Tag: micro fiction

Discovery of Newborn Girl on the Greenway, Newham, London | Leah Mullen

Discovery by a dog walker at 9.13 pm on Thursday, 18 January
junction of Greenway and High Street South in East Ham
child was taken to hospital, without any injuries
police are appealing 
to find the baby’s mother.

The baby could’ve been laboured out of a Dickens novel, born as she was and left like an unexploded bomb on the pathside.  The caul fell foul of the 10p plastic bag charge.  She mewled against it, spiking her newborn panic in the stubby grass. The mother was gone.

The mother was trafficked in an anonymous hospital ward.  The mother was fearing for her life, handcuffed in a cell, in a basement, in a cubicle on a boat.  The mother was sent overseas for daring to come overseas. The mother was anonymously dead or drunk and loving it.

Wise Men?  Too late in the season.  Too far north for storks.  Fortunately for this scrap of prey, too built-up for hawks to be buzzing the wasted verges. In the spring, hollers of sparrows murmured up from the long weeds there, surprising out of poppies and thistle along paths thick with joggers and crabapples. But January sprung almost sudden in the city with its grey promises: a season of steel wool, eczema, grass just stripes of prickle.

But the baby, for now just a collection of kicks in striped plastic, just a collection of scents, of blood, of milk, of meat to a wet and searching lurcher nose in the stubby grass, just a collection of slightly less grey promises: the baby

was found.

About the Author:

The Cashier | Trish Cantillon

I pulled the wrinkled dollar bill from the front pocket of my too-tight shorts and laid it next to the bag of M&Ms. The Cashier looked at me, then at the candy.  I knew I wasn’t supposed to eat candy because of my diet, but he didn’t.  Or at least I assumed he didn’t.  

I lied when I told my mom I was going to hit tennis balls against the backstop near the courts in the apartment complex we lived in.  My real destination was The Grog Shop, the convenience/liquor store in the lobby of our building.  

He lingered too long with my dollar in his hand, “You don’t need these,” he said, “They’re really bad for you.”  It was as if time stopped.  I was frozen, unsure what to do, but certain I didn’t want to put the candy back.  My humiliation gave birth to another lie, “They’re not for me, they’re for my brother,” I answered and made sure to put my racket on the counter so he could see I was an athlete, not an overweight twelve-year-old girl desperate for the M&M’s she would eat in secret.

About the Author:

Drunk Husband Crashes Yard Sale | Alice Kinerk

You decide to hold a yard sale, because it’s a nice thing to do, a homey, all-American thing to do. Also, you’re broke. You place a classified ad, mark the date, start stickering. 

Night before the sale, Drunk Husband goes out drinking, and by dawn has yet to return. Nothing unusual there, but given his recent promises, it hurts.  It’s for the best, you tell yourself. He’s sleeping it off somewhere. With all the hauling to do that morning, all the folding tables to set up.  Linens, CDs, tapes, pot holders, trivets, posters, books, magazines, clothes, garden tools, shoes, clothes, unused wedding gifts and parental cast-offs, beach stuff, utensils, plant pots. Everything out the door, down the steps, onto the front yard for liquidation purposes. 

It’s for the best. It is. It is. It is.

But then, Drunk Husband is rounding the corner. He’s tipping back a paper bag, stiff-legging it. Trespasser! he bellows at the old lady Q-tip who is your first customer. He’s half a block away, bellowing. 

Then he gets close, hovers over her like an interrogator. The Q-tip drops an eggbeater and beelines it to her Cutlass, drives away.

Another customer appears.  Scene repeats.  

You tell Drunk Husband to go to bed, but he doesn’t hear you. Instead he does a King Kong through your cityscape of folding tables, picking things up and dropping them. 

You cajole. He refuses. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

Until finally, mercifully, he does go. He stumbles inside to use the bathroom, some time passes, and he doesn’t return. Peace falls again upon the yard.

