Chelsea flash fiction

When Your Twin Brother Takes the One You Wanted by Tom Walsh

My brother called dibs on anorexia, even though it’s meant for girls. Since pyromania’s for boys, I took it; cherishing the asymmetry. I love the way fire hides, then jumps out to say BOO! like our father did when we were little. We dance with the flames. In the backyard. The woods. Along the railroad tracks. Late at night, in my room, fire devours lists with the names and hashtags of kids who taunt us on the bus and at school.

When my brother starts eating again, I put away my lighter. We have a pact. But I miss the heat, am terrified it won’t slake my hunger again. The dry grass beckons. An abandoned barn begs me to end its loneliness. The list of names on my desk has grown long, so long.

As a child, I loved the rain. The dark clouds crossing the prairie, the smell of sweet earth in the backyard, the chance to see a rainbow. Now, the fields are dry, the air smells of decay, no pot of gold awaits us. I seek glowing embers, hot blue flame. I tell my brother it’s time to purge.

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Tom Walsh is a writer and editor living in northern California. He has been a newspaper reporter, editor, wildland firefighter, and more. His stories are in or forthcoming in Litro USA, Hobart Pulp, The Cabinet of Heed, The Dead Mule School, Janus Literary, and elsewhere. His cat, born in the UK on the 4th of July, is, of course, named Independence. Follow him @tom1walsh.

Chelsea flash nonfiction

She Should See This by Nadia Staikos

The cousins have been taking turns in the backseats of different cars as we zig our way across the States; the parents switch us up so siblings won’t fight and drive them up the wall. There are gummy bears in this uncle’s car. My cousin eats them by first biting off every tiny appendage, one at a time; ear, ear, arm, arm, leg, leg. Body. Chew. She’s the eldest, and she doles them out at the same pace in which she eats them, and I sit with the aftertaste of each one for a while before I get another, watching the scenery whip by.

It’s 1990. When someone has to pee or gets hungry, a message is written in big letters on a piece of paper and gets held up in a window. The driver pulls up beside each car long enough for the passengers to read the message, then takes the lead, everyone following behind them to the next gas station or to pull off on the shoulder. We’re in a constant state of picnic; trunks are popped open and out come blankets, coolers full of food. The moms take the kids to pee in the trees while the dads have a beer and look at maps.

“M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I.” Another aunt is in the front seat of this car, and so now we all know how to spell Mississippi. My little brother repeats it over and over again, and he’s only five years old, so everyone thinks it’s so great, but enough already, we get it. There was an oversight, and we’ve ended up in the same vehicle. There’s a cousin buffer between us, listening to a Walkman.

“Holy cow,” my aunt says, every time we pass fields of cattle. I feel like my giggles are expected, and I pray for no more cows.

“How do you get from Canada to Las Vegas?” Everyone keeps asking my brother, every day.

“You just follow the yellow line on the road,” he explains, earnest.

 

My dad’s brother is driving this car. Things get tense in the front seat.

“Look at him,” my uncle says, angry. “What is he doing?” He has a voice that sits comfortably in anger, but I can tell something is really wrong. I crane my neck around the headrest, trying to see through the windshield. My family’s car is ahead of us, my dad at the wheel. I’m not sure about the rules of driving, but I see my dad has pulled into the next lane. He’s driving so fast, right towards the oncoming traffic. “That son-of-a-bitch is going to get everyone killed!” I feel heat prickle through me. Grown-ups can’t get mad like that, not at other grown-ups. My dad swings the car back into the right lane and my uncle swears with relief. My aunt is fiddling with the radar detector. I stare out the window, turned to hide my face, hot with shame. I refuse to speak.

When we make the next stop I run to my parents, and now I couldn’t speak even if I wanted to. My tears won’t stop. He almost got them all killed, and words were yelled, like yelled about him, and he was a son-of-a-bitch, and what did that make me?

 

Everyone is getting out of the car, but I keep my eyes closed.

“She’s going to miss it. She should see this.”

“Let her sleep,” my mother’s voice decides over the sounds of belt buckles clicking, chunking door handles, excited children stretching legs. I can feel eyes on me, expectant, but I’m good at pretending. I’m thrilled by how good I am at pretending. My cousins slide out, bouncing the seat, but I don’t move an inch. I’m a daughter-of-a-son-of-a-bitch, doing what I want. The doors close and the voices are muted by glass and steel. Our fleet has pulled over to see something beautiful; they’re gathering for a family photo that I’ll be missing from, smiles stretching like the Nevada desert. I stay still, listen to myself breathe.

