Tag: micro fiction

Everything Is Here, Everything Is Gone | Cressida Blake Roe

You become more man the further east you walk. As the coastal fires darken behind you, the state borders lie in ruins of cinderblock and snapping pylons, but you use them to mark your passage out of womanhood: Arizona, you cut your hair with a stranger’s knife and barter it for bread made more of synthetic polymer and wishful thinking than wheat, but you’ve been eating dreams for months, so it only reminds you of home. Arkansas, you bind your breasts with the fabric you had stuffed into your brother’s stolen boots and let your feet go cold. Alabama, you stop sliding your voice up to the anticipated octave, and Georgia—but Georgia is a dead name; you leave her behind altogether.

The stars are still falling when you reach the ocean, and their dying light allows you to read the overhanging billboard. In the old days, neon swirled through a sign declaring The Republic of New-Nueva-新的 York, but you know that the way you learned the mythology of Martin Luther King Jr. in high school. What’s left of it you can see spells “he Re N or.” Ironic. Because it’s neither here nor there, this ruined republic. Like the body you wear. Like the world that’s been ending for so long but won’t ever stop.

You’ve often thought about ending it, yourself, in that old life. So many times, digging your own grave with misplaced words, you were tempted to lie breathing the soil until its toxins sent you to sleep. Her, her, you mouthed into the dirt. Broken vessel, traitor bones. Should have swallowed the water when you fell into Lake Anza when you were thirteen and drowned. It took you nine years, four months, and seventeen days to climb out from the earth you carved up with your own shame and walk away from the girl buried there.

Now, you survey the moving seam where the water meets the land: blurry and unclear, the waves throw up plastic and choked fish and confusion. Nature never divided things plainly. A terminus is an origin point is a balance in the center of the scale. In this moment on the journey of radioactive decomposition, you understand you have only made it halfway to the person you are. Time stretches ahead of you into the dark, so you settle among the ashes of democracy to wait for dawn. It is a beautiful half-life, you think. All around glitter the shards of what you were, what you are, what you might have been; and from here, they look just like diamonds.

About the Author:

It Was a Pheromone Party | Val Maloof

You know, a pheromone party? The kind where strangers all wear shirts to bed for three nights in a row, then put it in a bag, label it with their ID number, and then everyone goes around sniffing each bag like a zombie trying to find its prey? You don’t have those here?

You should start them. They’re fun. Make sure to wear cotton, it’s breathable and your stench will last longer in the fabric. Try not to judge the color or what’s on each shirt, don’t read too much into it, it’s all about the smell. 

I know pheromones don’t have a smell, but it’s also about the smell.

No, you don’t touch the shirts, that would tamper with the purity of the experiment. You just sniff. They line up all the shirts like evidence bags and with gloves on and you open each one and try to find your future partner. At first, you might be really eager – Ok that one didn’t smell too bad. But just wait, they get better. I mean they also get worse of course, like repulsive even, but also better. There’s a smell out there that’s just right for you.

Who started this? A friend of a friend. He said he was looking for someone special. He said the apps were so empty and meaningless. How can you really know someone if you don’t know what it smells like to stand next to them? We all laughed and said that people do meet people through the apps. We said, you’re using your eyes to view their photos and then when you meet them you’re hearing their voice and feeling their hug. All these things matter.

But he said smell was his favorite way to know someone. He said after his wife died a few years ago he would wrap himself in the blanket she watched TV in. Every day, even in the summer he’d wrap her blanket around his neck and shoulders, seeing how many times it could go around his body. It was like she was still here. But after a while, the blanket no longer smelled like her. Time wore it off. And he’s now searching for her scent, sticking his face into each bag, hoping for something close. 

About the Author:

End Game | Laura Brown

We chased them in circles, kicking up clouds of dust – big, cumulus columns of fine red dirt – until, giggling and screaming, we were outside of ourselves, wound up into something like madness, at which point Gran would bang open the screen door and yell at us to cut it out and leave them chickens alone, and when we ignored her, pose the existential question that gradually brought us staggering to a sweaty halt, bent over with hands on our knees, panting and laughing a little more uncertainly, the dust settling, the chickens strutting off, indignant, out of reach, and we would all decide we were tired of the chase and race to another corner of the farm to do something else.

God, the angles of him. Long legs bent at the knees, ninety degrees to the floor; his back an acute line to his thighs when he leans forward, forearms resting on his legs. I am not available for this, but he dissolves me. 

And what do y’all plan to do when you catch one? Gran would yell from the doorway, fists on her hips, and that was the question that eventually stopped us, because the chase was exhilarating, but it had to end one way or another – either we stop, or we succeed – and never having succeeded, I didn’t know what would happen; I didn’t know what I planned to do; sometimes I had a vision of talons and beaks turning on me, tearing at my flesh, rivulets of bright blood dripping down my arms; other times, I had a vision of grabbing its body and finding that it was warmer and softer and more yielding than I ever dreamed, that I couldn’t stop myself from squeezing it hard and harder, crushing it to my chest, possessing it at last, until it goes limp in my arms, and when I let it go, it falls to the earth with a thud. 

