Category: flash nonfiction

Fabric does what it’s told if you’re patient, my mother says. She irons sitting down, in the corner of the living room with her back to the garden. She holds up the tumble-dried garment against the light, eyeing the creases like they’ll argue with her. And lose, always.

I am too small, too young, legs tucked under my hips on a plastic chair I’ll take too long to grow out of. She is meticulous in routine: wafting fabric onto the waiting board. Her palm flat, the other hand curled around the iron.

When she finishes a piece—one of my father’s nicer t-shirts—she holds it out. Wordlessly. I blink, snared, and scurry towards her outstretched hand. My fingers aren’t sticky—a mistake I’ve only made once.

I pinch the corners of the t-shirt and lay it on the empty coffee table.

She says nothing, but I know I am being watched. My turn. Corner to corner. Smooth out the creases. Tuck in the sleeves so it falls open when held to the light.

I smooth out the exposed seam and wait. Wait. For the flutter of fabric, for the light to dim behind it.

Instead, my mother clicks her tongue.

She doesn’t stand. The ironing board reaches her chest, hips perched on the edge of the chair, back straight. But her eyes bore into mine until I unfold the piece and try again.

My mother says fabrics remember everything. Denim resists. Cotton acts like it will behave, then doesn’t. Linen tries but curls in on itself. Like a baby, my mother adds. I don’t ask her why she thinks about folding a child to be put away.

The iron hisses, then breathes, then settles. I do the first two only in private.

We don’t speak in these moments. My mother prefers to complete tasks in silence, with the murmur of the radio dialed down. I mimic this. Unashamed, I hum half-formed tunes under my breath until my mother clicks her tongue at me in between pieces.

My mother’s clothes are lighter than my father’s. Yet it doesn’t make them easier to fold. I narrow my eyes as I align the seams, grateful for the myopia that helps more than hinders during these afternoons.

Sometimes, in the hollow aftermath of a finished garment, she watches me. Giving her wrists a break, she rolls them once, twice, her eyes fixed on me as I replicate the remnants of her teaching. My hands hesitate in their movements, anticipating the inevitable click to come.

I do not look at her even when I believe I’ve finished. I can’t. I hold out the garment like an offering—silent and expectant. My eyes stay down, past the shirt, past my feet.

There’s a pause.

I’ve done it right. I know I’ve done it right. Corners aligned, sleeves tucked. A rectangle utterly absent of wrinkles.

She takes it from me with caution only ever reserved for textures too delicate to touch.

And she unfolds it.

It sighs open.

The seams fall apart in her hands without protest. The rectangle—once so exact—loses its edges. The corners slip out of themselves, sleeves remembering their former shape more than mine.

She doesn’t look at me. That would make it instruction.

Fabric does what it’s told, eventually. I must be patient. I am patient.

I receive it from her hands.

I don’t realize I’ve been holding my breath until the iron hisses. Quietly, I copy it. Behind my teeth.

 

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Heather Emmanuel is a Black British writer of contemporary lesbian literary fiction and prose poetry. Her work is forthcoming in The Offing, SWWIM, Maudlin House, and Gone Lawn. You can find her at heather-emmanuel.com or at @heather.emmanuel8

 

When I return from a thirty-hour travel day my back feels feverish. I cannot figure out what is wrong with me. Why is my skin like needles? I ask my partner. I always ask questions that remind people I’m unlovable. Such as, why are we friends and why do you love me and will I die and can you tell me if my toe looks wrong. France was too green. I couldn’t focus on the lake beyond. Spent days wondering if the light reflection was tinfoil or skirt hems or coins. My stomach dissolved. People slammed kitchen doors. Basement doors. Arms on tables. Hands into hands. I grew up in an angry home. I sat after the slamming of the faux-gold front door set my heart in the path of a red drill and thought about dying. Every day everyone asked if I was okay. Twenty-four hours after returning home I packed my bags for Virginia. I was sobbing again because things kept falling to shit and a man was brutal and he wasn’t sorry. Not really. Suddenly I remembered. While we were watching television my partner slammed the length of his arm against my back. As a joke. He often play-punches me. Hard. My brain ate the memory for sixteen hours. Upon arriving in Virginia I seek out a bruise but find none. I call my partner and accidentally interrupted him so he ends the call. I call back to ask what his problem is and he hangs up again. This happens six times. There is another man who joked about saving me. I can’t elaborate right now. What else does this body remember when pain blooms beneath my skin? One day at residency I couldn’t eat and someone brought me a single slice of turkey. He asked, “Can you eat this?” I should have taken a picture as proof. I seek out evidence like a blood hound. This really happened to me. You must believe me because I’m covered in blood. Then I remember when my mother first grabbed my red arm and screamed until my skull changed shape. I would make the worst detective. I imagine inviting entire truckloads of evidence into a case. I go up against men who don’t believe my evidence and I spend the rest of my life trying to convince them. This doesn’t matter. It hurt. It was real. I’ve spent the summer disappearing into my skeleton but you have not yet seen my bones so you don’t believe I have a second situation. One day I might be wire. That’s not what I want to tell you. Once, I thought you were my home. Something, something, I’ll make my own damn home. Something, something, tire fire. Rage-red May. Death-try in June. I hate you in July. You reveal yourself in August but I’m already a dead egg. Nothing could have been done.

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Sam Moe is the author of eight books. Her most recent poetry collection, RED HALCYON, is forthcoming from Querencia Press in 2026. Her debut short story collection, I MIGHT TRUST YOU, is out from Experiments in Fiction (2025). She has attended the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and received fellowships from the Longleaf Writer’s conference and the Key West Literary Seminar. Sam has also attended residencies at The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, VCCA, and Château d’Orquevau.

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

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

 

The urn arrived unceremoniously, lighter than expected. It looked out of place wherever he set it down. All her clothes already sent to charity, leaving the closet empty; he put her on a shelf there, away from the yellow sunlight. Another wish he ignored, holding the rest of us hostage. The dust comes as it does.

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Christopher Scammell is a writer based in Port Saint Lucie, Florida. Their work explores memory, loss, and the quiet fractures in human relationships.

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.