 

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Nadia Staikos (she/her) lives in Toronto with her two children. Her work has previously appeared in perhappened, (mac)ro(mic), Fudoki, and elsewhere. She is prose editor at Chestnut Review, and is currently working on her first novel. Find her on Twitter @NadiaStaikos.

 

Chelsea flash fiction

Chainsaws Don’t Mend Broken Hearts by Rick White

We nurtured spruce saplings into fields of Christmas trees. Kissed them to sleep beneath a tapestry of starlight. We woke on silvery mornings; each new day an elegy to limbs outstretched and bending. We fork-pruned bows and sponged the tops, forcing the sap to flow back down, hardening trunks from within. The smell of it when I set it free — prehistoric! How the forest screamed. The heat of teeth on mangled splinters. Every one an ode to joy, lost forever. A fairy without its wings. I will make my home amongst the slithering worms, the chattering, gnawing bugs. A blanket of needles for the Earth to sleep in. Let us feast on stumps and soil, so that from this resinous slurry, this sainted wreckage, things may grow back — mightier than before.

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Rick White is a fiction writer from Manchester, UK whose work has been published in Milk Candy Review, Trampset, X-R-A-Y Lit Mag, and many other fine lit journals. Rick’s debut story collection Talking to Ghosts at Parties will be published later this year by Storgy Books. You can find Rick on Twitter @ricketywhite.

Chelsea flash nonfiction

Still Chewing On It by S.P. Venkat

“What did you have for lunch?” she asks, over Zoom. I promise, I wasn’t watching the whole class. I had other things to do. But I caught that. I stop and listen. What will he say? Will he tell her the truth?

“Rice and dal,” he says plainly.

I realize I’m holding my breath. Waiting to hear what she says. To hear what the others say. Will they allow it?

—

I am transported back to the school canteen, where my beloved puri and potato are currently being sneered at. “What’s that yellow mush?” One of them ask me. She is not really interested in the answer.

To have my meal thus slandered, hurt. But I also see what they see. A sad curled up little circle of oily bread in my lunchbox. And a square of unrecognizable, save for the peas, yellow mash.

Under their scrutiny, I am ashamed. They don’t know how tasty it is. The chewy bread is so satisfying, even cold. I’d been looking forward to it all morning. It’s a different but equal pleasure as leftovers. A pleasure twice anticipated and twice savored.

I tear off some puri, scoop up the potato and eat it. My mouth is watering with pleasure. But my heart isn’t in it. I try to be nonchalant, and it seems to have worked. They’ve moved on to other topics. They don’t really care. But look at me, 27 years later, remembering and still hurting. I’m still chewing on it.

—

I think of a story a friend once told me. It had been a similar thing with a teacher asking each child to state their favorite foods. “Rice and yogurt,” one boy had said. The teacher shook their head. “That’s not a real meal, honey.” The boy had looked crestfallen, my friend told me.

I imagine him baffled. If it wasn’t a real meal, why did he eat it every day? And love it so much? My friend had been there, another fellow yogurt-rice eater. But she’d stayed silent. She’d let him swallow the humiliation alone.

“Well, what did you say?” I’d asked at the end of the story.

“About what?” she’d asked.

“As your favorite food.”

“Oh, I don’t remember. Probably pizza.”

I don’t blame her. I probably would have done the same. It’s not a big deal. Whatever, right? But why did she tell me this story, so many years later?

—

I’m watching a documentary on Netflix. It’s hosted by a famous chef. He is of Korean descent. He’s got a famous restaurant in New York City. There’s this one segment where they film him in his parent’s house.

He’s asked about what he ate as a child. And he talks about how embarrassing it was to bring his home food to school. This guy? Are you kidding me? That food has literally made him a millionaire. A household name. But he still remembers having his food called stinky. When he talks about the taunting, his eyes wander. He doesn’t look at the interviewer or the food. I shake my head in disbelief. He shouldn’t be holding on to this, but clearly, he does.

—

Back in the present, I am still looking at the screen. “Rice and dal?” the teacher asks. I brace myself.

“That’s your favorite, right?” she asks tentatively and smiles.

He nods. No big deal to him. Or her. She’s already moved on to the next child. Anyway, half of them aren’t even listening. Distance learning with 5-year-olds is a mess.

It was all so matter of fact. I am relieved. No, it’s not just relief. I am grateful. I breathe again.

