Flash the Court

Author: Court Harler

  • “Vista Overlooking a Dying Childhood” by Emily Hoover

    “Vista Overlooking a Dying Childhood” by Emily Hoover

    “Vista Overlooking a Dying Childhood” by Emily Hoover is a one-hundred-word microfiction that springboards from a song and lands upon a jukebox, a marvel of ekphrastic momentum. Note the stark sentence fragmentation, which expresses the final breakdown of the family unit. From dawn to dusk, passed from father to mother, the children wait, and suffer.  —Court Harler 

    “Livingston Saturday Night.” Instead, early dawn in Tulsa, OK. Peering over a cliff face. But the cliff? The tavern parking lot. The face? Our father’s. Eyes glistening. Polished stones in the rearview.

    Our mother multiplies shift drinks. Monsoon clouds. The jerking emergency break. Then, our disappearing father. A dry riverbed. Our feet drag across asphalt. Captives.

    Caught in the swinging door’s breeze. Stinging cigarette smoke. Scramble. Barstools not monkey bars. Knees raw from praying. Purpled men pay her to pour. Our hands. A gowpen of jukebox coins. Peer over the bar-top toward our mother horizon. No, Mother, the slinking sun.

    EMILY HOOVER is the author of the poetry chapbook My Mother as a Serrano Pepper (Zeitgeist Press) and the flash fiction micro-chapbook Sinners to the Back of the House (Bull City Press). Her creative works have been nominated for the Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction anthologies.

    Featured image by Patrick Fore, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Five-Star” by Vallie Lynn Watson

    “Five-Star” by Vallie Lynn Watson

    Sometimes it’s difficult to define why a flash piece works so well. It just hits you hard, in the gut. “Five-Star” by Vallie Lynn Watson is one such flash fiction. Maybe it’s the cheek of the narrator, or the cheese as a multilayered metaphor. Either way, this piece will make you smile, and squirm.  —Court Harler

    The hotel is fab, he had said. Not fabulous. Fab. Did I want to go into a room with a guy who kept saying fab? The more he said the word, the unlikelier it all sounded, but then he surrounded the word with other words like champagne, fromage, and salmon.

    So I followed him, tottered down the sloped cobblestone to the shoreline, and then, I saw that he was right. The hotel was fab! An ocean liner carved into the cliffs.

    “I want one of those rooms,” I said, and pointed to the top, balconied floor.

    “Fab!” he said.

    When we crossed the threshold and were in the room, I looked for you in the closet, our old tradition, but of course you weren’t there.

    Then I looked out of the porthole, swept my eyes along the sparkling water of the channel, across the sparkling water to the other side, swept my eyes up to the sparkles of the stars, but I didn’t look for you in any of those sparkling places, either.

    When I turned my gaze back to the room, he was on the phone, saying something like Camembert. When he hung up, he beamed and said, “Fab!”

    I squealed lightly, because I knew he’d like that, and while we waited for room service, I skirted around him, grazing and nipping, flitting and dipping, and then the room service guy knocked on the door, surprised but delighted to see me in my current state. 

    When it was just two of us again, he said, “Fab,” and fed me cheese, let some warm Brie drop onto me, then gently teethed it off. Then he was less gentle while I sipped champagne and watched him be less gentle, then I turned the giant diamond on my left hand inward, into my palm, and scraped it across the top of his head, drawing a red line through his balding spot, drawing a little blood, and then I leaned down to lick the blood from his head.

    “Fab!” he said.

    VALLIE LYNN WATSON is the author of the novel-in-flash, A River So Long (Luminis Books); her work has recently appeared in Midway Journal, Moon City Review, and Bending Genres. Watson teaches in the MFA program at McNeese State, and edits the magazine Boudin. She is an avid sea glass collector. Find her on Facebook @VallieWatson.

    Featured image by Jez Timms, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “On the Anniversary of My Mother’s Death” by Amy L. Bernstein

    “On the Anniversary of My Mother’s Death” by Amy L. Bernstein

    “On the Anniversary of My Mother’s Death” by Amy L. Bernstein is a flash essay about the fundamental nature of memory. Is memory a “Scottish castle in ruins” or a “distant star that shimmers in peripheral vision”? As Bernstein meditates on memory, she not only laments what’s been lost, but also illuminates, and commemorates, what’s worth remembering.  —Court Harler

    I forget.

    My brother texts a photo with a note. Otherwise, I’d have forgotten still.

    A quarter century on, I’ve forgotten the sound of my mother’s voice. How she entered a room. The feel of her kiss on my cheek. The date she died.

    This is unsurprising.

    My memory bank lies like a Scottish castle in ruins, its boulders worn and scattered, half hidden by grass. Dates, smells, sounds, the vivid contours of when-and-where all trampled by a conquering army stealing away with the spoils.

    The spoils of memory.

    I dwell in a particular uncanny valley, where my husband or a friend might say, Remember when we…. Remember how you…. I’m shown a photo proving I was in situ, but I cannot reconnect with the time, the place, the day, the prevailing mood, the last great meal. Sometimes, I do not recognize my own clothing.

    Entire chunks of my life, from every decade, have fled the tumbled walls of this memory castle—never a memory palace, never grand enough for that. My mother is one casualty among many.

    Have I been a careless custodian, allowing memories to flee, never to return? Is there some trick to remembering that I never learned and am now too old to master?

    And what is memory, if one cannot remember? Is it like perceiving a distant star that shimmers in peripheral vision, vanishing the instant you try to look straight at it?

    How many nights have I stared up at the sky, trying and failing to unmask those stars in hiding? Wondering, where will I have gone when my “now” turns to “then”?

    A central fact of my life: I am a champion forgetter, an uncooperative witness interrogated by a squad of truth officers trying, and failing, to nail memories to the wall.

    “One minute you’re a grown-ass woman,” Mary Karr writes in The Art of Memoir, “then a whiff of cumin conjures your dad’s curry, and a whole door to the past blows open, ushering in uncanny detail.”

    Oh, uncanny detail, where are you? I wish to be flooded—to drink my fill of remembering itself…. The name of the girl at summer camp who believed she came from outer space…. The face of the first boy I kissed, reduced to a hank of long hair…. The first mountain I climbed…. The words I must have uttered to my newborn daughter….

    But I won’t be greedy. I’d settle for just one memory, after all: my mother and me, talking, touching, laughing, ever present, and absolutely unforgettable.

    AMY L. BERNSTEIN writes award-winning fiction and nonfiction that lets readers feel while making them think. As the author of six novels, including Tent City, and a book of inspiration for creatives, Wrangling the Doubt Monster, Amy brings a compassionate and insightful voice to writers’ conferences and podcasts around the country.

    Featured image by martin bennie, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Chimera” by MJ Huntsgood

    “Chimera” by MJ Huntsgood

    The repeated phrase “If I were a wolf…” establishes the speculative, subjunctive mood of MJ Huntsgood’s flash fiction called “Chimera.” Note also the “and” of the polysyndeton, the way Huntgood’s sentences feed one another until they culminate into a series of crushing questions. What does it require, in this mortal animal world, to find love?  —Court Harler

    If I were a wolf, I would be a gray wolf. I would be sleek and shimmer in the sunlight. I would roll in dust to stay cool in the summer, and would curl up under the moss of the forest to stay warm in the winter. I would be part of the forest, and it would know me.

    If I were a wolf, I would be part of a pack. Our part of the forest would be known through piss and smells and scratches and we would feel it in our bones. We would never stray. Family, we would say to each other with tongues and bumps and growls. We are never alone, not so long as we have each other.

    If I were a wolf, I would mate for life. My heart would be one percent of my total body mass and it would beat for one being and one being alone. I would never falter and I would never stray from my love and I would never think twice about betrayal. I am monogamous and I am loyal.

    But I cannot find you.

    Where are you, my love, I would think as I roam the back of the pack, thinking of how the other wolves have someone else that is just theirs and I am alone, here. My nights are cold under the moss, and my days are lonely.

    Are we two creatures in different packs, unable to meet? Do you run free, your paws padding on territory I can never touch?

    Or have you, in this life, come into existence as a creature that I can never love? Are you also something that mates for life and cannot find love?

    Are you the hawk that flies above me? Will you rain your feathers onto my fur, a token of an emotion we feel in our instinct but cannot express with our different, savage mouths?

    MJ HUNTSGOOD is a speculative thriller and horror author who explores the use of perspective and deep point of view in her work to find the nightmare not just in a situation, but within ourselves. She lives in Washington, DC, with her dwindling number of underwatered plants, two cats, and trophy husband.

    Featured image by Linda Christiansen, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Carrion” by Oliver Cubillos

    “Carrion” by Oliver Cubillos

    Nature can soothe, but it can also disturb. In the new flash fiction, “Carrion” by Oliver Cubillos, nature presents itself as a harbinger of—death? destruction? or perhaps even, desire? The “you” of the piece seems to not know what’s wanted, asking the reader for the answer.  —Court Harler

    It’s the second time this week. On the curb by the driveway. Laid out against the concrete. You notice the skull from far away. A trail of ants stretches from yard to street. All marching. There’s a cluster of feathers. Black feathers. There’s something warm in your throat. You swallow it down. One gulp. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Two gulps. The ants have journeyed far and wide for this. Food for the colony. You wonder if this crow knew the other. An opossum or seagull or skunk. A roadside corpse. You can’t possibly remember. That was long ago. This one’s different. You take another glance. Three gulps. There’s a Dixie cup and candy wrappers in the gutter. All those birthday parties. Years of piñatas. It occurs to you that all birds end up flightless. On the ground. It’s late spring. Fog rolls over the hills. There’s a dark stain there on the pavement. All around the body. The messes these sidewalks have seen. Popsicle stains or dog shit or chalk. You suppose it’s time to clean it all up. What a pain it was last time. The boys did it for you. The sky blossoms with dark gray. There’s storm clouds rising. You feel it start to rain. There’s water in your shoes. You watch as the skull and blood and all those littered feathers are swept away in the gutter. The dead crow’s beak tilts upwards like the mast of a schooner. It crests over a wave. Then another. You watch until you can’t see it any longer. Eventually it carries on.

    OLIVER CUBILLOS is currently pursuing an MFA in creative writing at Colorado State University. His work is published in Heavy Feather Review, BULL Magazine, Expat Press, Bright Flash Literary Review, and elsewhere.

    Featured image by Antoine Pouligny, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Anything” by Tracy Royce

    “Anything” by Tracy Royce

    “Anything” by Tracy Royce is a masterpiece of mood. The speaker of the prose poem begins “gloomy again” but ends, via a city bike ride, in an entirely new and revelatory headspace. Royce integrates spirited interiority with speculative exteriority to portray this transformation.  —Court Harler

    Gloomy again. Thunder rumbles and I wonder what possessed me to bike here. I sidle up to the window, read the whiteboard menu, and order today’s special, thinking there’s nothing so special about an everything bagel, but fine. The guy with the maybe-ironic mullet taps the whiteboard, which I reread. Huh. “What’s an ‘anything bagel’?” He shrugs and says, “We only have one, it’s yours if you want it.” I pay and retrieve the crisp paper bag, peek inside. Looks like an ordinary bagel with a smattering of poppy seeds. Of course. I toss it in my bike basket as the drizzle begins, a polka-dot pattern blooming on the bag as it absorbs the raindrops. I’m going to have a soggy special if I don’t hurry, so I pedal fast and scan for lane-changers. Registering movement, I glance at my basket in time to see the bag shift. Out sprouts a stem, shooting skyward, and the petals of an orange poppy unfold bright against the clouds. I’m trying to concentrate on the road, the cars, but now the truck beside me is slowing, the driver pointing at—Shit! I stop just in time as the signal turns red and cross traffic floods the intersection. Drivers and passengers gawk as my poppy’s petals rapidly expand. More thunder, and now I’m watching the rain pelt the vehicles around me, wipers swiping at the deluge. But I’m dry. Dry and smiling beneath this brilliant orange umbrella.

    TRACY ROYCE is a writer and poet with work appearing in 100 Word Story, The Mackinaw, ONE ART, and Best Microfiction 2026. Her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Southern California, where she enjoys hiking. Find her on Bluesky @tracyroyce.bsky.social.

    Featured image by melanie boers, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Mehmed’s Fever” by Râna Campbell

    “Mehmed’s Fever” by Râna Campbell

    “Mehmed’s Fever” by Râna Campbell is a hybrid work of speculative historical flash fiction and just a hint of prose poetry. Elevated language intensifies the regal setting of the Third Courtyard, while the symbolic and mythic allure of the peacock entrances both the eye and the imagination. “What one sees is what one has chosen,” so says the sage.  —Court Harler

    Sunrise alighted on the city’s minarets and began seeping through its bazaars like pomegranate molasses. Constantinople had been seized over twenty years ago, and Fâtih Sultan Mehmed strolled the New Palace’s Third Courtyard secure in Islambol’s inviolability.

    A rosebush stirred in the sultan’s peripheral vision. As he turned, a peacock emerged, its tail fanning out into a hundred iridescent eyes. Together they shimmered like the depthless night sky, beckoning Mehmed forward. He raised the brocaded edges of his emerald kaftan, the bejeweled silk garment refracting rays of amber, and crouched.

    What is it you show me?

    “There was a time when man and beast and the light of Mohammed were as one,” chimed a voice as familiar as the muezzin’s call to prayer. The peacock cracked open, birthing Akshemseddin’s white-bearded figure, his turban a resplendent halo.

    “Hodja Efendi, am I dreaming?” Mehmed asked his long-deceased Sufi mentor.

    “Is not life but a dream, Conqueror, in the watchful eye of Allah’s mind?”

    Day broke. The fragrant steam of spiced sahlep drifted over from the kitchens by the Second Courtyard. A bead of sweat escaped Mehmed’s turban. Then another. Where the droplets met the arid soil, pools of indigo and turquoise formed and sprouted peacock feathers. He steadied himself, rose, then moved to splash moon-chilled water on his face from the garden’s central pond.

    Akshemseddin followed, a trail of feathers blooming in his wake.

    “The peacock, too, watches…some see in its gaze the promise of paradise, others eternal disgrace. What one sees is what one has chosen. But vanity can blind a man.”

    “Have I been vain, Hodjam?”

    But Akshemseddin was gone, and the feathers in the grass encircled and overtook Mehmed’s limbs like vines, until he stood,

    himself a peacock,

    looking out at his sprawling empire

    from behind a dewy rosebush.

    RÂNA CAMPBELL is a damn good editor and a prize-winning writer of flash and microfiction, along with the occasional poem. Her work has appeared, among others, in Intrepidus Ink, God’s Cruel Joke, and Humphrey Magazine. For general inquiries and editing services rendered with love, Râna can be reached at yourfinaldraftediting@gmail.com.

    Featured image by Mohnish Landge, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “To a Flame” by Christie Chapman

    “To a Flame” by Christie Chapman

    In the microessay “To a Flame” by Christie Chapman, ekphrasis and metanarrative commingle in delightful ways, despite the theater’s dark and disrupted setting. “Winged obscurants” spark existential questions for the narrator: “Have I made my life in the right shape?” The plot evades any easy resolution.  —Court Harler

    In the 1983 Canadian comedy film Strange Brew, two bumbling brothers bring a jar of moths into a theater that’s showing a bad movie they’ve made. When the audience hollers “Boo!” one of the brothers opens the jar. As the moviegoers shriek and duck and flinch, and exit the theater—the winged obscurants follow their passion to the light. They block the projector’s flicker, which is inscribing the bad story.

    The brothers do this to escape, to avoid giving refunds. They’re mostly spared the consequences of their story, eclipsed by a hundred tiny yearnings.

    But really, they are the story—the brothers, the moths. I think about this a lot: What is a story? Have I made my life the right shape? What do you do when the plot goes astray—when the other person in your bed puts a pillow behind him and rolls away?

    I always felt more like the moths. The metaphorical moths; real moths use a light source to navigate only. I’m like those moonstruck loonies in eighties pop songs and eighth-grade love notes. I fling myself at any heat source. Story be damned.

    CHRISTIE CHAPMAN is a writer and mom in Springfield, Virginia. Her work has been published and is forthcoming in Electric Literature, LEON Literary Review, L’Esprit Literary Review, Midway Journal, The Bulb Region, Ghost Parachute, and elsewhere. She was a Lascaux Prize finalist for flash fiction and nominated for Best Microfiction.

    Featured image by Max Kleinen, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Balance Exercises” by Brian McNely

    “Balance Exercises” by Brian McNely

    “Balance Exercises” by Brian McNely is a lyrical, meditative flash essay about aging, but not in the expected, human-centered sense. One chilly morning, we meet two elderly dogs who require and receive different approaches to their care. The reader’s empathy deepens “in the gloaming,” in the knowledge of the “shadows” that await.  —Court Harler

    Mo used to wake me up by nudging my arm, her tail smacking the bed frame. Now my bladder is my alarm clock, and Mo stays in bed, nose to Frito feet.

    There’s a wind advisory, and the “feels like” temp is in the teens. I pee and pull on layers. Mo does three big stretchy down dogs before she’s ready. She ducks her snout into her Carhartt chore coat. I kiss her forehead and grab an orange tennis ball we probably won’t chase. We’re out before sunup, usually before anyone else in the neighborhood, save the folks who’ve been out all night.

    This morning, someone crouches in the Gatton Park field, hands near the fallow grass. They’re shuffling, bundled up in the predawn darkness. There’s a pram nearby, on the park path.

    Mo pulls at her leash, her cuneate basenji ears erect as we lean into the wind.

    The pram’s black canopy catches a gust and rolls down the path, and the man in the field bolts up and sprints after it, leaving something small and white lying in the grass. Mo stops pulling. I knead my fists in my jacket pockets and roll them against my stomach.

    A Jack Russell mix holds up his shoulders and head on trembling forelegs. The rest of his body melts into the earth, hind legs splayed and twisted. We stop. Should we help? Can we help? But the man jogs back with the pram in a few easy strides and kicks the wheel brake.

    I duck my head against the wind, tucking my chin into my puffy. The man crouches again and scoops the dog’s pliant, pale belly with both hands, lifting his rear legs so pink paws touch grass. They shuffle together into the wind, stooped and humbled, looking for the perfect spot to pee.

    I watch Mo watch them. No pulling, whining, or growling. She gives the dog a pass. We’re accidental voyeurs, seeing what we’re not meant to see. We watch from different heights and pass by in a wide arc.

    But I pull down my hood, brave the cold, and look back. The man is standing now, holding his dog to his heart. He lays him in the pram and pushes it the way we’ve come.

    I raise my hood. Mo moves on to new smells and sounds, and I watch her pick her way along the path. Her leash is wrapped around my left wrist and pinned to my body. I measure her weight against this reflective tether, balance her steps against my own. She leads us out of the park and underneath Oliver Lewis Way.

    In the streetlights our shadows reach across the path and over Manchester Music Hall’s gravel lot. She tugs at her leash again—ears up—and I brace. In the gloaming, she sees, before I do, a rabbit bounding away, outpacing our shadows.

    In a week, she’ll be ten.

    BRIAN McNELY teaches at the University of Kentucky and races bikes. His work has appeared in Off Assignment, Invisible City Literary Journal, Magpie Zine, Porridge, and in academic journals such as Philosophy & Rhetoric. Find him on Instagram @bmcnely.

    Featured image by Andréas BRUN, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Seven Flash” by Polly Walker Blakemore

    “Seven Flash” by Polly Walker Blakemore

    “Seven Flash” by Polly Walker Blakemore is a sequence of evocative snippets that stand alone (and together) as micromemoirs, or perhaps prose poems. Each of the seven segments offers an element of surprise, be it wry humor, clever wordplay, or sudden sentiment. Part of the pleasure of fragmentation is the sequencing itself—of not knowing what could come next.  —Court Harler

    The News, Warts and All

    Have you heard? Toads! They’re on six of the seven continents. Bless them.

    Under the Stove

    Under the stove I find a rubber band and a paper clip, a kernel of corn, a cotton swab, a toothpick, the seed of a tangerine, a thumbtack, the five of diamonds, a button the color of butter, a blueberry (softened, just a little), a corn flake (brittle, now), a marble with green and red swirling inside, dust.

    Toxic

    She had a cat. The cat got old and sick. The cat got sick of being old and sick. She got sick of the cat being old and sick. It wasn’t healthy. It was just normal. She just didn’t know it. Until she did. That’s how she explains it.

    Bother

    This fall I realized the leaves that fall from the oak trees weren’t the bother. The bother was the husband who got bothered by all the leaves that would fall from the trees and would frenzy himself into a lather blowing and raking them up for days and days, smelling like gasoline and sweat. It was his bother that bothered me. Now that I have divorced him, I can’t be bothered, with the leaves, and so many bothers that used to bother me.

    Grind

    She thinks about it every day. Extra coarse. Coarse. Medium Coarse. Medium Medium, Medium Fine. Fine. Extra Fine. With consistency similar to peppercorns, Kosher sea salt, coarse sand, table salt, fine sand, powdered sugar, flour. And the best brewing method for cold brew, plunger, cupping, cone, siphon, stovetop, Turkish. Instant.

    Crossing

    Just as all of the lights at this huge, sixteen-lane, four-way intersection near my favorite Dairy Queen change from green to yellow this afternoon, the man hitches his pants, leans into his walker, and begins to shuffle from the curb in his leopard-print fleece slippers and baggy barn coat.

    Sensed

    You know, it’s not so bad when you’ve a cold to lose your sense of taste for a few days. It takes the edge off, the salt, the sweet, the bitter, the sour, the umami everything. That’s what you tell yourself. It’s not so bad, to lose, you know?

    POLLY WALKER BLAKEMORE is a writer living in Louisville, Kentucky. She is the author of Visiting, a collection of writing from the journal she has kept for thirty-five years, about her time with her mother when her mother was in hospice. On Substack (@pollywalkerblakemore), she publishes a series based on her journal.

    Featured image by Jess Bailey, courtesy of Unsplash.