Flash the Court

Author: Court Harler

  • “Genuine Badger” by Elizabeth Rosen

    “Genuine Badger” by Elizabeth Rosen

    “Genuine Badger” by Elizabeth Rosen is a story within a story within a story. The writer of this powerful flash fiction frames recent events with those of the past to convey a cautionary tale that, on the surface, seems about a very determined honey badger. But really, it’s about…no, I’ll let you find out for yourself. The direct address of the second person only adds even more strength to the multilayered narrative.  —Court Harler

    Listen. Before you do that again, let me tell you a story. It’s about a honey badger named Stoffel.

    Stoffel could escape from anywhere. My college roommate Ava and I used to watch videos of him outsmarting his zookeepers time after time. This was when things got really bad for her. If it was just her boyfriend raising his voice, calling her a stupid bitch like you do to me sometimes, then we’d get stoned and give each other manicures or watch rug-cleaning videos instead.

    The zookeepers, they kept taking more and more away from that little badass badger to stop the escapes. First his badger girlfriend, who he was in cahoots with, then whatever implements were in his pit: a rake a landscaper had left behind by mistake, a tire. None of it stopped Stoffel. He found a way to use whatever was around to concoct a new escape route. And every morning, those zookeepers would peer over the railing to the pit below and see that their honey badger was missing again.

    It made Ava smile. The smile would make the bruising around her eye look like a regular shadow instead. Like how she looked her sophomore year, before the boyfriend.

    One day, as we sat on the couch we’d saved from the street, I took her arm. I pointed to the bruises there and said she had dark stripes just like Stoffel did. But she just drew her arm away and stared at the video screen. She didn’t answer at first, but then she said, “They always catch him and bring him back, don’t they.” It wasn’t a question.

    I called the cops once, even though Ava told me not to. Said it only made it worse for her. And it did. So I just kept playing those Stoffel clips when she came home bruised and ashamed. I hoped she would take courage from them. But of course, she didn’t. Sometimes I wonder if the last thing she felt before that final punch to the head was relief that she was finally going to be a genuine badger. Anyway, I hope it wasn’t just fear.

    See, I thought about Ava last night after you pushed me, and I think maybe she paid attention to the wrong things about Stoffel. Because badgers aren’t just escape artists, are they? They have claws, and teeth. They are smart, and tricky.

    Raise your hand to me again. You’ll find out.

    ELIZABETH ROSEN’s stories have appeared in journals such as the North American Review, Baltimore Review, Gargoyle, and Pithead Chapel, and been nominated for the Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net awards. Colorwise, Elizabeth is an autumn. She mourns the loss of Tab and still wants her MTV.

    Featured image by Ellie Eshaghi, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Compromise” by RR Menon

    “Compromise” by RR Menon

    In the microfiction “Compromise,” RR Menon takes a fresh approach to indirect dialogue. We are given what’s said as well as what’s unsaid, what’s intended as well as what’s unintended. The narrator and her mother are presented as the central figures of the story, but two additional characters lurk in the narrative’s margins, the brother and the matchmaker.  —Court Harler

    The matchmaker to my mother: She needs to compromise but doesn’t exactly say what the compromise is or what kind of compromise. She lets it sit and stale like the laddoo I once had to give up for my brother when there wasn’t enough, its rotund head plucked away from my hands and delivered to my brother’s.

    My mother to me: Get used to it and she doesn’t say what it is as she doles out more chakli for my brother and wipes her oil-slicked hand on her hair. Then she disappears the way the cricket bat from my cupboard did before my last match with the girls’ cricket team. Just emerging in the kitchen, her one hand making the sabzi, the other rolling out rotis before switching to adding tadka. Like Durga ma with many limbs.

    My mother to me: Don’t listen to those Western ladies and she makes a face of swallowing a whole laddoo when she hears the words independent and modern.

    My mother to herself: Western ladies can say what they want. When will she learn she needs to be a good, wholesome gulab jamun to find a good husband, good in-laws.

