Category: flash creative nonfiction

The Percolator | Marlene Olin

The 55-cup West Bend percolator looked like a miniature nuclear reactor. A tall stainless-steel body. A snug cylinder tucked inside. The secret to Shirley’s coffee was adding a pinch of cinnamon to the basket before plugging it in. A few minutes later, she’d hear the water churn and the contents simmer. Then the coffee would settle into a slow and steady pulse. Soon Shirley would smell the deep dark aroma of freshly brewed. Decaf, of course. Anything else would send her heart galumphing in her chest.

Now there was a gap in her coat closet, an empty space on the highest shelf. How many shivas had that percolator seen? Each Yom Kippur, she’d schlep it out of the closet every time they broke the fast. She could track the autumns of her life by that machine.

If only she hadn’t lent it to Marg! And for her book club no less!

Marg was her closest friend. One of the few people who understood what she was going through. When Shirley tried to describe the amyloid plaque destroying her husband’s brain, Marg listened, stirred the spoon in her mug, stared at the wall, tried to picture it. Like cottage cheese? she asked. Like curdled cottage cheese, Shirley replied. Then they laughed. They somehow managed to laugh.

For the two of them, swapping heartache had been as natural as swapping recipes. And when Marg told Shirley about her husband, about the blood disease that was a time bomb, about the tests every six months where they held their breaths until the results were in, they sat at the kitchen table together and sobbed.  

That wallpaper, Marg said, pointing with a spoon.

Images of teapots littered the wallpaper in Shirley’s kitchen. Big teapots, little teapots, teapots all the colors of the rainbow. The kind of wallpaper that was popular in the seventies.  When pop colors were in, and good taste was out.   

I’m like one of those teapots, said Marg.  Some days the pressure builds and builds, and I feel like I’m gonna explode.

At first Marg said she’d bring the percolator right back. Then a week passed, and Marg said Monday. Then Monday passed, and she said Tuesday. Then one Tuesday passed after another.

There was a history, of course. Shirley should have known better. Years ago, Shirley lent Marg her fake shearling jacket. Marg’s kids were taking her on a ski trip to Aspen, so Marg had trotted out her mother’s mink coat. It must have been in mothballs for fifty years.  

You want to get spray-painted? asked Shirley. You want the PETA police to knock at your door?

That was another mistake. You think Marg bothered to have it dry-cleaned? Nope. It came back with tissues in the pockets and a chocolate stain on the lapel.

They traded recipes, the two friends. Once, Marg gave Shirley a macaroon recipe and left out the part about using fluted cupcake cups. Shirley’s macaroons came out like shapeless blobs while Marg’s were picture perfect. Then there was the time Shirley shared her brisket recipe. It was a family treasure, the secret ingredients handed down from her Aunt Lil, the index card frayed and stained, her aunt’s shaky handwriting barely legible. And wouldn’t you know? Marj added more brown sugar and cut the tomato sauce in half. She improvised!! And her gravy was twice as thick and three times as tasty.

Twice a year, Marg and Harold head to their doctor’s appointment. She and Harold drive five hours to Tampa, check into a hotel, and talk to the experts at the hospital there. Later, speaking in whispers, Marg relays the news over the phone. It’s like her life is on hold, she tells Shirley. They live from one reprieve to the next.

Shirley can only wish for a reprieve. Alzheimer’s is like a relentless march, like those World War II slogs you see on TV. Her father, a Navy vet, would be glued to the screen watching the movies, reliving the torment, sweating through the swamps, ducking the bombs, dodging the shrapnel.

Those were the good days, he would say. We were in it together. Everyone suffered the same.

Some folks never complain. Some folks not only survive but thrive on pain. Take Marg. She is a breast cancer survivor. Her teenage daughter ran away from home. Her husband’s business partner cooked the books and stole their cash. Yet, each day she puts one foot ahead of the other. We all have something, Marg would say. Heartache isn’t graded on a curve.