More customers arrive. Sales are made. 

But then, from inside the house, the bedroom window opens.

Trespassers!  

It won’t be the final time he hurts you, nor the worst. But one day, twenty years later, remarried, middle-aged, you will watch the sunset through wildfire smoke, and this is the image which will surface.  Drunk Husband’s face in the window that morning, round and red like the sun is now. Just as angry.  Every bit as impossible to contain.

About the Author:

Not Until Fish Fall From the Sky | Kale Choo Hanson

Nina, I won’t let you marry him until fish fall from the sky, my father says as we sit on the back deck, him on a lounge chair smoking a cigar, and Ian and I standing on the threshold of the sliding glass door. Ian shifts beside me, his ears growing pink. Let’s just go, he whispers. But I’m not ready to leave. I had known my father would say this exact thing. He said it at my cousin’s birthday party when asked to try out the bouncy house, then again at the church auction when offered a cocktail with fruit in it, and then again when my sister Ella had saved up her waitressing money to buy a used Volkswagen Bug. I won’t let you drive that thing until fish fall from the sky. 

Ian is a good guy. He has a job as an accountant, keeps the philodendron in our kitchen alive, and listens to my stories like he’ll be quizzed later. It would all be fine if my father hadn’t caught him in the basement last month, polishing his piccolo. No man plays the piccolo and is proud of it, my father says to me later after a dinner of stony glares and silences. He was in marching band, he’s a great musician, I say. My father shakes his head and points at the sky. Fish, Nina. Fish. 

But today, as I stand on the back deck, clutching Ian’s nimble, piccolo-trained hand in mine, watching my father puff cigar smoke from a smirk, I am ready. Well, we are ready. I snatch my phone from my pocket and send my sister a text. I hear a grunt from the other side of the house, the front driveway perhaps. I brace myself for impact. 

The salmon, silvery and dead-eyed, lands on the side table beside my father. His beer, a gold cigar clipper, and ashes from a tray are launched into the air. His cigar flies from his hand as he jumps to his feet. The fish is much bigger than I had expected and I am impressed that Ella had cleared the whole house and almost landed it in his lap. What the hell? My father says as he stares down at the fish, his eyebrows narrowed and his smirk replaced with a gaping O. He doesn’t lift his gaze until we smell smoke.

We discover later that the cigar had rolled underneath the deck and into a pile of dead leaves. We get a lecture from a soot-covered firefighter. But before the red engines arrive— as we wait in the front yard watching the house erupt into flame, Ella, Ian and I with our chins tilted up in disbelief— my father is behind us, facing away from the house, feet bare at the end of the driveway, holding a 6-pound salmon in his fist, opening his mouth to say something and then closing it when nothing comes out.

About the Author:

Closure  |  David Obuchowski

The envelope was already partially open, the flap peeling up as if maybe you hadn’t licked it enough for it to stick. But after I read your letter, that couldn’t have been the case. You wouldn’t have gone to all that effort and then not have sealed the envelope properly. It must have been the adhesive. Cheap glue. Or old perhaps. It must have given way when it was already in transit. Had you seen that it wasn’t sealed, you would have taped it, ensuring the letter’s safety. So it wasn’t your fault. Not that you’d agree. From what you wrote, you’re all too willing to blame yourself.

Well I saw straight away that it wasn’t addressed to me, that it was for someone who lived five blocks away. A stranger on the same postal route as me. The mailman must have been in a rush. Or he must have been lazy. Or he must have been careless in his sorting. Or maybe that loose corner of the flap had just enough adhesion left in it to stick to a piece of my mail, like the seeds of a weed that cling to your shoelaces and the hem of your trousers. Hitchhikers we called them when we were kids. When you were a kid, you never would have imagined pleading for your own freedom. And yet.

So, for whatever reason, the envelope came to me, a stranger to you—not to him, a stranger to me, and a person who you hoped would become a stranger to you once again.