Smita_Profile_Pic_09.2021S. P. Venkat is a writer and comedian obsessed with the idea of displaced and reforged identities, aka immigrant lives. She also creates interactive comedy experiments, like her viral “Parenting in a Pandemic Simulator” which was featured in the Huffington Post. She is currently working on her first novel, Fired Up, which is a finalist in the SparkPress STEP contest for BIPOC writers. Find out more at http://www.almostfavorite.com.

Chelsea prose poetry

Instructions for Telling the Truth by Maggie Wolff

Lie. Don’t tell the doctor you don’t sleep more than a few hours a night, go days without eating, a week without showering. If you tell her the truth, the words you don’t want to hear will split you open again like a backache kick from inside the body.

Wait. Wait it out as long as you can. Hold on to fibers until they shred and slip, emptying your palms.

Speak. Tell the truth. But don’t tell it all. Tell the doctor just enough that she will say what you don’t want to hear, we need to increase your dosage, but not enough truth that she ups the meds too drastically. She says this can be temporary and we will see how you feel on the increased dosage. You tell her, I still want to feel, but you know even that is a lie somedays.

Take. Take the new pill added to the old pill to achieve the right dosage. You tell yourself, this doesn’t have to be hard, because the body knows how to swallow. Don’t beat yourself up for upped meds. The brain isn’t as well trained as the throat. You know this already. You know this by now.

Wait. It will take weeks for you to possibly feel better again. Wait and let it pass over you. Wait and sleep through it as the increase zombifies, nullifies, quiets the too loud parts of you and performs a brain drain. Wait and do what the body wants: sleep or stay awake all night, eat water for dinner or chewable food, wander from room to room like a ghost without the baggage or stay in bed ankle chained to the empty inside you. Wait and see, the doctor says. Wait.

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Maggie Wolff is a queer writer. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Black Fox Literary Magazine, The Lascaux Review, Saw Palm, and Qu Literary Magazine. She is working on her first poetry collection, which follows three generations of women as they navigate depression, addiction, and suicide. She is a poetry candidate in the MFA creative writing program at the University of Central Florida.

Chelsea flash fiction

A Man on the Street Offers Me a Cooked Shrimp by Andrea Frazier

And I take it, lift the slick comma of flesh right off the flimsy paper plate he juts gently but determinedly into my path. The man’s smile is a jumbled graveyard, each jaundiced tooth a mossy tombstone half-toppled by vandals or forced into a haphazard angle by tree roots heaving and flexing underneath the earth, threatening to burst through. Fueled by a winter melancholy twining my perennial nostalgia, I walk one hundred miles every weeknight over quiet sidewalks sometimes illuminated by wavering halos of lamplight, sometimes not. Now the man wiggles some fingers at me, not the goodbye I’d like but an invitation. With the shrimp tail pinched between my right thumb and index finger, I use my other hand to yank out one of the earbuds that reliably blanket my grey matter with dull noise and chatter. Even as I try to divert it, my mind thunders to the little black canister of pepper spray nestled like an heirloom bullet in the soft fleece of my coat pocket. A fleeting glow disappears into the dark crosshatch of towering pine branches as they welcome the sinking sun; the desolation of this short, tucked away road, creaky little homes buttoned up tight, breathes around me. Still, I smile. Smile at this man whose wiry gray hair poking from under a brown fedora rustles a bit as he bounces on the balls of his feet like he can hardly contain some good, delicious secret. Where did he come from? “Better with a smidge of cocktail sauce,” he tells me, his voice the strained chirp of a red-bellied robin caught, improbably, beneath a sudden cascade of dense snow. The plate, loaded with tiny carcasses, hovers between us. Glitter polish chipping on my nails, framed by tattered cuticles, glints faintly in the dying light when I step forward, swipe my shrimp through the pool of red. “Thank you,” I say. The pepper spray in my pocket: My mom halved a thirty-minute drive down sparse late-night highway to deliver it to my apartment, frantic after, in a moment of stupidity, I admitted that another man — on another of these hundred-mile walks — a stocky cannonball of a man in a blue windbreaker — had grabbed me from behind then barreled away. It’s been eight years since I’ve had a bite of meat, since I suffered through that one slaughterhouse documentary in college. But I chomp down immediately on the shrimp’s tough flesh as I walk away from the man with the graveyard smile, gnash the muscle, the ghosts of nerves rendered unfeeling between my molars. Heading toward home now through the dark chill, I flick the hollow shrimp tail onto some unknown neighbor’s front lawn.

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Andrea Frazier is a writer who lives in Pittsburgh. Her music essay “Let’s Get Fucked Up and Die!” is published in Drunk Monkeys.

