Month: March 2026

Alligator by Salena Casha

On By steve cIn flash fictionLeave a comment

I say to him, it’s been a year, and he looks at me across the table with its fake spider plant and starts talking about how he’s found a simple way to make lemon trees grow in the shade, like he didn’t text me an hour ago after 371 days of no contact, asking me to drop everything and meet him at Roast, and of course I did because I know through a friend of a friend that his mom just died. And so, I skipped a weekly meeting with my department head and took a Blue Bike in the wrong shoes to witness him in mourning because it’s what I deserve, to see him low, lower than I was when he left me on read, and be given the choice of whether to help him stand again or leave him as he was, but I’d never imagine lemon trees so, of course, it throws me. There’s a bit of egg hanging on to a mole on his cheek, just out of reach of his tongue, and I don’t tell him to get it, and I don’t wipe it off myself, even though I’d be absolutely annihilated if I knew that someone I was once in awe of saw it and did nothing. This is not because I’m in awe of him anymore, but rather, because I’ve experienced that sort of epiphany firsthand: how all the seriousness and subject matter expertise in the world on second-wave feminism can be diminished by a bit of spinach or a sesame seed or, in this case, egg and so I let it diminish him. There’s a woman next to us who’s seen the egg though, I know she’s seen it, and a part of me worries this witness will say something, but we’re on the same page and she returns to her Anna Karenina. He keeps talking about how he spliced a lemon tree with a fern and thickened its skin with alligator genes, for a moment, I wish that I had the sort of palate that craved lemon slices beneath chicken skin so I could say he did all that work in his little white coat for me, that he loves a metaphor as a substitute for feeling, but I don’t like lemons and I’m annoyed that I’m here again, unpacking his symbolism for free and that I still have his number memorized even though I deleted it and couldn’t even text sorry who is this when his message first came through like I’d rehearsed but that was also because he actually used the word emergency. My tired fantasy of an ending I deserve, like all the others before it (sending a love letter to me in the mail or asking for forgiveness in an overlong voice note and begging for me back just so I could have a choice in it all), is not coming true. I will not get the chance to say, I’m sorry your mom died but you made sure I never met her, and so, yeah, we’re not getting back together, because the emergency he mentioned is not, in fact, about her or us or, maybe even, about him. The bit of egg wags on his face and he asks me, So, can you take them? And I say, Take what? And he’s like, the lemon trees, they don’t need much, just water once every two weeks, just until Fall. Did you bring your car? and I see sparks on Roast’s stained-wood walls and I can picture a forest of them, fragrant and oily, ready to be scraped raw, and my voice catches on something sharp in my chest because he thinks I’m still in the same place that he left me, that he thinks I’ve already said yes, that the part of his brain that plays God with vegetation saw nothing wrong with reaching out to someone who couldn’t keep a plant alive to save her life, a someone he discarded, with an open-ended babysitting opportunity. Even in our play-pretend world that was alive and well 380 days ago, I was never that person and all the imagination I wasted on him since he stopped talking to me vibrates through my nailbeds. Maybe I should take those useless plants and burn them in effigy for closure and inhale their fragrant crisping wood to cleanse me of him like good sage. I exhale hard enough for both him and the woman with her Russian literature to notice and lean away and I think about this man who, last August, would still not have called me first about his mom, and it’s then and there that I decide I need something to survive me, a sign of life after all of this that is also an ending I deserve, and so I say, carefully, slowly, I’ll think about it. But, you know, I’ll probably kill them and the second I say it, death is at the table and something around his eyebrows crumples and he leans forward, the egg on his cheek just in swiping distance and my stomach swells because yes, this is the way I did picture it at last, him reaching for me as I walk away, and as I press my hands down to stand up, to leave him here at last, he grabs my fingers in his clammy palm, and says, I‘ll solve for that next. I promise, I just need more time. 