Shirley is giving her one more day. The deadline’s tomorrow, the square on her calendar circled. If Marg doesn’t bring back the percolator, that’s it.  A new one costs around $200.  There’s a nice one at Macy’s, she’ll say. It will fit in her closet just fine.

Meanwhile Shirley sits. Sips. Reads the news. A stream of sweat courses down her neck. Beads of perspiration slink down her forehead. And though the stove’s off, it feels like it’s on.  And though it’s sweater weather outside, inside it feels like a rain forest. And when she glances at the wall those teapots threaten to leap from the paper, the kettles hissing, the steam rising, the bubbles boiling, the water doing its little dance. With her hand on her chest, she waits. Because any minute now, any second, those teapots are going to blow their lids clean off.

about the author:

I think a good life happens when you meet life’s challenges with dignity and grace. 

Marlene Olin was born in Brooklyn, raised in Miami, and educated at the University of Michigan.  Her short stories and essays have been published in journals such as The Massachusetts Review, Catapult, PANK, and World Literature Today. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of The Net, Best Small Fictions, and for inclusion in Best American Short Stories. 

A brief Q&A with Marlene is available on The Buzz.

my mother says she wants to go out tonight | Camila Cal Mello

i tell her it’s not a good idea it’s halloween it’s crowded outside it’s kind of cold really it’s a strange thing to want when everything is falling apart but she stands up from her bed says i want to dress up so i gather the boxes of costumes from the garage while she vomits what’s left of her stomach into the toilet i pull out wigs tights cracked makeup props of a past i can’t quite remember i hear her retching i wonder what she wants to be this year what we did for this to be our life what made her so ill this time the pinch of plain white rice the spoonful of soup the tiny mountain of pills on her nightstand but there is no dressing it up the answer is always the same and i pull it out of boxes like a repeated costume that never goes out of style the cancer the cancer the cancer 

she closes the toilet lid and sits on top i appear at the door holding anything i think she might like though surely she doesn’t want to leave anymore but she points at the white makeup in my palm says i want that so i cover her forehead undereye bags sunken cheeks wrinkled lids in a thick white paste i add fake blood like scars all over try not to think any more about blood just this week she had a transfusion the chemo was too strong trying to kill her before she had a chance to survive now what to do about her hair or lack thereof i buzzed it off in the living room maybe a month ago because her black hair was clumped in every corner of the house discarded piles of a person finally she begged i want you to get it all off me at first i said no please afraid i would not know my mother without her waist length hair already she was yanking it out in fistfuls of evidence i know her body hasn’t belonged to me since birth but now it doesn’t belong to her either who was i to deny a broken body’s wish i tuck a silver wig onto her bald head and ask her to pick out a dress

i am a skeleton face wearing all black heating up the car the chemo has made her so small so cold i cannot cure much but i can offer a warm seat when she walks out the front door she is wearing a long grey dress thick shiny strands framing the ghastly makeup i’m not sure exactly what she means to be but the poison port on her chest is hidden her hair is touching her waist again and right now she is strong enough to put one foot in front of the other to sink into the cushion offer me a weak smile enough to make me press on the gas drive us downtown to watch little kids strut next to their healthy parents do you remember when i chose your costumes she asks me and of course i do angel princess pirate nurse devil walking up a driveway with a mother looming somewhere behind who i once was feels so far away now because i know i know how this skeleton face isn’t fooling anyone she puts her pale hand on mine maybe this year is like all the others my mother chose my costume and i wear it year-round look at me look at me will anyone notice i’m dressed up as a daughter 