Had the envelope been sealed, I would have scrawled on it wrong address or misdelivered and placed it back into my mailbox for the error to be corrected. Or perhaps I would have even walked it over to this nearby stranger and slipped into his mail slot, or beneath his door. Maybe I would have even written a note on it. Mailman delivered this to my house by accident. Cheers, a neighbor.

But instead, I could see your neat cursive hand in navy ink. I could make out words. Love and sorry and time and wrong and happy and sorry and sorry and sorry again. Well, I had to read the rest, didn’t I?

Three pages. Six, considering they were double-sided.

You tried to take the blame. You cast yourself as the villain. But that’s not what villains do. He was luckier than he knew. People like him always are. You gave him everything he ever wanted. So why give him one last thing? Why give him your navy ink, your neat cursive hand, your stamp that says forever for a letter that yearns for never again? 

Closure is too precious for the likes of him. Let him wonder instead.

About the Author:

Roman Holiday  |  David Sapp

I dreamed and found you young again somehow transported across the Atlantic, past Gibraltar then Corsica, over the waves of the Mediterranean. I arrived quite dashing in a light linen suit and polished Italian shoes, in a little white sportscar, over ancient brick streets and through Di Chirico piazzas and skewed Zeffirelli perspectives at your flat in Rome set curiously in the forum at the edge of the Palatine Hill. I took you in my arms, circled your waist, and my palm found the small of your back. You twirled for me, flipping the hem of your dress, a black and white print in tiny cubist abstractions. We danced spinning through your bright rooms with the high ceilings like a chiesa expecting Raphael above our heads – an Assumption or an Ascension. You’d arranged vases of flowers, and the tables and chairs were strewn with opened books, chipped china, and the remains of bread and the dregs of wine from the night before. The windows were tall and opened wide, curtains drifting in the breeze, and allowed the shouts and cheers of scruffy boys kicking a soccer ball outside. And there was a jumpy, comedic Italian tune playing from the phonograph – the kind of music that makes you want to whirl around the kitchen with your mother or gambol with your little sister balanced on your shoes. So pretty and poised, you were Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday after she got her hair cut short, raced Gregory Peck on a Vespa, and stuck her hand in the Mouth of Truth. Giddy, we laughed and ached and wept, immediately in love again. Your bedroom walls and the quaint watercolors you bought of the Pantheon, Colosseum, Spanish Steps, Trevi Fountain, and that little temple of Portunus near the Tiber – the very ruins around us seemed to laugh too, happy for us. But when I leaned in to kiss you, our lips refused to touch, to meet as willing participants in a prelude to desire. I heard, “Remember, you’re married.” Instantly I returned flying back across the ocean in my little white convertible to that other bliss I’d live after waking. And that was all. That was enough.

About the Author:

Letdown | Nicole Brogdon

After Dan’s Atlanta conference, Judy upends his blue carry-on, dirty clothes tumbling onto the laundry floor—khakis, twin socks, damp boxers. One gossamer green thong springs up like a grasshopper. Judy sinks onto cold tile, pincer fingers lifting the undies—lace with black spiky straps, Small. She smells them. Judy never wore thongs. Since Baby’s birth, she wore cotton floral briefs, Large.

From the den, Dan hollers, “I’m flying back to Atlanta next weekend. Another meeting.”

Baby howls in the master bedroom.

Judy’s pendulous nursing breasts swell, tender and pained, that let-down. Her whole body, sticky, sad, and letdown.