Salena Casha’s work has appeared in over 180 publications in the last decade. Recent pieces can be found with HAD, F(r)iction, and The Forge. She survives New England winters on good beer and black coffee. Subscribe to her substack at salenacasha.substack.com

I Belong Hair by Shivani Mutneja

On By okaydonkey7In poetryLeave a comment

Long arm hair is slowly longer arm hair is winding into prolonged arm hair is dreaming into sticky wet arm hair is only thinking of itself on the left arm soaped arm hair waiting to be rinsed so that it can go back to slightly tangled arm hair, having been forgotten beneath the woolens even by the judgmental eyes of mothers is the growing forestry of arm hair only imagining the future when a wax strip will uproot it into the dustbin or a razor will will it into the drain, till the longing of the arm hair makes it sentient into wanting to be seen by a stranger whose long stare may fabulate it into a savannah for cows to graze at.

Long pubic hair is longish pubic hair is longer pubic hair till the husband says, “I will trim those for you,” doesn’t say “I am tired of those on you,” because he knows better than long pubic hair is the longing to lick without indigestion, so he stands on the bedside while pubic hair wires gape, the scissor gently trims, long pubic hair trembling to the cold air is not a gripping story for the husband, razor takes away a bunch of narrative wires leaving deep inside the folds a long day of growing intimacy, tangled in the oblong gap between legs is the forest for one man to walk in till he can’t find himself.

Long armpit hair is crusted at the end with soap, what desirable lushness for the mousy parlour girl who wants to see it succumb to golden hot wax, to look at the black mat of it over the dirty cream of the strip is the hairy satisfaction she lives for, shows the strip to the bearer of the armpit expecting similar enthusiasm if not triumph, the stretched thin flesh of armpit, tenderness subdued to repeated pressure from palms, singed, betrayed that the once lush landscape is now naked folds, tongues might come for it, sweat will trickle down easy, beating close to the heart will be the resilient hair follicles till they sprout.

SHIVANI MUTNEJA is a writer from Delhi. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Her poems and prose have appeared in Nether Quarterly, Jellyfish Review, Two Serious Ladies, and decomp Journal among others. She is also the Associate Fiction Editor at The Bombay Literary Magazine.

All Our Furniture by Jimmy Kindree

On By steve cIn flash fictionLeave a comment

A Sunny Day

Can you hear me? Rachel? Rachel, why aren’t you saying anything?

Yeah, I’m still here.

—

Wait, Mom? Now all I hear is rustling. Is the phone by your ear?

Oh, yes, sorry. I’m just outside with Dad on the porch.

Okay.

—

Mom, I’m just thinking about what you said. That’s why I was quiet.

—

I just—I can make that payment for you this month. Of course I can do that—I just—

Oh, but honey—okay. Here, I’m going inside. Just—yes, yes if you really could, that would be—.

No, of course.

You know, I’m just going to send you a picture. The fence, after that windstorm. Did I tell you it crashed that old table right into the fence? It went through it.

—

Rachel?

But—hey, did you say Dad was there? Can all three of us talk about things?

—

Mom? 

—

Mom, I get that you’re mad at him. But I need—

If we can’t make that payment, I’m just not sure, honey. I’m—well.

—

—

It’s okay.

I’ll try to get him on. But you know he won’t have much to say. 

Okay. 

—

What are you doing—are you crying?

No, I’m fine. I’ve just stepped back outside. But there are acorns everywhere. They fall onto the porch all the time. They’ve been scaring me at night—they sound like there’s a person there. 

Hmm.

—

—

Honey, can I call you back when Dad’s chattier? I’ve been saying to him—oh, he’s got a few of the acorns on him. Let me go brush those off. 

Sure, Mom.

—

No, but, Mom, I’m sorry I couldn’t get to the phone yesterday. I didn’t see you’d called until late.

—

Mom, are you still there? 

I’m here. But it’s just the sunniest day here, Rachel. Sun, sun, sun.