when we get there i tell her we can always go back home there’s big crowds lots of walking she doesn’t even like candy still she ignores me breathes deep opens the car door we walk down a bustling fifth avenue her arm hooked in mine as superheroes and astronauts blow past us to trick or treat from storefronts some kids stop and stare at us they say children can see ghosts better than anyone else i think they must know just how much i am holding her body upright instead their parents ask for a picture they love my mother’s costume she’s so scary it’s almost real i want to tell them i’ve seen her scarier on wednesday afternoons floating in a chemo chair glazed look in her eyes smooth skin gone sour cheeks lips tongue so pale it’s like her face was erased how i sit beside her watching the rise and fall of her chest i want to tell them give me all the zombies monsters spiders there is nothing scarier than loss i hold my mother’s arm tighter as if she isn’t my worst nightmare

she doesn’t mind the cameras in fact she leans into character for the pictures looming over the children with an angry look they scream she laughs my face paint smears i record the moment so she can listen to it on repeat like an antidote to the wednesday poison press play her laugh her laugh her laugh we go on like this for an hour walking the street slowly stopping every few steps to admire a costume take another picture place a piece of candy into a chubby palm eventually i hear her breathing begin to rasp when i look at her she nods so we make our way back to the car i say ma i hope you had a good time she says yes oh yes the proof is in her white makeup cracked at the edges from her smile windswept wig grey dress trailing behind us i feel like a little girl with a bag full of candy when i tell her i’m glad we came she squeezes my hand says my daughter isn’t it wonderful to only pretend to be dead?  

Bonus audio of Camila reading from her essay…

about the author:

Camila Cal Mello is a Uruguayan, first-generation, emerging creative nonfiction writer, and poet. She earned her MFA from the University of Central Florida, where she received a Provost Fellowship in nonfiction. She is currently a PhD student in English, Creative Writing Concentration at the University of Mississippi where she teaches literature on campus and in the Prison-to-College Pipeline program. Her work has been published in Under the Sun, The Acentos Review, and others. Find her on social media @camivcal.

the doctor says i must milk her body | Camila Cal Mello

she is not a cow i say to the doctor and he shakes his head at me yes indeed she is a cow i turn to look at her i can see how every one of her bones is shivering inside the hospital bed her lower left breast bandage crinkling a long drainage tube dangling i expect her to say of course i am not a cow but her mind is somewhere far away locked in cancer’s lobby waiting to see whether life or death will call her name i turn back to the doctor say she may have changed a lot during surgery lost a tumor lost lymph nodes still she is not a cow he says look at her i turn again suddenly the room smells like manure my feet shuffle over hay i hear a low bellowing coming from her mouth she has a snout four furry legs black hair spread into spots a hospital tag on the tip of her ear i whisper oh god she is a cow and the doctor says she has to be now let’s get her home

the cow is uncomfortable in the car the seats are not made for recovering animals so i drive with one hand reaching toward the back every now and then the cow brushes up against it when we arrive home i coax the cow out of the car she wants to limp down the driveway into the house on her own because even sick she is stubborn i follow closely beside her holding the bottom bulb of the drainage tube like a leash all the way to the bedroom where the cow sighs curls into cotton bedding falls asleep relieved she can finally be healthy again even if only within her dreams  

in the meantime i worry i do not know how to care for a sick cow i am just a seventeen year old girl though i have learned how this kind of illness does not discriminate i must be a rancher now must help the cow survive i fall to my knees in the backyard where she cannot see how i break i beg the nature of things to let her live i dig my hands into the earth pluck the greenest blades of grass to wiggle in front of her mouth when she wakes in the next five to eight minutes alive inside the pain of it all 

the bedroom door creaks open her eyes are tired slits she laps water from a bucket i filled and i run my palm along her cattle coat then i remember what the doctor said the importance of keeping the drainage tube clear flowing to prevent infection but already her tube has a thick blood clot blocking the healing i tell the cow i need to take care of her leash in hand we hobble together to the bathroom in my head i repeat the doctor says i must milk her body though no one ever told me this would happen

