Flash the Court

Tag: Imagery

  • “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.

  • “Roll Call” by Barbara Krasner

    “Roll Call” by Barbara Krasner

    “Roll Call” by Barbara Krasner is a an ekphrastic flash fiction that reimagines agency and justice in a World War II-era Japanese American internment camp. With haunting imagery and fragmented language, Krasner captures the moment depicted in Hibi’s 1945 painting: the fear, the intimacy, the freezing frostbite, and finally, hopefully, the freedom restored.  —Court Harler

    After Coyotes Came Out of the Desert by Matsusaburo George Hibi (US, b. Japan), 1945

    William had just been following orders. Let the coyotes out of the pen, his commandant had demanded. Let them roam around the barracks. Let them howl. Frighten the inmates. So when roll call came, no one would leave, giving the commandant the excuse to punish them. As if standing in several feet of snow, feeling the pricking sensation of pins and needles at the onset of frostbite, wasn’t punishment enough for the prisoners.

    The signal came to sound roll call. No shuffling feet. No slamming doors. No talking. Except for one man, who took his place in the roll call. Alone. Bare feet.

    The coyotes gathered around him. He put out his arm, folded down his middle and ring fingers. Pointed the index and pinky at the animals. They ceased howling and approached him as if they were Labradors. He bent down and petted them, mumbling something in his native language, nothing that William could understand. One coyote licked the man’s face.

    The commandant strode into the square, barking orders at William and the man. The man stood erect, pointed at the commandant, resplendent in his uniform adorned with many medals. The man shouted a single word. The coyotes ran at the commandant. William turned away at first. Then he took off his own coat, draped it over the man’s shoulders, and escorted him back to his barracks. The sentinels could clean up the mess.

    BARBARA KRASNER is the author of three poetry chapbooks, including an ekphrastic collection, Poems of the Winter Palace (Bottlecap Press, 2025); as well as the full-length ekphrastic poetry collection, The Night Watch (Kelsay Books, 2025). Her work has also been featured in more than seventy literary journals. She lives and teaches in New Jersey.

    Featured image by Ricardo Gomez Angel, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Average French Bread with Two Eggs on the Plate without the Plate, on Horseback, Attempting to Sodomize a Crumb of Portuguese Bread” by Mikki Aronoff

    “Average French Bread with Two Eggs on the Plate without the Plate, on Horseback, Attempting to Sodomize a Crumb of Portuguese Bread” by Mikki Aronoff

    Mikki Aronoff’s new ekphrastic flash fiction, “Average French Bread with Two Eggs on the Plate without the Plate, on Horseback, Attempting to Sodomize a Crumb of Portuguese Bread,” is inspired by a painting of the same name. Herein, the salty house servant takes the sulky painter to task—for wasting her good food, for wasting her precious time—pitting the real against the surreal, resulting in the whimsical and the comical.  —Court Harler

    After a painting of that name by Salvador Dalí, 1932

    “That’s no crumb,” grumbles the artist’s servant. “The crust alone on that end piece would feed my family of seven for a week, and we’d throw the heel to the dog.” Juana’s pointing to where her patrón is stippling his brush, touching up the business end of a loaf of French bread that’s poking at the cut end of a loaf of Portuguese bread—the French bread erect, poised for pleasure, the Portuguese bracing for pain. Juana wipes her hands on her apron and shakes her head. The artist bows his, sets down his brush. He forgets that not everyone is rich, that loaves may need stretching.

    He has also forgotten how pleasurable dining once was. These days, he’s too distracted thinking about his wife’s lovers to remember to eat. When Juana forces the issue, shoving food under his nose, he plays like a child with what she puts on the table. Manchego dances with Cabrales. Bread has its way with bread. Napkins shield the loaves’ private parts, then are whipped off in a frenzied culinary tease. The artist stabs his sunny-side up eggs, smirking as he does so, waves his hands over double yolks like a priest, christening them with names like Wifey and Mother.

