On Your 60th Birthday, Resembling Our Mother, Dead at 61 by Patricia Q. Bidar

On November 28, 2025September 15, 2025 By steve cIn flash fictionLeave a comment

You emerge from your apartment, wheatfield hair ablaze in the afternoon sun. My big sister, skinny in a form-fitting dress. Today you are 60. I smooth my Hawaiian shirt over my paunch.

“Birthday girl.” I hand you your gift, a bottle of second-to-cheapest tequila. I got Bellflower Pete to stop at the liquor store before he dropped me off. I’m thinking ahead to what I will drink. How you and I will arrive early and can get in a round or even two before your guests arrive. It’s been so long.

You pass me a tin of gummies and some weed cookies from your job at the dispensary. “For you, Princely.” Your nickname for me; my wife Pia has family money.

You hold up a finger and vanish inside to put away your gift. You close the door quickly as you always do, leaving me on the step. You think I don’t know about the stacked-up newspapers and books and bottles and cans and CDs and record albums. All the sentimentalia you kept after our mother went. These objects provide you with comfort. I get that.

“Been a while.” I say when you reemerge.

“In the flesh.” Also, before I lost my license, you are nice enough not to say. Before my knee replacement; the botched tropical ale startup.

For a long time, I wondered whether you and I would stay in touch, once our mother went. Like us, she was a person of appetites. We share her face, wide and placid. We two share memories of being taken to the movies, her slipping alone to the back row where her married boyfriend waited. Another time, our mother and us, asked to leave our town’s Octoberfest, because she could barely walk. The face of the lady volunteer: Those poor kids. But life with our mother included small joys. She loved a celebration. And it is I who keep it going, now.

It’s bright outside. I lean against your mailbox as you secure your door, “Hang on, hang on, hang on.” I’m floating lightly. I’ve taken a hydrocodone pill. I tap at my phone and order the cheapest option on the Lyft menu. After she finishes work Pia, a teetotaler, will meet us at the brewery and drive us home.

Our driver is a young Latina in a black SUV. Her posture is very straight. “Your hair is really pretty,” I say.

“Thank you, sir,” she says, and I hear your soft guffaw. She passes the first three onramps. She stays on Western Avenue, even in East Hollywood, which is dodgier than when we grew up. But none of the raggedy characters near the 7/11 or clustered near boarded up storefronts pay us any mind.

“I just got a knee scooter,” you say with your crooked smile. “Well, a neighbor left it behind.”

“Ooh.”

You add so quietly you are nearly muttering. “Can’t walk more’n a couple of blocks.” I hear you breathing beside me, an unsettlingly intimate sound.

“Since COVID, every time I sit down, I fall asleep,” I offer. I drop my head to my shoulder, eyes empty and tongue lolling. Refreshing your lip gloss, you chuckle.

“Maybe you have that thing where a person keeps waking themselves up when their breath stops,” you say.

“Ha! Pretty sure my wife would have told me.” Underscoring the difference between us.

“Point taken,” you say sharply. You flash raised hands like a blackjack dealer and turn to the window.

You once told me that if you’d gotten married, you’d have saved hundreds of thousands in online shopping. Partied less. Stayed in good health. The presumption being that if it weren’t for my being married, my life would look a lot more like yours. I thought that was idiotic—why should it be another person’s job to keep us in line? But I have allowed the truth of it to soak in. You know how Pia takes care of me. She tells me when my food is burning, that the tub is about to overflow. Alone, I’d neglect my hygiene. I’d forget to feed the cats or pay our bills and lose my phone. In the end, I’d forget language altogether, reduced to aping lines from television shows and podcasts and graphic tees.

Like our mother, you and I both hold an unfillable void inside, even as we participate now and then in life’s parade. She was so skinny and jaundiced at the end. Her formerly dancing brown eyes gone flat. The thought of that happening to you makes me swallow hard. I’d be alone, then. The last of our family.

We arrive in San Pedro and gritty Pacific Avenue. I hoist myself out of the car. You are already flitting around to my side. The driver pulls away, heading toward the harbor. To clear the air between us, I defer to you, asking sotto voce what tip I should give.

“Most people don’t even tip,” you answer absently, straightening your dress.

“How do these drivers afford nice cars, when they get paid so little?”

“I just hope ours doesn’t take that same route all by herself,” you say. I rush to agree. We like thinking of ourselves as concerned for others. I’d told Pia I was worried you had terrible news about your health. I didn’t say I was invited to this shindig after one of my late night calls to you, lonely and high. That you were always cool about these calls and never threw them in my face.

I crook my arm for you to take. Smiling together at the brewery’s entrance, we make our way across Pacific Avenue, ready for a celebration. We are our mother’s children, after all.

Patricia Quintana Bidar is a western writer from the Port of Los Angeles area, with roots in southern Arizona, Santa Fe, NM, and the Great Salt Lake. Her work has been celebrated in Wigleaf’s Top 50 and widely anthologized, including in Flash Fiction America (W.W. Norton), Best Microfiction 2023, and Best Small Fictions 2023 and 2024. Patricia’s debut collection of short works is coming from Unsolicited Press in December 2025. She lives with her family and unusual dog outside Oakland, California. Visit patriciaqbidar.com.

Bed Rot by Sarah Chin

On November 14, 2025September 4, 2025 By steve cIn flash fictionLeave a comment

On the first warm morning of spring, Tom arrives holding half-wilted tulips like a man holding a bouquet of blunt instruments. He says he’s leaving me. For Amsterdam. Not the city—he clarifies—a woman from work. Named Amsterdam.

I do not cry. I do not rage. I do not pull his sweater over his head and pummel him with my fists like we’re in a hockey fight. No. I thank him. I say, Thank you so much, Tom, and close the door behind him, as if he’s just delivered an egg and cheese on poppy.