About the Author:

All The Kids Are In Therapy | Jen McConnell

Life was just a series of soon-to-expire sticks of string cheese but my brother, a monster with no imagination, ate his by biting into it, like it was any ordinary food, whereas the rest of us – and, by us, I mean all of humanity – pulled the strings off one by one, dangling them, slurping them like spaghetti, whipping each other’s cheeks with them, like normal kids and it makes you wonder what happens when a monster grows up and gets a job, and that’s when the therapist asked if I had a happy childhood and I hesitated, wondering if she really wanted the truth or rather the abridged version I gave everyone else because, while people loved to hear a tragic story, they preferred it in the third-person and that’s when I realized I was reclining on a couch, like a patient of Freud, and the couch wasn’t for my comfort but for the therapist, so she didn’t have to look me in the eye when I opened my heart and let the truth rush out.

About the Author:

Love Letters | Karan Kapoor

Dear Blue, You are an island far away. Extraterrestrial like oyster shells, I want to carry in my palms the stones beneath your feet. I rub moss all over my body as a way to be near you. An island is the raised thumb of an ocean. It means ocean is having a really good day. Or perhaps ocean is hailing a cab. I am working on convincing ocean to take a walk, so I can walk to where you are. For now, I let the sky open and cry in my arms. Rain is the way clouds look after us — the true teachers of returning. I trace my origin to the sun. To South Africa over three hundred thousand years ago. I am the color of fire, yolk, urine, lemons, daffodils, bananas, longing, summer honey. That I might be made up of cow urine might make you laugh. But I am made from the earth and you are sky. I want to rise above and fly through this smog and reach your doorstep. When we touch, we will be the color of a healed world. Eternally yours, Yellow.

Dearest Yellow, Your words are the cause of light. You are the subject of sun’s envy. Though you remind sunflowers to turn, they wither in my presence. I raise my hand but nobody asks why. When I was born, my mother’s milk came out blue. I did not know you then, but sometimes when I feel alone (which is a regular occurrence in this country where rivers stretch like veins over the broken skin of the earth) I imagine I have known you my whole life. Silver-gray clouds, like thieves, hop the fence of horizon. All beaches I touch hold a signpost warning against tsunamis. How does one outrun a tsunami? I did not mean for this letter to loom with death but these days even the palm trees along the stripmalls do not cheer me up. I am a world without footprints. I am the broom that scatters the dust of joy, shatters the vase of mercy. I am bruise, I am ice, I am Shiva’s throat, I am death. My prayer is not more than gossip. Why do you lose yourself in the atlas of earth and water? This fugue of distance. Do all colors not turn black if mixed together over and over? Yours in the pandemonium, yours in the quiet, Blue. 

About the Author:

Levitation | Michael Raqim Mira

A stained wedding gown hanging in a dusty closet is how you grieve without a sound. A failed marriage and not marrying the man she truly loved in college was how to perfectly control numbness: surgically remove a beating heart, place it on the altar of an empty chapel, and shoot it with a suppressed pistol. 

—

That gown was the first thing she showed me when I interviewed her after her husband was shot in the back of the head in a rice field. She tells me that was not the first time she cried over him. Before, he would come home drunk, then beat her while laughing maniacally. 

When he died, she felt two emotions: pain and ecstasy. 

—

Teresa of Avila levitated under the tip of Cupid’s arrow, her fragile body being ripped cell by cell as carnal pain and divinity pulled her at the ends like an archer’s bowstring. 

She defined the term total surrender, meaning to offer your entire being to what God had written for you, even if your fate is written in blood.

—

Her daughter pulled her hand, leading us to the rice terrace where a white, wooden cross marks the spot of a buried treasure chest. Her daughter’s pull is too strong for her frail, aging body. Her feet are staked to the ground, but her child is straining the umbilical cord connected to her torso, trying to drag her to the memory of a man she once loved. 

She loved another man once. He, too, is gone now. These loves, she thinks to herself, are like that unicorn on a carousel she tried to reach as a child at the annual fair. She could never see it clearly through the motion blur as the mythical creature ran round and round until its magic lost its gloss. 

In the Earth’s gravitational field, she is being pulled in every direction. She says a prayer and the words become an unwritten contract. She says she will always love him. What she really meant to say is, “We’re both free now.”

About the Author: