Flash the Court

Tag: Flash Fiction

  • “The Girl Who Broke Every Omen” by Hana Xen

    “The Girl Who Broke Every Omen” by Hana Xen

    In “The Girl Who Broke Every Omen,” Hana Xen lends new nuance to the objective correlative. Omens of folklore are reframed as their literal objects, instead of their actions or outcomes: broken mirrors, spilt salt, dead crows, and fallen ladders. Xen’s narrator invites the reader to explore the possibilities beyond the traditional conception of superstition.  —Court Harler 

    The first omen I broke was a mirror, and I swear it screamed.

    A thin, silver sound, high and startled, before the glass webbed into fractures. My reflection split into a dozen versions of me, each one staring with a different expression: warning, pity, hunger. One shard caught the light just right and made a tiny rainbow across my wrist. It felt almost deliberate.

    I should have looked away.

    I leaned in.

    Bad luck did not come.

    Something else did.

    The next omen was the salt. The shaker toppled from my hand, spilling white grains in a crooked, broken circle. A boundary. A warning line.

    I did not throw any over my shoulder.

    I stepped through it.

    Something stepped with me.

    At first it was only a second set of footsteps, slightly behind mine. Then a breath on my neck when I turned off the lights. On the third night, I saw her in the corner. Girl-shaped but wrong. Spine bent. Fingers too long. Eyes reflecting moonlight like wet stone.

    Not a ghost.

    Not me.

    Not not me.

    She pointed toward the window.

    A crow lay there the next morning, neck snapped clean, wings arranged like an offering. No blood. No struggle. As if it had been removed carefully from the sky.

    After that, omens cracked around me like knuckles.

    The ladder in the alley fell the moment I passed beneath it.

    Doors sighed open before I touched them.

    Streetlamps guttered when I smiled.

    People began stepping away from me in public. They did not know why. Instinct, maybe. Animals sense rot before it blooms. My stomach twisted sharply the first time someone flinched from me. I told myself I was fine. I probably wasn’t.

    Then the moon split itself open, rending into a thin crescent. A curved blade hanging above the rooftops. The night went still. Even the thing in my corner held her breath.

    She was not haunting me.

    She was studying me.

    Growing clearer each time an omen broke.

    Growing closer.

    The holy water incident happened after a stranger saw something behind me. He flung the bottle at my feet like he was trying to snuff a fuse.

    It burst.

    The mist rose cold and metallic.

    The girl inhaled.

    The man’s face twisted. He ran without looking back.

    I did not chase him.

    I turned to my shadow instead.

    I should have run.

    She smiled with all my teeth.

    I break omens now because they break first.

    Because something in me is waking.

    Because warnings were never meant to save girls like me.

    Only to announce us.

    HANA XEN writes mythic and historical fiction shaped by folklore, from eerie flash to hybrid narrative prose. Her work has been long- and short-listed in writing contests and appears in anthologies and literary e-zines. She believes folklore isn’t superstition but documentation, and lives in the Midwest with a healthy skepticism of both curses and social media.

    Featured image by Jeroen van de Water, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Precious Alchemy in the Margins” by Denise Bayes

    “Precious Alchemy in the Margins” by Denise Bayes

    In her new flash fiction, “Precious Alchemy in the Margins,” Denise Bayes offers the reader a feast for the senses: the warmth of “the fox’s fur,” the slime and slither of the “molluscs,” and the mystical sound of “creatures gather[ed], playing instruments.” And in secret spaces, in “the marginalia” and “the cloisters,” sharp reminders of the unrequited, or the “lured,” refuse to remain unnoticed, shimmering “golden” like tempting treasure.  —Court Harler

    Clever Foxes

    Mosaic gold glints on the fox’s fur, tin and sulphur fused in magic by medieval scribes. I unfold from my study of the manuscript, blink into the darkness of the college library. Memories of my Reynard, the russet warmth of our undergraduate love nest.

    Fighting Snails

    In the marginalia, humans battle slimy molluscs. We always lose to the crafty creatures.

    They remind me of her.

