WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Fracture," "Flood Plain," and "Monochromatic Photograph" by Robert Miltner

November 9, 2020

Fracture

by Robert Miltner

Sunlight blazes over a canvas of spreading plains. Rectangular farmsteads, linen thread county roads, rolling contours formed by glaciers and insistent shallow river beds. Flowing through tubular canals from northern tar sands to coastal shipping ports, a pipeline is a running fence that crosses fiercely over border shadows, aquafers, subterranean watercourses, sacred lands. Movement of the opium dram of corvine ink is seditious to voracious to incursive. Dogs bark with graphite melancholy. Coyotes howl malignant as rust-jawed necromancers. Obsidian crows displace a red-tail hawk, finish what it caught. Body and skin are torn, flayed, ruptured, cleaved bone to marrow to maw to broken bellows of jaw. The spill reveals its secret as blood tints soil: an immiscible ointment imping sacrifice to slick gods. Geography leans in on itself, heft to depth to density to balance, inverting to an eclipse of ravens, a collapsed tornado, a swindling sea of rising crude, a black hole displacing a prairie.

Inspired by the painting The Vanquished

by Hans Hoffman

Flood Plain

Terrifying beauty seen from an airplane. A river channel crested, breached. Mixture of drowned cornfields and layers of dark topsoil pressed from paint tubes. Swirling slurry of coal waste and sheen of hog farm muck leaked from earthen lagoons. Thick brown swaths of mudslides applied with a scraper. Floating islands of unmoored barns, warehouses, marinas, houses, docks, boats. Oil from ruptured refinery tanks. Snapped power lines ignite and fire’s red ribbons incinerate shore’s trees, shrubs, cattail marshes. Bridges closing, submerging, sinking. Sections of gray linear highways cut like discarded sheet metal. The drowning of squares and circles, triangles and rectangles. Silver flashes of sunlight on sudden-wrought water meadows, meanders, estuaries. Weather drones show a deranged collage after a fixed cartography becomes an action painting.

Inspired by the Land painting series

by Morgan Dyer

Monochromatic Photograph

String snaps and master wind marionettes kite’s frantic and fragile dance. Released from the cupped hands of a gust, kite tips and trembles and plummets like a small airplane faltering from an electrical stroke. Earth’s magnetic pull grasps falling kite, pushes it into the vast ocean of a failing farm field. Airplane is sparrow struck by escaped kite, is sparrow bleached by sun glare to absence of color. White feathers scatter like exclamation points beside the crashed crushed kite frame of small bird. Three crows coast and land. They eat from the bowl of sparrow’s belly, lungs by muscle by intestines by sinew until only the empty cavity remains. The corvid trio departs. Gathered clouds rumble and rift. White sparrow cup with its feathered tail fills with rain. Scrap dealers arrive, claim the emptied hollow of sparrow kite plane. Master wind deranges the wreckage like a sky broken by a shooting, a coup, or a species extinction.

Inspired by the ceramic sculpture Sparrow

by Kate MacDowell

About the Author:

Robert Miltner is the author of two books of prose poetry, Hotel Utopia (New Rivers Press) and Orpheus & Echo (Etruscan Press); several chapbooks of prose poetry, including Against the Simple (Kent State University Press) and Eurydice Rising (Red Berry Editions); a book of brief fictions, And Your Bird Can Sing (Bottom Dog Press); and a book of flash lyric nonfiction, Ohio Apertures (Cornerstone Press, forthcoming). His prose poems are included in Field Guide to Prose Poetry (Rose Metal Press), A Cast-Iron Airplane That Can Actually Fly: Contemporary Poets Comment on Their Prose Poems (MadHat Press), and The Prose Poem: An Introduction (Yale University Press).

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: "Spacewalk Procedure and Preparation" by Stephanie King

November 2, 2020

Spacewalk Procedure and Preparation

by Stephanie King

Decompress.

Space suits are pressurized at about one third of the pressure inside the spacecraft. Astronauts use the same procedure divers use when returning from the depths of the ocean. Otherwise, they would experience “the bends” going outside the craft into space.

One hour before a spacewalk, wear a mask and pre-breathe pure oxygen.

At such low pressure, the amount of oxygen in regular air isn't enough. Suck in that sweet elixir of life, much like you would each droplet of joy on earth. Think about how releasing nitrogen causes decompression sickness, just like releasing your pain causes depression aching even into your bones.

Move through the airlock to an unpressurized payload bay, which leads to outer space.

Float out into the deep void of space and realize what an insignificant speck in the universe you are. Try not to think about how, when you were young and didn’t know any better, you thought sperm floated around to find the egg, like the body was zero gravity. Forget about feeling trapped in the airlock, such a small space, like you did all those times in the church study when the other girls in your bible study group were out sick or on vacation, and Pastor Rick slid around his desk to you like a rocket making a gravitational slingshot around a planet.

Use safety tethers to stay close to the spacecraft.

Tethers are like ropes, with one end hooked to the spacewalker and the other to the vehicle. Wrist tethers keep hand tools from floating away. Don’t fantasize about unhooking yourself and floating off.

Slidewires, handrails, and footholds enable spacewalkers to move around outside the vehicle.

These guides help astronauts to maneuver to their tasks outside the spacecraft. Remember how, the week before you deployed, you finally invited that cute Hasan from Mission Control over and drank too much wine, but not too too much. When he came back to bed after using the bathroom, he tripped over some of your (or his?) discarded clothing in the dark and joked, “You need a slidewire in here.”

Suits are equipped with an in-suit drink bag (ISD) if you get thirsty.

They used to attach fruit bars near astronauts' necks, but now most of them eat before going out. Sip a tight bead of water. Think about how thirsty you were those times you threw up in the morning before going to 7th grade and wondering how you were ever going to tell your parents. Maybe now they would believe you, that it wasn’t your fault. When you miscarried, you were flooded with relief that you didn’t have to figure out how to get an abortion without your parents knowing.

Use manned maneuvering units (MMUs), larger propulsive vehicles attached to space suits, or simplified aid for EVA rescue (SAFER), a smaller, emergency MMU system attached to the space suit's backpack, for extra mobility and more complicated tasks.

If you become untethered and begin to drift away, use your SAFER to propel yourself back to the spacecraft. Listen to the directions from onboard the craft or Mission Control, especially if it’s Hasan. Focus on the deep calm of his voice as he says, “You can do this, Heather,” and even laugh a bit as you think of the epic “Things you can say on a spacewalk AND in bed” thread you’re going to post if you live through this. Think back to the gentle way he reached out to touch you the second time he came over, after you told him only a little bit, and think ahead to when you’re back in town and might call him. Maybe he’ll have moved on by then, in eighteen days, but if not: maybe you won’t make him turn the light off next time.

Remember your training.

Astronauts train for spacewalks in a swimming pool or in virtual reality. Don’t be alarmed by the heaviness of dread in your limbs. You can do this, moving through the deep water, toward the light.

About the Author:

Stephanie King is a past winner of the Quarterly West Novella Prize and the Lilith Short Fiction Prize, with stories also appearing in Entropy, Every Day Fiction, Loch Raven Review, and Lumen. She received her MFA from Bennington, reads flash fiction for Fractured Lit, and serves on the board of the Philadelphia Writers’ Conference.

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "The Parade of Corpses" by Brian Clifton

October 26, 2020

The Parade of Corpses

by Brian Clifton

Because the crowd had gathered for quite some time, the babies were crying a sore-throat cry. Despite this, no one dared to leave. It is not everyday one’s town hosts the parade of corpses. Some believed the parade of corpses was magical—all the cemeteries’ graves, all the coffin lids creaking open. The bodies in all states of decay congregated into a complex structural hierarchy the living would not, or could not understand. The dead would march through the main thoroughfare. This understanding forked into two schools of thought.

Some believed the dead would be slow—they lacked muscle. This subcategory of believers forgave the delay. They said, It is natural for the body to break. And so they sat on the sidewalk in the sun with big smiles plastered over their faces. For them, the whole crowd believed what they believed. They were inspired by compassion.

Others believed the magic that revived the corpses also granted preternatural vivacity. They developed plots in their minds. The corpses must be delayed because they were busy pilfering houses, hanging out at the dingy Shell station, smoking pack after pack of Marlboro lights. The dead wailed in their minds on bone-trumpets and skull marimbas. They couldn’t help but frown thinking about all the fun the dead must be having while they waited there, sweating their asses off, for this bullshit parade. You want to head out? they asked. Are you kidding? they responded, and let those fuckers win.

The parade brought out a certain type of resentment among those who did not believe it to be magically derived. Of these, some thought ghouls, and human beings can be ghoulish, disinterred all the dead bodies to display in elaborate contraptions that accentuated the grotesque ways dirt warps a body. Some also believed the ghouls to be building a large float of human bones, pulled by a rented tractor. These people wondered where the ghouls gathered that type of scratch as they squinted down one side of the empty street.

Others thought of the parade as, and they did not like admitting this, a sort of Olympics of the afterlife. There must be a council that chose the town. The parade of corpses could help the area economically—with the tourism, the media, the leveling of businesses to make a large stadium on the taxpayer dollar, the kicking out of homeless people, the whole nine yards. These believers scanned the sweating crowd. They saw parents applying and reapplying sunscreen to their screaming children, grandparents complaining, their neighbors, old high school cliques... They looked for faces they did not recognize.

