Month: May 2026

Jack Nicholson Complains To Me About Nurse Ratched in a Dream by Ambrielle Butler

On By okaydonkey7In poetryLeave a comment
He says don’t mind the cicadas’ whispers, don’t listen
to their hushed velvety wings dripping syrupy night
over the valley, and don’t mind the waffles they’ll serve
you in the cafe. He says don’t mind the staff and they won’t
mind you, says don’t start picking at a loose thread until
you have something in you that you’d like to start unraveling.
He says don’t you unwind yourself like that, says it’s lazy,
says you’re better than that, wasting your own time waiting,
trying to figure yourself out just to stitch you back together again.
He says don’t fear the things you see, says surviving is about
looking deep, says you can’t fill a fishbowl without skimming
beneath the surface of a rib cage. He says don’t tap the glass or
you’ll scare them, says he ain’t going nowhere though, says
nothing really scares him, not anymore.

AMBRIELLE BUTLER is a writer and poet from Texas. Her poetry can be found in publications like On the Seawall, Superstition Review, Valley Voices, Plainsongs and others. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @ajbutlerwriting.

Protocol for Sonar by Ellen Wiese

On By steve cIn flash fiction1 Comment

⦆

The sound goes out from my dark little room at the end of a long metal pier, collides with something, and returns.

Protocol: note all targets. The sonar display doesn’t give details, submarine or creature both just blurring dots. But I know that’s her, on the scan at last.

I can hear the stories in the ultrasonic echoes, the specifics that the machine can’t detect. I was slow to learn to keep it to myself. Aboard the Suffrance, I said too much, became a standing joke.

Now the closing shape’s a beacon, lit by spinline. Bright as the line passes and fading through the next rotation. Flaring another tick closer. Moving towards my dark little room, chasing the source of the sound she can hear.

In the log, I write: unknown target, though I know what it is.

⦆

One of the stokers on the Suffrance had something wrong inside the chambers of his chest. When I told him so, he said I could keep that to myself. But he took a shine to me. Rankled like a bear at the other boys’ derision.

Radio crackles. Downcoast checking in. Bored, congested with a cold.

Ears, this is Downcoast. How’s the view?

Can’t complain. Over.

Got a name on the monster they pulled up. Over.

They hauled the young one in at the downcoast station just yesterday, tangled in a trawler’s net. Whether or not it was dead when they caught it, it was lost to the world an hour later.

What is it? Over.

Architeuthis, he says. Big old squid.

I’ve heard the young one and its mother: long heads, too many limbs for me to count, eyes that scatter sound. But the sonar carries more than shapes. Today, the whole resounding space of the sea is raw with grief.

Huge, he says like this is news. Six meters long.

Under the floor, the pier’s bearings groan like men. Where the beams meet the platform, the metal is red with rust. It comes away on my fingers, sticks under my nails, leaves smears on the lid of the coffee machine.

⦆

I first saw the mother and the little one as smudges on the sonar screen. Listened as they feasted through a school of fish. The little one was slow to learn.

Once, when they wandered close, I paused the spinline and pinged them a hello. The baby darted forward, echo full of curiosity. The mother set her body in the sonar’s path. Mantle wide, she rushed the little one away. Broad like the stoker, squaring his shoulders at the others’ mockery.

On the scan, she flares bright again as the line continues its rotation. I calculate her distance and her speed and note it on the clipboard.

○

Hey, Ears, Downcoast calls again. Boys’re saying they’re gonna pay to stuff it. Sell it to a museum or something. The monster. You wanna buy in? Over.

Under my tight fingers, the pages of the log crumple, nearly tear. The rust under my nails leaves red lines across the neatly labeled rows.

I’ll pass. Over.

Your loss, he says. Dull as rocks otherwise. Anything down there?

Her outline etched by the reflected sound. The billows of her long limbs, her vast intent. Two kilometers and closing.

Protocol: call in unknown objects. The whole point of dark little rooms at the end of long metal piers. Safety and security and the national interest.

All clear, I say. Out.      