I don’t know why he brought a gift, but it would certainly make the whole thing worse if I refused it. I place the tulips—ten of them, all pink, smug, idiotic—in a blue Mason jar that’s been in the sink since Thursday. The tulips fan their little legs like debutantes on muscle relaxants. I put the stupid, little bitches in front of the open window by my bed.

Lovely women have fresh flowers in their homes. I read that in the Martha Stewart Living I keep under my toilet plunger. Lovely women don’t get left for women with architecture for legs. I want to be lovely, but my eyelids are heavy with exhaustion and SuperMax XXL Lash Wow! Mascara. In other words, I want to be unconscious.

I unzip my skirt like I’m shedding the fiction of who I thought I was. I remove the tastefully slutty blouse and distastefully supportive bra that I had so carefully picked for what I assumed would be a surprise brunch date. It’s horrific how excited I was. I collapse in bed. Flannel sheets from Costco. Grey and bleak, and so am I. The mattress groans. The tulips, meanwhile, look thrilled to be here. I can hear birds singing outside, and I hate them for it.

In another life, I was a sparrow. I sang loudly and often and took breadcrumbs from kindly strangers. I never once opened a shared phone plan with someone who said “babe” too often.

If I was a sparrow, I would be lapping at a glass of wine or pure love or whatever it is they drink in Amsterdam. This is not something I know. I have never had the occasion to get a passport. I’m not a globe-trotting hussy. My knowledge is limited to the Wikipedia page I skimmed after wondering what would possess someone to name a baby after a place half a world away. My guess is that it was a “creative” riff off one of those glossy city-names—Brooklyn, Paris, London—meant to sound worldly and sophisticated.

I’ve seen her photos, once, back when I was still trying not to be the kind of woman who Googles. But I Googled. It was after I saw her name on Tom’s phone. My first thought was, “oh, she’s lovely.” She has a face like a milk commercial. Her voice is a high-end essential oil. She probably doesn’t even try—or worse, pretends she doesn’t.

That’s the trick, isn’t it? Lovely women pull off femininity like backflips off the high dive. I’ve been trying so hard, since before I even met Tom. I smile at strangers. I go to Pilates. I say “sure” more often than “no”. I shave my body hair so that I’m smooth and blank. Tom liked that about me, that I was “cool.” An iceberg.

I watch the overripe tulips as morning turns into noon into everything after. One by one their petals fall, indecent and slow. He loves me. He loves me not. The petals scatter like little, pink casualties until there’s only one flower still perfectly intact in the ragged bunch. I reach from my supine position and pluck it out of the jar. I hold it to my nose, my lips. Then I bite. It tastes like pesticides and greenery. I chew and chew and chew the flower like cud.

Tulip madness. That’s what they called it. That’s what Amsterdam was famous for—at least according to Wikipedia. I think I understand something now, even if I’m not sure what it is.

I run to the bathroom and kneel on the floor. I vomit, knees pressed to the cold tile, hands gripping the rim as if I might fall through. The petals come up last—chewed, soft and blushing, floating wreckage in the toilet bowl. He loves me not.

I wash my mouth out in the sink. My lips are blood red, and my cheeks glow feverishly. My eyes shine—not with health, but with a kind of recognition. I look like someone I haven’t seen in a while. Not lovely, the way Amsterdam must appear when she enters a room like a neatly wrapped present, but raw and unruly.

I am already so alive.

I open the window all the way and lean out. It smells like warm dirt and a strange, feverish bloom. The birds are shrieking. They do not care if they sound lovely when they open their mouths. I scream back.

Sarah Chin is a writer with a day job in politics. Her work has been published in Epiphany, HAD, SmokeLong Quarterly, Points in Case, Sine Theta Magazine, and more. She lives in Chicago, Illinois and was born in the Year of the Fire Rat, which pretty much sums her up. More of her work can be found at sarahchin.net.

Spirals by Natalie Wallington

On October 31, 2025July 17, 2025 By steve cIn flash fictionLeave a comment

I am nine when I see the lights in the sky. I crow to Mom from the back seat that there’s a triangle over the field, moving away from us. She says she needs to keep her eyes on the road, but that I can draw it for her when we get home. I take some artistic liberties. What I saw as three soft, even lights I draw as a formation of floating spirals. I tell Mom that the aliens live inside each one like snails. I tell her their bright bodies are what make the rigid hulls glow.

I am thirteen when I see an alien’s ship behind glass at the natural history museum. The placard calls it an opalized ammonite; a curled fossil millions of years old and as big as a cinnamon roll, its pearly surface glinting back the whole cream-washed rainbow. I recognize it instantly, as if my drawing was some prophetic vision. I write my field trip essay about an ancient visitor from another world and get a D+ with the note “creative but false.” I start drawing the spiral on the back of my hand in crusty ballpoint pen, refreshing it whenever it fades, so when the aliens come back they’ll know right away who to trust.

I am seventeen when Mom finally sends me to therapy. The office has the color and smell of oatmeal. I invent a boyfriend who sometimes takes things too far in the back of his Jeep and feign angst over my belly fat. Mr. Dale eats it up. He doesn’t even ask about the spiral graffiti I’ve been caught leaving around town. I brag about my deception in the chatroom afterwards, where I’ve amassed a community of nearly two hundred fellow believers. They’ve seen the spiral ships too, hovering over pastures or appearing up close in dreams, glowing flesh moving inside translucent shells. Their descriptions color in the details of what I never saw.

I am twenty-one when I take a receptionist job at a medical imaging lab. I wear fingerless gloves to my interview so they won’t see the white scarring where countless metal nibs have etched the same spiral for almost a decade. I spend the workday on the paranormal message boards while the MRI revs in the next room like a jet engine. I map sightings of the aliens’ ships and misfile enough medical records that my boss checks the computer’s browser history. The day after I’m laid off, my online community reaches five thousand people. They comfort me when I share the news. I tell the truth: that I’m not upset. It just makes me want the ships to get here sooner.