    My mother to my mirror image: You don’t look like a gulab jamun. Your skin isn’t glossy or sweet-smelling or anything. And you don’t behave like one.

    When the matchmaker brings the rejected marriage proposals, my mother lies crushed and powdered on the sofa, fly-swatting them away.

    That’s when I know what compromise is. Watching the matchmaker and my mother gather the bits of laddoo into a bowl, and shoveling it into the bin.

    RR MENON is a Dubai-based writer. Her work has been published in The Disappointed Housewife, Mythic Picnic, Tiny Molecules, Bending Genres, the Bath Flash Fiction anthology, and elsewhere, and nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. Her middle-grade fiction, Chandu and the Super Set of Parents, has been published by Fitzroy Books.

    Featured image by Luna Dai, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “May the Circle Be” by Maximilian Martini

    “May the Circle Be” by Maximilian Martini

    In “May the Circle Be” by Maximilian Martini, readers of this flash fiction are asked to consider unspeakable tragedy. How does the survivor survive, day by day, only going “round and round and round,” endlessly circling her incomprehensible grief? A laundromat’s washers and dryers come to symbolize the cycle of life, the horrifying futility of living and dying. —Court Harler

    Her stomach is open as her wide-opened eyes. Laundry takes all night. The windows are walls that double the room, making two dozen washers and dryers, echoes of echoes. Her four dollar bills transform into a box of soap and suds in hot water that spins and spins. It takes her two machines to clean her clothes and his clothes and the baby’s cutesy little outfits, pink and white and soft. The baby didn’t have a lot of clothes. She was supposed to outgrow them so fast. They will be clean now. They shouldn’t be dirty ever again. Dirt comes in, dirt goes out. Stains come to stay. Money only ever goes out. Life should be so clean. Making a lesson of it doesn’t help.

    The wreck made standing hurt. Plastic chairs are nailed to the floor. Sitting in them grinds her busted discs. The man sleeping on the couch has a bad smell. Dust bunnies congregate everywhere in pools of detergent except right before her washers, spinning and spinning, hurricanes on the weather channel, crossing her eyes. She sits on the floor with some relief.

    She scoots in toward the washer on the left. One at a time is better. One is all it takes to be completely in love. Clothes smash against the drum. They’ll never get out that way. You have to lean in.

    The round window of the washing machine is warm and resonant against her forehead. This close, the spinning clothes take up everything: white and dark blue and the littleness of pink. Yawning had become blinking and then honking and screeching, the windshield exploded and then they were all spinning against each other, all three of them bouncing around the truck, between the walls, colliding like shoes in a dryer of metal and wheels and bones, tiny baby bones, colliding straight from the earth to death.

    A bell chimes overhead. Her eyes pop. Sleeping guy is gone. She’s more alone.

    One time, just once, she bangs her head against the glass on the door of the washing machine. Her neck aches and her discs grind. There’s something good about it, though, like parts sliding into place. The clothes go round and round.

    One time, just one more time, harder, she bangs her head. There’s too much noise to hear anything. Round and round and round.

    One more time now she throws her forehead into the machine. Her body goes through the circle of glass, first her head and then her shoulders, which drag in her busted discs and dirty legs and all of her ruined body into the wide-open drum. The water is warm and the clothes are soft, spinning, unbreaking, grasping at every loose arm, every tiny beanie and sleeper, tangled in his coveralls and her scrubs and the baby’s little onesies and pink booties that she’ll never wear again, they’re all together, more folding than breaking, more drowning than breathing, she’s very nearly through, almost in.

    MAXIMILIAN MARTINI writes, teaches, and sings in Chattanooga, Tennessee. His work has been published by Bending Genres, trampset, Walnut Street Publishing, and FlowerSong Press, among others. He is an artist with River to River Community Records.