Armchair     

At the end of the day, I leave essays ungraded, the plans for my lessons unfinished and dry. I stumble up when the night cleaners look in—they flicker, aggravated, away down the hall, chatting together, leaving delicate silence. One more glance at my desk, swimming with disemboweled stories I’m trying to help these young people find something true in. Today each one seems blank as an unwritten page. I blink, cross the room to the chair, press my spine into its cushions until I feel the buttons that cinch in its upholstery. I hold my body there, squeezed against the chairback till my breath suspends, suck my ribs back so my front and back fold together, like I’m contentless paper, without air or organs in me. Arms crease over chest. Legs hunch in. When another person sits down in the armchair I have emptied of myself, I brace my toes. Their back flattens against my knees, their scalp my whole vision. They complain about upholstery wearing thin, the bony arms. And it’s something I should mind, but I no longer do. They shift for comfort, pinch the fat of my belly, press back and back until another person sits in us now, folding together like butter in dough. On my neck, I feel breath, someone I have sat down on too. Thin layers. Leather skin, scalps thinly threaded. I feel light and so warm, the most beautiful thing, unexpectedly so, and I let out the breath I’ve been clenching. A little dust spouts into the air. Light flashes through it.

Lamp      

Sometimes my mother drives up to see me at work, wanders in along the tall, brimming shelves with her duffel and her scavenging eyes. She asks about the week’s acquisitions, and we wander together through unclaimed things from estate sales, consigned furniture in great piles, castoffs from office renovations north in the city, those kinds of things.

Today, she rapped her knuckles on an old table—“Skinny little legs,” she said. “Are you eating enough?” Warped veneer on an armoire—“I’ll just peel that off.” It slid into her bag. She opened drawers, felt into the corners, and sly questions eased in, just like each time she comes, about dating, about old friends she seemed to remember better than I did. I parried, asked her prying things in return, till her hand shot out, lifted my wrist as if checking for cracks, and I stiffened. 

I stalked back to my desk, while deep in the warehouse she kept shuffling and poking. I heard her hefting things down and turning them over. Then a gasp. A call of my name. I found her with an old armchair, whose upholstery she had begun snipping off. Somehow, it had started to bleed. Red was seeping through cloth, and inside my chest, something fractured. Looking embarrassed, my mother stitched the fabric back closed. She whispered apologies out there to no one until her voice blended into the HVAC. I completed an incident report on my phone. When she had gone, I crouched next to the chair, and I felt the new seam, softly as I could. My eyes somehow were wet. I spent a while rubbing the fabric over its back.

I thought a long time. At home I flipped on the lamp, and I listened closer than I had before. It started to sing. I tightened the bulb, and a pocket of memory sprouted out from that little gap at the edge of the switch, which I dabbed up with a towel and brought to my nose. It smelled sweet. And I called a friend I hadn’t talked to in a long time. I told her the story of the long, swollen day, and my mom, what things meant, until the sharp things in my chest unlatched, like many opening hinges. My friend said she also had found something like that once—it was a French press coffee maker, whose handle had a pulse like the skin over a person’s inner wrist.

This Morning     

This morning it was supposed to be rainy. When I woke up it was sunny instead. The colors all brightened, gem-green and sky-brimming. I had eyes where yesterday I’d had upholstery buttons. I blinked them, and I liked how that felt. I stretched out my legs. They’d been coiled before into little scrolls. I leaned forward then just to look at them, like a chair never does, and the stretch was wonderful—it unkinked that ache in my frame. It straightened my fabric in a way no one has ever been able to before now. And I found I could see so many things better this way, the trees out the window spreading and blending in waves, and a sea of new acorns that squirrels were harvesting up into nests. Then I made a little tea, which I’d always wanted to try, and I sat on the floor for a while just looking. Yesterday, I don’t think I knew. Moments like that, I’ve never told anyone, or never thought about them too much myself—just that, I wasn’t expecting to be who I am, or a person, a live thing. The teapot yawned a little. It let out some steam and it whispered, “Excuse me” to no one. The springs in me creaked. A heart somewhere was beating, and I had new little hands, wriggling in the carpet. 

Jimmy Kindree (he/him) is a queer writer and teacher. He comes from Minnesota and now lives with his husband and daughter in western Norway. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ecotone, Electric Literature, Raritan, The Hopkins Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere. He also spins yarn and knits with it, makes pottery, cheese, and bread, and plays the banjo.