God, everything about him. The intensity of his eyes, the stillness of his body except for the energy in his hands, rotating the base of his glass like a pitcher on the mound fingering a ball, studying the strike zone, watching, waiting.  

Maybe what I wanted was to be fast enough to catch the chicken, hands on either side of the wings, ready to clasp, and to freeze that moment in time; then the bird turns and cocks its head to the side to fix its liquid black eye on me, pausing, standing still as I brush the tips of my fingers against its feathers, grazing it just enough to feel the staccato pulse of its heart beating more than five times a second; then I draw back, right myself, and walk away, the bird looking after me, following me for a few steps, perhaps. 

But this is not the kind of thing that happens.  

About the Author:

Elvidarium | Kay Sexton

I’d never spoken to Ronita before we covered synesthesia in English class. To start with her name was weird, and she was weird. She always had chewed off nail varnish and how is that possible? There has to be a day when it’s perfect, surely?

I knew, from the moment Miss Perkins defined synaesthesia, which one of us was going to claim to have it. Magdalena Pike. Magdalena with the too-long fringe that she constantly brushed out of her eyes, the too-prominent Adam’s apple that was bound to raise questions in later life, the fluttery laugh with a hand pressed to her chest (the hand that wasn’t brushing hair out of her eyes). Magdalena would go on to become a hypnotherapist, to recover memories of past lives and end up suing an employer for discrimination because they wouldn’t let her bring in a six-foot pyramid to heal her clients’ endocrine systems.

Magdalena’s instantaneous acquisition of the ability to hear numbers and smell days of the week caused me to eye-roll inadvertently enough to catch Ronita’s attention, so when we paired up to write a piece, she tapped her pen on my desk. “You and me,” she said. 

We wrote about the colors of emotions. Not the obvious red for anger stuff. Taupe was depression, peach was the hour before school ended on a Friday, and jade was the color of a walk with your pet dog early in the morning before the newspapers were delivered. It was okay. It was adequate. It was more fun than anything I’d ever done in English class before. That was how we began, giggling through our creative writing, asking Magdalena snarky questions about tasting numbers as we ran downstairs to our next class, skipping afternoon school without discussion, without guilt. 

We played on swings like little kids, smoked cigarettes like grown-ups, talked like teenagers who’d never had a best friend before, which neither of us had. We became inseparable. But not for long. Three weeks after we first talked, on the peach hour of Friday, we were sprawled in the long grass behind the playing field, sharing a roll-up, when Ronita said, “You know when you wake up in the morning and turn over in bed and remember it’s Saturday and you don’t have to get up?”

I nodded. 

“You know the color you see behind your closed eyelids at that moment?”

I nodded.

“That color…” she inhaled deeply. “That color is elvidarium.”

I remembered that conversation when I heard the news on Monday morning. Heard that she’d taken pills she’d filched from her grandmother’s house – the house her parents thought she was staying at because they were away for the weekend. Her grandmother thought she was at a friend’s house. 

I knew I was that friend. 

I knew she’d woken that Saturday morning, rolled over in bed, said elvidarium to herself and known it was never going to get any better. 

I understood.

About the Author:

Kay Sexton has been a finalist for several writing awards including the Sunday Times Short Story Award, the Willesden Herald Fiction Contest and winner of both the Fort William Festival Contest and the Wollongong Literary Festival Short Story Contest. In addition she has had two non-fiction books and one novel published. 

Madonna and Child with Butter Cow | Zachary Kocanda

with a line from Wikipedia

When I say “Hillshire,” you say, “Farms,” then pull me in closer with your hooves. Spoon me like forgotten low-fat yogurt in the back of the refrigerator and kiss me goodbye before you leave for work. The most sensitive part of a cow is its udders, and the most sensitive part of you is me. But don’t worry. I’m fine. Take your time in the fields. I fear for the tipped cow, but you reassure me—: A healthy cow lying on her side is not immobilized; she can rise whenever she chooses. I follow the goings-on of the state fair, forlorn I can’t join you. The sculpted butter cow is the belle of the ball, like every year. I preferred last year’s design, but I’ll still protect her with my life. I take a twelve-hour shift and monitor the webcam to make sure she’s safe. The exhibit closes soon. I wait for you. A mother and child, alone, behold the spinning cow behind its bulletproof glass. It must be baby’s first state fair—so tiny, a pink bow in her hair, black and white polka dot onesie, little calf. The mother whispers to the infant: “You too are more than toast fodder, baby.” The child fusses. I see them stir before the sculpture has completed its rotation, and I white-knuckle my computer mouse. Hold it, I will to them, You must see this beauty from all sides.