    Featured image by Scott Evans, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “A Boy Wants His Mother” by Lisa Thornton

    “A Boy Wants His Mother” by Lisa Thornton

    “A Boy Wants His Mother” by Lisa Thornton is a moving flash fiction with a circular structure. Thornton uses third-person narration to allow the point-of-view character, a grieving grandmother, to ask the difficult questions about her daughter and grandson. In fact, the story hinges on questions. What can be done, when the situation seems impossible?  —Court Harler

    What should a grandmother say to the classroom teacher when she calls in the middle of the day on a Tuesday? Or the school secretary on a Friday morning? The words Carline Elementary appearing on her phone screen while she is buying Cheerios or pairing small socks.

    Should a grandmother tell them that a boy sits and stares? A boy throws his cereal, milk arcing through the kitchen before the bowl bangs on the linoleum. A boy slams his head against the wall in the hallway, leaving a dent in it and white paint in his curls. A boy runs up the stairs and down the stairs and up the stairs and down the stairs until his face is red and his breath comes in spurts. A boy slams his bedroom door. And slams. And slams. And slams.

    Should she tell the school about when her daughter drops by, always unannounced, always sorry, always happy to see them, sometimes during Jeopardy and sometimes on a Saturday, and a boy runs to her like a magnet drawn to its opposite? About when he attaches himself to her arms and her waist and snuggles up against her on the couch where they stay for hours, legs intertwined, his sweaty hair stuck to her face, their chests moving up and down in unison as this beloved stranger shows him videos on her phone of people falling down, people walking into pools, people falling off skateboards. Should she describe the sound of their braided laughter drifting up the staircase like some kind of sweet-smelling soup that she knows will go cold?

    They should realize that a boy wakes. Always the next morning or the morning after and looks for her. A grandmother listens to his bedroom door creaking open, his footsteps down the stairs. She pours his juice. She feels his eyes spy the empty couch. She sets the table with napkin and spoon. She hears his feet pad down the hall. She hears them pick up pace to the bath. She sets his cereal at his place and stands straighter, centering herself in front of the sink, each hand gripping the edge of the counter. She looks out the window at the hickory tree and sees her daughter when she was the boy’s age. Before the bad times. Before the lying, the crying, the inpatient stays. Back when her curls were easy to manage. A grandmother hears the boy run into the kitchen and stop. She hears him behind her, searching. She is aware that the back of her head tells the boy all he needs to know.

    What should she tell the school when they call? Alright, she says to the principal, to the licensed behavioral therapist. He’s hitting again, their cool voices deliver. We can’t control him. They don’t ask why, just can she pick him up? They call her ma’am, but he can’t stay. What should she tell the world about her grandson when no one is asking the question?

    LISA THORNTON is a writer and nurse. She has stories in SmokeLong Quarterly, Pithead Chapel, and other magazines. She has been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, and Best Small Fictions. She lives in Illinois and can be found on Bluesky and Instagram @thorntonforreal.

    Featured image by Sascha Bosshard, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Director’s Cut” by Kathryn Kulpa

    “Director’s Cut” by Kathryn Kulpa

    “Director’s Cut” by Kathryn Kulpa is an experimental flash fiction that explores interpersonal dynamics from multiple angles. These dynamics are illuminated in the sentence structure itself: the (mostly) unpunctuated tension between direct and indirect dialogue; the free-flowing inner monologue of the young narrator. And there’s a subtextual story haunting the narrative present, which manifests organically, tenderly, through stream-of-consciousness style.  —Court Harler

    A fake knife can cut you just like a real one. I didn’t know that until now, my blood seeping into the pool of ketchup mixed with acrylic paint on the floor. My arm throbs as if the severed hand lying on the ground is my real hand and Jonathan just keeps shooting.

    Great shot, he says.

    The color’s off, I say, because even with a big painful slash in my arm I see my blood is darker, less orangey, but Jonathan says they swirl together and the effect is mesmerizing.

    Gore is easy, he says. Beauty is difficult.