I am twenty-five when my supporters pool the money to buy a condemned cottage in rural Oklahoma. The location was carefully chosen for its proximity to past sightings. The nearest neighbors are three miles away down a peanut-butter-colored dirt road. Mom begs me to reconsider, to get an apartment in the city where I can meet other people my age. I hug her and don’t answer — she doesn’t know about the others, a whole network around the world that looks to me as a visionary. She waves as I pull out of her driveway for the last time. A creek flows near my new house over a bed of muddy silt. I sit in it to cool off after mowing the first enormous spiral into the overgrown field.

I am twenty-nine when we begin making arrangements. There are several dozen of us scattered in trailers and tents around the property. The county won’t let us add rooms to the cottage until we fix the ones already there. We don’t plan to live here long enough for that. Every morning we gather in the field, tracing the spirals with our bodies. Every evening, we practice sinking into the creek. We light bonfires. We send letters that scare the few people who still love us. My drawing is framed behind glass above the crumbling mantlepiece. When I close my eyes underwater, I can see the spiral lights as clearly as if I actually had.

I am thirty-three when I awake from a dream surrounded by light, certain that the aliens have come for us after our years of sacrifice. But the headlamps are attached to men; the floodlights attached to their trucks lined at the gate. I’m dragged outside squinting. Around me I hear people running, hollering, trampling tents. Mom shows up to court and cries the whole time, like she really believes I would do what they’re claiming. My sweaty lawyer tries playing up the alien angle to get me deemed mentally unfit. A few defectors take the stand to say I’m dangerous. I feel sorry for them, having to go through life knowing nobody’s coming to save them.

I am thirty-seven when the letter arrives. The woman wants to interview me for a documentary. She says the county is even letting her film on the land they seized. In the visiting room I show her my ink. Spirals on the backs of both hands, done stick-and-poke by a kid in the next cell block. She wants to hear about my follower who died in the creek. I tell the truth: that he was tired of waiting. The woman asks me if I’m tired of waiting. For the first time in years, I think of the triangle over the field — three soft lights that could have been anything. And I tell her I’ll wait as long as it takes. I tell her I know what I saw.

Natalie Wallington is a writer living in Memphis, Tennessee. Her flash fiction has previously appeared in Wigleaf, Ellipsis and 101 Words. She is a co-founder of the Kansas-Missouri Writers’ Collective and was a finalist for the 2025 Mythic Picnic Postcard Prize.

You Be the Flotsam, I’ll Be the Jetsam by Melissa Rudick

On October 17, 2025June 22, 2025 By steve cIn flash fictionLeave a comment

I called off from my job as an IT Support Specialist at the local college Tuesday, and whether as punishment or absolution, was eaten by a whale. If you want to be technical about it, I wasn’t eaten so much as I was in its mouth. The esophagus of a humpback whale is too small to swallow a basketball, let alone an adult human male with a little extra around his midsection. I found that out later, when I saw a marine biologist talking about the incident on TV.

My buddy Frank, who brought me kayaking that day, thanked me after. He said this was going to blow up his channel. Then he dropped me off at the hospital because of my “creepy smile and dead eyes.” The docs said I was in shock and gave me a full check-up. Seemed like everybody who worked there wanted to poke and prod at me and ask me questions. When they asked me what it was like inside the whale, I forced a laugh, said, “Dark and smelly!”

To tell the truth of it was impossible. Hell, I didn’t even understand the truth of it myself.

Mary picked me up at the hospital later. That one eyebrow of hers already raised, as if this was something I had done just to annoy her.

“You ok then?” she asked.

“Yeah, let’s go home,” I said. I reached out for her, but she was already halfway to the parking lot.

In the car, she was quiet. I watched her chew the inside of her cheek. She turned on the radio and they were talking about me. She turned it off.

“I don’t see what business you had being anywhere near a whale,” she said.

“Frank said kayaking would help us relax some is all,” I said. I couldn’t explain it to her. The sameness of my days. She’d tell me that’s what life is for everyone. Why would you think you deserved more than the rest of us, she’d ask.

“Frank is unemployed and a moron, you shouldn’t listen to him about anything,” she scoffed. “Case in point! I’m sure your boss will be glad to know you were too sick to work yet felt good enough to be swallowed by a whale.”

“I wasn’t swallowed, Mary. I was just in its mouth for a little bit,” I said. “Frank sent me a video, let me show you.”

“In case you were wondering, I’d already had a massively shitty day, so thank you for all of this.” She pulled into our driveway and got out. “Anyways, it’s all over the internet. I’ve already seen it.”

Mary’s put up with a lot over the last fifteen years. I get stuck in my head and forget things. I forget her. The only thing I brought to the relationship was being able to make her laugh.

“Then you saw how that whale spat me out like I was a band-aid in a pot roast! Like I was some factory worker’s finger in a can of pop! Like I was a pubic hair hidden underneath a burger bun!”

She flipped me the bird, which for Mary is darn close to a declaration of love, and maybe forgiveness too.

Inside the house, I sat on the couch. “My life flashed before my eyes, you know.”

“What’d you see?” Mary asked.

“Not much,” I said. “Not much at all.”

“Sounds about right,” sighed Mary, sliding a frozen pizza into the oven.

I sat on the toilet watching the clip again and again while Mary slept in our bedroom. There’s me on the water in my red kayak, paddling lazily. A bait ball explodes underneath me, silver fish launch into the air, then rain down on me. A half second later there’s a giant emerging from the ocean, mouth open wide. You can see me rise into the air, the kayak shooting up and away, now empty, and the whale returning below the water. Not even a second later I appear on the surface.

That I was gone for less than a second didn’t make sense. All I can think is that time works different for a whale, that it operates on its own scale and when I dropped in, it all slowed down for me too. The seconds turned to minutes turned to hours turned to days and there I was submerged in that wet, black cave, the waves and their echo roaring in my ears. I was a speck. I was a nothing. Tiny and absurd is what I was. Am.

I found a playlist of whale song, stuffed my headphones in my ears, and crawled into bed next to Mary. I pulled her tight the way she likes. She squeezed me back. The whales called to each other. Lonely, it seemed. I imagined myself sloshing around in that black womb. I closed my eyes to make it darker.

Mary called it my Jonah Day. She hummed “Under the Sea” while she washed the dishes. She asked if I wanted to role-play as merfolk. Then, when she saw the teasing hurt me, she got mad again and asked why she never got to have fun.

“What do you mean, fun?” I asked.

“I mean, I used to be a person that did things. Like kayaking or jumping off a cliff into water. With you, sometimes. Remember?”

I had made so many wrong assumptions about what Mary wanted from life and me. I forgot that side of her and we both lost out.

“So, neither of us are happy,” I said.

“But you’re different now.”

I tried to explain how I’d concluded that man held an outsized view of himself. How we loomed too large on this earth, in no way proportionate to the value we brought. I rambled about wars and climate change and mass extinction events. I told her that whatever fork on the evolutionary road led to us climbing up on land was a mistake.

“We’ve certainly made a mess of things up here.” She nodded her head, thinking. “And you want to go back?”

“Will you come with me?”

We busted into Frank’s garage, left a note that said, “Gone Fishing.” We tied the kayaks to the top of our car. It was night and no one saw us back up to the boat ramp. The ocean calm, we paddled side by side. Mary looked up at the stars. I told her I read online that you could take a scoop of this water, and it would contain more life than stars in the sky.

Mary cupped the water in her hands, brought it close to her face. “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” she said.

We pulled our oars through the black water. We let ourselves be swallowed up by the enormity of the night sky above us and the sea and all the life it contained below us. We looked everywhere but back.

We were specks, we were nothings, we were tiny and absurd, together.

Melissa Rudick is a writer living in Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania. Her work is forthcoming in Vestal Review and The Blood Orange Review. She is currently at work on her first novel. You’ll most likely find her wherever there’s milkweed, looking for monarch eggs.

Door in the Woods by Chris Scott

On October 3, 2025June 12, 2025 By steve cIn flash fiction3 Comments

Sarah is hiking up ahead of me, so she’s the first to see it. She goes around the bend, says “Hey now,” and stops in her tracks. Then I see it, too. Right there in the middle of the trail is a single door, like it’s been waiting for us. The door doesn’t belong here, obviously, with no structure around it except for a simple wooden frame holding it in place. “Weird,” I say, because what else can you say?

We circle it once. Studying Sarah’s face, I can see her wheels turning, some private communion between herself and the door that I’m not privy to. Maybe it’s some kind of art installation? The remaining relic of an old, demolished cabin? The thing about the door though: It doesn’t look like it’s been here very long. Like it hasn’t weathered the elements really at all, like it was just constructed specifically for an audience with us.

Sarah steps right up to it, tries the knob, cracks the door open a bit. And because Sarah is Sarah, she says, “I mean, we have to, right?”

The door makes me uncomfortable but I don’t know how to say this in a way that doesn’t make me seem silly. “Do we? Doesn’t really seem like it belongs here.”

“Yeah, no shit,” Sarah says, the kind of offhand dismissal to which I’ve grown accustomed lately. “Okay then, you walk around it and I’ll go through.”

“Are you sure?” We came to the woods to keep a struggling thing going. Six months of couples therapy and my eyes are constantly peeled for any wrong decision that could strain or sever our increasingly tenuous connection, that could make a trial separation less hypothetical, in the future.

“Count of three,” Sarah says, “You go around it, and I’ll go through. One…” Her hand still on the knob, the door partly open. “Two…” I run my fingers along the frame. “Three.” I go around just as Sarah walks through, and I’m overcome with the sudden certainty that she’ll vanish, the door transporting her to the moon or Siberia. But before my fear can get away from me, she’s already through. Just a door after all.

“Alright well… shall we?” I say, continuing on the trail, eager to put the door behind us. Sarah catches up with me.

“How do you feel?” I hand her the canteen.

“I feel great,” Sarah says. “How do you feel?” Also great. We round another bend, and I look back. The door is still there, closed again. Then I’m trying to remember, did Sarah shut the door after she walked through? But she must have.

In the car on the drive home, Sarah is taking off her hiking boots in the passenger seat when she says, “I can’t believe you did that.”

“Did what?”

Sarah turns up the radio even though we’re having a conversation. Strange habit. “Walked through that creepy ass door in the middle of the woods.”

I would normally assume Sarah was being ironic, making a joke. But. Seven years together, three of them married. I can tell she’s dead serious. “What are you talking about?”

“Umm…” Sarah curls her lips. “The weird door? On the trail?”

“Yeah, I remember the door. You walked through it, I walked around. I was too chicken. Are you messing with me right now?” I turn the radio off.

“Wait, no. What? That’s completely backwards. You walked through, I went around. Are you messing with me?” Sarah pleads, her voice rising. I turn back and forth from her to the road, trying to figure this out.

“What are we talking about, Sarah?” The door in the woods was maybe an hour ago. How could she be remembering it completely wrong? But her face says: She’s asking herself the same thing about me.

I don’t understand how this is happening. We volley back and forth like this for another ten, fifteen minutes, our accounts of what happened mirroring each other’s almost perfectly, but somehow inverted and wrong. We cycle through the conflict resolution methods Dr. Owens taught us. Patiently going over the details as we clearly remember them, over and over. Then one of us will say “reset” and we’ll take a deep breath and start over, but we always end in opposite places, unable to find our way back together. Sarah says I’m not listening to her, but I am.

I ask Sarah what it will take to put this behind us. She shrugs, says I could remember walking through. That I could remember it how she remembers it. That would be a start. I don’t know what to say to this. I don’t know how to remember something that didn’t happen. Eventually we run out of energy, just sitting in our respective silences on either side of the car. It feels so ridiculous, all of it. The door. Who went through it, who went around it. But the problem is not the fight, it’s the door. I look over at Sarah a few times but she doesn’t look back at me. She’s somewhere else now.

Later that night I’m back at the trailhead, Sarah at home asleep in our bed. Illuminated in my flashlight, everything looks different than it did earlier, otherworldly, backwards in the dark. But I know the door should be just up ahead, maybe twenty minutes jogging. Assuming it’s still there, and that’s why I’m rushing through the woods now, why I had to do this tonight. This feeling that the door will disappear if I don’t reach it in time. Thinking all the while how absurd this is, but I don’t know what else to do.

Then a wave of relief when I finally see it, waiting for me, pale wood against the moonlight, appearing even more out of place than it was earlier. But right where we left it, still. I pause briefly before the door, thinking this through, but there’s nothing to think through, not really. I take the doorknob into my hand and turn. It’s locked. I try again, harder. Locked. I walk around to the other side, just as locked.

I slam on the door with both palms, the smack echoing through the woods, spooking the animals, species I can’t identify. Then both fists pounding now, not budging, not even a little bit, but I have to get through somehow. I can’t accept otherwise, and I can’t lose Sarah to this. So I’ll be here as long as it takes. Until daybreak, until some other hikers come along who can help me, until I am able to walk through this door finally, and go home to Sarah and say: I went through just how you told it. My world is still your world and I still have a place in it, I swear. How will I ever belong anywhere else?

Chris Scott’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, Flash Frog, ergot., MoonPark Review, New Flash Fiction Review, scaffold, Gone Lawn, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. His fiction was selected for Best Small Fictions 2025, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He is a regular contributor for ClickHole, and an elementary school teacher in Washington, DC. You can read his writing at https://www.chrisscottwrites.com.

98. by Jordyn Damato

On August 22, 2025January 10, 2025 By steve cIn flash fictionLeave a comment

There’s something wrong with my head
It’s not a bump
I wish it was a bump
Even if it was a gross, protruding bump that made people afraid to look at me
I could handle that
I would dress it up—draw a face on it or something. I don’t know.
Make it pretty.
I can’t make the inside pretty.
I wish I could but
I can’t
These are some thoughts that infect me
Scream right now. Right now. Do it.
Flip the table. Now. Flip it or hold your breath until you pass out.
Hold your breath until you pass out. Do it.
I do it.
I have to do it.
Scream, pass out, flip things.
If I don’t, I will die.
If I don’t, my whole family will die.
My family is small and not very nice to me but I still don’t want to see them die.
I saw my twin brother die
When we were kids
I was not a fan.
I doubt he was, either.
Or maybe he was.
He doesn’t have a voice in his head.
He doesn’t have a head
Or a voice
Sorry.
I guess in many ways, I’m the lucky one
Mom told me that before
Don’t you know how lucky you are?
After I got sent home from school for stripping naked and attempting to flush my clothes down the toilet
I made a mess
A huge fucking mess! Mom yelled
I told her it wasn’t me
It was the voice
Newsflash, Tommy!
It wasn’t a yell, it was a scream.
EVERYONE has a voice in their head
It echoed in my room with two beds
You’re not special—don’t give me that bullshit excuse!
I don’t think I’m special, I wanted to tell her
I think I’m cursed
But the words didn’t come out
Instead, urine came out
Piss yourself. Piss yourself right fucking now or else your heart is going to stop.
I peed.
Mom screamed.
Dad came in
He was drunk
He pushed me against the wall
I hit my head
I hoped for a bump
(An explanation)
He spit as he screamed
Why do you have to make everything so hard on us?
No bump ever formed.
(No explanation)
He shook my shoulders
Banged my head again
You’re so goddamn selfish!
Through tears and over dad’s shoulder, I saw mom on her knees with disinfectant spray and a rag
I closed my eyes
I Imagined Tyler’s face
But it’s the same as my face
So it didn’t help
I can’t stand being in this body
My body
I miss Tyler
I miss his voice
I miss the way he could read my mind
I miss having hot dog eating competitions with him
I miss winning
I miss not having a stranger’s voice in my head
I think mom and dad think it’s my fault that he died
As if I told the drunk driver to be drunk at 7:30am
As if I told the drunk driver to swerve off the road
As if I told Tyler to walk on the side closest to the drunk driver
I broke my arm
And bumped my head
But no one seems to remember
Or care
Or miss the old me
I miss the old me
I miss my old family
I miss the warmth of the sun on my skin
The friends I used to have
The brain I used to own
It’s a scary thing
To not own your body anymore
To not be believed
To not be trusted
To keep everyone around you alive every single day, no matter the cost
And to never, ever even hear the words
Thank you

Jordyn Damato is a writer, lover, dreamer, in that order. She is currently an MFA fiction candidate at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Her work has appeared in Brilliant Flash Fiction and Bullshit Lit. Her favorite thing to do is hug.

The Passing of a Little More Than a Year by Lydia Kim

On August 8, 2025November 22, 2025 By steve cIn flash fictionLeave a comment

The soccer field was a miracle, an oval of grass behind a middle school where she could train her new small dog, play until it trusted her and understood their togetherness. She hoped to soften its vigilance, give it less reason to erupt.

Soon they met three other women and their dogs, two also-small ones and one big, and they formed a gang. The first summer of the pandemic, when being outside was the one thing you could do, though even that was a bit fraught, it’s not like the wind knew to blow the virus away from you and never towards you. But what a gift. After months of walks by themselves, each anxious for the other, she loved the ritual of heading to the soccer field, unhooking the lead and watching her dog run, thrilled, towards the clot of its friends. The sight of them leaping in greeting pleased her, the validation that her dog could make friends. The four dogs ran and feinted and rolled, sniffed each other’s glands, hunted along the perimeter of the fence for bits of old school lunches. They stayed out there for hours.

Surprisingly, inevitably, there was the gentle creep towards human friendship, which she knew was rare among strangers and rarer still at her age, almost fifty. They laughed over “Love Is Blind,” the debut season, wondered at sudden celebrity deaths. The doodle had a birthday with party games: dogs racing towards coupes of whipped cream, bobbing for hot dog slices. One of the women had a hysterectomy, another up and got married. They drank champagne for one, then the other. Other dogs came to the field but did not become part of the gang: Julius the Vizsla, Blue the wheezing Frenchie, Lola, curly-haired and shaped like a tipped-over fire hydrant. Their owners kept it moving, didn’t have or want dog treats, just a wave and some small talk.

Summer passed into dry fall, foxtail season, discussions of whether or not to cover a dog’s snout with protective netting. When the days turned even shorter, she bought four light-up collars so the dogs could play past dusk, a canine rave. They dressed the dogs up for Halloween, again for Christmas, and watched them learn the hard way to give a wide berth to the geese wintering on the field – the geese hissed and chased back, clouds of steam fuming from their beaks. Week after week, she walked to the field and sent her dog to its friends. Her dog looked for her now, came when called. She never quite got over the surprise of it all.

In the spring, she learned two of the women were moving to Oregon, one to Arizona. By summer, everyone was gone. Big dogs found the field, huskies, pit bulls. Sometimes the owners yelled at her even though their dogs were also off-leash, barking and coming too close.

She walked to neighborhoods with big houses and through the shopping center where she tried to pose her dog for a photo on a bench, Depressed Dog Sitting, c. 2021. It wasn’t the same. Her dog pulled her back to the field where it could spend time free, even if alone.

She threw the ball and her dog fetched it. This much they did for each other.

The two of them were not a gang, but they weren’t nothing.

The hot days evaporated into another autumn, and as the sky began to pink, her dog’s collar lit up. A husky entered the empty field. Her dog stopped, let the ball drop from its mouth. The husky considered the geese, then her dog. She moved towards her dog, who moved towards her. The husky chose the geese, sprinted at them. They pushed themselves aloft, rising, gaining smooth altitude, except one at the back, flying, but too low, too heavy.

The husky leapt, caught the goose in its teeth, snapped its neck left and right, thrashing the bird into the cold grass of the field, a spray of red on two white necks.

The goose lay in the center of its broken wings, the black feet pedaling as if trying to walk.

For days, she saw the carcass from the gate. She didn’t enter, didn’t want her dog to sniff the goose, hated to see it there, exposed and undefended, picked at. Finally, someone moved it by the fence to make room for soccer goals.

Within a week, the crater filled with new growth.

They went south, to the trail along the ocean, thick on one side with sea fig and saltgrass, land kelp. Dogs were not allowed on the beach, only the trail, saturated with animal smells and pocked with tiny tunnels that made her think of rabies.

Her dog strained at the limits of the lead, head lifted at the scent of endless brine. They stopped in a narrow pedestrian-trampled break to watch waves foam the shore below. Waves pushed in, and waves drained out.

The far water was dotted with freighters and ferries, carrying cargo and commuters. The world was grinding its way back to rush-hour traffic and holiday sales. The day had begun to blue. There wasn’t another creature for miles, so she did the calculus and they walked onto the beach. She freed her dog. It stayed with her at first then started to wander away, braving good distance, nosing along crab husks, fifty feet, a hundred feet away, more. Stopping at crushed cans and torn wrappers, the possibility of scraps. Even after a good year, it was hard to trust one’s luck.

She turned back to look, the apartment buildings squat and flat, the gate to the field ajar, the only way in or out.

Far away, the dark of her dog glowed against the pocket of sky.

She opened her mouth and made a sound, two clicks of the tongue, a half-trill, not even her dog’s name. The silhouette bent, held, then the shadow moved, began to run.

Lydia Kim has published in Longleaf Review, Peatsmoke, Catapult, The Hellebore, and in the anthologies And If That Mockingbird Don’t Sing and Non-White and Woman. She’s a Tin House alum and 2024-25 Tin House Reading Fellow and her work has been supported by the Kenyon Writers Workshop, Rooted & Written, and the de Groot Foundation. She is currently at work on a novel and story collection, represented by Ashley Lopez @a_la_ash.

Gallery by Jane O’Sullivan

On June 27, 2025March 8, 2025 By okaydonkey7In flash fictionLeave a comment

Loie Hollowell, Two centimetres dilated, 2023

I’m telling Ben about the heist I read about, how she distracted the security guard while he went upstairs and plucked a painting off the gallery wall. ‘De Kooning!’ I crow. It still thrills me. ‘No one even knew until they died!’

It’s late. Ben watches me from the end of the couch, that pinch to his eyes. ‘Should we call the midwife?’

‘What? No.’ I wave an irritated hand. We have miles to go. Miles. I reach the end of the living room and turn. ‘But I haven’t even told you about the best bit. He—’

‘Slow down.’

‘—Wore a fake moustache. That was it, the whole disguise!’ I keep playing it over, how anyone could just stroll in like that. No real plan, just a dollar-store stick-on and a baggy coat. That’s what I marvel at. How either of them thought it could be alright. But I only manage a few more steps before I’m hissing through my teeth again. The pain is red, orange, magenta, black. Pulling me wide.

Dana Schutz, Breastfeeding, 2015

She was on a plane, long-haul flight somewhere. Her baby was crying so she fed him, like they tell you to do, to calm him. But then she fell asleep. This is what I think about, at three, four, five in the morning, whatever broken time it is, willing myself to stay awake so I don’t suffocate my child and turn into one of those mothers on the news.

The bedroom door creaks and Ben shuffles out to check on me. Also because last week at the clinic, the midwife gave him a pamphlet on postnatal depression. ‘These are the signs,’ she’d said, like she was already thinking about what kind of muffin to get on her break. ‘You should both look out for them.’ And now he is, because he’s like that, and I am pretending I can’t see the doubt in his eyes, the way he studies me. It was his idea, the baby. I thought I could. At least, I told him I could.

The tap runs in the kitchen. Ben sets the glass of water beside me and bends over the back of the couch. His breath is warm on my neck. ‘Look at him,’ he whispers, because love is no problem for him. Love comes easy. ‘Look at his little eyes, rolling back like that. He’s so bloody drunk.’

The glass is the only still thing in the painting.

Julie Rrap, SOMOS (Standing On My Own Shoulders), 2024

Those mothers. The ones who are never on the news. The ones who say, Just heading down the club for a bit, there’s baked beans in the cupboard, and sort your brother while you’re at it. The ones who tell you, Don’t ever get knocked up, worst mistake of my life. The ones who, if you reach for the remote, might suddenly lance their cigarette into the back of your hand.

‘I don’t know how to do this,’ I tell Ben, our son in my arms. A weight now. A squalling leviathan and he knows. He knows I’m failing him and it breaks me into a million tiny pieces. I do everything I’m meant to. I feed him. I change him. But it’s not enough. And maybe if I’d had a different mother, the love would flow just fine. Maybe it wouldn’t always get so tangled in the constant terror.

Ben somehow manages to hold us both. ‘But you are,’ he says into my hair, the same thing the midwife taught him to say in the delivery room. ‘You already are. You’re doing it.’

Around us, the gallery creaks with other people’s footsteps. The two bronze women rise tall, the one balanced on the other’s shoulders, working together, feeling their way. My son, fifteen now, young leviathan indeed, hunches into his embarrassment. He wants to but he can’t quite face it. These two old women in their nudity.

Grace Cossington Smith, The Window, 1956

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I say, when my son asks what I see in it all. ‘This and that.’

He’s uncomfortable here. Doesn’t like the quiet, or the feeling that he’s missing something. ‘It’s just a window,’ he says again. ‘I mean it’s pretty, but is that it?’ Like every teenager is always saying. What else is there?

He looks back at the entrance. The crowds drift past on their way to the main exhibition. He wants to be with them, not out here in the wings. No headsets. No trim explanations. I could tell him, Yes, it’s just a window. I could tell him how his father used to plant his hands on my shoulders when he caught me standing there dreaming. How rituals are made, over and over. How eventually I told him I was thinking about my mother and how I was just the same and he said, The fuck you are. Don’t even think it.

Ben has already found a bench. I watch him across the gallery, squeezing his bad knee. ‘Maybe you could take your dad to the café?’ I say. That is, after all, why the two of them cooked up this plan. The view from the sculpture deck. The pistachio crème brûlées. A nice mother’s day treat. ‘You can get us a good table. Go on, love. I won’t be far behind.’

He is taller than his father now, has the same worry to his eyes, but the uncertainty doesn’t last long. He’s too hungry, for everything. Too eager to see what comes next. He nods at me and goes to collect his father from the bench. And I know exactly how it would feel. A small canvas, maybe. Nothing grand. The tidy weight of it tucked under one arm. The quiet surprise of making it down all those steps and out into the street.

Jane O’Sullivan is an Australian writer. Her art writing appears in Vault, Apollo, Art Monthly, Art Guide and many others. Her fiction has won the Rachel Funari Prize and joanne burns Microlit Award and also been published in Meanjin, Bull, Peatsmoke, Passages North, New Flash Fiction Review, Milk Candy Review and the Spineless Wonders anthologies Pulped Fiction and Play. She lives on Bidjigal and Gadigal Land in Sydney and is online at janeosullivan.com.au and @sightlined.

Two Stories by Linda Drach

On May 30, 2025October 31, 2024 By steve cIn flash fictionLeave a comment

TRAVEL & LEISURE

I’d see them in the cardiology waiting room. Not every time, but often. The man, shuffling behind an aluminum walker, his right foot dragging; the woman, slowing her gait to keep pace. Always, her hand rested lightly on his bicep. That was completely unnecessary. A gesture of tenderness, I guess. He looked like my second husband. She looked like the Starbucks barista my husband shacked up with before divorcing me. I’d stare at them until the woman felt me looking and glanced over to where I’d parked myself near the giant aquarium so I could reap the calming benefits of fish swishing. My eyes were flamethrowers that singed her bangs, burned through her skull, and incinerated the smoking cessation poster that hung on the wall behind her. Satisfied, I’d pretend to turn back to Travel & Leisure or Yacht World.

That was before my doctor shunted me off to hospice.

It was strange. I hated that waiting room. But when the couple appeared I forgot that I was waiting. Suddenly, I had energy and a sense of control, whereas just moments before, I’d had neither. I liked sketching in the details of their lives, imagining the bank statements and what was parked in the driveway. I liked thinking about her slutty lingerie, long abandoned, the elastic going slack in a bottom dresser drawer. I liked thinking about her bitching to her friends over too many glasses of Sauvignon Blanc about the pill bottles crowding her quartz countertops. About the long, tedious nights building puzzles instead of fucking.

Those were good afternoons for me.

It’s been months since I was there. But sometimes, as I’m staring down the teddy bear the volunteers insist on staging at the foot of my bed, I think of that couple. I wonder if he’s in a wheelchair now. I wonder if she’s gotten fat. I hope she’s gotten fat. These daydreams are necessary; they counteract all this false cheer. I heard one of the nurses talking about me, the only thing keeping that one alive is spite. I’m still listening for rubber wheels rolling down the hallway. To feel a little surge.

THE FARM

Pat calls on a Monday night to tell me my nephew – his son – is dead.

He never says dead. He says Joel is gone. But I know what he means right away, like I knew when our mom told us Sparky or Boo or Snowflake went to the farm, so they could run freely instead of eking out their short doggy lives in our cramped backyard.

Gone. That’s all he says. That’s all he can say.

When I get to the ER, Pat is slumped on a vinyl couch, yowling through clenched fists, like a cat with its tail stuck in a slammed door. The chaplain patting his back looks glad to see me. Five bug-eyed youth silently circle the room, like a school of guppies – stoic little fish, who spend their short lives sucking lines of shit off the bottom of their tank and then spitting them out to try again. Relentless in their efforts to find something delicious. Each time, it’s shit. These are Joel’s 12-Step friends. His goddamn friends, who watched him die.

It’s time to see Joel, but Pat says he can’t – he doesn’t want to see him this way, which is dead. When we were kids, I always took care of the lesser burials. Dozens of goldfish, two turtles, three lizards, and a chinchilla. A grim menagerie interred in our mother’s garden, near the concrete statue of Mother Mary. Our household was rough on living things. This is why I never had children.

The chaplain leads me through a set of double doors, and there’s Joel, wearing the same flannel shirt he was wearing on Saturday. Our boy needs a haircut. His copper locks, the same shade as mine, are shaggy at his neck and fall haphazardly across the petals of his cheeks. His hand is still warm – only a little bit cooler than my brother’s. Where are you, Joel? I whisper in his ear. The chaplain fidgets. He’s certain Joel is strolling through God’s cosmic vivarium. I shoot him a look and he leaves us alone. Can he tell how much I hate him right now? He knows my type. A lapsed Whatever, with my poems and pop songs and coffee can ashes, making half-assed attempts at the everlasting – when what I want is the farm.

I tell Joel if believing made it so, I’d make myself believe it. I’d send you to a party that goes on forever and never gets out of hand. Where you could play three-handed pinochle with your mother and grandfather and share a bottle of magic bourbon. The kind that won’t lead to black eyes or scarred livers. I’d make sure you’re happy. That you know you’re enough. I’m crying now, with my head on his chest. Bawling, really, like a motherless calf. I picture the floribunda roses framing my mother’s backyard shrine. Vivid red. Heavenly scent. Climbing the chain link, spilling over in its vigor. Back every year, despite our neglect.

Linda Drach is a poet and writer, public health program manager, and volunteer writing group facilitator for the nonprofit Write Around Portland. Her writing has been published in The Bellingham Review, Cagibi, CALYX, Cathexis Northwest, The Timberline Review, and elsewhere. She studies and teaches at The Writers Studio.

giving all my heart to the dirt sprayed across my hands by Fabiola Cepeda

On February 21, 2025February 21, 2025 By okaydonkey7In flash fictionLeave a comment

Sometimes I like to draw on my teeth, but not today. I do not like to draw on my teeth today because yesterday Luis ate dirt. The day before Luis was sprayed across my hands and my shirt; I had to dig a hole in my backyard. I said a prayer for Luis, my friend Luis. Today I put my pillows on the top shelf in my closet, I am giving up sleep for him.

My reasons for anything are always temporary, so it doesn’t matter if Luis killed the rabbit, even when he bit him. I miss my old life, when we would skip over rocks on the river, dip our feet in, get a cold. I miss being frozen in our room, unable to move, forgetting what it felt like to feel normal and healthy, wishing for more than anything to be warm and healthy again.

My feet slipped from under me during class while I fell asleep with my head down. looking out the window, my friend Sarah asked me if I was okay. I do not know how to tell her that I do not have time, I gave time up for Luis.

The rain falls all over the place, and my CD keeps skipping in my ears. Today is All Saints Day, I dressed up as, well it doesn’t matter, now that you can’t see it. My mom made me dress up for All Saints Day, I tried really hard not to celebrate it without you, I know it was your favorite. No one really likes All Saints Day. Mom and Dad’s breath comes from the same bed now, they gasp and are curious; I forget how thin the walls are here. I am going to stop crying all the time, I want to be as alive as one could try to be, even if that means doing the bad things. I want to hear people say, “That’s not like you! Luis would be disappointed,” but I know they are lying.

On the underside of a fog you are so lonely. Alone, with dirt sprayed across your face, wedged between your skin. I don’t want to be shot brushing my teeth with you. Alone in the modesty of our gums, waxed with baking soda. It was easier to avoid a greater sadness than whatever this is, I guess that’s why I did it. Why I buried you in the backyard, sliced up, full of juice.

It is still raining and you have stolen the warmth from this earth. But someday secretly, I will work on bringing you back up. That way we can walk into the theater, hand in hand; see the tiny stage hold up the great fools. Their shadows bouncing behind their eyes. And yes, it is all necessary, to see multiples of you through my backyard window.

The leaves are a yellow and it reminds me of you, and even though the road is closed I go down in. taking in the trees, searching for you. It is hard to find you in the dust that fills the air. I wish I could have looked at you a little longer, Luis. I know I must go but my ears hurt from wind blowing. The new is not important to me anymore, how could all of this keep happening when you are gone. You’ve been far from land for too long, just come back.

I could almost see you floating in class today. I didn’t cry, it was an awkward mask I forced myself to wear. Tall people do not seem to understand, Luis, the destruction of moldering at a wooden altar. At the funeral, others laughed. In your towel my knees killed grass, feet were brown and shone through the crack that ran up the wall. I got thrown to the tub, but I leaked out of my knee and made my escape to your grave. But they twisted me back and lives carried on.

My feet hurt from walking across streets for you. I can’t go go home anymore and sleep. I don’t think you would have this Luis, but I can’t keep squinting my eyes just so I can remember you. It is hard Luis, to eat when I think I see you on the kitchen table. It is even worse when I go to Abuela’s house and see multiples of you swaying in the wind. I go drawing on my teeth and smearing my nose on the couch. I don’t miss you anymore, you were just a lemon, Luis.

Fabiola Cepeda is a Mexican-American Writer from San Antonio, Texas. Her work has been published in Gravel, Cargoes, and The Hunger Journal. She is currently pursuing a degree in creative writing and studio art from Hollins University in Roanoke, VA. You can find her on Instagram @whatfabifound and @fabiolaleyendolibros.

Okay Donkey

Tag: story