    I remember her arrival at college, a Fresher slithering her way into the midst of our Medieval group, flattering him with her fake enthusiasm for Chaucer. How she listened wide-eyed to his words, flicking flirtatious glances at his golden hair.

    She lured him from me on silver threads.

    Bands of Animal Musicians

    In The Book of Hours, creatures gather, playing instruments. Scholars say they show the world turned upside down.

    My world turned upside down.

    Try for Fellowships, she told him.

    Academia is hungry for your words, she whispered.

    His head turned towards the glittering dream.

    The day they married in the College Chapel, I cloistered in the library until the last chords of dance music died. Trampled home across a carpet of crimson confetti.

    Warrior Women

    Now I head to my study through the quad, past the latest huddle of alumni reliving their glory days in noisy reminiscence under the curve of the cloisters.

    I freeze at the sight of him. My Reynard.

    His hand runs in a remembered swirl through tawny hair, now flecked with grey. My fingertips flinch, recalling the coarse texture beneath my palms. I remember his warm breath against my bare neck.

    He looks up just then, across the courtyard, straight into my eyes. The air shivers golden between us. 

    I step onto the manicured lawn, passing the sign.

    ‘Fellows Only.’

    I know he follows my every footstep.

    DENISE BAYES’s writing has appeared in New Zealand’s Micro Madness, Oxford Flash Fiction Anthology, Free Flash Fiction, National Flash Fiction Day Anthology, 100 Word Story, Thin Skin, Temple in a City, and Underbelly Press. Denise lives in Barcelona, Spain, with her husband and a cavalier called Rory, who is usually under the desk. Find her @deniseb.bsky.social.

    Featured image by kevin laminto, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Water Tower Views” by Liz deBeer

    “Water Tower Views” by Liz deBeer

    In “Water Tower Views,” Liz deBeer captures the intricacies of budding young love—it’s both charming and crude, both bashful and brazen. The reader is given a glimpse of young love’s potential future as well, which grows ever more complicated amid fraught family dynamics. Surveillance and supervision also act as key motifs in this bold flash fiction.  —Court Harler

    Pushing aside homemade floral curtains, I watch neighborhood boys bike toward our street’s dead end, supervised only by the town’s water tower, a silver globe atop long legs, like a giant metallic spider.

    The next morning at the bus stop, they laugh and elbow Billy, mimicking him climbing up the long ladder to the water tower’s top railing, swearing it’s over one hundred fuckin’ feet. How Billy spread apart his legs to pee on the wildflowers below, bellowing, “I can see the whole damn world up here!” They shake their pelvises as if they too are spraying Queen Anne’s lace and black-eyed Susans from the heavens. They suck on imaginary cigarettes, blow out phantom smoke puffs, hack from fantasy fumes.

    A few yards away, the other girls and I pretend we aren’t listening, aren’t visualizing a yellow stream watering the wildflower field, aren’t wondering if we could make smoke circles too or if we’d choke-gag-retch at all of it.

    When the bus pulls to the curb, the boys strut down the aisle to sit in back rows, as far from the driver’s view as possible. Sliding into a middle seat, I wonder what else Billy saw from the water tower. Could he see into our houses? Mom yelling at Daddy when he spilled spaghetti on the carpet? Or my older sister smooshed against her boyfriend on the motorcycle Daddy had forbidden her to ride? Or later, Daddy guzzling glasses of Seagram’s Seven and Seven, cursing the goddamn Mets?

    As we bump toward school, I wonder if Billy could see me from my window wishing I were with him, looking out over rooftops, yelling, “I can see too!” Or if he sees me now, thinking of him and the boys.

    LIZ deBEER is a teacher and writer with Project Write Now, a writing cooperative based in New Jersey. Her latest flash has appeared in BULL, Fictive Dream, Flash Fiction Magazine, Bending Genres, and others. She has written essays for various journals including Brevity Blog.