Others were convinced that the dead would not be so obvious in their choice of parade route. The dead, they reasoned, would stick to side streets, neighborhoods, at times of light traffic. These people nervously turned side-to-side, ready to dart at any moment. They felt inside themselves a great pain—like thrusting a limb into frigid water. They knew they must leave but questioned why so many others were also duped. The dead might only pretend to prefer side streets, etc. They certainly would not like all this attention, and aren’t we all alike when dead? They squirmed.

Another subcategory, mostly PhD. students, believed the parade of corpses would simply be a giant mirror, reflecting the crowd. Their eyes dragged purplish bags, their hair unkempt, their skin sickly. They waited taking mental notes, complaining about student debt and coursework.

Others believed the corpses were invisible to every sober eye, and so they began drinking early. The hour was late; the hangovers arrived. They saw nothing and spent the rest of their time calling for death. Others did not know why the crowd gathered. They had errands to run. Others remained steadfast in the devilry of reanimation. Others pirouetted with their phones held high, hoping to catch a glimpse of something.

Others, others, others. There will always be others in a crowd, murmuring about what it will be like, what death will be like when it comes, if it comes. Yes, it will come—don’t you hear? The bony heels striking and striking the hardening ground. Yes, I think so.

About the Author:

Brian Clifton is the author of the chapbooks MOT and Agape (from Osmanthus Press). They have work in: Pleiades, Guernica, Cincinnati Review, Salt Hill, Colorado Review, The Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, and other magazines. They are an avid record collector and curator of curiosities.

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WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Good at Cards" by Rita Feinstein

October 18, 2020

Good at Cards

by Rita Feinstein

The first card is The Lovers, reversed. The second is Three of Swords, a heart skewered by blades.

The interpretation is painfully obvious. “You’ve experienced heartbreak recently,” I say. “Maybe a relationship where one person was more invested than the other.”

“How did you know that?” the girl across the table gasps.

I never know how to respond to this question. The truth is that I probably would’ve told her the same thing without pulling a single card. People don’t seek spiritual guidance when they’re happy, and most people are unhappy for romantic reasons.

“Now is the time to focus on self love,” I say, because it’s important to end on a positive note.

Her eyes fill with tears behind her hipster glasses. “Wow, thank you,” she says. “You have no idea how much I needed to hear that.”

Still thanking me profusely, she rejoins the tide of people drunkenly celebrating the end of college. I wish there were a quieter place for me to read, but Kaleigh wanted me in the high-visibility room between the kitchen and the patio. She also wanted me to wear something “mystical.” I feel ridiculous in my granny-ish beaded shawl.

I never should have told her I read cards. I never should have agreed to do this party.

At one point in my life, this was the dream. I wanted to be just like my godmother, a master of the arcane arts. She had long black hair, always smelled like rosewater, and of course wore beaded shawls. During the darkest days of my early teens, she taught me tarot. Over steaming mugs of chai, we went through her Rider-Waite deck card by card, learning the major and minor arcana, the aces, the court cards.

Certain cards scared me at first. The Tower. The Devil. Death. But my godmother taught me to think of them not as challenges, but as opportunities for growth.

Another partygoer sits at my table, and I know from the angle of his baseball hat that he’s here to debunk me. I’ve grown to admire people like him. He’s already cynical, so he’ll never have a crisis of disillusionment.

As he’s shuffling, my phone buzzes in my pocket. I grit my teeth and send it to voicemail.

“I didn’t know wizards have cell phones,” he says, smirking.

“I’m not a wizard.”

I’m not, and neither was my godmother. I thought she was good at reading cards, but she was just good at reading people. And yet she let me believe that magic was real. That I could channel divine energy from other dimensions, that my third eye was wide open. At the time, it was what I needed to hear. But now it just feels like a betrayal.

The card the bro draws is Death. A skeletal knight on a white horse, a dead body at his feet. It means change, not real death, my godmother told me. Whatever happens, it happens for a reason.

My phone buzzes again. I don’t have to be psychic to know it’s my mom.

“Sorry,” I say to the bro, and answer the phone.

Most of what my mom says turns to static in my brain, but I make out the words “Do you want to say goodbye?”

An invisible fist crushes my lungs. I can’t breathe. My godmother can’t breathe. Her crystals and raw foods couldn’t cure her.

I stare at the Death card on the table, the blankly grinning skull. Sometimes the change is death. Sometimes things happen for no good reason at all.

On the other side of the country, my mom presses her phone to my godmother’s ear. I heard the shallow rattle of her breath, but she doesn’t say anything.

I panic and end the call. If I cry, I won’t be able to stop.

“Sorry,” I say again.

I try to focus on the card, but all I see is my godmother’s kitchen. She’s pointing at the setting sun in Death’s background, a benevolent smile on her face. “What do you think this means?” she asks, and when I shake my head, unsure, she says, “It’s time to let go.”

About the Author:

Rita Feinstein is the author of the poetry chapbook Life on Dodge (Brain Mill Press, 2018). Her work has appeared in Grist, Willow Springs, and Sugar House, among other publications, and has been nominated for Best of the Net and Best New Poets. She received her MFA from Oregon State University. Twitter handle: @RitaFeinstein

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Risk" by Dayna Patterson

October 12, 2020

Risk

by Dayna Patterson

Our first and only family game of Risk ended in truce, no one wiped from the board, although I’d conquered half the globe and was poised to annihilate both my daughters, and my spouse of fifteen years. My purple-black troops were everywhere, virus-like. I had artillery guarding every sea line, every possible point of invasion, cavalry in Madagascar and Brazil ready to wipe my eldest’s orange infantry right off the map. A host amassed in Alaska to bully into Kamchatka where my youngest’s green was spread thin. Instead of Mom, they called me Thanos, Darth Vader, Adolf. They skirted off to side rooms, whispered secret pacts, scuttling back to the kitchen with flaring faces, sparks in their eyes. How I would crush them, hailing southward from Iceland, stampeding northward from the Cape of Good Hope. Then my youngest, after ousting her sister from Japan, called for an end. I’m happy with Asia. Bursting both small hands repeatedly over the board, a magician’s gesture, Trees trees trees, we’re planting trees all over to make up for the blood. They sprouted from the game board in time-lapse speed: seed, sapling, twelve-foot trunks punching holes in the roof, letting a star-washed sky peep in.

About the Author:

Dayna Patterson is the author of Titania in Yellow (Porkbelly Press, 2019) and If Mother Braids a Waterfall (Signature Books, 2020). Her creative work has appeared recently in Carolina Quarterly, Duende, EcoTheo, and Gulf Coast. She is the founding editor-in-chief of Psaltery & Lyre and a co-editor of Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry. She was a co-winner of the 2019 #DignityNotDetention Poetry Prize judged by Ilya Kaminsky. daynapatterson.com. Twitter handle: @TitaniaYellow

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Today I Wonder What If No One Finds Her," "On Loss of Memory," "On Lack of Imagination," and "On Vulnerability on Stage"by Emily Perez

October 5, 2020

Today I Wonder What if No One Finds Her

by Emily Perez

Today a grown girl in the woods, up the hill from Columbine. Today a grown girl head filled up by Columbine. Yesterday a one-way fare, a flight across the nation. The day before a one-way fare. The day before a one-way fare. Every day she plans a trip to Columbine, alerting all the FBI. I’d sacrifice my privacy. I’d sacrifice my right to self-defense. I’d sacrifice my right to a militia. Today a grown girl wearing black and camouflage. One rumor says she’s naked. Today will we be hostage to a corpse, a girl with arms, a girl with rights to bear those arms. Today a manhunt for a teenage girl. Today a teenage girl becomes a man who’s hunted. Maybe with a wild look. Maybe quiet in the back, as her classmates knew her. Today 400,000 kids stayed home, and mine were fine. Today I told them someone wanted to hurt schools. And the police and principal had talked. And we were safe at home. Today their father told them crazy woman and pump-action shotgun. Today both kids refused to go run errands. Today they cried when I said stop acting crazy. Today they played an online game with guns. Today was like a snow day, only anxious and no snuggles. Today an Uber driver took her up the mountain road. The news report says she hiked through feet and feet of snow. Today my yoga teacher says where there is chaos, there’s a lesson. Today I tell my older son that everything’s okay and he replies there is no time that everything’s okay. Today they find her shotgunned near a copse. Today a girl gone in a field. I wonder about what shoes she wore and if her feet felt cold. One day not far away the snow will melt to columbines.

Note: “Today I Wonder What if No One Finds Her” draws from the events of April 17, 2019, when a teenager traveled from Florida to Colorado based on her obsession with the massacre at Columbine High School 20 years earlier. She purchased a gun shortly after arriving in Colorado. Her actions, deemed a “credible threat” by the FBI, shut down hundreds of schools in the Front Range for the day while the police searched for her. She was found dead by suicide the next day in the mountains near Denver.

On Loss of Memory

Maybe I was the one who found that beautiful Heid Erdrich poem, or maybe it was you. A few days ago I read it like I’d never seen it before but this morning when I awoke I thought this poem is deeply familiar and I could picture where I was when I first came across it.

In my late teens and early twenties I prided myself on having a mind like a steel trap; I kept no calendar, could memorize names and dates, took notes in class, but rarely needed to study because the act of writing them inscribed them on my mind. My memory was not photographic, but strong; I could retain and revisit.

My boyfriend called me “Ms. Memory,” and I basked in my capacity to track every moment of our bliss, to remind us both of how the story kept clicking into place.

In the days and months after our break-up, an event that set off one of my first major bouts of depression (though there had been tremors and precursors), I cursed my strong memory. It was memory that took me wading in every moment of perfect, undying love, every fleeting doubt, the unexpected and awful end. In remembering I experienced evisceration over and over, and I longed for forgetting.

If only I could forget! How could I endure such an exquisitely persistent memory!

I listened recently to a podcast about people who have moment-to-moment recall, how hard it is for them to move on from certain hurts. A fifty-year-old woman with this kind of mind flared in anger as she spoke of the day her mother threw away her special calendar. She seethed, and I felt it, too—the betrayal, her treasure gone. Then I learned this wound, so bright, so fresh, occurred when she was six. But with a perfect memory, how could she forget?

Within a year of that breakup, I re-read my diary and found that what I thought I’d remembered so precisely, the way the metaphorical knife had canted toward my heart and carved, was wrong. The angle, the time of day, the sounds uttered. I’d misremembered.

Or had I? I remember now that sometimes I would lie in those diaries, or soften the present, wanting the record to reflect a kinder history. I’d pre-forgive, trying to make those who had hurt me sound better so that someday the story would just be a blip, would fit the happy ending I so wanted.

Scientists say that each time we revisit a memory we rewrite it. Memory is ever pliable clay, molded with each new touch. How many times had I handled that memory, and what hands had I used? What else had I rewritten?

Older now, and having worked hard at both forgiving and asking for forgiveness, I wonder, is forgiving always active as rewriting, or at times, is it just forgetting? Now I forget which friends’ husbands have had affairs, whose father died of what disease, the percentage of girls and women who will be assaulted each year. I hear the news as if it’s new, but also something from the past. The distance stills the sting.

Now my memory is soft-focus, imprecise. I remember feelings and gists and figures fading into the mist. I conflate conversations; I twist plots and twine my children—which one likes mangoes, which one hates tickling. I have blocked out many fights from my marriage and yet certain triggers summon a terrible undertow.

Now I do not want to read those diaries, kept since I was ten, unearth those letters still boxed in my closets. I do not want to view the pictures, listen to the recordings, watch the videos. I need not revisit, re-immerse, rewound. Even happy memories bring a kind of pain—nostalgia.

Now, I drop a penny into a well and perhaps I watch as it falls, perhaps not. Perhaps I re-enter the well at some later date with a dredge and that penny comes back up. Or perhaps another penny winks a light that rises to the top.

On Lack of Imagination

I read someone’s opinion on the internet that in my generation there are Narnia people and Wrinkle In Time people, and though in some ways I am both, I longed to be a Narnia person. I say this not because of my rootedness in religion over science—I had both in my life—but because I wanted, wanted, wanted that kind of magic to be real. I wanted to be able to walk into my closet, or any one of the closets in my childhood home in South Texas, each with a distinct smell (some a mélange of scented candles, others dry cleaning bags, one with my mother’s perfume, one with mouse droppings and old luggage, one a dead rainbow boa), and to enter another realm.

I knew such things did not exist and yet I wanted my imagination to be strong enough that I could place myself there physically. I felt the same after reading The Secret Garden. I tried to imagine my sweltering backyard into a dewy, British festival of sun-dappled petals, full of sweet pea and lavender. I tried to be what I imagined of other girls, in love with horses, and I tried to imagine my bike as one. I tried to imagine an imaginary friend for myself, and when I was given baby dolls I found them boring, but I tried to imagine them into needy beings that I might someday imagine caring for.

I knew other people had this power and that perhaps if I ever wanted to be a novelist I needed this power. I’ve heard novelists on many occasions describe their characters “appearing” to them, “speaking” to them, going on long road trips with them—and yet, that vision, that voice, that capacity eluded me. I could imagine myself imagining, and that was as far as I got.

I read last night in Boy with Thorn by Rickey Laurentiis that God creating man in his own image shows lack of imagination. And I agree. And that’s my fear for my own writing, that it’s woefully limited by my own lack, that I may sit all night in a closet of coats too heavy for any Texas winter, and never see a lamppost, never lose sight of the outline of my own hand.

On Vulnerability on Stage

Last night I took part in a reading fund-raiser for reproductive justice: thirteen readers—twelve women and one transman--each coming at the subject matter from a different entry point. I expected the variety of topics, many triggering, complete with trigger warnings. What I did not expect was the number of people who prefaced their readings with the words “I have never read this before,” or “I have never said this before on stage,” or “I have never talked about this to anyone.”

The slam poetry genre skews confessional in such a way that the performance of profound pain, violation, and loss are expected parts of any given show, and the topics and style are defined enough that they have been parodied many times. The parodies, however, grossly simplify slam and its transformative power, the use of voice, tempo, and body as instruments to build, crescendo, and hush.

Slam poets are among the riskiest risk takers, often laying out their drama in first-person, not clinging to the page-poet’s insistence on the separation between the “speaker” and “writer.”

Last night’s reading was suffused with risk and vulnerability, but it did not make use of slam’s tones and techniques. The poems read were written for the page, and if seen on the page would have been transformative for their use of space and movement, their deft leaps through language. Most cloaked their true topics: assault, miscarriage, abortion, rape. It was the reader’s spoken preface that clued us in to context: “The first of these poems I wrote before my abortion; the second, after.” Readers said things like, “I have never been more nervous to read,” and “I’m not nervous about the poems, I’m nervous about what I have to say before the poems, so I wrote it down.”

The room filled with each reader saying the thing she had not written for publication, could not say in the saying of the poem. On their own these poems were gorgeous, powerful, and sometimes funny. But each poem’s raft was buoyed by an ocean of the author’s preface.

“I am a womb-man,” announced one reader. “I walked in this world as a woman, and now I pass, often, as a cis-man.” And then, “as a woman I experienced assault.”

Several months ago, I was called for jury duty for a sexual assault case. Before voir dire we potential jurors were asked to fill out a survey trying to gauge our opinions and experiences on assault. For the question, “Do you or does anyone you know have experience with assault?” I answered, “What woman has not experienced assault?” I wondered if this question was really for the men. Were they aware that nearly all the women in their lives had been assaulted? I realized during the beginnings of the #MeToo movement that I’d never discussed my assaults with my husband. Was he aware?

And what did it do for us, for the audience, for the world to speak the unspoken from a stage?

On stage, as a chorus of women and former women we spoke. We did not all live as women, we did not all have wombs, we did not all have children, we did not all share skin color or age or poetic style. But we all supported a woman’s right to autonomy over her body, a right that signifies her basic freedom and humanity.

And knowing that everyone who would come to this reading supported that as well, no matter the shape their bodies took on that particular June night, we opened new doors.

What is it about a belief in full humanity that enables saying?

About the Author:

Emily Pérez is the author House of Sugar, House of Stone and the chapbooks Made and Unmade and Backyard Migration Route. A CantoMundo and Ledbury Emerging Critics fellow, her work has appeared in journals including Missouri Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Copper Nickel, and The Rumpus. She is a high school teacher in Denver where she lives with her family. You can find more of her work at www.emilyperez.org. Twitter: @emilytheperez

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WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Sleuth" by Emily Rich

September 27, 2020

Sleuth

by Emily Rich

I find the soldier with the blown-off face in my father's desk drawer. Held up to the light—my small fingers carefully keeping to the cardboard edges so as not to smudge the slide—pink gore explodes out of black skin, white bone shines beneath it all.

In a second slide the soldier is repaired, railroad tracks of medical stitching running from mouth to ear. He is still asleep under my father's anesthesia.

I'm not supposed to be in this room, and I feel exposed, in enemy territory. So I shove the slides back in the yellow Kodak box before my movements can be detected.

The war is a tiger that followed my father home. It's been with us for years now. I must stay on alert and listen for its growling.

+++

"How did you get those bruises?" my first grade teacher asks. And though I don't answer her, my parents will pull me from that school by year's end. They ask too many questions, and we must stay agile, to keep ahead of the tiger's pursuers.

+++

The war is never spoken of, so I become a sleuth. What clues did the house hold? The man with the blown-off face gurgles from the desk drawer. Amid a stack of dust-covered stamp albums, I find a faded picture of my father, candlestick white in the hot tropic sun, hitting a volleyball over a net. His hospital scrubs are the color of palm fronds. He is grinning wide.

The father I know is only brooding moods and violence.

What became of the grinning man in the picture?

Deep in my gut I feel the tiger as it circles and warns and snarls.

+++

Mom says, "Your father gave anesthesia to Lewis Puller, the Fortunate Son, after he was blown up by that landmine."

What Mom means is that Dad is a war hero, and it's important to her that I know this.

But I can’t ask Dad about what he did during the war because I am never not afraid of him and his russet paws that ball quickly into fists.

+++

Many years later, after Lewis Puller has committed suicide and my father has lost his medical license, I will read Fortunate Son, the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir.

Puller recalls the moments after his accident, lying on a gurney at the Naval Support Hospital in Da Nang: "...I count down from ten while the anesthesia takes hold..."

The anesthesia. My father. And just when I think I've found him, he slips back into the darkened jungle.

+++

My first job out of college is in the Vietnamese refugee camps on the Thai border. I want to solve things, to fix the problems my father’s generation helped to create.

The Vietnamese government has just released political prisoners after ten years of reeducation, now America will take them and resettle them. The old ARVN soldiers and bureaucrats sit on a bench before me, skeletal thin, quaking with memory.

Did you know my father, the war hero? I want to ask.

+++

Many years later I will go to the research library at the Quantico Marine base to see what I can find out about the Naval Support Hospital in Da Nang. I find nothing about my father or Lewis Puller. But there are a number of men with blown-off faces. And arms, and legs. Too many to count.

Back in Denver, in my parents' house, the tiger circles my father, possessive. Round and round. They are both old now, and yet, there is no way I can get past the tiger even after all these years. There is no way to reach him, my father the war hero, my father who at one point existed before the war.

About the Author:

Emily Rich has edited nonfiction for literary reviews for over five years. She writes mainly memoir and essay. Her work has been published in a number of small presses including Little Patuxent Review, r.kv.ry, the Pinch, and Hippocampus. Her essays have twice been listed as notables in Best American Essays. She is currently the editor of the Bay to Ocean anthology, published on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Her twitter handle is @emilyjuanita12

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "American Lunar Society" and "Coyote Calling Competition" by Sarah Bates

September 19, 2020

American Lunar Society

the only way to describe this is to describe a jackrabbit vanishing into sagebrush the red mountains the 13 foot woolly mammoth in love with the woolly rhino for the first time there was no air no water only 12,000 foot mountains and the moon’s wilderness the lava didn’t flow but it oozed sometimes like a mountain I listen to you skin wolves for fun don’t worry he says I promise not to waste any part of its body being in love makes me want to unload the dishwasher there are grizzlies in my head when we kiss and the canyon where the sun ate its first star some women will say I died the same week the dragonflies died that I was only a girl walking across a girl’s big mouth last night you said something awful and now the Amazon is burning and I don’t give a shit of course meteorites hit earth and kill things of course the moon doesn’t chase me anymore finally I’m alive finally I have a boyfriend who loves me

Coyote Calling Competition

The oceans never loved, and the coyotes howling into the San Gabriel Mountains would not howl back, even the herd of buffalo crawling out of the West Virginia hills would turn away from this heart of mine. I just kept driving until everything became a glacier or some ship, Utah’s largest outdoor adventure store. I just kept driving to the lighthouse, the lighthouse was closed, the mountain was screaming. It is true I chase whales that were never there, I’m tired of finding books about Benjamin Franklin— I feel the same way as Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman, but don’t we all? It is true I have a golden heart just sitting here. Should I dip it in water? Sink it in blue? Dear reader, I am tired of holding onto things gently, my best friend is afraid to ask her new boyfriend to take a selfie—just do it. The world might end tomorrow. Say it like this: I lost everything

and found half a moon, say loving you feels like finding an extinct New Zealand bird or a sleepy grey whale right off the coast of California. Say I started catching trains to the countryside and started a storm of blue, clouds somewhere over Tulsa. Say no one can speak the dead language I am tearing at.

About the Author:

Sarah Bates has an MFA in Poetry from Northern Michigan University and currently teaches at Southern Utah University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Zone 3, The Rumpus, Best New Poets 2017, Seneca Review, and Hotel Amerika, among others. Her first chapbook, Tender, is now available from Diagram New Michigan Press. Twitter: @tricknastybates

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Apricot" by Amanda Chiado

September 14, 2020

Apricot

by Amanda Chiado

When your parents say swallow the wishes, you stand on the edge of the pasture, admiring her soft, silky back and large glossy eyes, how she walks like she owns the long horizon of lush grass and each apricot heart in the orchard. Your mother says her mane is an omen. You like omens. Your father says that when he was a boy, he dreamed of riding through the deep woods on his own appaloosa. No other breed is marked with such contradiction. Sticky fingers can only go so far, you tell yourself.

You swallow. First, you stole your father an old book. Next, a knitted sweater. Whenever he’d dream, your heart would ache and pound the earth of your body like a stampede. Soon enough, you turned your night into his dream. You made your way into the dark barn. You’d never worn all black in your life, but you saw then how love does its job to a body.

The soft girl loved you, after she almost trampled you to death. Then, the light flashed on from the kitchen window in the nearby house, hearing the barn door’s squeaking release. You hitched your body up in the moonlight, hushing the animal, a thousand apologies folded up into two words, for all your misgivings. As they had in your childhood church, your sins echoed, this time they floated up into the dying stars.

Your heart drove the horse into the shadows, one soft encouraging kick at a time. The little barn small behind you. Then, a hot rod on Cherry Hill peeled out, and the girl got spooked. She took off. You could barely hold on. Your father’s eyes flashed in the trees. The animal galloped and panted. You held on to her omen mane, on and on into the woods.

The rush of her fear filled you with regret. When she finally stopped, she continues huffing. Her silky body filling and releasing the air. You cried out into the uninhabited darkness for your parents.

The owls became new points of home from which to navigate. You are exhausted by the image of your father sleeping, snoring even, dreaming of his appaloosa carrying him over steep hills.

You rested your body against the horse. Your mother was right. Her body was warm; both dark and bursting with light.

About the Author:

Amanda Chiado’s poem "Armor" is part of the 2019 Visible Poetry Project, animated by Marc Burnett. She is the author of the chapbook Vitiligod: The Ascension of Michael Jackson (Dancing Girl Press, 2016). Her poetry and short fiction has most recently appeared in The Pinch, Barren Magazine, and Entropy. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart & Best of the Net. She is the Director of Arts Education at the San Benito County Arts Council, is an active California Poet in the Schools, and edits for Jersey Devil Press. www.amandachiado.com

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

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WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Cherry" by J. Matthew Gottwig

September 7, 2020

Cherry

By J. Matthew Gottwig

Dad was always a body man. He liked Mom for her body and would laugh his smoker’s laugh and spit in the dirt and kick more dirt over his spit, but he wasn’t my dad—just my sister’s dad, and I hated when he came home after drinking and told Mom to get her ass in bed, and after he was done, he’d go back out to his Stingray and wax and stroke it down like it was a sweeter woman. Mom said calling him dad would bring us closer, and she was right. I loved Dad for his car, and after Mom died and Dad ended up in County, I wanted to drive that car into the ground, but my sister wouldn’t have it. She quit school and took a job at the service station and made enough money to keep us eating but not much more than that, and I started taking Dad’s cherry Stingray out drag racing and helped bring in a little more, but when my sister asked where I was getting the money and found the fenders beat up, she hit me hard and wouldn’t stop until I swore I wouldn’t bring it out again, and every day after that, every goddamn day, she checked that car, and I called her a bitch for not trusting me, but she was right, because Jimmy from school… yeah! Jimmy Deffès! He’d say, Bring that car out again and race with us, and he wanted to lay some cash down on Dad’s Stingray, and I kept telling him, Yeah, Jimmy—I’ll bring it! Just tell me the time and the place, but I wouldn’t show. He’d smack me around the next day and say, What you think I’m messing around here? Car like that can make us some easy money, and you sure as shit ain’t doing anything with it, but Jimmy quit asking, quit talking to me at all, when I figured out I could hit back.

Most nights after that, I’d hear my sister out working on Dad’s car with the crickets and coyotes, you know, working the engine, swapping out parts and doing a bad job of it, and she’d swear at that car, call it a bastard, but she got better, and one day, I saw she’d painted it bright white, and after she’d waxed and stroked it down, it glowed like a cloud in a sunburned sky. I kept calling it Dad’s car, and she hit my shoulder and said, Like hell. It’s mine now, and we argued about that. Sometimes I still thought about taking it out drag racing and making some easy money, but I didn’t want to run it into the ground, not anymore, and one night after she was done with work, I heard the garage door go up and the engine rumble, and that engine shook the whole house, but I was playing XBOX and kept playing but could hear her car on the highway and go further than I’d ever heard her go before. It made me think of thunder rolling from far away.

THE END

About the Author:

J. Matthew Gottwig is a programmer and librarian for the University of Maryland system. His work has appeared in such publications as Nature, sub-Q, and the CutBank, which awarded his story "Tether" 2018 Montana Fiction Prize. Although a parent of two young kids, he somehow manages to maintain a semi-regular writing schedule.

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Ten Bad Feelings" by Jane Kim

May 22, 2020

Ten Bad Feelings

By Jane Kim

After being told I needed Benzoid

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There weren’t even any triggers, but they started getting more frequent and severe. But even though doctors and pharmacists gave diagnosis and prescriptions that defined certain symptoms, that didn’t explain why my body did what it did, didn’t help me make sense of the shaking or involuntary contractions or hyperventilation, not in the moment, not after; why, how, why;

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If not why

After her first visit to the local gyno, she was put on birth control pills for her cramps and irregular periods. When she told her boyfriend, he asked if they could stop using condoms. She needed her boyfriend to be as fearful of pregnancy as she was, even if it was her body; when she explained this logic, he seemed unhappy, but didn’t push the matter.

This wasn’t why they broke up, but later she wondered if that was when they had begun to break up.

No Reason

It was at a party, not exactly black tie but formal, that a woman I didn’t know said, Can you hate someone for no reason?

I glanced at her, but she wasn’t looking at me, she was looking at a woman wearing a silky grey dress across the hall, who I recognized as one of the speakers from the dinner reception earlier that evening. She seemed to be laughing but we couldn’t hear her from across the hall, and she managed to look lovely ladylike even as she laughed through a mouthful of crudités.

I wanted to say you probably have a reason, maybe it’s just not a very good one, but instead I nodded vaguely, and said, I guess, and realized that too was true, because just that moment I hated the woman in the grey dress. I hated her because the woman I didn’t know resented her, and that was probably no reason for me to hate anyone, but I did, so I stood sipping prosecco with the woman whose name I never learned in our brief shared unreasoned dislike.

Inverse and Irony

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Have I been to someone what you have been to me?

Habit

The first time he gets migraines, he goes to see a doctor with a pale grey face. He slips on the flat surface of the floor a few times, throws up a few more, and is put to bed in a dark room on some dissolving pills.

He later picks up the migraine meds they prescribe. Imitrex. When the migraine revisits, he puts the Imitrex on his tongue, and within minutes has a throat constriction, he can almost feel the sternum closing in against his heart. It turns out he is allergic to some component of Imitrex, and they change his migraine medication to rizatriptan and zofran instead. He is secretly glad the new prescription is cheaper than the last, no particular difficulty breathing.

This is how he develops the habit of perusing every word in patient education and drug information printouts. He knows reading them won’t reduce any risk, his body is his body and it’ll always be allergic to its allergies, but then again, no habit is reasonable.

In the produce section of Whole Foods

What are you looking for? I offer. The woman says, green onions, and I point to the scallions in the produce section, but she shakes her head, apparently they aren’t the right size or the right variety, though I don’t know what she’s looking for and can’t tell the difference. This is the largest local grocery store, so I tell her to perhaps look for them on the weekly farmer’s market. She nods, looking crestfallen, but remembers to says thanks, and with an awkward smile, says, there aren’t a lot of recipes from home that don’t use them. I want to say I’m sorry, I don’t know what I can say or do that would help, but she looks so apologetic, and both of us end up repeating, No, I’m sorry.

Leave

My roommate tells me about his friend, who is on medical leave after being diagnosed with PTSD. She had to take time off from work because she needed breathing space, but the irony is, as she takes time off at home she can no longer seek therapy or treatment because her family cannot, will not, does not know, and so on the medical leave her family thinks is simply a leave she tries to touch a different word of her diagnosis each day by herself, nursing her invisible illness in solitude.

She would eventually like to get to what disorder is and how exactly it has tweaked or broken her apparatus, but she hasn’t yet gotten past what it means to be Post-anything. My roommate looks grim when he says he isn’t sure whether his friend should extend her leave, and I am thinking of how she will process what trauma is supposed to mean, post, past, or present.

I don’t care enough

On her first date with a guy who could sport a beard and actually pull it off, she didn’t discover he was vegan until after she had ordered her food, the unfortunate choice of protein chicken rather than tofu. She hoped he would have straight up told her, but he didn’t. He flashed her an innocent grin over his kale and she wished she had thought to ask about his dietary restrictions before they chose the restaurant, or at least before she ordered the food. Having lost all appetite for the strips of chicken, she forked her meal less than eagerly.

The conversation went fine despite her lackluster replies and he delighted her with his manners, but she had been too out of it to hope for a second date. She did the math in her head and thought perhaps one in four of her friends now were vegan, or at least vegetarian. And though she recycled religiously and didn’t use to-go cups or plastic straws, she wasn’t either, she hadn’t really tried. The unusual September cold felt like another accusation of her failure, so she rolled up her car window, and thought to herself, I don’t care enough.

Relationship

After dating Ben for a couple months, with whom things remained shockingly stagnant–sex remained satisfying, conversation interesting–she put him in exhibit B. He was getting dangerously close to the center, but there was no sign of either deterioration or progression in their relationship, and by this she suspected she might belong in some other, more peripheral category of his diagram. She was beginning to miss the simplicity of her relationships in exhibit A.

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Musician

A few nights ago I was sat at a bar
chatting to a poor old chap getting
mellow drunk with whiskey, and I do
not know if he plays music for a living,
but he did ask if I knew anyone kind
who does not love useless things.

About the Author:

Originally from Seoul, South Korea, Jane Kim started writing with the Vancouver-based Creative Writing for Children's Society since 2005. In 2014 she published a 400-page novel, Fallen, on Amazon Kindle, and currently explores experimental short stories and creative non-fiction. Her short story “Broken” has been featured in STORGY magazine in 2018, and her personal essay, “Umma, How You Break My Heart,” was published in Cherry Tree Literary Journal Issue V in 2019. After receiving her B.A. in Literary Arts and History of Art and Architecture at Brown University, she is currently completing her master’s degree in English at St. Peters College, Oxford.

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Three Flash Fictions" by Hayley Swinson

March 18, 2020

by Hayley Swinson

The Wrong Question

“Why aren’t you eating?” the man asks his teenage step-daughter, seated across the table from him.

She pushes her food around with her fork, watches the back of her mother’s head retreating to the bathroom.

“Don’t you like it?”

She nods. Looks at her mother’s empty chair. Under the table, she touches the cheap ring on her finger, relishes the way its peeling gold coloring scratches her skin.

The bell over the restaurant’s door tingles as a group of men and women files into the restaurant: feminine chatter with undertones of male laughter, the women clutching glittering purses and the suit sleeves of their dates.

The girl looks down at her jeans and t-shirt and her face reddens. Her step-father’s eyes narrow as he takes in the new arrivals. “A little over-dressed for this place,” he mutters. He stuffs food into his mouth, speaks around it, points at the girl’s plate with his fork. “Your food’s going to get cold if you don’t eat.” He swallows a bite, barely chewed.

“It’s a salad,” the girl says, spearing a leaf of spinach with her fork, bringing it to her mouth. The single leaf bends in half to fit between her lips, pursed in a heart-shape—as if preparing for a kiss. There’s a crunch as the stem breaks, and the girl chews it slowly, deliberately until the leaf is pulp on her tongue.

Her step-father fidgets in his chair. Wipes his wet mouth with the burgundy cloth napkin. Saws at his food with his knife. “You know, proper etiquette says you’re only supposed to cut one bite at a time. But that’s not very efficient, is it?” He laughs as he chews, slicing a grid into his steak. The girl watches the edges of his mustache, the tiny crumbs lodged in its hairs, the way it moves as he chews, more expressive than his eyebrows.

A smiling waiter seats the men and women in evening attire at the table next to theirs.

The girl swallows. Sips from her water glass. Twists the ring on her finger, feeling its inner edges rub against her skin. Her eyes wander to one of the women’s evening gowns. It is a deep blue edged in a pearl beading that trails up her side and intertwines with the lacy bodice, like froth on a wave.

The women laugh, flashing their teeth at the waiter as he pours them red wine. The woman in the blue dress places a hand on the waiter’s arm as she thanks him. A diamond glitters on her ring finger. Her nails are manicured, her teeth straight and white like sun-bleached shells.

The girl tries to stab another spinach leaf, fails, moves shredded carrots around her plate. She imagines herself crumbling, vanishing like sand through open fingers.

Her step-father brings the next bite to his mouth. “Your mom said I’m supposed to ask you about school.” He chews loudly as he looks at her, eyes expectant, fork hand gesturing for her to speak.

The girl’s knife squeaks on the plate.

With the tips of her fingers, one of the women at the adjacent table tears bread off the loaf in a graceful arc.

The girl gulps from her water glass, swishes the water in her mouth.

“What’s going on at school?” her step-father asks, moving the steak around his gum like a wad of tobacco.

The girl puffs out her cheeks. There’s a shriek from the table next to them and she turns to look. One of the women laughs, head thrown back, eyes shut, fingers cupping her stomach. Her husband looks bewildered, hand hanging in the air between them, warm light flickering off his wedding band. The girl’s stepfather glares at the woman, clears his throat loudly. “Can’t even hear myself talk,” he says to no one in particular. He catches the eye of the woman’s husband and they exchange a commiserating look.

The woman’s laugh ends in a throaty chuckle, and she grins at her husband, who frowns. He moves his hand to her leg, resting it there like a tether.

Under the table, the girl slips off the cheap gold ring and places it in her pocket. On the other side of the restaurant, her mother emerges from the bathroom, heads for their table.

The man sponges the pink steak juice with his bread, refocuses on his step-daughter. “Tell me about school,” he says to the girl, shoving the bread into his mouth.

Frozencamp Creek

When you asked me to cut your hair, I said yes without hesitation, even though I’d never done it before. We went down to the stream and you took your shirt off, threw a towel around your neck.

“Nice out today, huh?” I said, as you settled down on a rock, wetting your feet in the stream.

You looked up: towards the sun that baked the river stones, creating hot waves in the air, spreading the smell of decay from upstream. “Sure,” you said, batting gnats away from your eyes. Sweat was already beading up on your shoulders and forehead.

“Can you wet it?” I asked.

Your eyebrows shot up.

“Your hair, I mean.” My cheeks burned. Why had I agreed to this?

“Oh, sure,” you said, looking away, then bending forward into the stream, bringing your hands to the back of your neck to make sure your hair was completely submerged.

As you worked, I could see your tendons running from neck to shoulders and down your back to your waist like a road map.

You pulled your head out of the water, dripping from the ends of your hair, spreading little ripples in the stream. And when you sat still on the rock, towel back in place over your shoulders, and I picked up the painted art scissors and a clump of your hair, you shivered.

“You’re not cold are you?” I asked, snipping off a curl.

“No,” you said, watching the curl drift downstream, hands clasped tight over your knees.

We fell silent, listening to the water bubble and flow and the sharp schick schick schick of my scissors until that, too, became another natural sound.

When I was done, I dug my hands into your hair at the roots, drawing it to its ends between my fingers to measure evenness. The muscles in your neck were taut and unmoving, resisting the jerk of my fingers. Before I thought better of it, I put a thumb at the apex of your spine, pressing against the tension that had grown there.

You groaned and bowed your head towards your lap. In the distance, the lunch bell tolled, but neither you nor I made any move to leave.

Surefire

Mama and I stare as the neighbor’s house burns; we stand just outside the circle of heat. Grandpa has gone in search of Mr. McNair to see if he can help. My palms are damp, clasping Mama’s hand with both of my own. Is our house going to be ok? Shouldn’t we be worried about us? Mr. McNair’s hounds bark and carry-on down the way. I wonder if their pen is heating up from the fire, and I think about going to let them out.

Far off in the direction we came, there’s the wail of a fire engine, soft but getting louder. I wonder if it will make it down the dirt driveway, if it will get stuck between the trees. I wonder if there will be anything left for them to save.

I ask Mama if we shouldn’t just go down to the lake and bring water in buckets to put the fire out. She squeezes my shoulder. “That’s a nice thought, sweetheart.”

The fire truck arrives, but the house is a mass of fire by then, glass exploding out from the attic windows. Grandpa reappears with Mr. and Mrs. McNair, all three sweating and beet-colored. They stand with their hands on their hips next to us and the firemen and watch their house burn to the ground next to the lake.

Mrs. McNair is crying silently, her hand covering her mouth. All that water and nothing doing to put the fire out. One of the firemen, shouting to be heard over the fire and the hounds, says, “Good thing it rained last night or all these trees’d be caught, too.” Mrs. McNair takes a deep, rattling breath and her husband looks down.

“Small blessings,” Mama says. She is trembling.

Grandpa kicks a rotten log on the ground, and it falls apart round the middle.

At home, Mama picks ash out of my hair as she bathes me in the tub, pouring cup after cup of water over my head.

About the Author:

Hayley Swinson has a Masters in writing from the University of Edinburgh and an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. She is Editor-in-Chief of 'The New Southern Fugitives' literary zine, and works as a freelance copy-editor and writer in Wilmington, NC. Follow her on her blog, hayleyswinsonwriter.com.

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "To Begin" by Mariya Poe

February 17, 2020

To Begin

By Mariya Poe

It was sometime during those years we lived in a one room house on a vast plot of land with dying soil, fox babies, buzzsaw cicadas, and ten-foot cattails. Evenings, we were alone while our pregnant mother tended to our father’s depression in ways we weren’t allowed to see. One of my brothers would walk until he sunk beneath the hills and the other went somewhere else.

We must have had neighbors because a man was there with me, not for the first or last time. I wore the same dress that whole week and he bent down to touch its hem. He pulled lemon slices from the pockets of his jeans. Their wetness had soaked through down the front of him. The fruit was sticky and frayed, already squeezed. He lay the slices in the dirt of the garden and along the pond’s edge. The idea, he said, was to see what would show up to feed on the juice. See the disruption. Our mut followed me close, sniffing each slice, then us, trying to put it all together. The man wound his way through my hair. After he got started, he moved slow. I remember how it was worse because of the citrus on him.

The city’s teaching me to be a different person but the dying soil is in my body. When I’m with a man, as I am right now, my apartment flips. Everytime it’s something like this: we’re having sex on the bed, or the floor, and then we’re clinging to the ceiling. My fingers stick to the plaster. He keeps going. He sees the ceiling behind me but he thinks it’s the floor. His hands search for my hands. I want him to tell me what to do and how to feel. Footsteps from the place upstairs beat against my back. You’re so good, he’s saying. You’re so good. A drop of his sweat falls down, down. Wind blows through the kitchen window and rushes across the apartment below us.

We flip back again and land on the bed right before he’s done while his eyes are shut tight. I imagine his stomach drops like mine but he doesn’t know why. I roll off the mattress onto the hardwood to press my forehead against the cold, hard grooves, and he slides into the sheets.

There was so much light left. I twisted my neck to look at the lemons with dirt and ants all over their yellow. I hoped for some kind of magic. I wanted to see minnows catapulting themselves out of the water, flopping their bodies forward, inch by inch, toward the sour, mysterious thing.

About the Author:

Mariya Poe earned a BFA in writing from the Pratt Institute. She’s the winner of the 2015 Stony Brook Fiction Prize and her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Hobart, wildness, New Orleans Review, The Collagist, Mid-American Review, The Adroit Journal, and Sonora Review. She’s the associate editor for Carve Magazine and an editor at 101 Words.

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Big Mood" by Margie Sarsfield

February 10, 2020

Big Mood

By Margie Sarsfield

Six years ago I dropped a bowl of buttered spaghetti on the carpeted floor of a dorm room in Colorado. I wasn’t in college. It wasn’t a dorm room. It was employee housing. It was a ski resort. It used to be a club med. I say dorm room because that says it best. Someday it won’t be six years ago. I lived there with some guy I lived with – but it was my spaghetti – it was all I had. // I was twenty-three and drunk all the time: fifths on the bathroom floor next to the tub with the shower running so I could smoke cigarettes and talk to my friend about the songs he cried to in high school, always a good listener and only sometimes on pills anymore: my greatest achievement. // I have always eaten too much. Spaghetti has always calmed me. Hungover all shift (probably) standing on my feet eight hours (probably) fighting with the guy I lived with (probably) coming back from the club med communal kitchen, I dropped my one thing and do you think I ate it anyway? Do you think I squatted down and fisted spaghetti back into the bowl and left the carpet dirty in a circle of butter and parmesan?
Is that what you think I did?

About the Author:

Margie Sarsfield is a Pushcart-nominated writer living in Columbus, Ohio. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in The Normal School, Seneca Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Hippocampus, and Quarter After Eight. She is the winner of University of Louisville's 2019 Calvino Prize and Midway Journal's 2019 -1000 Below Flash Prose Contest.

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WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "The Importance of Lighting in Relationships" by Rachel Laverdiere

February 3, 2020

The Importance of Lighting in Relationships

By Rachel Laverdiere

Stage 1: Electric Lights

When considering new relationships, ensure optimal lighting. Bright electric lamps highlight cobwebs and other unsightly refuse—including ghosts—and aid in the discovery of lingerie abandoned in the bottom bureau drawer, baggage stashed in his master bedroom closet.

Warning: Do not fall under his charm before spending sufficient time in harsh lighting. Study your potential companion’s features. Determine whether he has shifty eyes. Do not ignore small twitches, ticks or subtle shadows. Upon returning from powdering your nose, confirm he hasn’t tampered with the dimmer switch. Do not get caught in the dark.

Disclaimer: Spend evenings on bright public patios with those who know him well. Red flags will appear. If he has few close friends, he must be hiding something. Like corpses in his basement. Remember what you are looking for.

Stage 2: Candlelight

Baby-step your way from electric lighting to candlelight once you determine the relationship is worthy of pursuit. Proceed with caution. The ambiance adds romantic undertones, softens features and conversations and forces lovers to lean toward murmurs.

Warning: Do not over-spritz his gift of cheap imitation cherry blossom perfume nor overextend yourself to decipher mumbled words, or you risk singeing your eyelashes. Insist he speak up, repeat, speak plainly. Never assume truths spill from his lips if your gut insists otherwise.

Disclaimer: Consider the amount of wine you’ve consumed before allowing the flame to grow. A blaze burned to a certain brightness is near impossible to extinguish.

Stage 3: Moonlight

By the light of the moon, you’ll believe he makes the future glow. And the sex will be incredible! Better enjoy it while it lasts because soon enough you’ll yearn for sleep before the earth swallows the sun.

Warning: He’ll promise you the universe, swear he hung the moon among the stars. Beware the dimming of stars drained by a hefty mortgage, his child support payments and jalopy forever-in-need-of-repair. The man sleeping next to you will become a stranger. His snoring will push you to sprawl out in the spare bedroom where your mind drifts back to a man you once knew well. He smelled of fresh rain and ink, and Oh! how his eyes twinkled when he made you laugh…

Disclaimer: Lightning often strikes in troubled seasons. Is it your fault that your heart fluttered? That a flush bloomed on your cheeks? You cannot deny batting your lashes, nibbling your freshly glossed lips. Or that when his hand brushed your thigh, you squeezed your knees together and revelled in the jolt.

Stage 4: Gaslight

Propose a camping trip to rekindle your moonlight desires. Play dice by the glow of kerosene. Morning will find you at a campfire where coffee percolates, bacon sizzles and beans pop in their tin.

Warning: Study the 1944 movie Gaslight. Wife asks Husband about the flickering lamps. Husband, who secretly and repeatedly dims and brightens the lanterns, accuses her of having a wild imagination. Wife doubts her sanity. Will she discover Husband’s the demented one?

Disclaimer: Say you have a tiff. After you’ve poked holes into his misstatements, take your coffee into the camper. Read while he chugs another beer and sulks by the fire. Grumbling, he fumbles in and snatches his keys. You ask where he’s going, but his response is the flicker of sunlight on a slamming door, the spit of gravel as he drives away. He wanted your attention? He’s got it.

Stage 5: Emergency Lighting and Exit Signs

Emergency lights are standard safety feature in modern high-stakes relationships. These battery-charged devices are automatically activated by a power warpage. Especially if one partner is an egocentric in disguise. Tell me you made him sign that pre-nup.

Warning: Emergency lighting work for minimal time. Locate the nearest exit. Do not fret over how you’ll explain to your mother how you’re leaving another marriage. Burying your head in the sand is easier, but eventually you would suffocate.

Disclaimer: For optimal security, consider adding sirens. Neighbours who witness the commotion will confirm that danger lurks—even when he insists it doesn’t.

About the Author:

Rachel Laverdiere is a language instructor and writer from southern Saskatchewan. Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction pieces are most recently published or forthcoming in journals such as filling Station, Blank Spaces, Entropy, Atlas and Alice, and Barren Magazine. Her flash fiction was shortlisted for the Geist 2015 Short Long-Distance Writing Contest.

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WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Mum's Dream of the Eternal Arms" by Sammy Salem

January 27, 2020

Mum’s Dream of the Eternal Arms

By Sammy Salem

Mum had a dream about a bar.

The bar is in heaven. It’s where A-List alcoholics go after drinking themselves to death. It’s called ‘The Eternal Arms’.

In ‘The Eternal Arms’ the absence of time means no last orders and a tab that’s never called. There are no hangovers, cirrhosis, DUI’s or interventions. No heartburn, heartache, social services or children wetting themselves in the car while they wait for you to finish up that last, last drink.

A paradise for the permanently pissed.

The doors swing open and a sweaty breeze carries you into the stale smell of beer, vinegar, and urine.

Hemingway and Bukowski are arguing. Their raised voices bring Jackson Pollock back online and he’s surprised to find himself pissing on the bar. Despite the splashback, Judy Garland hasn’t noticed, she’s busy trying to convince her eye to catch the bartenders. An attempt at a wink goes awry as her right eyelids stick together. Pollock wipes his hand on the now snoring Judy’s dress and slides back onto his stool.

Meanwhile, Charlie Parker leans across a sticky menu to pour Edith Piaf another glass of wine and Tennessee Williams tries to shake off Billie Holiday.

‘You getting me a drink, sugar?’

Williams, still waiting for that click, waves Holiday away.

She spits then shifts her weight onto her other hip and looks down the seasick line at the bar.

‘How about you, handsome?’

Jim Morrison necks his beer and unzips his leather trousers.

Serge Gainsbourg shakes his head in disgust before noticing a wobbly Veronica Lake being escorted into the disabled toilet by Montgomery Clift. Gainsbourg drops his cigarette in Patricia Highsmith’s gin and follows. Highsmith downs the gin and mumbles lovingly to her handbag full of snails.

Suddenly laughter breaks out at the back by the fruit machine. Hunter S Thompson has put Toulouse Lautrec on his shoulders and is running in circles around the room. On a tight corner, the diminutive artist tumbles over the bar and takes Hank Williams’ bottle of bourbon with him.

Staring down at the place the bottle used to be the singer is confused, but before the tears and questions can form, Dorothy Parker slides a beer down the bar to him with a wry smile.

She then returns to the entertainment of watching Jack Kerouac drool over Jean Rhys as a dark patch grows wider and wider on the crotch of his beige slacks.

‘Back on earth, they’d all be barred by now,’ mum chuckles as she reaches for her glass.

I put my hand on hers.

I feel it shake.

As her dry lips crack into a smile, she eases her hand free and raises her glass to the glamorous afterlife of the alcoholic.

Now, with the world a person lighter, I raise my glass in this toast too.

I hope you made it mum. You drunk piece of shit.

About the Author:

Sammy is a published writer and recording artist from the North West of England. They currently work in an antiquarian bookshop in London and are assembling what Leonard Cohen called ‘a manual for living with defeat’.

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WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Autumn Everywhere" by Cathy Ulrich

January 21, 2020

Autumn Everywhere

By Cathy Ulrich

The astronaut isn’t an astronaut yet when her mother dies. Her mother will never get to say my daughter the astronaut. Her mother is a quiet on the other end of the line and the astronaut saying mother, are you there.

The astronaut is away at school when her mother dies. The astronaut has a stack of books beside her bed and a dorm mate who cuts photos of boy bands from magazines like she is a middle school girl, puts them up on the mirror that stretches across their room. The astronaut feels haunted by her own reflection. The dorm mate is always smiling, covering the mirror bit by bit with pictures of pretty boys with perfect hair.

The astronaut has been writing letters to a girl from her neighborhood that she doesn’t dare send.

I have been thinking of your hands.

I have been missing your hands.

The astronaut buys postcards at the campus store, mails them bare but for the address of the girl she will someday marry.

The astronaut watches the leaves turn when she walks across campus, the yellowing, oranging of them, the skeleton-whisper of their rustle. Boys from her classes are always coming up behind her, asking if they can carry her books, asking if she’d like to study together. Their tongues linger on the slither of the s.

They say: I’ve seen you in the mornings, running.

They say: Where are you running to?

The astronaut smiles. The astronaut is good at smiling at boys; they always end up smiling back.

I’m not running anywhere, she says.

The astronaut’s father wants her to book a flight home when her mother dies. His voice hitches on the line, and the astronaut pretends it’s just the distance.

I’ll drive, she says.

You won’t make it in time, he says.

I’ll drive, she says, all night.

The car is from high school. The astronaut paid for it with money from tutoring, handing a stack of twenties to the neighbor selling it, sorry about the cracked windshield, but I checked all the tires. It was the first thing the astronaut thought of as hers, hers alone.

She parked it in front of the girl down the street’s house, come ride with me, and the astronaut watched the girl dip her fingers out the passenger window, thought now we can be free.

When the astronaut gets home — she thinks of it as home yet, home still, and will for a while, until her father sells the place and moves south, stops answering her calls — her grandparents are there, and her grandmother is crying in an arid way, shoulders shaking, face twisted.

She says: oh, my baby, and the astronaut turns her face away, looks out the window.

Oh, she says, it’s autumn here, too, and her grandmother embraces her, tight, tight, tight, your mother would be so proud.

The service is a small service. The astronaut winds and unwinds her program in her hands. The photo on the cover is of her mother when she was young, her mother when she was a girl.

I hadn’t seen this one before, the astronaut says.

You resemble her, says her grandmother.

After the service, the astronaut takes the program in the mortuary restroom, flattens it on the sink counter, holds it next to her face in the mirror.

Someone knocks on the door, are you all right in there?

The astronaut turns on the water in the sink, drops the program in the garbage can.

I’m fine.

The astronaut’s father had the mortuary limo take them to the chapel, has it take them home. The astronaut sits in the limo seat beside him in the suit dress her grandmother picked. She has chewed off the red of her lipstick, puckers the fabric of her skirt clutching it in her hands.

Her grandmother says: Will you stay?

The astronaut says: I shouldn’t get behind on my studies.

She rolls down the back window with the push of a button, drifts her hand outside. The girl from down the street is standing on the corner when they turn onto the road, like she has been waiting. She sees the limo, the astronaut’s reaching hand, stretches her own hand out, curls her fingers up in a small, light fist.

Is she waving, says the astronaut’s grandmother.

No, says the astronaut.

She says: No, she’s taking my hand.

About the Author:

Cathy Ulrich paid for her second car with a handful of twenty-dollar bills that the seller counted back one by one. Her work has been published in various journals, including Cream City Review, Puerto Del Sol and Black Warrior Review.

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WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Lumberjacks Pound Their Dead into the Ground" by Michael Mark

January 7, 2020

Lumberjacks Pound Their Dead into the Ground

By Michael Mark

At first Gary called her name, crooned it, like when dinner was ready, then he turned off the radio and leaned toward her in the passenger seat to see if he could hear Gladys breathe, held his breath so he could be sure. By Pine Bluff, he turned on the warning blinkers, and pulled to the side of I-80, shut off the engine, and put his ear near her open mouth, his cheek on her side, before he pronounced her dead to himself. And then - what else could he do, Nebraska in December, the ground frozen - he went on driving, radio off. After some time, maybe it was the familiarity of I-80, the comfort of the landscape’s monotony they drove together on their annual vacation for 13 years, the memories taking over, her bakery smell, he forgot she was dead and he switched on the radio, started singing. Then he got the sense something wasn’t right with Gladys. He looked at her, curled up, said her name, slowed down, leaned toward her, still not sure, thinking maybe he made up that he knew she was dead, the daze of all the miles playing tricks on him. He put the blinkers on, pulled over, still on I-80, this time in Cheyenne, rested his head on her side, and kissed her, knowing. He looked out at the hard land and drove on. This kept happening. He’d drive away thinking about Gladys, happy pictures in his head, then somewhere in the flat miles he’d be singing until he’d get that bad sense. He’d pull over, and realize, almost like it was the first time. And he’d drive on, and he’d forget. This is Gary’s story and he should be the one telling it but I just love it.

About the Author:

Michael Mark’s poetry has been published or forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Copper Nickel, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, The New York Times, The Sun, Waxwing, The Poetry Foundation's American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily, and other places. He’s the author of two books of stories, Toba and At the Hands of a Thief (Atheneum).

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WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Nothing is Easy, Hurley" by Rebecca Bernard

December 30, 2019

Nothing is Easy, Hurley

By Rebecca Bernard

Standing in the kitchen, before the flattop grill, Hurley feels the buzz in his pocket, and no way is this a good sign. Dana, who sleeps till noon. Dana, champion of the fishnets. Dana, the so-far love of his life who, probably, maybe, tried to break his idiot heart last night—

Hurley cracks one, two, three, rereads the ticket, four eggs onto the blazing grill before him. The soft egg bodies wiggle and flail on the hot-ass surface and calmly, coolly Hurley waits to flip them. To end their misery.

Or like—she didn’t exactly break his heart, more like—put it on ice. I don’t know, Hurley. Takes a large bite of falafel. I don’t know anymore. That Dana with the dyed blond hair and the longboard and the eyelashes like tiny feathers all meticulously painted in black goop.

Four slabs of bacon hit the deck and the air smacks with grease. The trick is to let the bacon fat make its way toward the eggs but not to invade the flavor entirely.

And Hurley out afterwards, buzzed, drunk, wasted, with Stupid Rick and Stupider Mikey. One more Jager, Hurl, one more. And so, of course, last night’s, late-night series of fuck-yous and tear stained emojis. Dana, I need you, baby. I love you. Puh-lease.

The phone in his pocket buzzes again, and Hurley looks up to see Suzanne in crisp green polo shaking her head.

“You almost got table 6? Two over easy, two over medium, three sides of bacon?”

The order printer begins to heckle, and Hurley sees the tickets spit out and hang down and his own jaw hung down last night, just like that. Sad, slack, lame.

“Order up!” Hurley plates the eggs, the meats. Suzanne adds toast, parsley, anemic slice of orange and off they go in the steady hands of Emily, server, waitress, whatever.

Hurley takes the new tickets from the printer and adds them to the line-up. They look like the saddest string of Tibetan Prayer flags, all off-white and cheap paper and focused on food, like food is on anyone’s mind now at seven in the morning when the best, hottest girl might no longer love you if she ever really did in the first place.

Buzz. Must check, can’t check.

“Hurley—what’s the matter with you?” Suzanne frowns.

“How’s table 14 coming?” Emily again, capable hands dusting powdered sugar onto a stack of French toast.

“Almost up.” Hurley focuses his almost wet eyes on the tickets. Ladles out pancake batter onto the grill and sees the bubbles rise then disappear. Everything disappears. It is the nature of everything.

“Ephemeral.” Hurley says the word out loud in the hot kitchen, the breakfast onslaught just now beginning, everything, just now beginning or ending.

“What?” asks Suzanne.

“What?” says Emily.

“Nothing,” says Hurley. No more buzz in his pocket. No more buzz in his heart, his brain.

Hurley, Dana had said. Tahini in his beard. Lettuce in his teeth. I just don’t know if we want the same things.

Hurley flips the pancake and part of it is burned, not burned, but well done. Passable. He adds four links of sausage to the grill. Two patties. Then pours four servings of scrambled eggs onto the hottest part of the grill and watches the writhing, the squirming of so much protein all at once, vulnerable and ugly.

Like what, Hurley said. Flavor of tomato still on his tongue, sweetness of hummus. Like, Hurley—I just don’t know if you’re hardcore enough. I mean, Hurl. Can you really call yourself punk rock?

“Order up table 14, table 2.” Hurley plates the eggs, Suzanne garnishes, Emily whisks them away.

Hurley, lamely, I mean, I could get a faux hawk, gauges. Dana, head shaking. Feather earrings whistling back and forth like so long, see you later.

Spatula inches into the mass of scrambled eggs and fluffs, flips, fluffs again.

It’s not me, Hurley. It’s you.

Beyond the swinging doors of the kitchen, Hurley pictures the bevy of hungry diners. The emptiness in their bellies. The faint sticky syrup grazing their arm hair as hands grasp coffee cups like desperate, ceramic lovers. The hunger of it all. The need. And Hurley?

Table 17. Four orders of sunny side up eggs. The eggs, perfect in their white halos. This is your brain. He pokes an egg, the yolk spills drunkenly across the grill. This is your brain on Dana. “Order up. Table 3!” He cracks a replacement egg onto the grill.

There is something clean about the sunny-side up egg. There is promise in its face. Its unblinking, yellow eye.

Suzanne out on the floor. Emily garnishing, reaching for the plates. “Hurley, are you okay?”

Hurley looks up, meets Emily’s eyes, nods. Then, reaches for the phone in his pocket, pulls it out, hesitates. Clicks to black. Egg is flipped, bacon is prodded. “Emily?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you think I’m punk rock?”

Emily looks up, pushes her tongue against her front teeth, blinks her non-crusty eyes. “Definitely not.”

Hurley frowns. Feels a sudden warmth, the grill, the steam of frying meat. Puts his phone back into his pocket. There are so many eggs.

The kitchen is empty. The heart is empty. Steam and grease envelop the space, the man in the space. Hurley, wearer of the Vans. Hurley, listener of the Blink 182, not the old stuff, the new stuff, the shame.

Emily in the kitchen again. Taking the ticket. Piercing the ticket on the spike. “Hurley?”

“Yeah?” The spatula is grasped. The eggs drying out, abandoned.

“I always thought you were metal.”

The mouth swallows. The apron, once white, now stained with the greased hand’s wiping. “Metal?”

Emily smiles. Hand tucks a strand of blond hair back behind the ear. Teeth white, but crooked. Pretty. “Yeah.”

Hurley, his mouth a line. The phone abuzz. The heart abuzz. “Okay.”

The head, the heart. See how they bang anew.

About the Author:

Rebecca Bernard is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of North Texas where she serves as Managing Editor for American Literary Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, Southwest Review, Pleiades, Meridian and elsewhere. Her work received notable mention in the Best American Short Stories of 2018.

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WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "The Man Running the Hiring Committee" by Sara Schaff

December 10, 2019

The Man Running the Hiring Committee

By Sara Schaff

You've got the search narrowed to two solid candidates—one man, Candidate A, and one woman, Candidate B. A is obviously the better fit. By all reasonable measures, he's accomplished more than most in his career: Ivy League education, glowing recommendations, paid speaking engagements, being white and straight.

But it isn't just the sheen of his accomplishments or his prior experience with six figure salaries. You genuinely like him. And when you bring him in for an all-day interview, which includes dinner at the place with the cute waitresses, it turns out everyone else likes him, too! He reminds Jack of his buddies from boarding school. He's just like David's frat brothers at Duke. Ambitious, of course. But he also knows how to have good time! Everyone agrees: he's the one.

Well, everyone except Jane, the woman on your hiring committee, who you had to include because, well, diversity. Not to knock Jane, who's pretty enough, but kind of a downer.

"I don't think we should hire him," she says.

Quintessential Jane. "Why not? He's perfect."

"I just…got a bad vibe."

You try hard not to laugh. She sounds like your tween daughter.

"A bad vibe," Jack says. He and David exchange glances.

Jane takes a breath. "He kept staring down my shirt when he thought I wasn't looking."

Now you and David exchange glances. There's not much to look at under her shirt, for crying out loud!

You don't plan to give Jane's whining a second thought. But later that night you tell your wife what Jane said, while you're crawling into bed. You think you're on your way to a quick, sleep-inducing roll in the hay, after a mutually satisfying laugh at Jane's expense. But your wife gives you that look.

"What?"

"Listen to Jane."

"Jane's a killjoy. You said so yourself! You never want to invite her to our parties."

The look your wife continues to give you is one you've seen all your married life, but there's something new about it: she's not just annoyed; she's fucking pissed. And suddenly you realize she might actually leave you for her hot and sensitive yoga instructor, Raphael.

So the next day, imagining Raphael going down on your wife, you call up one of Candidate A's recommenders, his old boss, a guy who’s been at it for a long time, who knows what's what.

"Oh, A!" he cries. "Everyone loves A. He gets great results."

You're about to say thanks and hang up, but you think of Jane. You think of Raphael bringing your wife breakfast in bed. You ask, "Was there ever any—"

"Any what?" There's a long, potent pause.

"Was he ever, you know. A creep? With women?"

The pause extends.

A's boss answers finally, slowly. "Well, there were, ah, rumors. Some women didn't feel…"

"Didn't feel what?"

"There were a couple of complaints to HR."

Later, you repeat this information to the hiring committee.

Jack frowns. "So?"

Jane frowns. "What do you mean, "so"?"

David says, "You can't let a couple of rumors ruin a guy's' life."

Right?! You give an internal fist bump to Jack and David. Your wife's not going to leave you for fucking Raphael! He's got terrible BO, and your wife is very sensitive to smells.

"Innocent until proven guilty, right?"

Jack and David nod. Jane does not nod.

She says, "This is a god-damn job interview, not a criminal investigation. Candidate B has no rumors about misconduct following her. And she's got basically the same resume."

"But she's not a good fit," Jack says.

"She really isn't," David says.

"Not the best," you agree. She had a lot of ideas, and she wasn't above inserting them into the conversation.

In the end, you're willing to make the call: Candidate A all the way. Even if it means losing your wife. Because that's the kind of sacrifice you have to make sometimes. To do what's right for your fellow man.

About the Author:

"The Man Running the Hiring Committee" is from Sara's second book, The Invention of Love, forthcoming in June 2020 from Split Lip Press. Her first collection, Say Something Nice About Me (Augury Books), was a 2017 CLMP Firecracker Award Finalist in Fiction. She's an assistant professor of English at SUNY Plattsburgh. Read more of her work at saraschaff.com.

Fracture

Flood Plain

Monochromatic Photograph

Spacewalk Procedure and Preparation

The Parade of Corpses

Good at Cards

Risk

Today I Wonder What if No One Finds Her

On Loss of Memory

On Lack of Imagination

On Vulnerability on Stage

Sleuth

American Lunar Society

Coyote Calling Competition

Apricot

Cherry

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Ten Bad Feelings

After being told I needed Benzoid

If not why

No Reason

Inverse and Irony

Habit

In the produce section of Whole Foods

Leave

I don’t care enough

Relationship

Musician

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The Wrong Question

﻿Frozencamp Creek

Surefire

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To Begin

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Big Mood

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The Importance of Lighting in Relationships

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Mum’s Dream of the Eternal Arms

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Autumn Everywhere

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Lumberjacks Pound Their Dead into the Ground

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Nothing is Easy, Hurley

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The Man Running the Hiring Committee

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Frozencamp Creek