Chelsea flash fiction

Moses in the Chevy by Jim Kourlas

There’s only one car in the lot when we come out of the Kum & Go, this black Chevy SUV with tinted windows, engine idling and two pit bulls in the back seat howling as loud as the baby in front. Trey says car seats aren’t supposed to be hitched up to the front seat. Jodine says you can’t leave a baby in a car, but when she goes to open the door the pits go psycho and that’s the end of us playing heroes. It’s like 2:30 on a Tuesday, muggy as hell. The sky’s too bright to be this buzzed.

We were swiping nickels across scratch-offs in the shop when Trey went out for a cig and the doors ding-dinged open and all that barking-crying swallowed up Whitney Houston. Mellie only looked up from behind the counter, shrugged, went back to her Sudoku. So me and Jodine follow Trey outside. The driver could be in the bathroom, we suppose, but Jodine says when she peed away her Colt the john was empty. Nobody came in the shop. So who knows who pulled up in that Chevy, got out and left a baby and two pit bulls screaming for rescue or whatever.

Jodine gets her phone out, starts dialing the cops. I don’t know anything about babies, so I’m trying to figure out if these dogs are all pit or have a little mixed in. Some boxer maybe or something with a thicker coat, shepherd, you know? They’re boy dogs, big balls knocking between those ripped hind legs. I’m tapping the window, trying to shush them, but it only riles them up more. Trey says stop it.

Jodine goes back in for some Combos and another Colt and some more scratch-offs and we have a little picnic there on the hood of the Chevy. Swipe swipe swipe. Trey slices his path through little fake slot machines, but Jodine says take your time because who knows how long the cops are going to be. I say maybe the Chevy owner is coming back. Then Trey says, searching his card for a win, that maybe there is no owner of the Chevy, maybe it just appeared here. Jodine nods, says none of this is really happening, none of it, but I’m leaning against the hood, feel the heat, the pulse of the engine, and I like this idea—that maybe the baby is a special baby, like Noah or something, dropped in the river.

Moses, Jodine says, shaking her head. She still goes to church sometimes. We pass the Colt back and forth and I can feel things slipping more, our thoughts and stuff. And so I go off, telling them how maybe the pit bulls are like angels guarding Moses-baby there. And how the baby came out of nowhere, out of a god named Chevy. This gets us feeling better about the pits, better about drinking, better that we’re just standing around having a picnic and not risking our lives to save this baby. Baby’s already got its angels, Trey says, nodding.

Then this other car pulls up, a clean white SUV with a hood too high to picnic on, shaking to some fat Latin beat. Nearly runs Trey over. He skitters out of the way and we all slide our stuff over to the front of the Chevy, making sure not to mix the couple winner cards with the stack of losers. This tall swarthy dude in a sky blue suit steps out with a set of keys in hand, flips through them, finds the right one, then opens that Chevy door. Like we’re not even there. Unhitches that baby from the car seat, pulls it up to his chest like a mother, a goddam mother I swear it, kisses it on the head and bounces it up and down until the clouds part, waters part, I dunno, this baby stops crying. Then he climbs back into his SUV, turns his beat down to nothing. Jodine hurries over and slaps that hood but the SUV backs away, just slips through her hands-like, and heads down the highway.

What about your dogs! Trey shouts, and the dogs, it’s crazy, go quiet now, like their barks were Lassie-barks calling for that rich white man like us morons called the cops. Only the cops were never coming, and that swarthy man was, so the pit bulls knew more about what was what than we ever could. I’m thinking we could use some pits like that, some angels, and say maybe we can take them home with us, but Trey says our landlord will kick us out. And Jodine says better not fuck with angels, that you can’t own one, you just got to be good and wait around like you’re at the DMV until your name gets called.

We head home after that. We still have a few more scratch-offs to blow through before the game starts at three, so at least we have some stuff to look forward to. I’m thinking about the pits though, how we left them curled on top of one another in the back seat of that Chevy, work done, dozing until they’d fly off to guard the next Moses-baby or whatever. I think I hear sirens, but I don’t know if they’re cop or ambulance or dogcatcher. If they’re coming for the baby or the pits. Then I look at Trey and Jodine ahead of me on the weedy shoulder, arms outstretched like kids on a make-believe balance beam, and I know the sirens are coming for us.

What the hell, I think. I turn around and head back to the Kum & Go. I don’t want the cops to take the dogs away. Maybe I’ll get arrested or caged with the pits. Or who knows—maybe we’ll all get saved.

