WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "87th Street, NYC, January 3rd" and "What We Now Live With" by Andrea Marcusa

December 2, 2019

By Andrea Marcusa

87th Street, NYC, January 3rd

They lie in street gutters, exhausted, anorexic, and balding like feather-plucking birds.

Once thick and green and smelling of pine, now with limbs that snap like toothpicks and shed a flurry of brown needles on white snow. Worse are still partially decorated trees, with silver icicles tangled on branches, broken bulbs swinging, a string of dead lights snaking its way towards the trunk. Leftovers like washed up seaweed after a storm or a forest devoured by swarms of locusts. But worst of all is my neighbor’s full green one, which I’ve walked past for weeks after it was dumped early before heat and lights could wither it. Because of the daughter. Mowed down on a street corner, the driver as young as the victim and as high as December stars. The building handyman took the tree down and lay it on the street corner a week before the holiday. That bejeweled tree too vibrant, too cheery to remain upright and lit.

Now two days after New Year’s, the tree’s still there, rich and dense among other tired-out discarded ones, reminding me. It’s been a harsh holiday season.

In the next weeks, the dumped trees will be chewed up and spat out and turned into wood chips. A sanitation worker will feed each one, watching the jaws shred wood, needles, and bark and then spray it into green and brown piles for bagging. All that joy, happiness and heartbreak.

Bound, shipped, scattered.

What We Now Live With

As I pulled the door to our beach bungalow closed for the last time this summer and felt the lock click into its hollow, I looked up and saw the sun had already shifted and now bathed the back porch in pale fall light. I knew that the real world was almost here again.

My children and husband were already in the car, so filled to the brim it sat low to the ground and although soft jazz was playing on the car stereo, we were all in our own worlds. I considered the winter months ahead and didn’t know what they would bring. A spray of angry bullets in a classroom, a flood of dammed-up bitterness surging in our streets, a headstone with an unexpected name?

I imagined our neighborhood in the city, how when we left, last century’s houses were being pulled down and turned into piles of bricks, and week after week concrete and glass floors were pushing higher and higher, casting long shadows that had never been there before. Would they be so tall that they’d scrape the clouds when I returned? Would winter storms batter our shores again or pile up record-breaking peaks of snow or send rescue boats into our streets? Only a few years ago, such worries would never have filled my mind with the simple shift of seasons.

I settled into my seat, buckled my belt, and I listened to the gravel churn under the wheels as my husband backed the car out the driveway. When we turned onto the road, I just couldn’t look back on all the shuttered peace and happiness we had found in the safety of a home away from assaulting headlines and posts, and warring TV news people and heads of state. For four weeks, we’d lived in a news and internet void filled with the sweet calls of birds, the citron glow of fireflies blinking haphazardly into the night, the flights of herons as they dipped into the bay and flew off with a fish that gleamed in the sunlight, the sound of dice rolling onto a Monopoly board, and the whistle of badminton shuttlecocks. Our weather forecasts came from the heavens: “Red sky at night, sailors delight. Red sky at dawn, sailors forewarn.”

As our car pulled farther and farther away, the feeling I’d put to rest for four weeks stirred. The one that made me feel as though I was living on borrowed time and that this happiness that I savored for a few weeks was not mine to possess, but only taste. That despite the peace and joy still circulating in the car carrying the four of us forward, a fear of what I couldn’t foresee gripped me so that even the traffic lights turning green, yellow, red, seemed to count down.

As we pulled farther and farther away, I thought of the millions of parents all over who, like me, were holding this huge untenable thing called family.

Forever wondering how to keep it whole.

About the Author:

Andrea Marcusa’s literary fiction, essays and poetry have appeared in The Baltimore Review, Booth, Citron Review, New South, River Styx, River Teeth and others. She’s received recognition from the writing competitions Glimmer Train, Third Coast, New Letters, and Press 53 and been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes. Andrea divides her time between creating literary works and photographs and writing articles on medicine, technology, and education. To learn more visit: andreamarcusa.comor follow her on twitter @d_marcusa .

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

CutBank Online features one work of flash prose or prose poetry every Monday. Submissions are free and open year-round. Send us your best work of 750 words or less at https://cutbank.submittable.com/submit.

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "The X-Ray Machine at the Buster Brown Shoe Store" by Timothy Reilly

November 26, 2019

The X-Ray Machine at the Buster Brown Shoe Store

By Timothy Reilly

For Jo-Anne

Eight-year-old Larry Nolan decided to secretly stay up all night and watch the sun rise from his east-facing bedroom window. He devised a few activities to keep from nodding-off. In the dim moonlight, he gazed into his fishbowl: watching the otherworldly neon tetras swim in and out a submerged shipwreck. He used a flashlight to read from a book of heavily-illustrated ghost stories. With the same flashlight, he charged a walnut-sized glow-in-the-dark human skull and also a 5x3 glow-in-the-dark likeness of Christ’s face: whose eyes would open or close when tilted. With his Lone Ranger Binoculars, he looked out the window at the pockmarked face of the waning gibbus moon.

Sometime after midnight, Larry snuck out to the backyard to find where the moon had gone. He found the moon clinging to the top branches of an Italian cypress. He then aimed his binoculars at a large oak and caught sight of a Great Horned owl. The owl hooted but Larry wasn’t scared. He felt privileged to be part of the night.

Back in his room he struggled to stay awake, until he heard the clinking of milk bottles. He opened the window and felt a soft breeze rising in direct proportion to an orange glow. He saw the sun rise. It was miraculous. Now he could sleep.

His parents woke him three hours later. They had promised to buy him Buster Brown shoes for his First Communion.

The shoe store smelled of shoe polish and cigarette smoke. Larry was groggy. The poster of Buster Brown gave him the willies. Buster had hair like Prince Valiant and a weird, turn-of-the-century sailor’s outfit. Who was this ancient child?

When the shoe salesman went to get shoe boxes, Larry went to the foot x-ray machine and pondered the bones of his feet. This is my skeleton, he thought. This is what I’ll look like when I’m dead.

About the Author:

Timothy Reilly had been a professional tubaist (including a stint with the Teatro Regio of Torino, Italy) until around 1980, when a condition called “Embouchure Dystonia” put an end to his music career. He gratefully retired from substitute teaching in 2014. He has published widely, including works in The Citron Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Iron Horse Literary Review, Zone 3, Fictive Dream, Grey Sparrow, and Superstition Review. He has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Timothy Reilly lives in Southern California with his wife, Jo-Anne Cappeluti: a poet and scholar.

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Shallow Roots" by Christina Simon

November 19, 2019

Shallow Roots

By Christina Simon

Mama and Sterling’s absences are long shadows cast in front of me, moving with the sun, disappearing at night, then reappearing long and dark again in the day. On the sidewalks of Los Angeles, I dodge these shadows, walking carefully to avoid them, never forgetting they are there.

The roots of a palm tree form a ball, fairly shallow, but wide enough to keep the tree from toppling over. I feel like these roots, a tangled mess of assorted, frayed brown strings, a woman who could be shattered by a gust of wind.

Mama, who told my little sister Sterling and me “Black is Beautiful” so many times we believed it. Homeschooled, we strolled along the Venice boardwalk holding hands. In my child’s mind our closeness would last forever.

I stare up at the palm trees until it hurts, tears pelting my bare arms. Towering, graceful, aloof creatures who gaze down on me, batting their lovely, long-lashed green eyes, lids half-closed, bored with the hot empty sidewalks below. Thin, tall bodies, wispy and willowy in the wind, clustered together, the palms whisper down to me, they can see up into Heaven.

About the Author:

Christina Simon is the nonfiction editor for Angels Flight Literary West, an online literary publication and curator of author salons at The Last Bookstore in Los Angeles. Her essays have been featured in Salon, The Broken City, Proximity’s blog, True, Entropy, Barren Magazine, PANK Magazine’s Heath and Healing Folio, and forthcoming in The Offing. Christina received her B.A. from U.C. Berkeley and her M.A. from UCLA. She is a volunteer with 826LA where she helps kids write their college essays. Christina lives with her husband, two teenagers and their rescue pit bull, Piper Spot.

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Big Al's Pet Emporium" by Kari Treese

November 12, 2019

Big Al’s Pet Emporium

By Kari Treese

Alabama was Tom’s cat. He left her in a closet too long when she was a kitten and she’d been skittish as hell ever since. A dark calico, black and orange all over, her colors matched her personality—dark and wild. “The cat was non-negotiable,” he’d said; I could have Tom and Alabama or I could have neither.

After I moved in, we had to keep the bedroom door shut because she kept pissing on my pillow. She took to hiding in the laundry basket, launching attacks when I came too close. She refused all my attempts to pet her, preferring instead to wander in figure eights through Tom’s boots when he returned from the field, skitter onto his shoulders, purr into his hands while he watched TV. We enjoyed a tenuous peace, Alabama and me, while Tom was in the house.

She turned into a real bitch when Tom deployed. She took to wailing outside the bedroom door at night, loud enough to wake the neighbors. MP’s knocked on my door 3 times in Tom’s first month gone.

“What do you want me to do,” I’d say. “Reason with a cat?”

“Just have to ask ma’am. We keep getting noise complaints and housing won’t be renewing your lease.”

“You got it sir. I’ll ask my cat to keep it down.”

I took her to a vet who prescribed kitty Xanax. I slept a full 8 hours for the first time in weeks.

Tom returned on R & R 4 months in. We had two weeks to make up for lost time and prepare for the next 8 months gone. Within hours, Alabama was staking her claim. She hissed whenever he kissed me, started lunging at my ankles, claws bared, from under tables and around dark corners. Tom started locking her into the travel crate every time we disappeared behind the bedroom door. Otherwise, she’d paw at the door scraping and caterwauling until we relented.

When Tom flew back to Afghanistan to finish what was left of his 12 months, I started looking for no-kill shelters. I’d tell him she ran away, scooted out the front door while I was carrying in groceries, and just like that, lost.

“We’re full on cats,” I heard again and again. I even checked one state over, un-phased by the 4 hour drive. One of the wives at an FRG meeting suggested I try Big Al’s—a pet store on route 83.

“They take cats sometimes. I was out there buying a bunny for Macy last week,” she said.

The clerk at Big Al’s Pet Emporium asked, “How’s her temperament?” while Alabama hissed and spat in the crate.

“Oh, fine. She’s a real sweetheart.”

I felt good driving away. I imagined tossing out the last box of kitty litter, the last plastic bag of piss piles and little round turds. I rolled the windows down, crooned with Chris Isaac singing, “things go wrong, but I still love you.”

Tom took it hard. “I should’ve waited to tell you,” I said. “The other wives warned me not to give you bad news.”

“No. It’s fine,” he swallowed loud enough for me to hear through a country, a continent, the whole world between him and me. “Really.”

When 12 months was extended to 15, I thought I saw Alabama in the Westfield mall parking lot. I chased her under a car, tried to coax her out. “Bammy, come here sweet girl. Come,” all the while making that sound thkk, thkk, thkk, and rubbing my thumb into my fingers feigning a treat. The cat stared at me. I stayed there stretched, belly on the asphalt, hand jutted under someone else’s sedan, pleading “Come, come here girl.”

Her eyes held me there, stuck on a taut line. When I blinked, she flashed gone. I was dizzy when I stood up, head swimming with the cat, the man, and the smell of Big Al’s Pet Emporium stuck for 3 months in my nose.

About the Author:

Kari Treese is an MFA candidate in prose at Mills College where she is the managing editor of 580 Split. Her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Lunch Ticket, Rivet, and others. She is a fiction reader at Atticus Review. Before writer, Kari was a casino customer service rep, hostess, Baker’s drive-thru extraordinaire, military spouse, and mother. She’s a fish person, for whatever that’s worth.

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Red like Gold" By Taylor Flickinger

November 4, 2019

Red like Gold

By Taylor Flickinger

I wanted to go to Colorado for the long weekend. A trip away from people, I told Natalie. A real vacation. But Nat wanted to go to California, said she liked the beach. There are beaches in Colorado, I said, and the water doesn’t kill you like it does in California. A real beach, she said. I asked her what that meant. She shrugged and said beaches have oceans.

So we took our kids to California. On the first day, right after we unpacked from the long drive, Nat said she wanted to see the bridge. Okay, I told her. I’ve seen it, and it’s disappointing. Just a big red thing. God knows why we call it golden, it’s not even yellow. Why do we call things by what they’re not? Nat and I got in an argument once, when we were first married. She thought coconuts were actual nuts. It’s a fruit, I told her, but she just wouldn’t believe it. Nuts have two layers, I said, coconuts have three. I even drove to the supermarket and bought a coconut, still in its husk, just to show it to her. See, I said, a fruit.

It’s in the name, she said. Coconut.

We ended up going to the bridge, driving nearly an hour just to get to it. We left late because Nat couldn’t find the stupid camera. I told her to leave it, there would be too many people to get a good picture anyway. But she kept looking. She said how else would we remember the trip without a few pictures?

Nick and Mitch cried the entire way there. We should have turned around right then. I should have turned the car around, packed up, and driven to Colorado, to the mountains and the trees and freshwater lakes. God knows I wish I had, but I didn’t. Nat turned on the radio to distract the kids, and twenty minutes later they were quiet.

The sun was setting when we pulled into the parking lot. There were a lot of people, most of them with cameras taking pictures of the not-gold bridge. Walking around, looking out at the ocean. Cars passing by. A fog was starting to roll in, painted pink and orange from the setting sun. The clouds looked like breaths of fire. I wanted to leave then. I was hungry, and the boys must have been too. I didn’t want to walk out on the bridge. We saw it, it’s not like it changes from red to gold if you walk on the damn thing. But Nat insisted, and the boys wanted to throw rocks into the ocean. Fine, I told them, just don’t hit anyone. Imagine, seeing someone getting hit in the head with a rock that fell from so high. Imagine trying to live knowing that you basically killed someone.

I guess what matters is that we went. We walked on it and had a fine time. Nat took pictures as the boys threw their rocks and counted the seconds until they hit the water, leaning over the railing to watch. 1… 2… 3… 4… Nat didn’t like that. Come on, she said, I’m worried the boys will fall. I told her the boys were fine, that they aren’t stupid enough to jump. But I swung Nick up into my arms anyways and grabbed Mitch’s hand, and we finally started to leave.

Wait, Nat said, we forgot to get a picture with everyone. I rolled my eyes, but Nat was already walking up to someone, asking to take our picture. But before she got more than a few words out, some middle-aged guy pushed past her, almost knocking her over. I admit it, I lost my temper. I turned around and yelled something at him, but not to be nasty, I just wanted him to understand that the bridge wasn’t going anywhere, or the ocean or the city. I wanted to tell him that nothing was going anywhere, that he could take his time to take as many pictures as he wanted without pushing anyone out of the way. But right when I yelled out he looked at me the way Nat looked after she miscarried. I mean, he stared at me with starving eyes for three or four seconds, but it felt like it would never end, I just couldn’t look away. Eventually he blinked like he was waking up. He looked out over the ocean, glanced at me one more time, and jumped over the railing, just like that. He just fuckin’ jumped without even stopping to think about it.

Someone screamed when they realized what happened, but the man had already jumped for God’s sake and nothing we could do would change that. Mitch and Nick were watching his arms flail like he hoped to learn to fly. Nat’s mouth was open, her eyes dull with disbelief. I picked up Mitch in my other arm, somehow found Nat’s hand, and started pulling my family away before we heard it, the wet noise of his body smacking the black water like so much wet cement.

The car was quiet as we pulled away from the parking lot. Nat started crying when we passed an ambulance, lights flashing as it sped toward the beach below the bridge. I gripped the steering wheel, starring at the broken yellow lines painted on the road. When we got back, I got the boys ready for bed while Nat sat stiffly on the couch and stared through our hotel window at the night. Kids were swimming in the pool outside, playing while their parents sat quietly in the hot tub. Their muffled shrieks and splashes were the only noise. I was remembering how the man just jumped, how his body made that slapping sound, how someone started taking pictures as we pushed through the crowd. Nat said she was going to our room after the boys were in bed, but I wanted to watch tv to clear my head.

I turned it on and sat down. The news was on. They were talking about the man who jumped off that red bridge. I raised the remote to change the channel but stopped when they put up a picture of the victim (their word, victim). It was taken just two weeks before he jumped. He was wearing an orange vest and holding up a fish as big as his arm, leaning in like he wanted to kiss it. I remembered how he looked at me right before he jumped, like his brain had done it long ago and his body was hurrying to catch up. I thought of how I was probably the last person he ever saw and wondered if he thought of me before he hit the water. I remembered how quiet the crowd got right before he hit, like his fall was a prayer and the slap of his body against the black ocean was the amen.

I didn’t like looking at the picture, so I closed my eyes as the program continued. They talked about how five percent of people survive the fall, but most of them drown anyway because it’s too goddamn hard to swim with busted bones. Some of them manage to swim but die from the cold, and the ones who somehow survive everything talk about how they regret jumping the instant their feet leave the bridge. I turned the tv off then, imagining it was me that jumped, kicking with shattered legs as icy blackness pushed into my burning lungs.

The kids outside had stopped swimming. I sat in the quiet darkness for a long time, it could have been hours, just sitting there feeling the weight of my body, the sofa pressing against me, the breath in my lungs, the heaviness of my life.

Did you know it’s both? Coconuts, I mean. A fruit and a nut. And a seed, apparently. There’s always something else. I looked it up after California because it felt important, I can’t remember why. I don’t think I ever told Nat, but maybe that doesn’t matter.

Anyways. When I went upstairs Nat was still awake. She wanted to talk about it, she said that we could have done something and the boys saw him fall and we should have stopped him because maybe he had a family like ours. I told her about the way he looked at me right before he jumped, how it wouldn’t have mattered what we said. He jumped a long time ago, I said. I told her about the picture of him I saw on the news, how you’d never recognize him as the man we had seen. Two completely different people, I said. It was like a lie, I said, or something close enough to break your heart.

Stop it, Nat said, so I turned the lights off and lay down, looking at the way the darkness covered everything around me. We both sat there for a long while, both of us awake, and I couldn’t help but think about how I counted the seconds before he hit the water. 1, 2, 3, 4. He just jumped, cool as autumn.

About the Author:

Taylor Flickinger is a senior at Brigham Young University studying English and Creative Writing. After graduating, he plans on getting an MFA and eventually a PhD in creative fiction. He works as a teaching assistant for two non-fiction writing classes, though he's most passionate about writing short fiction. Aside from reading, writing, and teaching, his hobbies include analog photography and cooking.

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Dracula Mountain" by Craig Buchner

October 29, 2019

Dracula Mountain

By Craig Buchner

They called it Dracula Mountain. The stony peak—rock like metal in the hard sun—cresting clouds. The crows cawing from the shadows, and that smell of ammonia choking every sense.

Then Carter, up the trail, staggered toward us. Lost for how long now? Seventeen years old, but pale and skeletal. Back from the dead. Bit by the beast, the story went. Harmon Barley, my Lizzie’s brother, said he saw the whole thing. “A creature with six-foot wings. Flew right out from the tree, grabbing him by the shoulders. Yanked him out of his own shoes.” Carter’s body supposedly fell to the ground, his arms and chest bit up. Gasping for air. Harmon left him for dead, but here Carter was, alive as the day he was born.

Harmon Barley was known to lie when it served him, but his sister Lizzie said, “Nightwalkers been around for eons, and it was only a matter of time before they take this world back.” Dozens had disappeared before Carter, but only a few had come back to us. They all had the same bite marks, and they were quarantined. Incisors and canines extracted for safety.

Lizzie never lost hope that her boy was still out there. We searched the mountain for months. If the creatures didn’t have him, starvation certainly did. I never said this to Lizzie, because I liked her company, and now that she says she loves me, I owed it to her to keep looking.

In the beginning we were happy, mostly. Lizzie sold insurance, and I dreamed of sailing to Central America if I could ever save enough. She was on a work trip to Iowa when Carter went missing. Neighbors saw nothing but agreed one hundred percent she should have never left him alone. I stopped by once when she wasn’t home. Dark, deep pockets under his eyes. He blinked uncontrollably. “Allergies,” Carter lied. He was a mess who was always going to be a mess, but Lizzie was a good mom. If I’d have known I’d be searching for him night after night and her waking up screaming and crying out for him, I’d have handcuffed him in the basement with a bowl of water like a dog. Then he’d never break her heart.

Before the stories of monsters and before she said she loved me, the town had another problem. When the paper mill shuttered, people overloaded on uppers to work two or three part-time jobs to pay their mounting bills. They couldn’t afford the pace. They needed cheaper, stronger drugs, and a slew of underground concoctions were born. I heard stories of kids experimenting with their own recipes. The vilest of them burned through their veins like pure acid. Loose meat like slow-cooked brisket hanging off their bones.

The world got dark fast. And people quit living for any good future. Before we knew it, they were vanishing completely, including Lizzie’s boy.

When we found Carter, he could barely walk. Arms violent with pustules. I grabbed Lizzie from hugging him on the trail. “But he’s my baby,” she pleaded. I wrapped him in a blanket and carried him all the way downhill.

Before first light, Lizzie was finally asleep. Carter was in his own bed, moaning and babbling. He’ll be fine, I told myself, but I could hear him on the phone. I pushed my palms against my temples. That unbearable conversation. “I need it,” he repeated. “I’ll kill somebody, I don’t care.” If he didn’t tear us apart before, it was only a matter of time. The certainty of it helped me to my feet. I pushed open his door, said, “Get up.” Grabbing his face, his lips opened to speak, I forced all the cash I had saved for that sail boat and that bullshit dream into that black pit of a mouth. I said, “If you ever come back, I’ll live forever to make yours hell.” He gripped the cash and breathed out slowly—calm, proud. I was a monster, but to him I was nothing but a savior.

For exclusive “Dracula Mountain” video content produced by Emmy-nominated filmmaker Tim Van Horn, check out the CutBank Facebook page!

About the Author:

Craig Buchner’s fiction and poetry have been featured in Tin House, The Baltimore Review, Hobart, The Cincinnati Review, and many other literary journals. He is also the recipient of the AWP Intro Journals Award for his fiction. Although he was born and raised in the Adirondacks of New York State, Craig calls Portland, OR, home, where he lives with his wife and daughter. To read his work, go to: www.craigbuchner.com

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Coyotes" by Cameron MacKenzie

October 22, 2019

Coyotes

By Cameron MacKenzie

My friend recently came back from a trip to LA where he stayed in a house with a deaf and blind dog. They called the dog Roomba, because it roamed through the place bumping into things and scarfing up food. It was old but not tired, and had settled into a low and steady rhythm of life that it seemed it could sustain indefinitely. But my friend wanted to tell me about the dog so he could actually tell me about the coyotes.

The coyotes roamed the edges of the neighborhood at dawn and dusk, big eared, serene, drawn tight as bow strings. Coyotes love to trick domestic dogs, to play with them and draw them away from their yard and out into the hills, where they then set upon them as a pack, kill and eat them. From this time-tested game Roomba was immune thanks precisely to his handicaps, so he’d patrol the back yard--protected by a ten-foot fence--with his nose to the ground, the coyotes darting in and out of the brush on the other side, curious, I’m sure, perhaps even frustrated, that their natural charisma, their superior athleticism and streetsmarts and dark and exotic draw of the wild had absolutely no effect on the snuffling trash compactor who labored diligently just feet away.

I don’t know about LA, but when I lived in San Francisco I used to run out in the Presidio by the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s all pine trees and crumbling cliffs dropping off into the pounding sea and, as the park is generally empty, the place is a runner’s dream. There’s wide honey-golden routes that run you past the main attractions, and then narrower paths out to wilder places--to beaches you wouldn’t otherwise know existed, to unannounced art installations in the woods, to old bunkers and rusting ballistic missile sites and radar towers surrounded by barbed-wire, their gray paint peeling in the wind.

I once found myself down one of these side paths that then opened up into another and another until I found myself on a trail that was just about as wide as my own foot, nearly overgrown by the grass. The further I took this back into a grove of eucalyptus the more I began to wonder if it wasn’t some sort of water runoff or deer track. I soon found myself in a part of the park I’d never been in before, the papery leaves of the high trees rattling against one another as I came to a clearing--no underbrush, no scrub--and here the path petered out completely before a circle of what could only be described as beds, as worn indentations in the grass arranged in a rough circle before me, each one about two feet long. They looked like little nests, and I wanted to bend down and touch one--just brush it with my fingers. But I knew it was better to keep my feet, better to keep my hands free and my legs beneath me, just in case they should decide--against their nature but still--just in case they should choose to come at me all at once.

Coyotes come across the Golden Gate Bridge at night, lured by the smells of the city, and they’re not the only ones--they’ve got cameras on the thing so they can tell. You got possums and raccoons and skunks and deer and snakes, but it’s not at all unusual for mountain lions to pop over at night for a dumpster-dive, nap in the park for the daylight hours, then head back over after the sun goes down.

Roomba’s limitations saved his life on a regular basis, but the local coyotes weren’t so easily dissuaded. They had watched their prey and learned its habits and had taken to killing squirrels and mice and throwing bits of the carcass over the fence for Roomba to find. The owner had seen the meat himself, pink and bloody and flecked with bits of bone, laying on top his rich green fescue like a prank, or a reminder.

“God knows how they get that crap over the fence,” the guy said, “but once those fuckers set their mind to something, they tend to find a way.”

About the Author:

Cameron MacKenzie's work has appeared or will appear in The Michigan Quarterly Review, Salmagundi, The Rumpus, and J Journal, among other places. His novel, The Beginning of His Excellent and Eventful Career (MadHat Press) and monograph Badiou and American Modernist Poetics (Palgrave Macmillan) were both published last year. He teaches English at Ferrum College and writes for The Roanoke Review.

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Wingman" by Tanya Whiton

October 14, 2019

Wingman

By Tanya Whiton

Wednesday, February 7, 1973: The plane was already on fire when it hit our building, and the pilot was already dead.

I learned this fact many years later, after I’d tracked my father down. He relayed the story over pints at a pub in South Boston as if it were part of a logical continuum—fate was already in motion. Everything had been decided. Rumor was the pilot, Robert Lee Ward, was smoking in his mask. Twenty-eight thousand feet over San Francisco Bay, his flight leader flying alongside, and he just dropped out of sight. The other pilot radioed Oakland Air Traffic Control to say—here, my dad got a little choked up—he’d lost his wingman.

I was pretty boggy by that point in the conversation. But I had some questions that needed answering, and they weren’t about the payload a U.S. Navy A-7E Corsair II could carry, or which squadron it had belonged to. I wasn’t interested in bandying dusty Vietnam-era acronyms, or discussing the unique qualities of the A-7E’s flaps. He’d been a civilian, anyway—even if all his friends at Alameda Naval Air Station were enlisted guys.

Dirtballs, was what my mom called them. Turds. She’d protested the war.

The bartender set another round in front of us. My old man looked me over, and lifted a pint in one swollen, cracked claw.

“My buddies, you know, they got to go to all these exotic places.”

They’d been on carriers in the Gulf of Siam. They’d taken leave in Bangkok. They’d haggled with tiny Korean ladies in the Seoul markets, picked up some jungle bug while marooned on Guam. They had stories to tell. If things were shitty—if, for example, a guy lived in a lousy apartment building that smelled of other people’s cooking, well, it was all temporary. But not for my dad. He could never get away.

“Must’ve been tough,” I said.

An American Airlines Boeing 727 departing Boston was framed momentarily in the bar’s one narrow window.

Did he know the Island smelled like burned flesh and jet fuel for months after the crash? Did he know that my friends and I found shards of metal in the trees? Or that mom and I slept on a pile of blankets on the floor of a neighbor’s house? Every day, I circled the blackened hole in the ground where Robert Lee Ward’s oxygen mask and parachute vest were found.

And fifty four days after the A-7 plummeted out of the night sky, the remains of an unknown white male between the ages of thirty and forty were discovered. It was decided they belonged to my father.

And yet here he was. What did he have to say about that?

He exhaled and shook his head. College hadn’t taught me anything.

“The plane was already on fire,” he repeated. “It—you have to understand, son—it made an opening.”

About the Author:

Tanya Whiton’s fiction has recently been featured in The Cincinnati Review, Al Pie de la Letra, and Fanzine, and is forthcoming in Collateral. Her story “Up” was nominated for the 2018 Best Microfiction Anthology, and she won second prize in Zoetrope: All Story’s 2017 Short Fiction Contest. Her short story “Atlantic Window in a New England Character” was selected as a finalist for the 2019 Tennessee Williams Contest. She is also the co-writer and an associate producer of the documentary feature THE ZEN SPEAKER: BREAKING THE SILENCE.

The former Associate Director of the Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program, Tanya has taught creative writing and professional development skills for writers for the Lesley Seminars, Stonecoast Writers’ Conference, Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, and the University of Southern Maine.

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Ghosts” by Nicole Lacy

October 7, 2019

Ghosts

By Nicole Lacy

My grandfather existed in one of three places: stretched sleeping on his worn recliner, downing shot after shot at Sal’s bar, or late in the evening, sitting alone in the cellar—all the lights out. He’d descend silently, never explaining the reason, and remain there for hours. Each time he disappeared downstairs, my grandmother shooed me from the stairwell and warned me not to follow.

One night before bed, as Grandma watched reruns of The Lawrence Welk show, I crept close to the top of the cellar stairs, cracked the door, and waited. Shifting uncomfortably on my knees, I heard him stumble into a piece of wayward furniture, muttering “cocksuckers” as he did. The legs of a chair creaked under his weight, followed by the crack of a can of beer being opened. A moment later, my grandfather began talking to himself in the dark.

It started off quietly enough—muffled murmurs and tittering—but before long his voice rose upward in anger. All was peaceful for a time, then peals of laughter shattered the silence. As I stared into the stairwell concealed in black, I tried to make out his words, but they were unintelligible. Soon I began to imagine the sounds slithering from the mouth of a demon.

Terrified, I ran to my grandmother to demand explanation.

“Sometimes Pap-pap just needs to be alone,” she said.

I went on, trying to tell her about words I couldn’t decipher, and she told me he was speaking Hungarian.

“Who’s he talking to?” I asked.

“Himself,” she responded.

“Do you know what he’s saying?”

“No—only his mother would understand.”

I thought of my great grandmother, sitting alone in her cluttered house in Munhall. I always dreaded visiting—the rooms smelled sour and there was not enough light. She seemed rooted in the same spot, seated upon a tattered floral recliner in the living room, frail body wrapped in a crocheted throw, hair concealed by a babushka. There was no television, or if there was, it was never turned on. No cartoons or coloring books. She didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Hungarian so we never spoke to each other, though my grandfather sometimes translated simple phrases like, “Look at those fat cheeks!” as she pinched me, leaning so close that I could count her chin whiskers. She died the year before, having been a passenger in her daughter’s car when it lost control and slammed into a telephone poll.

As I gazed toward the cellar, wishing I could understand my grandfather, I wondered if he was speaking to his mother in the darkness—telling her all of his secrets.

About the Author:

Nicole Lacy holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Carlow University in Pittsburgh. Her work has been published in Tin House Online, Word Riot, and The Los Angeles Review and is forthcoming in the anthology Waves: A Confluence of Women’s Voices.

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Laze" by Lucian Mattison

September 30, 2019

Laze

By Lucian Mattison

Tadeu’s arm sank like a plumb line, taut between the couch cushions, not reaching for anything, but blindly rolling crumb-like grit under his fingers. He touched something like a hay needle. The television swept across a panorama of Pacific Islands. It looked just like the tops of mountains poking out over dense cloud cover, atoll an open top volcano of blue lava.

Jo talked about an ex who he was texting again. He picked up the lighter, flicked the wheel, flame licking on and off. He tapped the cigarette on the glass ashtray balanced on the couch arm. It nodded with him as he fell silent.

Tadeu waited for him to continue. He didn’t.

“We’re leaving soon anyway,” Tadeu said, putting his head on Jo’s thigh.

Jo agreed and turned back to the episode of Blue Planet on coastal waters. A billow of salt steam and laze erupted from a knuckle of lava, its frayed edge like wet dough, baked solid by cold. The ocean hissed back, mineral turned brittle in its newness. Tadeu sunk further, now up to his shoulder in the cushions, unable to pull away. The further he sank into the couch, the more lava cooled somewhere else on a coastline, expanding the reaches of the far islands on TV.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen with him when I’m back. Obviously, I want to see him again,” Jo said.

“I know. I can’t stop you.”

Jo didn’t mention anything about the people who would fill his place while Tadeu finished up his last year. Jo wanted open endedness or people with expiration dates.

Tadeu sunk, most of his body disappearing into the couch. He raked at the leather cushions with his remaining hand. Jo went on, tapped his cigarette into the glass block. Lava hit the ocean, more steam, volcanic glass shattering into acid plume.

The ocean enshrouded Tadeu.

Jo’s muffled voice murmured above him, as if being pushed through a pile of wet laundry. A list of fish broke formation, caved in as they swam past, evaded the tumble of hot rock settling like toothpaste in a sink basin. The ocean was electric blue, hotly violent. Tadeu watched as words piled atop him, more liquid rock. Waves smoothing it over him like thumbs on cracked clay, until all light was locked out.

The inside of the rock was silent. The television showered Jo’s sleeping body in swatches of color. He’d wake up while it was still dark outside, gather his keys and wallet, and leave the house for good. For months, the ocean bristled around Tadeu. Algae began to cling to his surface. Then, a nest of bivalves. Later, small crustaceans. Life swelled around him. A force, now farther away, raised the earth below, pushed him up above the water’s surface. Ribbons of wind and waves broke over the top of him, and the crustaceans gripped tighter, laid flush against the exposed pieces.

About the Author:

Lucian Mattison is a US-Argentinian poet and translator and author of two books of poetry, "Reaper's Milonga" (YesYes Books, 2018) and "Peregrine Nation" (Dynamo Verlag, 2017). He is based out of Washington, DC, where he may or may not be living among the ghosts of long-deceased reptiles. His poetry, short fiction, and translations appear in numerous journals including Hayden's Ferry Review, The Offing, Puerto Del Sol, Sixth Finch, and Third Coast. Read more at Lucianmattison.com.
You can also find him on Twitter (@luciannumerouno) and
Instagram (@luciannumberone).

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Yellow Sac Spider" by Cameron Morse

September 24, 2019

Yellow Sac Spider

By Cameron Morse

One morning I find on the kitchen counter a torn piece of a paper towel with the word spider in green highlighter resting atop my empty jar of Barilla pesto, unscrew the cap and walk the partially rinsed jar to the flowerbed, army green flecks of basil still slicked to the inside glass. A yellow sac spider, indeed, lay at the bottom of the translucent rink. Who left the name of its species, any of the predaceous arachnids of the order Araneae, I can only infer from the neatness of the script to have been my mother. With whom my wife and I have lived all these years since the year of my first seizure and subsequent treatments for brain cancer. I can only guess my spider, for upon my reception of this missive it became mine or at least mine to dispose of, crawled into the jar of its own volition only to be discovered there by Mom because she has in her life squashed her fair share of spiders and would not have hesitated to expunge another, especially one caught trespassing on the immaculate quartz countertop. For my part, understanding how arachnophobia is presumed to be genetically hardwired due to troubled prehistorical relations between us and them, I prefer to extend pardon and proffer a life unfettered among phloxes. I set the jar down and walk away as I once dropped two pet turtles in a campus pond because I was tired of them and breaking up with the girl with whom I carried back their terrarium from the wet market to my sixth-floor apartment at the Shandong Institute of Business and Technology, the girl I could never get rid of, who later became my wife.

A week or so has elapsed since I returned my tallow little friend to what constitutes for eight barbed legs and miniscule brain the wild or at least a more natural habitat than a six-ounce jar of various ingredients including but not limited to grana Padano cheese, potato flakes, and cultured milk, salt, enzymes. Deciding it may be time to pay a visit, I step out into the stillness and heat and intermittent breeze of mid-April sun rising at the birding hour of morning to find alas the poor soldier in still the same position as the one in which I first made his acquaintance, the legs alongside one half of his abdomen twirled together, the other half’s legs splayed.

Everything for naught, the note, the period of captivity, the release to the wild, all of it: the return visit from Beijing, family meeting vacation to Florissant in which I fell as if struck by lightning and convulsed at the foot of the wardrobe, the ambulance ride butt cracks of EMTs moth beating at the headlamp CAT scan and subsequent MRI, all of it for a drowned sailor, a disembodied member of a species generally hated by members of my own and maybe even murdered by my own mother. What joy is this, devoid of content, what empty joy.

About the Author:

Cameron Morse was diagnosed with a glioblastoma in 2014. With a 14.6 month life expectancy, he entered the Creative Writing Program at the University of Missouri--Kansas City and, in 2018, graduated with an M.F.A. His poems have been published in numerous magazines, including New Letters, Bridge Eight, Portland Review and South Dakota Review. His first poetry collection, Fall Risk, won Glass Lyre Press's 2018 Best Book Award. His latest is Terminal Destination (Spartan Press, 2019). He lives with his wife Lili and son Theodore in Blue Springs, Missouri, where he serves as poetry editor for Harbor Review.

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "La Paz Porta-Homes" and "Sitting with My Wife's Urn in My Lap" by Jace Einfeldt

September 17, 2019

La Paz Porta-Homes

By Jace Einfeldt

When me and Trev were younger, we went Christmas window shopping with mom. Most years, looking was all we could afford to do with her habits and all. We had always wanted a bike. The wind in our hair, the freedom. Doesn’t get much better than that. Just pedaling, balance, and total control. Just you, the bike, and the road.

Christmas Day usually consisted of presents wrapped in pages from the National Enquirer topped with a bow. The days between Christmases got longer when money was scarce. One year, mom noticed me and Trev trading basketball cards with Kenny Farnes two trailers down. That year, Trev got a City Rec League Basketball T-Shirt (size XL) with ketchup stains on the design: a picture of a man hanging on a basketball hoop with the words “Rim Rockerz” across the top in graffiti. Even if we didn’t like the gifts, we had to say we did. She was thrifty in all the wrong ways.

We had a paper shredder in the trailer that mom brought home from her job at Staples, and when she said we had no money I wondered if she just put her paychecks through the shredder. I remember sifting through the shreds hoping to piece together a dollar bill.

Even though we were poor, mom threw parties like we weren’t. Our trailer was full of people and got smaller when guests came over. They always stayed overnight. Sometimes we stayed out late because we didn’t want to walk in while she was conducting business. When me and Trev left for school, we played “the people sleeping on the floor are lava.” When mom was out, we played “guess when mom comes home.” Loser cleaned the living room, gave mom Tylenol, and got her to bed. In the end, we both dealt with mom’s hangovers. We played our games and made our own traditions. Mom revered our traditions and games as much as she honored and respected routine drug tests at work.

One Christmas, me and Trev were eleven and nine years old respectively. We wrote Santa a letter. We were 99% sure he didn’t exist, but on the off chance he was didn’t want him to miss us. We wanted to cast a wide net. We even sent a letter to the president. We told Santa we had been good boys all year. We cleaned up after mom’s parties. When she forgot to turn off the light in the living room and fell asleep on the futon, we turned it off for her and put a blanket on her. When the police came looking for her, we said she wasn’t home because that’s what she told us to say. When she needed us to pee in containers for her so she could keep working at Garth’s Food Mart, we peed in containers. We talked a lot about it and decided to ask for a bike. We’d use it to be paper boys so we could help mom pay rent. We weren’t asking for stupid things like mom always said. We just wanted something nice. We signed it “Sincerely, Kirby and Trevor Davenport.” We even wrote the address: La Paz Porta-Homes. We knew Santa made it to La Paz. Last year, Silvia across the way got an easy-bake oven, and Scotty Philips got an RC monster truck.

We put the letter on the kitchen counter praying mom would take it to the post office.

Mom got laid off from Garth’s for sneaking dried mango slices out in her bra. We didn’t expect Christmas this year.

Mom went out a couple nights before Christmas looking for a miniature tree but ended up blowing the tree-money on a bag of weed. She told us that marijuana comes from trees, so she actually got what she had set out to get. We ended up making a tree by gluing Andes Mints wrappers together on a piece of paper, using brass pushpins to hold it up on the wall. On Christmas morning, we sprinted to the living room to see if Santa got our letter. Mom was up. A bedsheet was draped over something in the middle of the room.

We couldn’t remember if she had come home. She told us that Santa came with something last night. She said that if we wanted it, we had to promise that we’d use the gift to help her. We nodded with excited resolve to help. She pulled the sheet. It fluttered to the ground. In its place was a yellow two-seater bike.

We didn’t breathe. One breath and the bike would crumble into powder and mom would snort it up.

I imagined flying down a hill with Trev in the back-seat, air soaring through our hair, tickling our ears. We swore we’d do anything to help.

She handed us a heavy backpack and an address on a piece of crumpled up lined paper. She told us to take the backpack to the address.

We lumbered forward through the narrow dirt path leading to Jacinto Drive tipping over twice. The chain caught hard with ever pump of the pedal as we agitated it with our constant gear shifts. Just as we got a rhythm figured out a kid bolted across the street right in front of us. Santa definitely made it to his house last night. He had a bike; his was new. He probably didn’t have to pee in containers for his mom or tell the cops that she was gone when she was actually wasted on her bed with a glass of water and three Tylenols waiting on her night stand. He probably didn’t have to pretend people were lava or keep guessing when his mom would be home even though it was well past midnight. This kid, who could still believe in Christmas miracles, shot a smile our way. Trev returned it with the bird. We rode off down Jacinto Drive glancing back as mom and the trailer got smaller and smaller.

Sitting with My Wife’s Urn in My Lap

By Jace Einfeldt

Does “on my lap in an urn” count as never leaving? If not, do I have any moral or legal obligation to hold my end of the promise?

Do other lifeforms have urns? Is cremation an option for extraterrestrials? Do they make their own urns in a pottery class? Are they unnervingly aware of their own mortality?

Do other lifeforms mourn? If not, how do they express grief? Is it through tears? Self-inflicted solitude? Running for hours down the same paths that they once walked with their loved ones? If these aren’t options, do they have therapists? Supportive families? Close friends? Children? Religious leaders? Do they believe in God? Or gods? Or an afterlife? What would it be like? Would it be in the sky? Composed of clouds? Or would it look like a refurnished, restored version of their home planet? Would they see their loved ones again? Or would they simply just be? Or cease to exist? Float in limbo, directionless, cold, and alone? Would they find solace and peace in such ideas? If not, where would they turn? Are they afraid to die? Afraid to think about death?

Are there spaceships that can take individuals into space to clear their minds? How big would they be? Do they have private space shuttles? Would it be considered littering if I dumped ashes into space? Isn’t all life carbon based? Would I be fined? Would the Interplanetary Recycling Agency arrest me for improper disposal of an organic substance? Do I need a permit to dispose of organic substances? Does the permit cost more than $5,000? If so, where do I sign?

Part of me wants to be arrested.

To be fined.

To be found.

If I get arrested, would an agent of the Interplanetary Recycling Agency dispose of the ashes for me? If the agent is reluctant, could a bribe change their mind? If the bribe doesn’t do the job, would they take pity on me? Or would they look past me? Get tired of my questions: “why me?” and “why now?” Take the urn off my hands, and shoot me into space as punishment for not doing more? Would they blame me like I blame myself? Or would they seek to understand? Would they let me talk? Would they listen? Would they validate my weary soul?

I would take pity on me.

Would they believe me when I say that I was just keeping a promise made years ago? Do they believe in promises? Are promises protected by interplanetary legislation? Just because a promise is made with a pinky, does it make it invalid?

Do they have doctors? Do their doctors discover malignant brain tumors in their perfectly healthy patients? Are tumors even a worry for more advanced lifeforms? If so, how big do they get? Do they start as the size of a marble? Would these doctors provide false hope? Would they be told to be “cautiously optimistic”? Would the tumor grow to the size of a ping-pong ball? Would they play ping-pong in the waiting room to keep their mind off reality? Would it be inoperable? How would they break the news to the patient’s loved ones? Would they be blunt? Straight-forward? Cut to the chase? Would they, hopefully, try a more humane approach? Would they offer condolences? Or would they just move on?

How do you properly say good-bye to a pile of ashes? Can you just open a lid, say good-bye, and shake the contents out? Like emptying a vacuum cleaner? Or should it be more intimate? Meaningful? Ceremonial? Should I offer a prayer? Give a eulogy? If so, what would I say? With only myself to hear, would it matter? Is this even my wife anyway? How does the song go again? Ashes to ashes, dust to dust? This is what she wanted, so why I am still clutching the urn?

If I empty the contents into the “EJECT ORGANIC WASTE” chute, will I feel less guilt? Would she be offended if I used the chute? Should I find another avenue of release? Is there a less offensive “EJECT ORGANIC SUBSTANCE” chute? Does it really matter in the end?

Once she’s released, will I be able to see the ashes drift away? Or will they blend into the blackness? Is it cold out there? Will I be able to see her again? If so, will she recognize me? Will I recognize her? Will I be able to tell her how much I miss her? Does she miss me? Does she know I’m here?

If I’m in space, how many days could I survive? Weeks? Months? Does air go bad? What if I ran out of fuel? What if the pod’s battery dies? Is the oxygenator connected to the battery? How much oxygen is left in the reserve tank? If there’s none left, would I asphyxiate? Should I just I pull the “EMERGENCY ESCAPE” lever? Would there even be an “EMERGENCY ESCAPE” lever? Does being a widower in a one-man spacecraft count as an emergency? In case of an emergency, what should I do? Is there a limit on emergencies before pulling the “EMERGENCY ESCAPE” lever? Three? Two? One? Would I be a terrible husband if I left my wife alone in space? Would it be any worse than leaving her on earth? Will she be waiting for me on the other side? Once she’s out there, I wonder if she’d appreciate company?

How can I know unless I pull the lever?

About the Author:

Jace Einfeldt is a native of Southern Utah and is a senior in Brigham Young University’s English program. He is an avid reader and writer, specializing in contemporary American literature and short fiction. When he’s not knee-deep in class work, he works as a writing consultant with the BYU Research and Writing Center and BYU Writing Fellows. After graduating, he will be pursuing a master’s and PhD in American literature. Aside from his accomplishments within the English program, he plays the cello, is fluent in Tagalog, and has the most awesome wife.

About Weekly Flash Prose and Prose Poetry:

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Excerpts from 'B-Flat Clarinet Fingering Chart'” by Ryan Mihaly

September 3, 2019

Excerpts from “B-Flat Clarinet Fingering Chart”

By Ryan Mihaly

About the Author:

Ryan Mihaly is a poet and musician who recently completed the BridgeGuard residency in Štúrovo, Slovakia. He graduated from the MFA program at Naropa University where he was an Anne Waldman/Anselm Hollo fellow. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from: 3:AM Magazine, DIAGRAM, Crossing the Dissour, Asymptote, the Massachusetts Review, and in Ilan Stavans' anthology On Self-Translation: Meditations on Language. A multi-instrumentalist and composer, he has played in a number of jazz, rock, folk, funk, punk, and experimental groups over the years, and frequently collaborates with dancers and poets.

About Weekly Flash Prose and Prose Poetry:

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: ""Bully" Comes From The Middle Dutch Word For Lover" by Skylar Alexander

August 26, 2019

"Bully" Comes From The Middle Dutch Word For Lover

By Skylar Alexander

Bill Havenhill and I grow up piss-ants in the same piss-ant town; we both have sisters named Cheyenne; we both are aliens in an elementary school named after a spaceman—him because he is too fond of magenta markers and me because I am dirt poor and smell like it. Michael Maynard, the third in our trifecta of little green men, lives over the bend in the wilderness toward McCausland. His family reuses paper plates and he  only wears sweat pants.  He is the husky to our prepubescent thinness, and thus  bears the brunt of  the beatings. Michael Maynard has a body like a bear and a dad who hits a lot harder than the pretty tanned jackass who  beats us, whose name I write  in a black ink heart  on my headboard;  Michael Maynard takes it like a man, but Bill and me—we take it like the sissies we are. We  all  bleed, but my bleeding is different.

We all grow into our adolescent bodies. Bill Havenhill gets a girlfriend with a lazy eye; Michael Maynard gets a girl pregnant after bending her over the prep table at McDonalds on the overnight shift, but they pay to get her womb cleaned out; I get an hourglass figure early enough that my daddy’s friends label me “an old soul” before pulling me into their laps and slip me money like they used to when I was little. After we throw our square hats in the air and do the picture thing, Bill enlists in the military; Maynard tries his hand at professional wrestling; I try to get married, to anyone, several times, to my ruin.

Bill Havenhill grows into a Rocket Specialist; Michael Maynard grows into his father, drunk and angry; I grow weary of men and take to carrying keys between my knuckles. Bill Havenhill does Kuwait, then does Killeen; does gay marriage, then does gay divorce. Michael Maynard does the chain store circuit—tours Walmart, then Menards, then Lowes’ as head cashier; Michael Maynard nails himself a little red-haired wife and red-haired son. I am nailed, repeatedly, a crown jewel in too many men’s exotic butterfly collections. I do the hokey pokey with every major religion after my man  (reformed, not like the  rest, he swears)  hits  me, then leaves me with nothing. Bill Havenhill takes to Trumpism, Michael Maynard takes to Trumpism, I take to puff-puff-pass; I take to vows of refuge; I take to anything that makes me disappear.

Bill Havenhill gets into cockatiels, moves to Ft. Hood alone. Maynard gets into LARPing, goes by  Morg  now; he dominates the  fifteen-year-olds  in the park. I get clean—so clean I gleam like new pennies. I tie myself to a helium balloon and watch them as I float away, waving like Princess Di, until I too am but a blip in the atmosphere, blip-blipping into the black.   

About the Author:

Skylar Alexander is a writer, teacher, and graphic designer living in Iowa City. She is the assistant director of the Young Emerging Writers Program at the Midwest Writing Center in Rock Island, Illinois. Her writing has appeared in Smokelong Quartely, Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking, and Light Industrial Safety, Hobart, Poetry City, USA, PromptPress, Mantra, and elsewhere. Her first collection is forthcoming from Forklift Books.

About Weekly Flash Prose and Prose Poetry:

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Talent vs. Genius" by Patrick Nevins

August 20, 2019

Talent vs. Genius

By Patrick Nevins

Talent borrows. Genius steals. Talent collects $200 when passing Go. Genius takes Free Parking. Talent brings a sharpened number two pencil on the day of the test. Genius cuts class. Talent pays his library fines. Genius shoplifts from the local booksellers. Talent is a Boy Scout. Genius is Goofus in Galant’s clothing. Talent finds a 1-Up. Genius uses the Konami Code. Talent advances on a wild pitch. Genius steals home. Talent requires prescription glasses. Genius swipes your hearing aid. Talent wants to know if you’re not using your ketchup. Genius has already filched it. Talent stays six car lengths back. Genius passes on the right. Talent adheres to MLA style. Genius plagiarizes. Talent consolidates student loans. Genius accepts grants from the school of hard knocks. Talent goes underwater on an adjustable-rate mortgage. Genius squats. Talent would like your feedback in a brief survey. Genius is ruining your good name. Talent gets consent. Genius assaults. Talent begs the judge for mercy. Genius gets held in contempt of court. Talent lives on borrowed time. Genius lives on Talent’s dime. Talent withers in a retirement-home bed. Genius smashes every tooth in your head.

About the Author:

Patrick Nevins is Associate Professor of English at Ivy Tech Community College in Columbus, Indiana. His fiction has appeared in The MacGuffin, The River, Gravel, and other journals. He is on Twitter @Patrick_Nevins.

About Weekly Flash Prose and Prose Poetry:

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time On The Nintendo 64" by Adam Crittenden

August 12, 2019

Playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time On The Nintendo 64

By Adam Crittenden

When I arrived at Kakariko Village, chickens flapped to the lazy music and the villagers sat outside of their cottages. I rolled to get around—because rolling around as young Link is faster than running—and stopped occasionally to talk with villagers. I had no idea that the amount of fucked was so rich in this village initially, but when I became older Link I saw the village for what it truly was: a facade for the sins of all of the villagers who lived there. Who knew that so much death and decay hid behind the cemetery and under the ground? As older Link, rain constantly pelted the abandoned village, but the rotten ReDead corpses masked with wooden faces still lingered. They never went away; they couldn’t because they had nowhere else to go. The first time I approached one (as young Link), it crept slow and froze time—as the ReDead do. No buttons could save me, and it approached while I stood, hypnotized. It grabbed my chest and hugged. This was like one of those bear-hugs my father gave me growing up as a child. I hated them. He wouldn’t let me go until I began to cry and struggle to breathe. When he released me, he would laugh and I would somehow be okay again—at least until the next hug. Sometimes I think those hugs were his way of saying, “I resent you. You are a burden.” At other times I think those hugs were his way of saying, “I don’t want you to be weak. You can’t be weak.” Those strange hugs. How odd to forgive someone we love. How odd to move on so quickly after pain. How odd to never really move on.

After I finished the level, I sometimes returned just to look around, even though the village had the same corpses waiting in the same places.

About the Author:

Adam Crittenden holds an MFA in poetry from New Mexico State University where he was awarded an Academy of American Poets Prize. His writing has appeared in Barrelhouse, Bayou Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, Barn Owl Review, Whiskey Island, and other journals. Blood Eagle is his first full-length book of poetry and is available from Gold Wake Press. Currently, he teaches writing in Albuquerque at Central New Mexico Community College.

About Weekly Flash Prose and Prose Poetry:

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "As Through a Sieve" by Jad Josey

August 7, 2019

As Through a Sieve

Jad Josey

You sift and I sweep. I move the broom close to your feet, the bristles poking your toes, cranberry-red nails with unpainted crescent moons near the cuticles, because you haven’t been to the salon since your mother called, since she choked out the words about your father, since you said Daddy over and over until I wrested the phone from your hand.

The sifter glimmers with newness. Three birthdays ago, I wrapped it in newspaper, the worst wrapping job ever, you’d said, the corners of your mouth turned up, teeth showing. You tore the paper, cheeks flushed with wine. Afterward, the sifter lingered unsifting through three different Ansel Adams calendars on the wall. I will never tire of Half Dome strafed in that light and those shadows.

You sift and I wait. You used to turn a whisk in careful circles, and I would excavate clumps of cocoa powder with my fork. I wondered if you found them in your cake, too. Now you pull the trigger on the sifter and the kitchen is a windless field, flour falling quiet as snow. I worry at your feet with the broom, trying to bear something out. Trying to shepherd something back in.

About the Author:

Jad Josey resides on the central coast of California with his family and one very large cat. His work has appeared in Glimmer Train, Passages North, Reed Magazine, Little Fiction, and elsewhere. He is currently at work on a collection of short stories. Read more at www.jadjosey.com or reach out on Twitter @jadjosey.

About Weekly Flash Prose and Prose Poetry:

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "The Swimmers" by Elizabeth Paul

July 30, 2019

The Swimmers

By Elizabeth Paul

Since a lot of things didn’t make sense to me as an American living in Kyrgyzstan, or perhaps because so much seemed to reference the past more than the present—the faded signs on crumbling buildings, the silent and vacant factories, the statue of V.I. Lenin—I did not think too much of the fact that there was no swimming pool at the Swimming Pool bus stop. Perhaps there had once been a swimming pool, I thought, or maybe the name referred to the Ak Buura River in a colloquial way; the river ran parallel to Isanova Street, and near the bus stop was a popular swimming spot, where a wood-plank bridge provided access to the grassy left bank.

But in fact, there was a swimming pool near the bus stop. I couldn’t see it from the road because it was set back on the far side of the river and in the ground, with nothing surrounding it to suggest a swimming pool. Perhaps if I’d noticed how the Russian word for swimming pool, bassein, resembles the English word “basin,” I might have had a better idea of what to look for—a simple 100x300 foot concrete pit with grass growing right up to its edges.

I was finally initiated into the secret of the swimming pool through Lyalya, the aunt and second mother of my then-boyfriend and now-husband, Stas. Lyalya, Stas, Stas’s mom, and his sister were one of the few ethnically Russian families still living in their Central Asian town. They’d watched most of their Russian neighbors and friends leave since the end of the Soviet Union, and I wondered what that was like. Did their hometown still feel like home? On what terms did they feel they belonged?

Lyalya loved to swim on summer evenings, and one late afternoon she invited me to join her at the pool. I knew it would be awkward—I was a beginner in Russian—but it was time to get to know Stas’s family.

Lyalya’s habit was to do the breast stroke—keeping her head above water—about two-thirds of the length of the pool and back. So she had left her thick, rose-rimmed glasses on and clamped her orange hair up with a black claw clip before leading me down the slimy, slick ramp into the water.

There was no smell of chlorine and no dancing of light over a cerulean blue liner. In this rough container, the water appeared dark and opaque, and when I let my legs drop, weeds dragged across my ankles and brushed my toes. There were no kids with goggles and snorkels. There were no swimmies or noodles. No diving boards, life guards, or lanes. There were no deck chairs or concession stands. No trash cans stuffed with empty soda cups and neon-stained nacho trays. There were just a few people—mostly boys in their underwear bobbing in the water or standing around the perimeter—and a few cows—some grazing nearby, others passing through trailed by a skinny child wielding a long, thin branch.

Our pale legs glowed in the water, and I wondered what kind of spectacle we provided. The kids at the pool had never experienced the multiethnic empire of the Soviet Union. Did our white skin look as unusual to them as it appeared to me in the dark water that had been diverted from the river? Did I look American even in my swim suit? People could always tell I was American. I was never taken for a Russian.

I don’t remember what Lyalya and I talked about. I did more listening than talking and understood more than I could express, though there was much that eluded me. Still, Lyalya seemed to understand most of my awkward, accented Russian, which took patience and faith. What I remember well is our walk down the slippery ramp before watching eyes, our synchronized shock as the mountain-river cold chomped down on our flesh, our pinning of shoulders to ears and elbows to ribs as we waded in to our waists, our pinch-faced lunges into the first stroke, our parallel wakes, the bob of our torsos and the dip of our chins, the eventual warming up, and the final emerging. I remember the water, the fresh air, and the sunlight surrounding us like amber does an insect, suspending us in a luminescence apart from the inevitable flow of less remarkable moments.

About the Author:

Elizabeth Paul’s work has appeared in Cold Mountain Review, The Carolina Quarterly, The Briar Cliff Review, Sweet Lit, The Indianapolis Review, and Duende, among other places. Her chapbook Reading Girl is an exploration of the art of Henri Mattise. She served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kyrgyzstan and currently teaches at George Mason University. Her website is elizabethsgpaul.com.

About Weekly Flash Prose and Prose Poetry:

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Prayers on Friday " by Aiysha Malik

July 22, 2019

Prayers on Friday

By Aiysha Malik

He leans the entire length of his body against a geometric garden carved into the standing oak panel. At three feet high, it is still one foot taller than him. You watch his fingers travel over the intersections of the pattern, feeling for edges, delighting in the hollows. They find an open octagon.

He aligns his head and peers through. He places his eye against the tiny aperture as steadily as a gunman places his eye against the sight. As tenderly as a filmmaker holds his eye against the viewfinder.

The Imam, wearing jeans under his robes, approaches a man standing by the entrance. They hug and their eyes scan the spaces behind each other’s back.

Sometimes a gunman and a filmmaker can be the same person. This morning you heard that sometimes that happens. That sometimes they can shoot two things at once—a human and a livestream.

The mothers huddle together like points in a seven-fold tessellation, purposeful but unnatural. They whisper and their eyes triangulate the distance between themselves, their children and the exits.

You turn to search for your tiny observer and find him still pressed against his precise peephole. The relief you are ashamed to feel stretches up to be held and you gather it against your heart, safe and warm on your chest. It wasn't you and it wasn't here. Not today.

About the Author:

Aiysha Malik is an ever-curious writer and designer. Originally from Canada, she now resides in the United Kingdom. In 2016 she co-founded Mamanushka, a popular lifestyle blog devoted to the experiences of being a mother and Muslim woman of colour. Find more of her work and inspirations on twitter and Instagram @goodonpurpose.

About Weekly Flash Prose and Prose Poetry:

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: Flash(back) to the Winners of the Spring 2018 Big Sky, Small Prose Flash Contest

July 15, 2019

Water

By Allie Mariano, Winner of the Big Sky, Small Prose Flash Contest

The cement steps disappear into Pontchartrain brack and Mississippi mud. A flock of shock-green parakeets roost on the rail. Our kayak is chained to its posts. We’re lucky we built houses seven feet off the ground. The higher the house, the closer to God. Murder is down; petty crime is up. This is a roguish, half-governed place.

A little skiff approaches with three teenage boys. They hold a sousaphone, a trombone, a snare drum. They look ahead, somber. The snare drummer raises one stick in greeting. The sousaphone player takes a deep breath and presses his lips to the mouthpiece. His cheeks dimple. “St. James Infirmary” moans from the horn: slow, mournful, in a minor key. Let her go, let her go. God bless her.

When the water started rising, the rich by the lake with their nice brick homes and their carports were SOL. The rest of us lifted our shotguns. We scooped sand and lifted and scooped sand and lifted, and a couple people made a few more feet. Then, they rounded us up, they made us leave; they told us the city would soon be gone.

Today, we climb in the kayak and follow the band. We pass the cemeteries first. As the water rose, the crypts stayed put. Bodies seeped out, bone laced with remnant flesh floated amongst the graves. Now, statuesque angels stand tiptoe on the water, a concrete stag looks out over the water-imbued city. A popular tourist attraction, these cities of dead. Now there is nothing, and the tourists won’t be deterred, enchanted as they are by the ravaged. A parakeet flies overhead and settles on the nose of our craft. Three more follow suit. The brass band speeds up; the sousaphone player keeps playing. When I die, please bury me in a top hat. The sky is gray and threatens rain.

Down the street, Canal, as it is, past the half-submerged pedestal where Jeff Davis once stood. The corner bar, the Holy Ground, took water and held it. Its doors are gone; its insides fully flooded. Past the hospital complex, under the highway, must and mildew scented. Fat droplets fall on our heads. Ahead, the tallest buildings rise from the water like lifeless cypress. On the left, the Quarter, deader than it’s ever been.

We came back, like we always come back, even though they said it was gone. All the wood was damp and spotted black, nothing bleach couldn’t cure. They told us we couldn’t take any more water, not for a decade. This flood will just drain into the coast. It sounds like bullshit.

Ahead, the levee separates this lake-city from the river. Once dirt and grass, it is piled high with sand bags. On the other side, a Mississippi steamboat bursts with people. They shoulder each other to see the drowned city; those in front clasp the rail and look out in wonder. They look well fed. It’s early, and this band is smart. The tuba has stopped its solo second line, and the boys don’t look at each other. The snare player counts off, steady, and they begin. Joyful. You’d never guess the tuba warmed up on a dirge.

The tourists clap. An older man on the boat knows the lyrics and claps his hands. This is all we’ve got. Everything is water. They throw food into the boat: packaged cookies, apples, cans of Coke. We can taste the syrup. We could climb on board, abandon ship, find a new place. Somehow, the water suits us. The scavenging and the singular pursuit of survival. It seems better to stay. The parakeets fly up and land on the boat’s awning. It feels sad, but they will come back.

Originally published in CutBank 88 and featured online here.

Holding His Fire

By Daryl Scroggins, Runner-Up in the Big Sky, Small Prose Flash Contest

Before he died from spilling bug killer on himself, Mr. Gallardo would show us neighborhood kids his command center. If you knocked and offered to mow his lawn or clean his gutters, anything, he would open his door and tell you to come on in. Most of his house never had any lights on.

What he liked to show off was in a room with a world map on the wall, where bright tube lights made you squint. There were racks of rifles and shotguns in there, and a long table that looked like it was made out of pistols. He made his own bullets at a table on the other side of the room, and he showed us special kinds he had invented himself—some he said could never be sold, even in America. He had a 4 gauge shotgun shell he said was filled with glass eyes. He had a pistol cartridge with a star-shaped slug that he said would turn into metal spaghetti on impact. I think he had some magical beliefs too, because he said he had a shell that Would Not Fire unless you said a secret word before pulling the trigger, and a pistol that, if stolen, would fire the first time the muzzle lined up with the thief’s face.

We compared stories after he died, and we had all asked him what gun he would use on a Tyrannosaurus Rex. He had it in the crawl space under his closet floor. The barrel was as long as he was tall, and instead of a stock it had a trailer thing with wheels that unfolded, and it had chains and metal stakes to keep it from rolling back too far when it was fired. Whenever someone asked him if he had ever shot it, he always said he would not have a gun he had not fired. I was the one who had to go and ask him how that could be true, if the new gun you buy has never been fired before you shoot it, you own it and haven’t fired it. I think that hurt his feelings. He stopped letting me in, and everybody says that was the start of him not being so friendly. I said I was sorry, but they all said who could tell what might make a guy like that go twitchy.

But I think maybe a question can kill you. One that has the magic in it that has a way of slipping up on a person like a little piece of dirt in your mower’s gas tank.

. . .

An ambulance came, and they him out of there, and then the bomb squad came for the gunpowder. There was yellow tape all over the place and extra locks put on all around, but Mr. Gallardo had shown us The Tunnel. A tunnel works both ways if you know where the booby traps are, and we did. He had said he didn’t have any family, so we figured it would be a shame to see the police get everything when they already had a SWAT team.

Someone said the funeral home director let a story slip out about what happened when Mr. Gallardo was cremated. There were some loud popping noises while he was in there going up in smoke, and when they raked up the ashes to put in an urn they found an almost melted .22 derringer. It was a mystery, but we figure he knew he’d be going to the hospital when he called 911, and he didn’t want to go unarmed. So he, you know, did what people do when they hide drugs.

As far as I know, the T. rex gun is still there. It would be hard to get it through The Tunnel, so you would have to take it right out the front door. I bet there’s at least one pistol still in there too.

. . .

Sometimes, I dream about that big gun in the crawl space, and it’s always the same dream. There’s a family like mine living in that house, and aliens are invading, everything blowing up and people screaming, and everybody runs to hide under the floor. Someone shines a flashlight on boxes and boxes of ammo stacked up all around. They are wondering what it’s for when the spotlight finds it—the only gun that will make you feel safe again when you don’t know what world the trouble is coming from.

Originally published in CutBank 88 and featured online here.

A Posture of Grace

By Kim K. McCrea, Runner-Up in the Big Sky, Small Prose Flash Contest

April shattered at my feet, a barnacled shell salvaged from a maze of days, days battling kelpies at the bottom of the sea. This morning, I look up to see it is May. The grass is thick, riotous and defiant. The buds of the honey locust tree, the last leaves to unfurl, open fists of gold, the misers. Rosemary is blooming and the rhododendrons shine like starfish. A black crow flies east against a white cloud, blue sky. I am prone to seasickness. I am back on land.

On the first day of April, I sat at my father’s cluttered kitchen table and clutched the edges like a tipping raft, fighting to keep my balance.

In my father’s house, keeping watch. Walk him, faltering and wizened, to the toilet. Inspect his leavings expecting to read an oracle: tea leaves, this is, omens found in flights of birds. In two weeks, he will be the same age as his own mother when she died, died at last, alone and unmoored in a house of strangers caring for the old and unanchored. Stand watch. Old men enduring assaults on their flesh to repair the rending of time threatening to choke the bowels. Slipping backward, further under the waves, with each incision and intrusion--glasses of water, pills of different colors, oatmeal and soup, laundry to wash away the blood and urine, a cane, a heavy walker, a cane, a slow recovery, if it comes, silver hair a broken halo from hours upon the pillow, bandages on his head where he slipped and fell and bled. I sit alone and keep watch. Three days ago, a tiny golden bird hit the window above me and broke its neck. I put it in a box to see if it would survive, somehow. Later, I wrapped it in a shroud of paper towels and whispered a small prayer for forgiveness, for the waste, my sorrow. Ask pardon.

My father was sinking below me, fading into the distance, sifting down in the murk at the bottom of the sea. I tucked him in bed and kissed him goodnight. I stood watch. The next day, I maneuvered him somehow back into the hospital. Each morning, I stopped at the hospital cafeteria and cheated the self-serve espresso machine into adding an extra shot to my latte. I tipped the cashier extra because I felt guilty. I drew the curtains around the hospital bed, straightened the blankets, and consulted the nurses. I asked for clean towels and soap, filled the plastic tub with warm water, and swished a washcloth through it. I sat beside the bed and read my book. Gradually, Dad got stronger. Kicking toward the quivering surface, we struggled upward.

Some hours, while I sat with my father, I read from Home by Marilynne Robinson. The novel is set in Iowa, in a small town called Gilead. The author’s spare language, with lines as lean as an Amish chair, is often difficult for me to grasp. I must read a paragraph several times to take its meaning, sounding out each sentence like a primer. Perhaps it’s a difference in vernacular, a syntax of rhythms that is unfamiliar to me, or the gentle piety of Midwestern pastors that is foreign. I’m still working my way through the book.

It is the idea of grace that Robinson returns to like chaining psalms. “Assuming a posture of grace,” is a phrase I read and ponder as I sit with my father. I conjure Isadora Duncan draped in a sheer pale gown striking an arabesque. And what is grace? What does it mean to assume a posture of grace?

Recovery was slow, yet steady. In the middle of the month after he was discharged, we celebrated Easter and his 85th birthday together. With a posture of grace, first comes the possibility of forgiveness. And, with forgiveness, then comes the possibility of understanding, Robinson goes on to write. I have come to realize a posture is not a pose, but a raw and persistent readiness, that grace is simply, but not only, a tender embrace of mercy. I return to the idea as I stand in the garden, pondering how we broke the surface in our embrace and found footing again. As I’m pulling up long blades of grass, I notice the grape leaves are unfolding. The new green leaves are edged in rose.

Originally published in CutBank 88 and featured online here.

About the Authors:

Allie Mariano lives in New Orleans. Her writing has appeared in Saw Palm, Day One, and in New Orleans’ Times-Picayune. She is the nonfiction editor for Midway Journal. She is working on a novel, and she’s happy to be here.

Daryl Scroggins lives in Marfa, Texas. His poems, short stories, and creative non-fictions have appeared in magazines and anthologies across the country, and his most recent book is This Is Not the Way We Came In, a collection of flash fiction and a flash novel (Ravenna Press).

Kim K. McCrea worked as a system analyst for 25 years, building out the internet of things, before returning to letters. In 2017, Kim won the Treefort Wild West Writing Prize and was a finalist in both Proximity Magazine’s Essay Prize and the Barry Lopez Creative Nonfiction Contest. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Tishman Review, Thoughtfuldog, and Watershed Review. Kim lives in Eugene, Oregon, where she wrangles her Labrador in the rain and scouts for Great Blue Herons.

About Weekly Flash Prose and Prose Poetry: