Flash the Court

send me your irreverence

  • Are You a Writer?

    Are You a Writer?

    Welcome to Flash the Court. This venture is more about creation and curation than submission and selection. Send me your flash prose, fiction or nonfiction. Your choice. Or no choice at all. Hybrid is lovely.

    For your (very generous) $5 reading fee, I will also provide two lines of (extremely subjective) feedback: 1) what I love, and 2) what I don’t love. As with all advice, solicited or unsolicited, you can take it or leave it, as you wish—your prerogative. Either way, you’ll get your money’s worth, I guarantee.

  • “Waiting for Halley’s Comet Again” by Kara Kahnke

    “Waiting for Halley’s Comet Again” by Kara Kahnke

    Some say the primary key to parenthood is presence, but in “Waiting for Halley’s Comet Again” by Kara Kahnke, readers are given a glimpse of love so strong it defies the distance of absence. The narrator in this concise, circular microfiction tells her son a beautiful “lie” that resounds into the “dark sky” like cosmic truth.  —Court Harler

    When I was five, I believed someone painted the comet with glowing brushstrokes above us just for Dad and me to watch. The comet’s light burned hope into the dark sky. Dad promised me he’d live another seventy-five years. He squeezed my hand. “I’ll make it.”

    I squeezed back tighter.

    Now, I teach my son to gaze skyward. “Mom, if I swallow falling stars, will I glow?”

    I lie too, just to see my five-year-old’s best smile. “They’ll dissolve in your tummy, shooting light beams from your fingertips.” His right cheek dimples, reflecting Dad’s grin.

    When my gray streaks whiten, and age spots join my freckles, my son and I will search the sky. I’ll lie to myself, convincing my heart that I see Dad riding on the light.

    KARA KAHNKE lives in Tempe, Arizona. Her work appears in BULL, Micromance Magazine, Raw Lit, Under the Gum Tree, The Citron Review, and other places. Find her on Bluesky @karakahnke.bsky.social.

    Featured image by Reign Abarintos, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Bobcat Trail” by Swetha Amit

    “Bobcat Trail” by Swetha Amit

    In “Bobcat Trail” by Swetha Amit, readers meet two characters in the process of radical change. The young narrator is about to leave for college, while the narrator’s unhappy mother begins a very different type of personal transformation. Amit imbues this speculative fiction with precise, unforgettable imagery and impeccable subtext.  —Court Harler

    After Dad abandoned us for another woman, Ma felt more comfortable in the garden than in the house. Beneath the starless sky, on the damp earth, nestled between the rustling bushes and the oleander tree. I would sometimes see her crouching. Her knees close to her chest, her brown eyes tracking the movements of a finch or a squirrel with uncanny stillness. One afternoon, the summer before I left for college, I found her almost motionless near the oleander tree. Her silhouette seemed to shimmer in the heat. Her floral-patterned sundress appeared to melt in the dazzling sunlight. Her soft velvet hands were now elongated and curved into claws that clutched the murky brown mud. A short bobbed tail twitched and brushed against her ankles.

    “Ma?” I gasped.

    She slowly turned her head to look at me. Her warm brown eyes were now wild, with golden irises and vertically slit pupils. The bridge of her nose protruded, and long whiskers grew from it. Her face was sharpened and framed by tufted ears. A low guttural chuff escaped her throat instead of the human words that included my name and insults hurled at Dad over the phone. Words that pierced my gut and made me retreat into the solitude of books and art. For a moment, we held eye contact. There was no fear or regret in those eyes—just a cold, steely look.

    A squirrel emerged from the bushes looking for fruit. With a quick leap, she gave chase. I watched her move along the fence with a grace that Ma’s sluggish body had forgotten when she’d feast on Oreo cookies relentlessly or wipe out tubs of ice cream, weeks after Dad left. I watched her now partly in awe, partly anxious, wondering if fatigue would catch up with her aging body and she’d be found breathless, clutching her chest. Like the time she attempted a power yoga session while watching a video, only to find herself panting on the floor. I watched her and the squirrel disappear into the muddy trails behind our house. I waited until sweat trickled down my forehead. Until my throat became parched, and I forced myself to get a glass of ice water from the kitchen table. I came out. Ma was still not back. I waited until the sky turned pink to bruised purple, then a hollow black. The ice in my glass melted. I stood outside for a long time, listening to the sounds of the crickets chirping, the distant honking of passing cars, and an owl hooting. 

    A rustling in the bushes startled me.

    “Ma,” I called.

    I squinted to see two golden blazing spots. They were just fireflies.

    I waited all night under the starless sky, inhaling the scent of the mud, for Ma to emerge from the trails, panting. I held my glass of half-full water tightly.

    SWETHA AMIT is an MFA graduate from the University of San Francisco. She is the author of a memoir, A Turbulent Mind, and three chapbooks. Her words appear in HAD, Bending Genres, Ghost Parachute, Gone Lawn, cream city review, and others.

    Featured image by Giorgio Trovato, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Still Drowning” by Dawn Tasaka Steffler

    “Still Drowning” by Dawn Tasaka Steffler

    In “Still Drowning,” Dawn Tasaka Steffler uses the repetitious form of the pantoum to allow the poem’s protagonist to return, again and again, to her grief and regret. Variations of designated lines permit the devastating details of past events to “bleed” into the woman’s present moment. The poem focuses on an impossible loss—one impossible to remember, one impossible to forget.  —Court Harler

    As part of her yearly physical, the doctor orders a full blood panel.
    That night she is thirsty but she’s fasting, she can’t have food or water.
    There used to be a swimming pool in the backyard but she filled it in with dirt
    years ago, after her friend’s toddler son fell in and drowned.

    She is thirsty but she’s fasting, she can’t have even a sip of water.
    Before going to bed, she brushes and flosses her teeth so hard they bleed.
    She often dreams about her friend’s son who fell in her pool and drowned.
    After which her friend moved away; they aren’t friends anymore.

    Before going to bed, she brushes and flosses her teeth so hard they bleed.
    Clean clean clean, she thinks, imagining the bright red arteries in her body.
    She understands why her friend moved away, why they aren’t friends anymore.
    She, not her friend, had found the boy, eyes open, at the bottom of the pool.

    Clean clean clean, she thinks and closes her eyes, imagines bright red blood.
    She sees hands and hair floating up like a kelp forest. At least
    she was the one who dove in, sparing her friend those eyes, open but unseeing.
    Meanwhile, her own son sleeps in a dorm room so very far away.

    Years ago, she turned hands and hair floating up like a ghostly kelp forest
    into a garden of flowers in a swimming pool full of dirt.
    As flowers drowse, because the sun is so very far away, she decides,
    if tomorrow her doctor orders her to give away all the blood in her body, she will.

    DAWN TASAKA STEFFLER had a highly commended story in the October 2025 Bath Flash Fiction Award and her most recent stories appear in Fractured Lit, New World Writing Quarterly, and Gooseberry Pie.

    Featured image by CHRSNDRSN, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Red Saturday” by Shira Musicant

    “Red Saturday” by Shira Musicant

    In “Red Saturday,” Shira Musicant focuses on a singular pivotal event, a common technique for micromemoirists. Less commonly, however, Musicant utilizes third-person instead of first-person point of view, which helps to convey the sheer unbelievability of the moment. The child narrator of “Red Saturday” “sits on the curb” and, all alone, “wonders if it was real.”  —Court Harler

    She sits on the curb at the corner, banished from the house. Dad has given her his old tee shirt, and Mom has cut the pomegranate into pieces, revealing the crevasses where the red seeds hide. She digs her fingers into the fruit. She is red and pink and fuchsia, the tee shirt, her hands, her mouth. The juice is tangy and sweet, the seeds crunchy in her teeth, the voices from the house sharp and bitter.

    She sits on the curb, her feet in the gutter, and a car speeds around the corner, around her resting feet and her red-stained face. She feels the hot whoosh and the way it lifts her hair from her face. When it is gone, she wonders if it was real.

    It happened so quickly, there was no time for fear to take hold.

    After the car, she sits on the curb at the corner wondering if the driver saw her, if she almost died, if Mom and Dad knew what had happened. She has no words to explain the car, no words to explain how big the world and how small her feet in the gutter. The only words she has in that moment are the words she doesn’t know, but hears flung through the house, angry red biting words.  

    She peels back white skin in the pomegranate, uncovering another hidden red cluster of seeds, waiting for her parents to call her back inside.

    Later, Mom throws the tee shirt in the washing machine and scrubs the juice off her face and hands. Later, Dad leaves in his car, backing down the driveway into the street past her corner. She watches him go from the window, waving goodbye, and pressing her hand into the glass, a hand still pink from the scrub and the pomegranate.

    SHIRA MUSICANT, recently retired from her practice as a somatic psychotherapist, writes short fiction and creative nonfiction. Her work has received four Pushcart nominations and can be found in various literary journals including Star 82 Review, Vestal Review, Fourth Genre, SmokeLong Quarterly, Bending Genres, and Milk Candy Review.

    Featured image by Karyna Panchenko, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Capsule” by Adele Gallogly

    “Capsule” by Adele Gallogly

    “Capsule” by Adele Gallogly is a vividly depicted microfiction about mothers and daughters: their coded conversations, their unspoken understandings. Set at a local carnival, Gallogly activates the senses with “pink popcorn,” “sunset clouds,” and “seawater upset by boats.” Above it all hovers the “refused” Ferris wheel, and one significant secret.  —Court Harler

    You refused the Ferris wheel twice that day with teenage politeness, almost poise. I first asked while sucking on pink popcorn, a snack you’d devour for weeks afterwards. I’m good, Mom, thanks. After we conquered another ladies’ room wait, I offered to pay for the express ride line. Still good, thank you though.

    I didn’t get it. While young, I loved those rising seat pods in the sky, that gift of flight without free fall, those views huge and safe. Your dad and I didn’t always kiss up there; sometimes I was content to watch sunset clouds the colours of our tongues. He didn’t tease me with unwanted rocking, like most boys did (yours, too?).

    We split a sauceless corn dog. I worried about my own possible nausea, a souring gut complaining only to me. You didn’t admit you’d grown blisters in one carnival hour of wrong shoes. Near the boardwalk, I laughed at painted spaniels in red lace bonnets. You strode ahead, towards seawater upset by boats. The familiar rims of your shoulders seemed steady and strong as you moved across the stained wood. Already you were lifting your secret news into the future, my freighted daughter.

    I caught up enough to see your expression, indescribable then. Now I know. You looked dutiful and worn, like the host of a suddenly sparse party, like some mother up late with a sinkful of plates, brushing off crumbled food with no good memory of making or desiring it.

    “Capsule” was highly commended in the 2025 Bridport Prize Flash Fiction Award and first appeared in their winners’ print anthology.

    ADELE GALLOGLY is a nonprofit writer/editor and an emerging flash fiction writer living in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Her stories have appeared in the Bridport Prize 2025 Anthology, FlashFlood, Six Sentences, 50-Word Stories, Paragraph Planet, and elsewhere. Find her on Bluesky and Instagram @AdeleGallogly.

    Featured image by Devon Rogers, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Rush Hour Ghost” by Fred Muratori

    “Rush Hour Ghost” by Fred Muratori

    In the microfiction “Rush Hour Ghost” by Fred Muratori, the occasion for the telling is a too-long traffic light, or possibly a minor case of road rage. The narrator is full of salt and snark, not to mention doom and gloom, but read on to see how the story pivots upon a central object. Here, dark daydreams reveal the emotional core, the story beneath the story.  —Court Harler

    Daydreaming at the traffic light. It’s five p.m., the sun is out, and people in their cars appear to be wearing masks: Ms. Clown, Mr. Werewolf, the Piglet Twins. The light is red and reminds me I could die at any time, while I’m jogging next Sunday or even when this light changes, as a mother of three on her way to fetch a son from karate class speeds through the intersection in an SUV and dislocates my skull from my spinal column. The light is still red and there’s no SUV in sight but already I’m planning how I might haunt my careless murderer, making her garage door rise and fall at midnight, appearing as the Guilt Channel on her cable TV, leaving clues to her husband’s infidelity. My hands, as recommended in Driver’s Ed, assume the ten and two o’clock positions on the wheel. I notice the absence of my wedding ring, which I haven’t worn in years. It’s at home in a wooden box among tie clips and inherited cuff links. I’ll wear that ring when I’m dead and haunting my assassin. Semitransparent, luminous, I’ll hover above the terrified woman and her husband in their master bedroom. I’ll moan and wail, hum a grim pop tune from the early ’80s. “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell. They’ll see the wedding ring and assume I’m dearly missed, my absence an abscess in another person’s heart, and their grief will feed my own. Well finally: the light’s turned. It’s a beautiful day of blue and green and golden glare off the neat white houses, the first day of no one’s idea of forever.

    FRED MURATORI has published three full-length poetry collections. His poems and nanofiction have appeared in The Iowa Review, Poetry Magazine, Denver Quarterly, Vinyl, Unbroken, Barrow Street, The Best American Poetry, and others. His poetry reviews appear in The Manhattan Review, American Book Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Ithaca, New York.

    Featured image by Frenjamin Benklin, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Drop by Drop” by Melissa Llanes Brownlee

    “Drop by Drop” by Melissa Llanes Brownlee

    In “Drop by Drop,” the new lyrical microfiction by Melissa Llanes Brownlee, tension creates narrative structure. Consider the “compound bows” and the “cloud” of the cousins’ anger. Also consider the way commas demand moments of pause, akin to traditional poetic lineation. Like the narrator, the reader is both pushed and pulled through the piece.  —Court Harler

    Uncle takes me and the cousins hunting, our compound bows carried on our backs, uncle’s gun, holstered, for emergencies. A family of boar were heard rooting around up the mountain, so we had parked on the highway and followed the shape of uncle through the tall grass and trees. The cousins brag about getting a boar, their picture taken, the tusks saved for a necklace. I keep quiet, the borrowed bow, a weight I didn’t want. I hear a nip, a bark, and stop. Uncle is motionless, his head pitched to the side. He looks at me, pulls me with a wave. I drag myself to him, pulling the bow from my back, getting an arrow to notch. Uncle points through the trees and I see them, a mother and two babies, bristles dark, snouts edging around trees. Uncle nods at me. I hear my cousins whispering, their anger, a cloud around me. I notch my arrow, remembering uncle’s instructions, breathe, line up my sight, aim for the ear, pull, seeing his knife pointing to the soft bits of the pig at my oldest cousin’s wedding, the best places to aim. I let fly, my shoulder hurting from the tension, and my arrow pierces the mother’s side, missing the ear, missing the spine, and there is a scream, and I shiver. My uncle sighs, pulling out his gun, the shot echoes the boar’s charge in reply and all I see is the blood lit on trampled ground.

    MELISSA LLANES BROWNLEE (she/her), a native Hawaiian writer living in Japan, has work published and forthcoming in Moon City Review and Prairie Schooner. Read Hard Skin (2022), Kahi and Lua (2022), and Bitter over Sweet (2025) from Santa Fe Writers Project. She tweets @lumchanmfa and talks story at melissallanesbrownlee.com.

    Featured image by Ty Feague, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Incomplete” by Isabel Fontes

    “Incomplete” by Isabel Fontes

    A flash based in dreamlore is tricky to write, and even trickier to publish, as this ephemeral form often proves enticing for the writer, but ultimately, too elusive for the reader. Not so for “Incomplete” by Isabel Fontes. Here we have two dreamers intertwined by separate sleeps, enacting an entirely new reality. When waking life fails to deliver, dreams become dangerous.  —Court Harler

    André is thirty-nine.

    He wakes at the same time every day – whether he wants to or not.

    The alarm rings before it should.

    He is already awake when it happens, staring at the ceiling, heart alert for no reason he can name. The woman beside him murmurs something and turns away. He doesn’t answer. He hasn’t touched her in weeks.

    The marriage means nothing to him anymore. He shares a bed, not a life. His body lies beside another, but his thoughts are elsewhere.

    He goes to work. He does what is expected. The smiles around him feel rehearsed, automatic. Everyone moves as if following instructions written long ago. More and more, he senses that he’s only watching his own life unfold.

    That night, sleep comes quickly.

    Too quickly.

    Clara is thirty-six.

    She lives in a modern flat with a husband who loves the idea of them together. She works in public relations, surrounded by voices, meetings, and noise. None of it reaches her.

    Every morning, she looks at her reflection and feels delayed, as if the woman in the mirror arrives half a second too late. Her days follow a strict sequence – wake, speak, smile, return home.

    At night, she clutches her pillow and closes her eyes.

    That is when the dreams begin.

    Between sleep and waking, they find each other.

    They don’t know names.

    They don’t see faces.

    But they are not alone.

    Their breathing aligns without effort. When one inhales, the other follows. When one hesitates, the other waits. It feels natural, necessary – like something finally returned to its place.

    Here, they feel whole.

    The first thing André notices is how thin the days become.

    He forgot a meeting. Then another. His reflection pauses before copying his movements. He types sentences at work that feel unfamiliar, as if written by someone else.

    At night, he dreams of a glass breaking.

    The next day, one shatters in the office kitchen. The sound makes him stop. He waits for the echo. It never comes.

    That night, sleep pulls him under again.

    Clara dreams of standing in a room without walls.

    The next day, she feels exposed everywhere she goes.

    Her husband asks if she’s listening. She nods. His voice feels distant, poorly tuned. She rushes through meals, through conversations, through hours.

    Night becomes the destination.

    They grow closer in sleep.

    Where André feels hollow, Clara fills the space.

    Where Clara fades, André steadies her.

    Together, they fit.

    During the day, both of them think further. Clara’s hands tremble when she’s awake. André’s name is spoken twice before he responds. They stop correcting these things. They stop caring.

    Awake, they are fragments.