i tell the cow i will be gentle so gentle in the vanity mirror i watch myself duck toward her udders to find the place where the cow stops where the tube begins i thought it would look more secure the truth is that there is just a hole in the cow plastic hanging from it i squeeze the tube between my pointer fingers and thumbs try to milk the clot down down down wonder how hard i would have to pull to yank it all out the tube the clots the liquid the sickness it is my job to get it all out the cow is counting on me only me everything shakes my hands are a blur and i coo to stop her trembling because i cannot tell where her body ends where mine begins so much smell of manure makes me dizzy i am seeing black spots hearing whining still trembling all coming from my own body not hers the tube tumbles from my hands i faint sideways into the bathtub like a cow tipping when she least expects it

i regain consciousness she is looking back at me wide eyed confused the tube swinging from the side of tender human breast i say you are not a cow she says no i say you have cancer she says yes i say it once more to really make sure you are not a cow she says no no i am your mother. 

Bonus audio of Camila reading from her essay…

about the author:

Camila Cal Mello is a Uruguayan, first-generation, emerging creative nonfiction writer, and poet. She earned her MFA from the University of Central Florida, where she received a Provost Fellowship in nonfiction. She is currently a PhD student in English, Creative Writing Concentration at the University of Mississippi where she teaches literature on campus and in the Prison-to-College Pipeline program. Her work has been published in Under the Sun, The Acentos Review, and others. Find her on social media @camivcal.

The Leftovers | Michelle La Vone

Oma holds the pesto jar up to the light. I tell her not to worry about scraping, but still she wields a long-necked spoon. “Opa hasn’t been eating enough,” she declares. Clink clink clink. “Half the time his lunch is still sitting there when I visit, and he wants me to eat it,”—clink clink clink—“and I say no, I didn’t come all this way to eat up your food!” Splat! onto the chicken bake.

I squint at the cryptic oven symbols, slide the dish in, and set the table. One plate, two plates. Butter dish, bread basket. Napkins scissored in half. I think about when I was here last: platters of jams and cheeses, pastel forks in fruit. Opa to my left, slow-chewing the soft yolk of a sawed-off egg, trying to teach me a valuable life lesson: slowly, child. You have time. 

Today, the table feels smaller. To my left, a home phone, a stack of papers. After the oven beeps, Oma sits across from me, chewing on chicken and childhood stories of the 1940s: running to bomb shelters on the walk to school, losing playthings but trading grenade splinters like playing cards. Sleeping under blanketed roofs of fireproof sand. Slurping Grützwurst and Sauerkraut soup given by a kind Soviet soldier. Other Soviets banging on the bunker door. As I smear another slice of bread with butter, she recites wartime national anthems and nursery rhymes. 

Eine alte Frau kocht Rüben,
Eine alte Frau kocht Speck…
…Und du bist weg!

She giggles, clears her throat, pulls white asparagus strings from her dentures. I scrape my plate as she swallows two gulps of water and commends the pesto for helping the chicken slide down. “Take more!” she tells me, then places both hands on her belly and declares, “I can’t eat as much these days. You know, I’ve lost a lot of weight from all the chaos with Opa.”

I nod. Oma’s cheeks are sunken, her creases more pronounced. She follows me into the kitchen, pokes the still-steaming asparagus stalks, and slips four into a bag for Opa. Limp-bodied, they fold into a heap. “Like worms!” Oma laughs, then tucks them away next to a tub of linseed oil and quark— her sworn superfood. Just like Opa’s honey, mom’s fish oil. 

At the hospice that afternoon, Opa offers me firm jello, peeled apples. A chocolate bunny wrapped in foil. “I still have a yogurt to gift someone,” Opa waves the container, his voice frail. 

“I’m still full from lunch,” Oma defends herself. “You should save it for later, in case you get hungry.”

“I have everything I want here. I just have to say, bring me this and that, and they do.”

“Well then, it’s good you’re not at home!” 

In their laughter, I picture them in their apartment together: Oma in an apron, always. Opa in slacks and a belt, slicing fresh-baked Brötchen. Poppy seeds flying. I picture myself with them, sliding my plate over to Opa, my eyes too big for my stomach. I imagine the clink clink of the mini marmalade spoon, the eventual pat of Opa’s hands on his stomach. The sigh of a satiated man. 