    Featured image by Dana Kamp, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “She won’t survive this” by Salena Casha

    “She won’t survive this” by Salena Casha

    In “She won’t survive this,” Salena Casha artfully blends speculation and personification, interiority and exteriority. We might also mention elements of post-apocalyptic flash fiction, though readers will encounter very little “post” in this environmental apocalypse, except for nameless “mutants,” endless “shades of tan,” and one last courageous soul.  —Court Harler

    In her time, she’d known storms, but not like this with all its shades of tan. Clay on canvas, camel hair on Gobi dunes, clouds choking on their own dusky exhaust. The winds made the brackish water in her ribs tremble. In the 2340s, she’d sacrificed her outgrowth pads and threaded her roots between the salt plank grains of Earth’s changed topsoil. Just to keep her in one place, even if it was Ohio. 

    For comfort, she thought about how she’d outlasted humans. How those chlorophyll-less mutants ill-governed what sunlight there was left behind window slats. Her ancestors had complained about millennial plant parents and their inconsistent watering cans, but she’d always found them innocuous, if sadly misled, beings. Some of them, the scientists mainly, said cacti would never grow in Cleveland. All wrong, all gone. Sure, she was alone, but she still counted.

    Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Once, someone said that cockroaches would survive the apocalypse, but they hadn’t thought about snails. Those land crustaceans with their spiraled shells and belly mucus. A decade ago, one had chosen to circle her roots. Every day, she watched them collect gravel. They’d been particular, choosing chipped detritus in camphor speckled with chartreuse, chrome veined with cherry. Slate and canary and emerald sea glass. She hadn’t realized what they were doing until one morning, they took their collection and stacked the stones like bricks on their entrance. Walled themselves inside and never came out. Their tomb stayed beside her, too heavy for the wind, and on days when a sliver of sun pierced the landscape, she watched the light play off its self-made stained glass, a spiraled church in miniature.

    So, no, she hadn’t always been alone. 

    The day of the storm, she hunkered down more than she’d hunkered down over the decades gone, her grips tightening around the hallucination of loamy soil. It was one of those feelings that never left her, after all these years, the sticky particles of wet Earth. She pretended that below her, worms still sifted the Earth’s layers. The air picked at her, but she held fast. She couldn’t see the snail’s shell through the percolated landscape and panic thrummed through her. She was tired. Old, beyond measure. As the gusts enveloped her, she let herself whisper it aloud. 

    Maybe I’ve fought enough. 

    While she’d wondered it before, she wasn’t sure she’d meant it this time more than times past. The air roiled, full of what she’d put into the universe and the ground slipped beyond her and she wasn’t sure if she let go first or the Earth finally became slick as a bald pate. Somehow, the wind lifted her, shredding her anchors into silk dust. As it swept her up, away, elsewhere, she thought about how she could change again. Become a bird. Or, maybe, something else entirely. 

    Perhaps even become the light that flickered through azure glass.

    SALENA CASHA’s work has appeared in over 150 publications in the last decade. Her most recent words can be found in HAD, Metaphorosis, and Flash Frog. She survives New England winters on good beer and black coffee. Subscribe to her substack at salenacasha.substack.com.

    Featured image by Pete Godfrey, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “The day they bomb the art gallery” by Belinda Rowe

    “The day they bomb the art gallery” by Belinda Rowe

    “The day they bomb the art gallery” by Belinda Rowe is a flash fiction with the beating heart of a prose poem. Note certain poetic techniques, such as the well-placed repetition of the “enigmatic smile.” Or how the images of color burst upon the page in fits of sensory delight. The narrative itself is a puzzle that both resists and relishes its completion.  —Court Harler

    I sweep up a scrap of canvas with a woman in a bright-blue robe being abducted by a soldier. My sister picks up the intact face of an unremarkable woman. People are looting scraps of Poussin, Raphael, Renoir, Géricault, da Vinci, Matisse, Caravaggio, Delacroix. Art is jigsaw. Art is carried on the wind – my sister and I are swept up in the fervour.

    Our mother’s at home when she hears the news and calls. Are you both okay?

    A man on a raft waving a scrap of red-and-white fabric sails past us on the wind. Buildings collapse, ravens caw, the air is acrid.

    Art is everywhere, I shout. Emile found a young woman’s face –

    – describe her, our mother urges.

    She’s nondescript – black shoulder-length hair, dark eyes, long nose, an enigmatic smile.

    Is she painted on canvas? our mother whispers, as if someone might hear.

    Wood –

    – quick, put her in your backpack, don’t let anyone see you.

    The streets are filled with people stuffing sacks with splinters, details, fragments of Naples yellow, vermillion, carmine, azurite blue, malachite, bone black. We step over marble limbs, the torso of a bare-chested woman carrying a blue, white, and red flag, then slip through a storm drain into the catacombs, wend our way home along dark, dank passages, our phone torches lighting the way.

    On the black market and the dark web, people trade art, barter for potatoes, cheese, bread, offer cash, whatever they have. People want to reconstruct: ‘Has anyone found John the Apostle and Judas from The Last Supper? I’ll trade you for a scallop shell with the feet and legs of Venus.’ 

    We decorate our houses, workplaces, car windows: a philosopher meditating, swirling clouds, stars, a crescent moon, Aphrodite’s marble head, a pearl earring, tiny skaters on a frozen pond, sunflowers, a young lacemaker peering at her work. People wear fragments of canvas, marble, and jade around their necks; fashion hats, trousers, sundresses from medieval clothing. Someone puts an intact porcelain urinal in their loungeroom window.

    I search for the poplar-wood panel depicting the sixteenth-century dress – raven black, elegant, simple, possibly silk with subtle gold embroidery – that belongs to the woman with the enigmatic smile. When no one replies, I make quick work detaching the woman dressed in the bright-blue robe from the soldier abducting her, trade him for a piece of poplar-wood panel and oil paints, enough food for two years.

    I set to cutting, splicing, gluing the woman with the enigmatic smile onto the piece of poplar-wood panel – apply lead white pigment, blacks, browns, greens – bring her chest, her low-cut bodice, her dress, her right hand resting on her left wrist, to life, a blurred soft smokiness. Art is compulsive, tenacious. Time contracts, my fingers smooth, blend, layer. We aren’t flies you can squash, I whisper.

    BELINDA ROWE is an emerging short-fiction writer. Born in Aotearoa (New Zealand) she now lives in Walyalup (Fremantle), Western Australia. Her recent fiction appears in Unbroken, Literary Namjooning, Fractured Lit, New Flash Fiction Review, and Vestal Review. She was a SmokeLong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow in 2025.

    Featured image by Ashkan Forouzani, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Christmas” by Betty Stanton

    “Christmas” by Betty Stanton

    We can name a day, even a holiday, but can’t know what it holds for those other than ourselves. In “Christmas” by Betty Stanton, “the calendar doesn’t mean much anymore,” but a new name, “something secret—something with edges,” may mean everything to the character called Angel. In this gut-wrenching, enigmatic flash fiction, Stanton asks us to reconsider “real names” as well as their personal and societal implications.  —Court Harler

    She says her name is Angel. It isn’t. No one uses real names anymore. Real names are too soft. Too easy to scar. Too easy to burn.

    Her girlfriend goes by something harder now—something secret—something with edges. Something that breaks you open when you touch it and not the other way around. Angel writes that name in notebook margins, folds it into receipts and the empty packs of cigarettes. It keeps the shadows orderly.

    They have new coats. Army surplus green. Warm enough to forget what month it is.

    This is Christmas, apparently. The calendar doesn’t mean much anymore. Days run together, blur like spilled ink. One long gray smear of hunger and cold. Sometimes she sings. Sometimes they eat. Sometimes they make love.

    Sometimes they make money. They don’t talk about how.

    In her bag: two shirts, torn jeans, pens, pencils, ten notebooks full of black. This is survival. This is art. This is what’s left when the world stops remembering you.

    Angel sings when she’s happy. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does it almost sounds like light breaking through.

    It doesn’t last.

    This is Christmas, apparently.

    Tomorrow will be, too.

    BETTY STANTON (she/her) is a Pushcart-nominated writer who lives and works in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She received her MFA from The University of Texas at El Paso and holds a doctorate in educational leadership. She is currently on the editorial board of Ivo Review.

    Featured image by Lawrence Aritao, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “The Lilacs Even the Purple Ones” by David Guiotto

    “The Lilacs Even the Purple Ones” by David Guiotto

    Note the inherent lyrical tension of David Guiotto’s flash fiction, “The Lilacs Even the Purple Ones”: the stream-of-consciousness effect created not only by lush poetic language but also by the omission of the comma. In the third paragraph, readers will sense a tightening of the line as the unnamed woman leans into her internal resolve, only for the sentence structure to start to unfurl again into a fresh if uncertain world of impending possibilities.  —Court Harler

    The lilacs even the purple ones were fading and she thought that was a bad sign. But then as they followed the street down the hill and came to the old road that curved under the locust trees their white clinging flowers smelled just like he’d said once they smelled vanilla like the cookies his mom would bake dragging the raw fragrant clusters through batter and baking them in the oven a ragged oily sumptuous cookie even though they weren’t acacia trees of the Veneto but close and oddly wonderful like an old family memory and that was a good sign. She took his hand as they walked.

    He squeezed her hand back and watched the trees and had no idea what she was about to tell him or ask him and her decision frightened her like when how long someone could go on being ignorantly happy while the death of a loved one went unknown. That was an exaggeration of course and she released his hand and grazed his forearm as he lead them across to the sidewalk just as a couple teenage girls loped by on bicycles. It was a good town she had to admit, his hometown that he loved with its river and pine ridges and old pals at every corner it seemed slapping him on the back inviting them to dinner sparking up stories about their college days or high school days hell even grade school days she heard no end to the heroics; a pleasant city even if the art scene wasn’t exactly the Mission but she’d grown weary of the big city and ready to like Boise leafy and parks and a safe place to raise their daughter and they’d gotten lucky to buy a house right after the crash my goodness what houses cost now.

    They’d almost left then, she remembered. After three years a little spitefully after not finding a house he’d parted for Sonoma to work a winery, then come back a couple weeks to see them and on the second day she’d spotted the listing, a mid-century in the lower foothills needing work but just the place they could afford and by that very afternoon the owner, the son of the old gal who’d raised her family there but was lying in hospice, Dolores was her name, he accepted their offer like it was a miracle even to him to sell the home to a working family like his and not the two lowly investors who’d tried to lowball him a week earlier. She knew right then they weren’t returning to California. Moving into that handsome house in need of new floors and plumbing but windows to feast your eyes on the seasons in the big trees of the neighborhood. Knew right then her life and their life was to take a new course and returning to SF or Sonoma wouldn’t be in the cards for years or more until a morning like today, when she opened the letter announcing her grad school acceptance two states over in Colorado, and later she suggested they walk down to Hyde Park for an early dinner just the two of them while their girl slept at her besty’s, and the locust blossoms like white grapes in the rusty branches and her hand touching just inside his shirt his warm skin and unsuspecting gate as he quoted Williams on the anarchy of the poor delighting him, and she bolstered her courage for what she’d have to tell him, or ask him. But tell him it would be. 

    DAVID GUIOTTO is the author of the geographic poetry collections Sawtooth Country (Limberlost Press) and Holocene Trail Guide to the Boise Front (Wolf Peach Press). His prose has appeared in The Limberlost Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, CyclingTips, 3 Syllables, The Cabin, and Street Mag.

    Featured image by Liana S, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Self/Other” by Gargi Mehra

    “Self/Other” by Gargi Mehra

    In “Self/Other,” Gargi Mehra’s self-conscious and self-reflexive mother-narrator spies herself in a fellow soccer mom. She compares and contrasts, converses and reminisces, though eventually decides, “But our miens are the only factors in common.” What may be deemed an everyday exchange soon develops, through carefully chosen and depicted detail, into a glimpse of contemporary feminism, into a peek at the conflicted woman within.  —Court Harler

    At the football ground I run into my younger self – the one that bounces while she walks, and perhaps gyms while she sleeps. She’s leaner than I’d ever been, her calves smooth, biceps flexed, arms buffed, skin de-spotted, eyes fiery, chin firm, lips curled. She’s definitely not the early-twenties version of me that’s bitter and broken and teary-eyed and forever scouring the horizon for the male pillar that will bear the weight of her sculpted shoulder.