Jim Kourlas earned an MFA in creative writing from Roosevelt University in Chicago and has stories in Hunger Mountain and The Blue Mountain Review. He lives in Omaha with his wife and son.

Chelsea flash fiction

It Takes 25 Minutes to Walk to the Laundromat by Andrea Lynn Koohi

I love the smell of gasoline.
*
When my stepfather comes home, his hands are blackened with grease. He washes them for four minutes under the tap.
*
The cat brings songbirds home in his teeth, hides them behind the sofa. My mother scolds him with tears in her eyes. Says he understands and he will learn.
*
My stepfather says don’t be anti-social. Says get out of the house, go make some friends. I pass a hooded stranger on my way out the door, sit under the walnut tree in the yard.
*
I can’t leave the table until I finish my milk. I stare at the back of a dirty fork, rub its sting from my knuckles. When the glass is empty, I vomit all over the floor.
*
My stepfather works beneath a car in the garage. I dance around tools, puddles of oil. When he asks for the wrench, I find it right away. His teeth flash praise, my breath releases. He rolls back under the car.
*
I see the stranger leave, sense a stillness in the house. I know to wait outside, make bracelets with dandelions, listen to the plunk of walnuts on the ground.
*
I peer over the sink to watch the day’s work float like an oil slick, then slip down the drain. I pop the dirty bubbles on the bar of soap.
*
In the car my mother rides seatbelt-free, window open, jewelled hand to the wind. My stepfather blares Bon Jovi on the speakers, drives 20 over the speed limit. I dig my hand into a box of French fries, feel the slip of oil on my fingers. I love this little nook in the backseat of their happiness. I never ask if we are there yet.
*
When my stepfather comes home, his hands are clean. He’s carrying papers and rage. I hide in my room with a pillow to quell the flapping in my stomach.
*
The more beautiful the bird, the more tears my mother cries.
*
It takes 25 minutes to walk to the laundromat. My mother pushes the metal cart while I steady the garbage bags that threaten to spill. My stepfather stays home, feet crossed on the sofa, eyes like the cat’s when they spot a yellow bird from behind a window. One foot shakes rapidly back and forth, going nowhere. There is no pedal to stop it.

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Andrea Lynn Koohi is a writer and editor from Toronto, Canada. Her recent work appears in Pithead Chapel, Reservoir Road, Idle Ink, The Maine Review, Streetlight Magazine, and others.

Chelsea flash fiction

With Appetite by Jasmine Sawers

People always ask me, Hazel, how did you meet your husband? I found him in a can of Spam. He was pretty as a painted teacup, brushing black curls out of his eyes. He unfurled from his jelly ham bed and held his hand out for me to shake, his touch the weight of a snowflake. By the time he stepped from the edge of the tin and into my palm, I was done for.

People always ask me, Hazel, how does a regular woman conduct marital relations with such a curio? All you have to know is he called me his mountains and valleys. My Everest, he would say into my skin. My Grand Canyon. My Vastness. With appetite he traced each freckle, nerve, and vein. He mapped me out. He traversed my expanse and wanted me anyway.

People always ask me, Hazel, didn’t you think about children? Oh, our magic beans. Too big for him to hold, too small for me not to crush with a single brush of my finger. We learned early about children.

People always ask me, Hazel, did you see it coming? It’s easy to look backward and cobble together the mosaic of how things went wrong. This quiver in his lip, that flutter of lashes around rolling eyes. This snide tone, that put-upon sigh. Nights spent separately: I in our sumptuous feather bed, he nestled in his beat-up empty can in the pantry, curl of tin pulled taut over the top. The truth is I was cleaved from my senses when he packed up his tic tac suitcase, cleared out his matchbox dresser. What else could I do but seize him where he stood?

What could any woman in love do but swallow him whole?

Sawers_smiley_author_photoJasmine Sawers is a Kundiman fellow whose fiction appears in such journals as Ploughshares, AAWW’s The Margins, SmokeLong Quarterly, and more. Sawers serves as Associate Fiction Editor for Fairy Tale Review and debuts a collection through Rose Metal Press in 2022. Originally from Buffalo, Sawers now lives and pets dogs outside St. Louis.

Chelsea flash fiction

The Songs of Some Birds by MJ McGinn

When I wake up, she’s already gone. The telephone wire, hanging limp outside our window, is bird free. There’s nothing in the bed but me and strands of Meg’s orange hair.