Bedside now, I notice how Opa’s white sheets swallow him whole, how his contours are jagged cliffs, not the slopes he used to ski. I am aware his body is preparing its feast for flies, just like Mom’s, when two men in black business suits carried her deadweight into the summer night. I am aware that it will always be too soon.

“Anything you want, just ask,” Opa looks over at me and smiles when I tell him I’m getting ready to leave. I squeeze his liver-spotted hand, assure him I have everything I need. I thank him for his decades of gifts: money for college, houses, cars. Then he motions to the tray beside him. “Take something with you—everything needs to be eaten,” he raises an eyebrow. I shake my head no, but no one, nothing listens.  The doctors tried to scrape it all out, they promised us, but the cancer marches on.

***

Less than two years later, my sister and I knock on Oma’s door. When she opens, she is all eyes, a skeleton hunched in sagging skin and distended stomach. We walk her back to the bed, where she slips out and onto the rug. Her bones are heavy; I need my sister to help heave. What is wrong with me? She asks. We tell her that half-cookies don’t count as meals. We tell her that, just like Opa and Mom, her body is losing the war. 

After she dies, we pour paper clips out of the pesto jar, collate hospice bills and bank statements. We toss out smalec, salmon creme, slimy turnips. We throw away canned liver, jarred capers, bottled linseed oil. We shred signatures, account numbers. We pack up four cubic meters of marble table, porcelain dishware, and family heirlooms that we slow-ship by sea. We leave behind the rest of the household, poorly stacked pots and half-used honey. We whisper through time and space and to unmarked graves that we rescued what we could, but please understand–sometimes, the leftovers go to waste.

about the author:

Michelle La Vone is a Nashville native currently living in the Pacific Northwest. She loves salsa and bachata dancing, snacking on summits, and designing whimsical animal stickers. Her work has appeared in In Short: A Journal of Flash Nonfiction and Five Minute Lit, where she placed as a finalist in the Fall 2024 Flirt contest. She can be found at: 
michellelavone.substack.com.

I Conjure My Great-Grandmother In a Dream; She Gives Me a Lesson on Revision | Alayna Powell

In this version, I get my period for the first time, black and puddled between my legs. She  appears in the bathroom. I am just twelve years old, so young I still yearn for womanhood. Is this  a dream or a memory? I ask her, unsure. I am suddenly unsure of everything. She giggles and  holds out her hands, palms cupped, as if she’s prepared to release a secret.  

In this version, I braid her hair every morning. I count each strand. Time passes quickly in this  version. One day, after many days, we wake to find her hair is no longer hair, but thin strips of  silver, razor sharp. I reach to braid it and my hands bleed. I reach to braid it and my hands bleed.  I reach to braid it and my hands bleed.  

In this version, she keeps sinking deeper into the pull-out couch. My sister and I run circles  around the living room, around the wood stove, the TV so loud we have to scream, so we  scream. It’s a game like duck-duck goose, but all we have are chickens. Each time we make a lap  Granny gets sucked deeper. We can’t actually tell if she’s sinking or shrinking. The TV is on a  loop: Rachel Ray, Joel Osteen, The Weather Man. We all want to be the loudest, so we scream.  Rachel Ray, Joel Osteen, The Weather Man. By the time we catch the chickens, all that’s left of  Granny is her hair, two silver braids stuffed between the cushions. We scream. Rachel Ray, Joel  Osteen, The Weather Man. Feathers dance around us.  

In this version, she never died. She can’t. She’s sick of it. She squats on the front porch, knees  raised to her chest, pale nail polish flicking perpetually just over her toenails. You try livin’ uh-hundred and twenty-seven years, she says, all spit, no teeth. She wants to look good in her  casket. Her laugh comes tired and thick.  