    “Hapless,” sighs Juana, as she doffs her Cordobés felt hat, passed down from her father, a dusty bent feather tucked in the band. She slings bucket and rags over her arm to waltz down the hall and clean the latrine. “Next time, try fruit!” she shouts over her shoulder, soapy water sloshing all over the tiles.

    MIKKI ARONOFF lives in New Mexico, where she writes tiny stories and advocates for animals. She has stories in Best Microfiction 2024/2025 and Best Small Fictions 2024 and upcoming in Best Small Fictions 2025.

    Featured image by Guillermo Mota, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Widow Training [Field Notes]” by Eileen Toomey

    “Widow Training [Field Notes]” by Eileen Toomey

    “Widow Training [Field Notes]” by Eileen Toomey is a micromemoir that moves and moves— we’re shopping, we’re driving, we’re walking, we’re ferrying—until suddenly, we’re stopped: cold in our tracks, begging ice for a “warm beer.” The joy of movement is lost, now suspended in grief.  —Court Harler

    Saturday morning. We went to Sickles, an urban market in the old Anderson building that reminds me of DeLuca’s in Boston with expensive cherry tomatoes clinging to the vine. But we were in Jersey, with branzino lip to lip, dead eyes appraising us from the fish counter.

    Dropped the car off at the shop. The old Lexus might need a jump here and there, but she’s like driving a couch. Maybe that will be me, my middle softening like nice leather, the same texture of Mother’s body as she aged.

    Who knows how many more miles we will travel? Road trip warriors, we laugh like kids in the car with the music and memories. “Do you remember the Oregon Inn?” one of us will say each time we pass the Cedar Point exits on 80 in Ohio. “Dusted perch and prime rib,” the other one replies.

    Now when I’m writing at our kitchen table, I listen for your breath, the creak of the floorboards as you cross to your dresser. Damn this old house, each room stacked with books and dusty lamps. When I hear the rattle of your pills, I know you are awake.

    We went to Memorial Sloan Kettering outpatient, just for a day. In preliminary tests, they found cancer everywhere—and kept you. Because of COVID, they wouldn’t let me stay. I walked thirty blocks, past piss-stained eating sheds, and took the ferry home instead of getting a ride from Denny.

    Then I did this funny thing that I never do alone, and never during the day: I ordered a beer on the boat. I hoped they had something local like a Cape May, but I settled for a Heineken in a giant can. I hate warm beer, so I asked for ice. The bartender looked at me funny, and I thought, Fuck you, I’m widow training.

    EILEEN TOOMEY’s works have appeared in The Rumpus, Cleaver Magazine, Oyster River Pages, and more. Her poem “Immunotherapy” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Eileen is currently shopping around her memoir, You Were All Average: Tales of a Canaryville Girl.

    Featured image by Peyman Shojaei, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Then Came Funboy” by Sam Berman

    “Then Came Funboy” by Sam Berman

    A little horror of a dream for Halloween is Sam Berman’s “Then Came Funboy.” But it’s not horror, exactly. And it’s not just a dream. Indeed, it’s a love story, of sorts, with no end in sight, much like the endless reverberations of a supposedly safe ship smashing again and again against the indomitable iceberg of history and lore, of breath and myth.  —Court Harler

    A dream I often have.

    Which I had again just last night.

    Is that I am on the iceberg right as the RMS Titanic approaches and becomes brilliant through the low fog. It’s moving slow but also fast. And I jump and wave. I yell. Loudly. I smash my hands together the way babies do when they build things. But. Of course––being a dream and all––the ship stays resolute. Stays coming. Keeps on me. And soon the hull is well over my head. And try as I might—and I do try, as best I dream-can to push the ship back out to a safer part of the Atlantic—my wrists just break. Just snap. Just explode, actually. Against the hull. I yelp. While the children up on the standing deck begin to hang themselves over the railing, showing me pictures on their cellphones of my body, and pictures of some family members I no longer mess with too much, and then they spit on my head, and call me a kike, and shoot Nerf guns with party blood, set on the most extreme power setting, right at me. And there are some lanterns in the dream. And screaming. And everyone’s breath looks like bulls’ breath when there’s screaming. Which is when I wake up, usually. A lot of the time. I wake up right then.