⦅

After a dive off Peterhead, the Suffrance surfaced in a bank of fog. Nobody knew yet that we’d drifted. Only blurs on the sonar screen. But I could hear the edges through them, some dead volcanic peak.

I told the control crew we would break our hull along the ridge. The navigator took my collar in his hand. Not going to change course because a sparker thinks he’s better than the scan.

The bow took water and we sealed it off too slow. Saltwater hit the batteries and turned to chlorine gas. By the time a merchant steamer reached us, 46 hands were lost. No one could tell me what happened to the stoker, if it was sea or gas that put him on the roster of the dead.

⦅

The radio again, static before his voice crawls through. Always wondered, he says. Did you believe it? Your magic hearing thing.

Don’t clog the channel. Over.

Boys down here say you’re really crazy.

Jeers in the crew mess. The stoker standing, head scraping the ceiling, asking if anybody wanted to say that one more time.

I put my thumb on the switch that stops the sonar’s spin. She’s closing now, her jets in the display’s revolving beam.

⦅

Protocol: maintain and observe the rotation of the scan. Whether gas burned through the fluid in his lungs or breakers trapped him in the hull, I never found out how the stoker died. As the mother nears, the only sound she makes is the rush of water through her body like blood in the valves of the heart. She won’t find her baby’s body here, but I know where it is.

I thumb the switch, a narrow slice of ocean stranded in its range. Direct it south, a degree offshore, where the downcoast station and the body of her little one sit just beyond the sonar’s beam.

For a moment the scan is empty. But then a blur on the display. The echoes contort behind her as she follows the signal’s course, her intention sharp and set.

At the sonar’s farthest reach, she slows. In the sound I see her drift a moment upright. Her eye turns towards my sound, smooth and round and shining black. As though she can hear me in the echoes too, I lift my hand.

Ellen Wiese is a Chicago-based writer. Ellen’s previous publications include Portable Gray, AGNI, Wigleaf, and Lost Balloon, and her writing has appeared on the 2022 Bristol Short Story Prize shortlist, the 2022 Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize Long-Longlist, and Glimmer Train’s 2018 Very Short Fiction Top 25. She graduated from the MA Prose Fiction program at the University of East Anglia.

The Office of Nobody There by Jeffrey-Michael Kane

On By okaydonkey7In poetryLeave a comment

There is an office where they keep sounds no one was present to hear, the tree falling, the glass crazing, a man in 1943 saying the name of a woman he would not see again, into a telephone that had already gone quiet on the other end, metal cord dangling frayed.

The clerks are very organized, everything is filed by frequency, then by grief, then by the peculiar sub-category they call almost—sounds that arrived one room too late, or one year, or one translation, nothing is named, the radio in the office tuned between stations, songs burning white in static.

I applied for a position there once, they said the work required a certain tolerance for unresolved vibration, I said I understood completely, they said most people say that, they said come back when you can hear the difference between an echo and an answer.

I am still standing outside the building, the brick hums at a frequency I recognize but cannot name, this is, I believe, the interview, this not naming.

J.M.C. KANE is the author of Quiet Brilliance: What Employers Miss About Neurodivergent Talent and How to See It (CollectiveInk UK). Disabled, he writes from this learned experience as an ASD-1. His prose work has been published in more than two dozen literary journals & magazines. Kane was a finalist for the 2025 Welkin Prize for Fiction and received the Reader’s Choice Award, was shortlisted for the 2025 Letter Review Prize for Short Fiction, was a finalist in the 32nd Annual Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest (2025), was longlisted for the 2026 Bath Flash Fiction Contest (UK), and has recently been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Kane admires compression and exhibits a willingness to trust his reader. He lives in New Orleans with his dogs, family, and a house filled with art.

Three Stories by Brendan Todt

On By steve cIn flash fictionLeave a comment

Sarah met an old acquaintance

Sarah met an old acquaintance who confessed there was something wrong with her, that her taste buds registered cilantro as soap, that she had noticed this only now, somehow, in her thirties, when she had eaten it for the first time entirely by itself, with two fingers, out of curiosity, out of a tiny glass dish among other garnishes, at a party of respected peers. Sarah asked her if her taste buds might change or change back but the friend admitted it was something elemental, genetic, final. Sarah thought about how strange it was that her eyeballs remained spherical and eyeballs. Her father had once called a stray dog licking at his ankles at a gas station a stinking miserable cunt of an animal and then asked Sarah not to tell her mother. The friend cried. Her boyfriend had confessed to her to loving Tex-Mex far more than authentic Mexican cuisine, which he had tried only once, and not been impressed by. The friend admitted she loved the boy—she kept calling him boy, boy—and insisted that the sex was fine, yes, perfectly fine, that she appreciated it, even, the break it afforded her, the opportunity for leave and release, just lying there, understanding there were some things she could have and others, finally, she could not.

Sarah receives by mail a letter

Sarah receives a letter, written by hand, from her nephew who has also drawn a picture of Sarah as the sun. Giant and yellow and happy and rare. Sarah’s sister has children whom she often sends photos of, who fold themselves like letters, sitting cross-legged on the floor or hanging in some abominable shape from the playhouse out back. Sarah has held these very same children like letters in her lap. 

The children like to share secrets, but only if they are written or drawn, and therefore able to be found out, and only therefore worthy of being kept secret in the first place. The children fold up these pictures and notes and sometimes stuff them into Sarah’s travel bags or the drawers of Sarah’s own house when they visit. Sometimes they stuff them in her pockets. Once, the nephew, who had seen his mother do this with her money, stuffed his note discreetly inside Sarah’s bra. The mother had a talk with him because that is the mother’s place. 

Sarah remembers folding very tightly the notes she passed in class. She remembers folding the large bills her own aunt gave her when she visited when she was a child. She remembers the same aunt teaching her how to cross and how to not cross her legs—and pushing her out into the sun when she had been too long inside reading a book. She remembers being scolded, many times, by a professor who told her she must never fold the poems she submitted to class. Henceforth she never did fold the poems because henceforth she never did permit herself to submit.

Sarah runs through the neighborhood knocking loudly

Sarah runs through the neighborhood knocking loudly, not exactly shouting, not exactly waiting for each neighbor to come to the door before moving on to the next, hollering back behind her as the doors open, Look up there, look up there!

Above the cul-de-sac swoop eleven bald eagles, all white-headed and grown. She’s a little out of breath now as she settles in for another good look herself. She hands off a spare pair of binoculars to a child and his father beside her. Can you believe it, she says, with the kind of enthusiasm she usually reserves only for the classroom when a student has come upon—typically stumbled upon, by accident—something very nearly magnificent.

I don’t need it, no, I don’t need it, says the boy as he pushes the binoculars back into his father’s hands. I can see them now, on my own. I can see them, I can see them! Out come sister and mother next. Will you hold me, the boy asks Sarah, and she does. He is only a little bit closer to the eagles now, but together they are much closer to something else.

On a few other porches stand a few other neighbors. Some have their own binoculars. One a giant telephoto lens. White heads and white tails, shouts the boy. I never knew they had both! I’ve seen them in the zoo, says the sister. You can put me down now.

The group breaks off into compartments, still visible, but heading in their own directions. Maybe families. Maybe soon-to-be mating partners. Are there even more awaiting them at the river? What’s a group of bald eagles called, again? She used to know.

The harder the eagles are to see, the closer the neighbors gather in the street. They pass among them the binoculars. Even the boy wants them now. I will never forget you, he says, and as Sarah hands him back off to his father, she is quite content to imagine he is no longer talking only to the eagles.

Brendan Todt lives and writes in Sioux City, Iowa. He has been working on a series of short prose that follows a character named Sarah. Other Sarah pieces have appeared in Necessary Fiction, Moon City Review, The MacGuffin, Complete Sentence, and elsewhere. “Sarah draws little moustaches” was a finalist in the Smokelong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction. A book-length manuscript of these stories has been recognized in the Cider Press Review Book Award (Finalist) and Word Works: Washington Prize (Semifinalist).