I shoot out of bed, pick up my glasses from the nightstand, slip them on, and go from blur to focus light-switch quick. I have my orange carry-on bag on the bed, and I’m stuffing socks and sports bras into it before I even check the time. This all feels practiced. Muscle memory. It isn’t.

I knew I was leaving yesterday. I had to, but I didn’t really know it until I woke up. Until I started stuffing clothes into a bag, debating if I could bare to leave my records behind.

It’s not Meg. Well, it is Meg, but it’s not something she did. I still love her, that’s really what I mean. On our first date, we went to the zoo. It wasn’t our first date. Our actual first date was at a bar, and she had to leave after half an hour because of a work emergency, so it didn’t count. We went to the zoo, and she paid for the tickets online, and she didn’t even have to convince me because I thought she was so way over-the-top gorgeous. In her car, on the way there, she told me that as a kid, a tiger peed on her.

I move on from socks and undies to t-shirts, jeans, comfy things. I check the window for birds.

I told her it was a cute story, but that I didn’t believe her. I told her that no kid from the Jersey suburbs could encounter a tiger in the wild and live to tell the tale. She smiled at that, a side of her mouth smile, she started to say something then cut herself off and just said, “I like you already, you know?”

I check the time, 8:56 AM. Meg leaves for the gym at 8:30 on Saturdays and gets home at 10, unless she gets coffee afterwards, then it’s 10:15. I have time for the records. I pull on jeans, socks, and a black t-shirt, two snakes crawl toward the collar. No time for a bra, but time for the records. I slip and slide out of the bedroom, step into my Blundstone’s at the door and avoid the kitchen, really just the fridge of summer weddings I won’t be attending with Meg, avert my eyes, head straight for the living room.

We had sex after the zoo and it felt very animal. Tigers. Roar. Her orange hair everywhere.

I can’t fit all the records (67) in the suitcase, and I don’t have time to make executive decisions, so I close my eyes and pick five. Stuff the five in the bag without checking what’s what, then say fuck it and pick two more. Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots and The Cost of Living.

I’m not leaving because of her. I love her. Really. That day at the zoo, that night in the bed I’m leaving behind, I thought that was it. The story we’d tell our kids. I texted my mom the next morning and said, “Hey, I know who I’m gonna marry now.” She sent back three heart eyes emojis, then “What’s her name?”, then “don’t tell your father until I talk to him.” It wasn’t the first time I texted her that, but it would be a lot cooler if my dad was a lot cooler.

I’m leaving because of the birds, or maybe her attitude towards the birds.

I order an Uber and look around the room, a final sweep. Anything else essential? My chest and shoulders tighten. I rub my chest where my heart lives, where the t-shirt snake’s head rests. My therapist says I carry my stress in my shoulders and my depression in my ribs. She says anything in the chest is a mix of both. I think she makes up everything she says the night before.

The problem isn’t that Meg is haunted by a cauldron of birds of prey. The problem is that she likes it. Maybe loves it. She blows them kisses goodnight. She thanks them for leaving her dead presents. I don’t mind having the only apartment in Philadelphia with no mice or rats. I mean, the birds are beautiful. Regal. Powerful. All the things Meg is. Dangerous.

The Uber is here, and I don’t take any last-minute items, no miniature memories. No strands of orange hair. Meg can have it all. I walk down the three flights to the street with my orange rollaboard click-clacking each step along the way. I’m not crying, but I might just be too upset to know.

Yesterday, or actually two days ago, Meg and I got in a fight. Over fucking Grubhub. It wasn’t our realest fight, but it was our loudest. I guess the birds heard. Friday morning, walking to work, they dropped a cat on me. Its fur orange with dried blood. They sat on their electrical wires, cleaning their wings with their beaks, preening, like look what we can do.

When I told Meg about the cat, she wasn’t angry. She wasn’t scared. She just said, “Catherine, they love me.” As if dropping dead animals on a romantic rival, real or imagined, was simply a product of love. The worst part was, she was right. Because when the birds dropped that dead kitty on my hair, got its blood on my best work blouse, my first thought was to throw it back.

The drive to the airport is quick. Henry, the driver, smells like Newports and doesn’t say a word. No traffic on 95. The skyline is a haze of heat in the distance. The sun chews up the clouds, spits them out. I see birds in the distance, little v’s. I wonder if they’re Meg’s and how fast they can fly.

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MJ McGinn received his MFA from Adelphi University. His work has previously appeared in the Guernica/PEN Flash Series, New Flash Fiction Review, The Molotov Cocktail, Firewords, Bridge Eight Press, and elsewhere. He lives in Philadelphia.