    Yeah.

    And.

    The dream I have the second most.

    My Darling.

    Is that I turn around in the bakery.

    And come back.

    And that I don’t do those, that, the, of course the thing I have already already done.

    SAM BERMAN is a short story writer living in Boise, Idaho.

    Featured image by Art Institute of Chicago, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Tufts” by Miriam Mandel Levi

    “Tufts” by Miriam Mandel Levi

    “Tufts” by Miriam Mandel Levi is a ghost story of a flash fiction. You’ll sense a weird chill, and not quite know why. Maybe it’s the way the author captures the ineffable, or the sublime. Or maybe it’s the way the narrator suffers, so alone. Either way, you’ll feel the season’s fear: solitary rambles, falling leaves, peripheral apparitions.  —Court Harler

    A piece protrudes behind my ear, at my waist, so I adjust my hat, tuck in my shirt. You wouldn’t believe how many times I go to the bathroom to check, and it’s a rare bathroom these days that has a full-length mirror.

    Once, in a conversation with a guy at a work, I noticed a piece jutting from my shoulder. I brushed it off with a toss of my hair as if it were a flake of dandruff. Another time, at a bar with friends, I found a few pieces at my feet, and kicked them out of sight. What was that? someone asked. Straw, I think, I said. Maybe by day the bar is a barn and at night they delete the n. They laughed. It takes so little to throw people off your scent.

    In the past, I worried about my dusty, musty scent. Avoided confined spaces, overdid the perfume. I made my movements small and circumscribed so I wouldn’t crackle. Mercifully and sadly, not a single person has ever noticed or let on that they know. True I hid, but only in order to be found.

    My mother used to admonish, Stay out of the wind, remember a cow could take a chunk out of you, don’t get too close to a fire. Of course I know how sorrily and abruptly it could end for me. But after all these years of concealment, I can’t say I’d miss it: life, or loneliness, I mean.

    Over the years, I have searched for someone like me. Looked for a lightness of step, listened for a rustle. I’ve come across people stuffed with cotton batting, wool, feathers, foam, even ball bearings—all trying to pass themselves off as flesh and blood, as if it were some standard of normalcy.

    Sometimes I imagine tearing off my clothes, grabbing tufts from my head and belly, and tossing them into the air like dry fall leaves. You see! I’d shout at no one, until my voice grew hoarse and my clothes sagged and the wind whipped up the long crisp strands and scattered them.

    MIRIAM MANDEL LEVI is a retired speech-language pathologist turned writer and editor. Her work has appeared most recently in JMWW, Flash Frog, The Forge, Under the Gum Tree, River Teeth, and Bending Genres. She is an editor at Under the Sun: A Journal of Creative Nonfiction.

    Featured image by Nellie Adamyan, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “What It Takes, What It Gives” by Cheryl Pappas

    “What It Takes, What It Gives” by Cheryl Pappas

    “What It Takes, What It Gives” by Cheryl Pappas is a prose poem, an ekphrasis, and a eulogy. Impressions of life; remainders of death. The bold hues and shapes taken from Lee Krasner’s 1971 Palingenesis are reawakened in words: a passing of souls from paint to page.  —Court Harler

    After Lee Krasner, Palingenesis

    My soul is a splendid, manufactured thing,

    creaking cranes and wrecking balls—

    the noise keeps me up at night.

    Hard edges smoothed with berry cream, mixed with hard-earned blood. Generations get rebirthed when bodies from my past crush into molten ash.

    I can smell the talcum powder from here.

    Multitudinous shapes linger on my tongue (how insensate I am depends wholly on pressing tasks at hand): black patent leather shoes, jackets used for blankets during the war, a hypodermic needle, a vinyl record, a candle.