    Asleep, they are complete.

    Sometimes André wakes with his chest tight, lungs waiting for air that arrives late.

    Sometimes Clara wakes holding her breath, unsure why she ever stopped breathing at all.

    They begin to dread mornings.

    The alarm becomes an intrusion.

    Waking feels like a loss.

    The dreams deepen.

    They don’t speak there. They don’t need to. Movement is effortless. Time doesn’t resist. It feels like remembering something that was never allowed to exist.

    Outside the dreams, their lives erode quietly.

    One morning, the alarm rings.

    Only one of them wakes.

    The other never does.

    Born in Lisbon, ISABEL FONTES is the author of three poetry books and has published internationally, including recognition in the United States. She is the creator of Jazz’n’Poesia and the television programme A Conversa Com. She lives in London and shares aspects of her life and creative process on Instagram @isabel0fontes.  

    Featured image by CHUTTERSNAP, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “My Favorite Day of High School” by Alaina Hammond

    “My Favorite Day of High School” by Alaina Hammond

    How much can a writer convey in one hundred words? In five tiny paragraphs, Alaina Hammond delivers all that readers can crave from an irreverent microfiction, and more. Often, less is more: what’s not said, says volumes. High school, indeed, may be the test we can never quite complete.  —Court Harler

    It’s Saturday morning. I’m at a high school. Not mine, but it smells roughly the same.

    There’s a poster, announcing auditions for a play. For a split second I consider auditioning, then remember I can’t. Whatever, I’m in a play next week.

    In the classroom where we wait for our tests, I notice a cute guy next to me. Whatever, my boyfriend’s hotter.

    Mr. Cute Guy gets a calculator, which means he’s planning to be a STEM teacher of some sort. Me, I’m taking the English teacher’s test.

    ​My confidence is solid. High school’s easier to handle, when you’re twenty-eight.

    ALAINA HAMMOND is a poet, playwright, fiction writer, and visual artist. Her poems, plays, short stories, nonfiction, paintings, drawings, and photographs have been published both online and in print. A four-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize in fiction, her novelette, Jillian, Formerly Known as Frog Girl, was published by Bottlecap Press. Find her on Instagram @alainaheidelberger.

    Featured image by Ivan Aleksic, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Family Dinner on the Overnight Train” by Lisa K. Buchanan

    “Family Dinner on the Overnight Train” by Lisa K. Buchanan

    “Family Dinner on the Overnight Train” by Lisa K. Buchanan is a flash creative nonfiction essay that playfully subverts expectations of the form. Told in third person instead of first, the piece is based on the author’s fond memories of family dinner-table games and train vacations. Each family member is effectively and entertainingly characterized by an alias, and the essay’s events unfold with dreamlike, childlike wonder.  —Court Harler

    First Place Prize of indigestion went to Big Engine, whose role at the table was to maximize speed and consumption. Last Place Prize, achieved by dawdling interminably over onion rings and sirloin, went to Young Caboose for whom rushing—through a meal or maintenance check or sublime landscape of jagged lava—would violate true train travel. Air Whistle announced each station-stop with adrenalized squeals. Dining Car’s pleas for mealtime civility did not prevent Engine and Whistle from shoveling succulent pink prime rib into their maws the way sweaty shirtless men had shoveled lumps of coal into bygone-era fireboxes. By the time Caboose brought up the rear, Dining Car’s favorite forbidden-fruit cordial had sold out, and Engine and Whistle were immersed in glops of French Apple Pie with Nutmeg Sauce.

    Through the night, Engine snored louder than the clickety-clack of steel wheels on steel tracks. Dining Car dreamt of forbidden fruit and sweaty shirtless men. Caboose stayed open late, wide-windowed and happily alone, while even Whistle was rocked into a soothing stupor and the most memorable of sleeps.

    Decades later, with Engine retired, Dining Car reduced to a snack counter, and Caboose gone largely remote, Air Whistle fondly recalled those family-of-four vacations aboard the overnight train from Los Angeles to Albuquerque. Rail travel in the region may have honeymooned decades earlier with mink stoles and felt fedoras, but another era might yet arrive—couplings strengthened, energies electrified, and those great gleaming windows ever saving.

    Writings by LISA K. BUCHANAN appear in CRAFT, The Citron Review, and elsewhere. Foes: fellow bus passengers with shoulder bags near her nose. Friends: people not preceding her in line for chocolate sorbet. Heroes: public librarians. Current favorite banned book: They Called Us Enemy by George Takei.

    Featured image by Patrick Fore, courtesy of Unsplash.