About the Author:

Girls Over The Edge | Susan M. Breall

The thrill of blue, the smell of cold water hitting warm concrete, the chatter of girls by the edge of the pool. It was a white-hot day, a day without current or motion. She sat, awkward and apart from the other girls.  She wanted to be like them, so she dangled her feet on their side of the pool. She rubbed at her sunburned legs as she listened to their laughter and pretended to understand it. She knew she was not like them, with their bronzed bodies and colorful swimwear.  She was a sun-bleached outdated magazine cover, a pair of discarded eyeglasses cast aside on a shelf. 

As she looked up at the wide expanse of sky a boy her same age approached. He had her coloring, her same beyond-white skin tone, her same pale blue eyes, red hair, and freckled cheeks. He gave her a warm familiar smile, then walked over to the beautiful chattering girls and pushed them, one by one, over the edge of the pool. She continued to look up at the wide wonderful sky during the screaming and flailing of limbs. One girl could not swim.

He was more than a brother. He fought every nasty boy who threw banana slugs at her legs. He knocked a boy unconscious who forced her to eat garden snails. But the beautiful drowning girl meant no harm, so when she stopped looking up at the sky and looked down at the pool’s edge where her brother stood, she screamed for a lifeguard who then came running from the back alley behind the changing rooms where he was making out with his girlfriend. The lifeguard pulled the beautiful drowning girl out of the deep water that was about to devour her. She thought how fortunate for the beautiful girl that she happened to be right there at the edge of the pool. 

About the Author:

By day Susan M. Breall handles cases involving abused, abandoned, and neglected children. By night she writes short stories. She is the 2022 winner of the Gateway Review flash fiction contest. Her stories appear in numerous anthologies including The Raw Art Review, Kairos Literary Magazine, Running Wild Press, The Write Launch, Impermanent Facts, Paragon Press’ Martian Chronicles, and Dreamers Writing.

The Ripening Process | J. D. Hellen

It starts with your girlfriend buying a new kind of cheese she had to request at the deli counter. She believed you last weekend when you expressed the need to “elevate” your omelet, a diversion from discussing your unemployment.

You try a slice around noon and decide the cheese is too good to taint with eggs and oil. It’s perfect as it is, right from the twin stacks in waxy paper.

It’s easy, too, a creamy, satisfying mouthfeel to hold you over until you figure out what to make yourself because your girlfriend is working late again. She said she’d help you update your resumé this weekend and that, maybe, her coworker has an in for you. “He likes music, too,” she said. 

But you told her liking music isn’t enough. You can’t work just anywhere after you’ve been in The Industry.

On Saturday, your girlfriend is tired but offers to proofread your resumé. “It’s in good shape because you’ve been home all week?” Her assumption is insulting, distracting. So while she naps, you snack on some slices and rearrange your record collection. Music lovers can’t be reduced to bullet points and power verbs. 

The next day, you assure your girlfriend you’d get the groceries if you could, but your ankle’s acting up. You ask for more of that cheese. “You’ll have to make me one of those omelets,” she says as she leaves the apartment. You can’t tell if she’s serious.

The next week is more of the same, but you keep the cheese closer, cradled between a couple of ice packs in your old work lunch bag. Your ankle’s acting up, after all, and calcium is good for bones. 

You call Todd, your college buddy who lives in Texas, because he has connections in The Industry. He texts hours later, after you’ve almost finished a cheese stack, and all you reply is, not much same shit different day.

Later in the week, when your girlfriend comes home with dinner—subs, but she forgot cheese—you talk about moving to Texas. Your girlfriend cries and doesn’t finish her sub. “You’ve never talked about moving to Texas. Do I even know Todd?”

You finally get to your doctor about your ankle, but she’s more concerned about your cholesterol. “What have you been eating?” You don’t mention the cheese and insist on an x-ray. “I’m sorry about your job,” she says, writing the x-ray script. “My cousin teaches music. Maybe you’d like that?”

You tell her about Todd and Texas, and she gives you another script for Lexapro.

Your x-ray came back fine, but you think it’s best to do home delivery for groceries. You have to now, since your girlfriend moved out. You’re not sure which cheese she was buying, so you keep trying new ones. Burnt. Nutty. Almost soapy. 

Your (ex-)girlfriend emailed you apartments in Texas before she left and said the move would be good for you, that you’d “freshen up.”

Todd keeps texting, but you usually don’t answer.

About the Author:

J. D. Hellen writes character-driven stories. Her short fiction has been featured in the Timberline Review, The Horror Is Us anthology by Mason Jar Press, and Door Is a Jar Magazine. She is currently working on a novel. Before professionally working with words as a copywriter and copy editor, she was a science teacher for almost a decade. She lives in a suburb of Philadelphia, PA with her fiancé and cat, and you can get to know her more at jdhellen.com or @jdhellenwrites on Instagram.