    Holiness is a crowd of color, clanking in greens and pitched pinks, barely contained, but held. I spin out new levels like fans twirling fast back into the bowels of earth.

    I am my brother

    I am my father

    I am my mother

    They are dead.

    I am food

    Let it begin.

    CHERYL PAPPAS is the author of the flash fiction collection The Clarity of Hunger, published by word west press (2021). Her work has appeared in swamp pink, Fractured Lit, Wigleaf, Hayden’s Ferry Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Chattahoochee Review, and elsewhere. She is a 2023 MacDowell Fellow.

    Featured image by Michael Hamments, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Farmed Out” by Katrina Irene Gould

    “Farmed Out” by Katrina Irene Gould

    Ever wonder about the person who grows “your potatoes and greens”? How they spend their days and cold-cold nights? How they rise “earlier even than the crows” to a “black sky” to plant and harvest and plant and harvest in a never-ending cycle of work and work and more hard work? Katrina Irene Gould provides a glimpse of the grower’s life in her new prose poem, “Farmed Out.” What’s “love” got to do with it? the speaker wants to know.  —Court Harler

    Soft-gray dreams give way to a black sky, pinprick stars, a new moon. Long johns, scratchy wool socks, boots she’s learned to upend and shake after that one squishy-mouse time—never again, thankyouverymuch. The iris bulbs in the mudroom fail to cheer her. They wait, as she does, gnarled and dirty, for when the sun will unfurl their impossible, velvety, muzzle-soft petals.

    You’d like to think the hush of the barely-morning still shakes awe into her, but today the barnyard is a frozen sea, her careful steps—she’s awake earlier even than the crows—compelled by habit and obligation. So what if your potatoes and greens weren’t harvested with love most days? Who else do we ask to love their work so much that in the consuming of it, you feel their care? That can be your dream: that in this coal-black morning, a person has risen to make you feel loved.

    KATRINA IRENE GOULD has spent thirty fulfilling years counseling in Portland, Oregon. ​Her writing ​has appeared in Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, The Gilded Weathervane, HerStry, Glacial Hills Review, Mukoli, Literally Stories, and others. Gould examines our knotty experiences in hopes of helping us all to hold our struggles more lightly.

    Featured image by Sonny Mauricio, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “It Was the First Day of Fall When the Sumo Left the Dohyō…” by Mathieu Cailler

    “It Was the First Day of Fall When the Sumo Left the Dohyō…” by Mathieu Cailler

    Fall is a time for favorites: your favorite cozy sweater, your favorite apple, your favorite cat named for your “favorite singer.” As the seasons shift, so too, do you. In this time of transition, read and reflect upon “It Was the First Day of Fall When the Sumo Left the Dohyō…” by Mathieu Cailler, a flash fiction just in time for the autumnal vibe.  —Court Harler

    …and championships and cultural nobility behind. He changed into a Thelonious Monk T-shirt and gray slacks, leaving his mawashi in the changing room at the Gap. He traded in his high-calorie chanko nabe for a crisp Fuji apple at the farmers’ market and downed a glass of buttery chardonnay at the wine bar across town. He abandoned the forceful moves of sumo—yori-kiri, oshi-dashi, uwate-nage—for ballet lessons on pas de bourrée, rond de jambe, and soubresaut. He stopped by a pet store and adopted a cat, which he named Ella, after his favorite singer. He stroked her coat and listened to her purr as he strolled home.

    Maybe the oak tree in his yard had shed some of its leaves. Maybe Ella would like to nest atop them. Maybe he could take pictures of her and post them to Instagram, or maybe instead he’d simply lie down beside her in the soft autumn foliage.

    MATHIEU CAILLER is the author of seven books. His work has appeared in over 150 publications, including Wigleaf, The Saturday Evening Post, and the Los Angeles Times. He is the winner of a Pushcart Prize; a Readers’ Favorite award; and the Paris, Los Angeles, and New England Book Festival prizes.

    Featured image by Aaron Burden, courtesy of Unsplash.