In this version, she is twenty-five with no kids and no plans for them. She watches me cut my  hair in my bathroom. Her face changes shapes but, ultimately, it is still her face. I’ve seen so  many versions, I just know. While I cut, I tell her about birth control and abortions like she’s  never heard of them and she tells me I still have a lot to learn. I ask her to hold the mirror while I  cut the hairs at the nape of my neck. She asks to hold the scissors.  

In the dream version, it seemed her hands grew larger around whatever she was holding. In the memory version, I sunk into the toilet, choked by my own blood. In both versions, a frog was  hidden in the cup of her hands.  

In this version, her throat is filled with several hundred balls of cotton. She won’t let me take the  polish off, or even touch her toes (she’s ticklish). She spends hours on her back, open-mouthed,  while I pick lint and tartar from her teeth.  

In this version, she’s a young mother of ten, then eight, then seven.  

In this version, she’s a young mother of seven, and her husband just died, and she’s losing the  farm and the house too. It’s a nightmare. In this version, I spend hours organizing a GoFundMe  campaign. We receive so many thoughts and prayers. We spend all of it, recklessly, on self-care  treatments. I pray for her first pedicure, where they scrape layers of grief and polish from each  nail. 

In this version, she is only eleven. She hasn’t yet met the man who will become her husband,  who is already a father to his first son. We don’t know about him yet, or about any sons. We are just girls. We haven’t begun to contemplate what that might mean. When we bleed, we press our tongue to it. Add warmth to the wound and wait for it to end.  

In this version, we are in my last childhood bedroom, where I stopped being a child and became  something else. In this version, I don’t know all the things that have happened to me. I am in  high school, holding secrets with a loose fist. In the real version, I come out to my mother here,  and despite my way with words, it sounds like a confession. In this version, which is not the real  version, it is my great-grandmother who sits on my bed. I open my mouth. A soft white foam  billows out.  

In the extended version, she responds, everyone thinks about kissing girls sometimes, no need to  make a big deal of it but as soon as the words leave her lips it is only foam, yellow and sticky.  

In this version, everything’s backwards. I am the mother on the bed and she is the daughter and  she is my great grandmother when the foam begins to rise we are expecting it. Something like relief settles around the room. We’ve been here before. When I fold my hands around hers, yes,  it looks like prayer. But in this version we don’t bow our heads. In this version, we don’t even  blink.  

In both versions, the bathroom fills with frogs in seconds. They skip the tadpole stage, appearing  fully formed and fertile. See how quickly? she says. See how quickly a frog will leap from the cup  of your hands? 

In a much later version, we go on double dates. We fall in love over and over, sometimes several  times in one night. It is a love that has nothing to do with bodies.  

In this version, she hasn’t been born yet. It’s a dark night, but the moon is full-bellied, yellow.  The woman walks slowly, steps light as leaves underfoot. She is waiting. She smells pine. In  this version, there are no mothers. In this version, there never will be. 

A snippet of this essay, read by the author:

Alayna’s essay was selected as the 2025 Honeybee Flash Creative Nonfiction Prize winner by Kristine Langley Mahler. Kristine had this to say about the work…

“In “I Conjure My Great-Grandmother In a Dream; She Gives Me a Lesson on Revision,” the author’s speculative encounters with their great-grandmother move through versions of possible histories to assemble connections. Blending memory, speculation, and the potent truth that only arrives in dreams, this flash CNF brilliantly acknowledges the nuance of trying to tell another’s story while knowing we will always get it wrong. Hair is braided and cut, life is truncated and extended, love leaps across generations like a frog. A gorgeous reconstruction of what might, has, and can be.”” 

about the author:

Alayna Powell (she/they) is a biracial Black writer with roots along the Southern East Coast and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She is a fourth-year MFA student at the University of Alabama, where she’s also pursuing a certificate in Archival Studies. In 2025, she served as the Poetry Editor for Black Warrior Review. https://alaynapowell.wordpress.com/