    We trade names, birthdates (but not years), family trees (but not mental disorders that may have passed down), and even veer into dating histories. But our miens are the only factors in common. I struggle to scrape out the little details – it’s like poking at the grooves between my premolars, hunting down that elusive morsel just to find something, anything, that we share.

    Then it turns out that even our mothers aren’t the same. She says her mom flatlined even before their wedding – only then do I look past those cheekbones that pierce the air, and glimpse the resolve etched into pimple scars just like mine.

    Our little girls trot up to meet us (look at us – aren’t we progressive by getting our daughters to football and not the usual dance-craft-cooking-painting kind of classes?), hers bereft of shin guards, hair tucked into a tight bun, while my little czarina has fixed a tiny pink bow to the scrunchie of her ponytail.

    The smartphone rings and other-me toddles off to bark into its electronic butt, the sunlight bouncing off her hair, feet springing off the turf, while I scour the landscape for a woman that misses perfection but mirrors me.

    GARGI MEHRA is a writer, a computer engineer, and a mother. She plays the piano, smashes her lessons on Duolingo, and thrives on word games including crosswords, Scrabble, and of course, Wordle. She lives with her husband and two children in Pune, India.

    Featured image by Alberto Frías, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Ladies Prefer Blonds: Fragments of an Undoing” by Ali McKenzie-Murdoch

    “Ladies Prefer Blonds: Fragments of an Undoing” by Ali McKenzie-Murdoch

    “Ladies Prefer Blonds: Fragments of an Undoing” by Ali McKenzie-Murdoch is a prose poem that fixates on one deceptive word: rubio, which means blond but with bloodred roots. But it’s also a flash fiction that tells the story of a woman enmeshed in an obsessive love: “Red says danger.” Readers must parse blond from blood, light from dark.  —Court Harler

    Rubio, they call him. It makes her skin burn. Clio mouths it like a secret, as if saying it will bleach her tongue. Golden, honey, caramel, strawberry. Blond as seduction, as light, as warmth.

    Rubio comes from rubeus, red—not golden. Bloody. Not the chill flaxen tresses of northern fairy tales, but the burn of the south, the sun, his gaze.

    In German fairy tales, gold is the reward. The endless braid. Escape, spun from strands.

    Real or from a bottle?

    In Renaissance Venice, women bleached their hair with horse urine and lemon juice, lying on sun-soaked roofs. Blonde, they believed, was closer to the divine. The sting, the smell, the heat.

    The first boy Clio ever kissed had hair tousled with salt and sand. She remembers his cool blue sun-cream scent but forgets his name.

    Blond is not a colour. It’s an obsession.

    Toria once told her, “You like blonds because you think they’ll be softer.”

    Later, Clio will learn that blondness cuts.

    When did she start seeing only fair-haired men in every room? Not the albinos—all sunburnt necks and white lashes—but sand-coloured men, sculpted from the beach. The ones who fall between the dark and the light.

    She thinks she’s chasing illumination. Or is she chasing erasure?

    Ru-bi-o. Almost Rubicon. The river Caesar crossed—a point of no return.

    He calls her morena. Dark. Sometimes it feels like a compliment. Sometimes it presses against her skin.

    In Rome, ruber meant red like rust, wine, wounds. The raw underside of things.

    His comrades call out Rubio across the parade yard, across the beach, their voices laced with soft mockery. His hair clipped close, but not sharp. More like a dull-edged sword.

    Blondness is recessive. Like power, it must be fed.

    Clio kept her childhood hair in a box, wrapped in tissue paper. Her mother burned it when she turned twelve, leaving the room smelling like melted sugar and loss.

    She once wrote his name in lipstick on her inner thigh. Not a blond mark, but rubeus. A red closer to violence than romance.

    The light in Ceuta bores into Clio, hard and brilliant as peroxide.

    Sometimes she catches herself staring at the backs of fair-haired men in cafés, in airports. Not desire, but recognition of blanched hope.

    In Marrakesh, she saw girls selling blonde hair extensions. Gold packaged in plastic. Dreams plastered over darker scalps.

    With age, his hair has darkened—like bruised fruit, like lead white in an old painting. Blackening.

    Later, she will see his name as a warning. Rubio. Rubious.

    Red says stop.

    Red says danger.

    Red spills when skin breaks.

    In the end, it won’t be his blondness that undoes her, but his distance.

    Ash. Platinum. Dishwater.

    These are the shades Clio will paint herself in shame.

    Naming the lightness won’t keep him from slipping into shadow.

    To know him will leave her marked with a darker hue.

    She thought she was chasing light.

    Now she knows it was only heat.

    And heat leaves ash.

    ALI McKENZIE-MURDOCH’s work appears in X-R-A-Y, Fractured, Your Impossible Voice, Litro, Bending Genres, and more. Her work was shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award 2025. She’s working on a novella-in-flash about liminal spaces—theatre stages, no-man’s-land, the foreshore—places where boundaries blur.

    Featured image by Paolo Gregotti, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “The Day It Rained Stone” by Kathryn Kulpa

    “The Day It Rained Stone” by Kathryn Kulpa

    In her newest flash fiction, “The Day It Rained Stone,” Kathryn Kulpa entirely reinvents the contemporary genre of the coffee-shop story. In such a story, usually set in a diner or eatery, readers are gently treated to a light narrative, a humorous or illustrative slice-of-life moment. Instead, Kulpa stuns the reader with the horror of the mines and the generational echoes of grief. The result is a vivid but weighty story that honors the dead and counts the blessings of the living.  —Court Harler

    Every day when I go in to work to pull espresso shots I see the picture on the wall at Tunnel House Coffee, men with pickaxes and miner’s caps. Men who built the tunnel. Great-Grandpa Chuck was one of those men. Charles Henry Walker was the name on his tombstone, d. 1934, but the old pictures in Grandma’s album have “Pop” or “Chuck” on them, in liquid brown ink, in old-time cursive writing. The men were up by dawn. Out on the mountain before the sky did more than pink the edge of the horizon. Great-Grandma packed his lunch, never fewer than two sandwiches in that heavy steel lunchbox, two hard-boiled eggs, salt and pepper wrapped in a twist of waxed paper, thick scones split with a thread, then sealed back together with a smear of honey butter, the way Grandma still fixes them. Wives, sometimes kids too, waving goodbye as their men disappeared into the mountain, into caverns of stone that grew bigger each week.

    Every day, the blasting. Whistle blowing, once for caution, twice for all clear. Vibrations that went on so long you heard them even in stillness, your teeth rattling, fingers tapping out syncopated rhythm as you trailed off to sleep. Everybody knew fine china wasn’t safe on shelves. Everybody knew, when the men were in the tunnels, glasses would dance, lights would flicker, clean clothes would wear a topcoat of powder, like a girl going out for the evening.

    The Dark Day was the one everyone remembered, even Grandma, and she wasn’t more than three. She says her bones remember. Still won’t drive through a tunnel, still won’t ride an elevator. Like my mother, with her fear of tight spaces. Like my nightmares of being buried alive. That day the blast rumbled on, too loud, too long. The day they blew the whistle three sharp shrieks, again and again. SOS. SOS. Dogs howled along, tails tucked low. The day of long night, they called it, as if the sun never rose, blocked by the haze of stone dust in the air. Ambulance horns, arOOga, arOOga, and bucket brigades for when fire hoses no longer reached, but it wasn’t smoke that blacked the sky, only stone. Only mountains of stone, blasted, crushed, turning a tunnel into a tomb, sealed forever, so that all they buried of Great-Grandpa Chuck was the wedding band he wouldn’t wear into the mountain, lest the initials on it get too dust-choked to read. That ring lay, gold under earth, and not far off Great-Grandpa lay, with two hundred other men, bone under stone, and when the old folks ride that tunnel they still take off their hats, still bend their heads and whisper a quiet blessing to the dead we all live with.

    KATHRYN KULPA is the author of A Map of Lost Places (Gold Line Press) and For Every Tower, A Princess (Porkbelly Press). She was a 2025 Writer in Residence at Linden Place in Bristol, Rhode Island, and has stories in BULL, Flash Frog, Ghost Parachute, matchbook, and Your Impossible Voice.

    Featured image by Nick Osipov, courtesy of Unsplash.