    Also freaking painful, I say, and walk off while he’s still filming, which I know he hates because he loves long takes, but I’m not getting septicemia for his slasher-slash-art film. Jonathan’s mom asks how the movie’s going and do I need a cup of tea and I say no, just the bathroom. I pull my sleeve down because I don’t want her to see my cut and freak out. She’s kind of a hypochondriac, talks about germs and how you should always close the toilet seat before you flush or else you’re spraying “atomized waste particles” into the air. Which I can’t stop thinking about every time I use the bathroom at school where the toilet seats don’t close, and now I have to pee but I hate using the bathroom at Jonathan’s house because it’s so close to the kitchen and I keep thinking his mom can hear me pee so I run the water full blast and then I see I’m dripping blood on her floor and on the toilet seat and my pants, even my sneakers are red, how could there be this much blood, did Jonathan nick an artery with the fake knife, could he have subbed a real one, but that would be a messed-up prank even for somebody whose favorite movie is Blood Feast, and then I realize it’s not from the cut and I’m bleeding like Carrie, hemorrhaging, how do I clean this up? Will Jonathan’s mom think I’m pregnant? Having a miscarriage? I’m scrabbling under the sink for pads, stuffing Kleenex in my pants, Jonathan’s mom knocking on the door and me hanging onto the sink hoping this dizzy feeling will pass because I’ve only ever acted faints, never done one, and she puts an arm around me, asks if it’s like this every time and I say mostly and she asks have I told anyone, which of course I haven’t, in middle school my dad asked if they told me about “that stuff” in health class and I said yes and that’s the last time he mentioned it, and she asks are the cramps bad and I nod and she says it’s endometriosis, she has it too, and then I’m in bed, sweatpants, heating pad, and when Jonathan asks can we get back to filming we give him the look and send him to the store for ice cream.

    KATHRYN KULPA is the author of A Map of Lost Places (Gold Line Press) and For Every Tower, A Princess (Porkbelly Press). Her stories are published in Best Microfiction, Boudin, Flash Frog, Ghost Parachute, matchbook, New Flash Fiction Review, and Trash Cat Lit.

    Featured image by Eric TERRADE, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Laid Off from My Own Spin-Off” by Christopher M. Grady

    “Laid Off from My Own Spin-Off” by Christopher M. Grady

    “Laid Off from My Own Spin-Off” by Christopher M. Grady is a multifaceted prose poem. Grady synthesizes three distinct craft elements into an intriguing, innovative hybrid work: first, the sustained metaphor of the television show; second, the list format of the primary actors; and third, the epistolary tone that allows for the power of direct address. Ultimately, to the reader’s delight, the speaker of the poem triumphantly refuses “the end” of the show.  —Court Harler

    We could’ve had a different story than a gay kid struggling for success. To the producers above, to the algorithm, to the audiences who only want us to be tragic.

    Not everyone deserves screen time in my episodes. Yet here I am, glitching to write my last words, a finale before they’re laid off from my own spin-off.

    1. To my father, whose legacy somehow made the budget. Fishing was never my pastime, touchdowns never highly rated. At least your baldness was a recurring gag for a cheap laugh.
    2. To Nathan’s copies, each the same actor. Nothing extraordinary in camouflage, nothing unparalleled in reused voice lines. Everything mirrored through CGI.
    3. To the girl who was a one-trick pony, clutching my shirt from the background, outing me like a desperate attempt for a ratings boost, though we all forgot your name.
    4. To DJ, who has overstayed as the first attraction. Nights climbing through my open window, shame hiding in boring closet monologues. Mornings rushing plotlines like a canceled show.
    5. To myself, whose image was branded in tears. You decide who speaks louder, who walks on screen bolder. Remember, you hold the spotlight like immunity.

    You think this is the end? It’s just a small commercial break. Stay tuned for the inevitable reboot. More gay. Less tragic. Same algorithm.

    CHRISTOPHER M. GRADY is an LGBT Black teenager from the United States, residing in Virginia. He is an emerging writer experimenting with varied ways of writing stories for the purpose of entertaining readers and growing in his craft. Some of his publications appear in The Disappointed Housewife, Bending Genres, and Young Voices of RVA.

    Featured image by Diego González, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “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.