The Ex-Puritan. Her writing was selected for Best Spiritual Literature 2023 and Best Small Fictions 2024, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, The Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and Wigleaf Top 50. Connect with her at bethanyjarmul.com or on social media: @BethanyJarmul.

I.

Photo 1

My mother perches with spoon to my infant mouth that forms an expectant o.

Photo 2

I am two, twisted in my mother’s lap to hold a translucent grape to her lips. Her eyes close and she smiles into the sun. I’m wearing a blue bikini I call my zucchini. I interchange superman and supermarket; being and bean.

“I’m a human bean,” I announce.

 

II.

“Was I always tall?” my mother asks one day. Just shy of seventy, her breast cancer has spread. I bring her bags of eggplant parmesan, garlic artichoke hearts, fresh tomato with basil, wedding soup.

At the kitchen table, she stares straight ahead. I fix her a plate, place it in front of her.

“Which one is artichoke?” She taps the top of a tomato. “This one?”

“No, this one,” I say, guide her hand.

 

III.

One week before she dies, I stand at my parents’ bedroom door with freshly-boiled eggs quivering on a plate.

Her swollen legs dangle over the side of the bed. She shakes her head.

“No? Do you want a peach?”

She nods. In the kitchen, I slice a peach into small, pulpy pieces, return to my mother, her eyes closed.

“Mom,” she says to me.

The plate hangs in my hand. “No. You’re my mom,” I say.

“Oh.”

“You’re my mom and I’m your daughter.” I hold up a speared peach slice. Her mouth opens.

“Mmmmm,” she says, shoulders hunched, mashing the fruit on her tongue. Somehow, I believe the peach will transform her into who she once was.

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Elizabeth Koster’s work has appeared in Fourth Genre, River Teeth, Split Lip, Sweet, Hobart, Five Minutes, and The New York Times “Modern Love” column. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Columbia University and teaches writing in New York City.

Watched a couple passionately make out in front of the Randall’s on Westheimer today. I say passionately because I saw him put his hand behind her head as they kissed, a.k.a., the best move ever invented, something that should be bottled and sold. Ninety-seven degrees out on a day gray like a donkey’s back and they sat thigh to thigh at a picnic table next to a gently swaying sign that said You can prevent shingles. Actually, a sign can’t say anything, you have to read it. I learned that from a PBS show for kids about math, spoken (I think) by a ventriloquist’s dummy. Put a hand behind his head and his mouth will move. I watched this couple from the other side of the strip mall as I ate my plain frozen yogurt with chocolate chips – a boring order, I know, but the vastness of possible flavor and topping combinations stresses me out, mathematically. These two found each other so that has to count for something. It’s been so long for us, years since the humid night we met when you used the best move ever invented, that I worry you now find me boring, or insufferable. My voice in your mouth. Your kiss in my nerves. Sometimes we don’t say much at all and sometimes when I’m being insufferable you place your hand on the hollow of my back, the spot that sometimes itches that I can’t reach, and (I think) I can feel something dormant begin to stir.

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Brooke Middlebrook grew up in the hills of western Massachusetts. She’s currently an MFA student in nonfiction at Bennington College and a reader for The Maine Review. Recent work appears in Fugue, The Cincinnati Review’s miCRo series, and Hunger Mountain.

 

It’s my turn to go to Mr. Zeigler’s delicatessen. We only go there when we need groceries on credit. I always peek in through the glass door first to see if Zeigler has customers. If he has a lot, I wait outside with Mama’s note clenched in my fist, my hands dug into my coat pockets. Tonight it’s cold and I give up waiting for the right moment. I plunge in, head down, stomach knotted.

Mr. Zeigler’s meat case is unreasonably high. Coins slip out of hands, clinking against the metal countertop and sliding down the glass front of the showcase of kosher cold cuts and German potato salads. I reach up as close to the top of the counter as I can, straining to keep my balance and my dignity. Zeigler takes the note and clucks his tongue. He knows me, knows what my note will say.

Zeigler fetches the items, muttering and complaining the whole time, handling the things roughly, his hands raw and red from the cold meats. He grumbles louder whenever my mother puts cupcakes on the list, something really not needed. My sister Irene hates when Mama asks for cupcakes. She feels the same way Zeigler does about them because she knows we need cereal and bread more than sweets.

Zeigler finally takes a heavy paper bag, leans over the counter, and begins working his figures, the skinny stub of a pencil lost in the pads of his thick fingers. Its squared point makes dark noisy numbers against the coarse paper, and for a time that’s the only sound in the store—that and his muttering.

But then the entrance bell tinkles. It’s Beth Colasurdo and her father. Beth is in fourth grade with me at school, although I’m not sure she knows it. She never says hello, never even looks at me. They come to the counter just as Zeigler is about to get his account book. The book has a place on one of the highest shelves. He brings it down in a great fanfare of getting and reaching in step to a soliloquy that bemoans deceitful deadbeats and the thankless work of grocership and the proper way they did things in the old country. Beth watches him. There sits this dusty courthouse of a book and the pathetic collection of ingredients for our supper tonight, and she looks at me as if this must be some strange, sordid transaction.

Mr. Zeigler turns the cracked yellowing pages until he comes to McGuigan. He takes his time entering the figures into the ledger. As usual, he reads me the new total and reminds me to be sure to tell my mother how large it’s getting. “I can’t run this store on charity, you know,” he croaks. “You people think you got everything coming to you. Well, that’s not the way it is for the rest of us. The rest of us have to pay our way.”

“Yes, Mr. Zeigler,” I say. He likes kids polite, and I’m hungry.

I can see Mr. Colasurdo is embarrassed. He takes Beth to the back of the store and pretends to look for some cereal. I watch them as Zeigler packs the groceries. It seems like they have important things to say to each other, funny things too, because Beth laughs when he looks down at her. When she steps away from him to look at something, he notices the hem of her coat is up in the back, so he reaches down and fixes it for her. I can tell he probably does that sort of thing all the time, because Beth doesn’t even notice.

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Mary Ann McGuigan’s creative nonfiction has appeared in Brevity, X-R-A-Y, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. The Sun, Massachusetts Review, North American Review, and many other journals have published her fiction. Her collection Pieces includes stories named for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net; her new story collection, That Very Place, reaches bookstores in 2025. The Junior Library Guild and the New York Public Library rank Mary Ann’s novels as best books for teens; Where You Belong was a finalist for the National Book Award. She loves visitors: www.maryannmcguigan.com.

freck.le (frek.e) n. 1. The spots that appear on my cheekbones and shoulders when we play at the swimming pool in August, down the road from my house (turn right at the Kroger’s, keep going past the post office. Take a sharp left.), splashing in the water, swimming laps of it. Laughing and diving and my long legs kicking. I am just a child. 2. They are dark brown, sometimes on my nose, rust colored. My dark skin when the summer comes, the whole length of my arm dappled in sunburnt light. 3. I never asked my mother about the sun, about the way our Filipino skin could still flake off, turn dark, how the sun could crinkle it and leave its own leftover light all over my body. She never worried about it. Her skin was always perfect. (v) 4. This October afternoon, the windows open, the kitten climbing onto the couch to curl her body around, to press her claws into the blanket, to show the dips and dots and flecks of light inside her moonstone eyes. 5. The apartment, the tiled floor, the thousands of miles from me to you. What the sun does, in one long strip of yellow light, through the slats of shutters, the blinds, the softness of the room when you are gone. How lonely it is without you. 6. In moonlight, phosphenes bubble up in bright auras when I rub my eyes. They skip and jump, they fill in the empty space of all these missing years, like I can see you if I shut my eyes tighter, all one blurry mess, pooling up, spilling haphazardly into the depths of November. We are almost there. We can count each freckle if you want. One at a time. Pick them up off the ground like seeds to be planted. Fill jars with them, all together, take them outside. 7. Light up the night like fireflies blinking.

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Jacqueline Goyette is a writer from Indianapolis, Indiana. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and has appeared in both print and online journals, including trampset, JMWW, Heimat Review, The Citron Review, Eunoia Review, and Cutbow Quarterly. She currently lives in the town of Macerata, Italy with her husband Antonello and her cat Cardamom.

I have a shiny red envelope filled with a small wad of cash, glittering notions of all the things I can use it to buy—a Super Nintendo game or a rare postage stamp from the former Zaire for my collection—and my parents aren’t screaming at each other for a change. I am dining on lobster at the Grand Mandarin tonight. There’s a karaoke bar downstairs that’s always closed like a darkened motel and next to it is a koi pond with a small waterfall and a miniature mountain landscape that evokes dreams of old China. After dinner I sit on the footbridge that crosses the little pond pretending to be a giant who lives a peaceful life in that mountain valley, content to quietly listen and observe everything around me. The red envelope glows through my pocket, a reminder of the material comforts to come. The disposable placemats printed with the Chinese zodiac all say that the rabbit is the luckiest of the signs. I don’t know if that describes me, but I’m certainly the happiest, if not the loneliest a child can be.

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Eliot S. Ku is a physician who lives in New Mexico with his wife and two children. His writing has appeared in a handful of online literary journals, including Maudlin House, Carmen et Error, Roi Faineant Press, Whiskey Tit, HAD, and Call Me Brackets.

You’re supposed to be 43 now, maybe 44?, and you’re either the guy on Instagram with the photos of handguns and old cars and tattoos (HOLD FAST and DON’T TREAD ON ME) and the surgery scar from the terrible car accident, and I can’t really tell because I think those eyes are the eyes I remember, maybe?, but you’ve grown a beard and you live in a different state, and you haven’t posted anything in the last three years, and I don’t know if you’re dead or not,
OR
you found God and volunteered your time for Him, and you work at a warehouse one state over from where we grew up, and, two years ago, you wanted a different job, so that’s why you made the LinkedIn page, but there’s not a single photo of you online—your profile mentions you were in the Army, which you were, though it doesn’t give your years of service—but I hope this is you instead and
that you’re doing well,
NOT
like how it was when you were 19, and it was Halloween, and your girlfriend told us you were on leave over the weekend, staying at the Days Inn and not at your mom’s place, and it smelled like old smoke in the room, but there we were, just the five of us on the king-sized bed and the cloth armchair and the questionable floor, and your girlfriend was dressed as a harlequin for the party she went to earlier— none of the rest of us were in costume—but, holy shit!, you’d shaved your head and grown taller, and you had abs and pecs and sunken eyes now, and there was a seriousness to you, maybe something to do with why you had to go and live with your dad in the middle of high school,
AND
there were empty Rolling Rocks on the floor, like the green bottles we stole from your mom’s fridge when we were 13 and she’d gone to bed, and do you remember how we stayed up late watching Tales from the Darkside on VHS after trick-or-treating? In the movie, Debbie Harry played the witch that was going to eat the little boy she chained up in her pantry, and he wound up saving his own life Scheherazade-style by reciting stories to her about a mummy and an evil cat and a family of gargoyles, and sometimes these are the fictions we have to say out loud because not saying them is worse.

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Barrett Bowlin is the author of the story collection Ghosts Caught on Film (Bridge Eight). His essays and short fiction appear in places like TriQuarterly, Ninth Letter, Barrelhouse, Salt Hill, The Fiddlehead, and Bayou. He lives and teaches and rides trains in Massachusetts.