Flash the Court

Tag: Imagery

  • “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.

  • “Beth” by Shell St. James

    “Beth” by Shell St. James

    “Beth” by Shell St. James could be a contemporary, albeit chaste, roommate romance, but the narrator’s slightly elevated tone suggests otherwise for this flash fiction. In four dramatic scenes artfully condensed to their very essence, St. James utilizes poignant detail and evocative imagery to depict an indelible setting and deliver an unexpected storyline.  —Court Harler

    The first time I saw Beth, she was dragging her luggage through my front door, cursing like a sailor as the suitcase got caught on the threshold.

    “May I help you with that?” My lips twitched as I tried to hide my amusement.

    She pointedly ignored me, a spirit of fierce independence evident in her scowl. Palms up, I backed off and watched her struggle, squashing down my impulse to take the dratted case out of her hands.

    The second time I saw Beth, she was sipping a glass of Merlot, listening to my favorite piece by Chopin, with her eyes closed. I stood in the shadowed corner of the study, quietly observing, as the music inspired her to rise from her chair and dance barefoot across the room. I fell in love with her as the candlelight lit her face, her auburn hair swirling in a fiery cloud, her graceful limbs fluid and expressive, painting the air.

    That night I crept into her bedroom as she slept, unable to resist the temptation to touch her. I gently stroked her cheek, wishing I could confess my feelings.

    Her eyes flew open in alarm, and she bolted upright in a panic.

    Ashamed, I fled the room, retreating to the attic.

    The last time I saw Beth, she was packing her things, intent upon leaving. I broke down and wept, begging her to stay, but she looked right through me. At the door she turned back warily, her fearful eyes scanning the empty front room.

    “Please don’t follow me,” she whispered. “Rest in peace.”

    SHELL ST. JAMES is an author and artist living in an 1895 farmhouse in the foothills of North Carolina. Her short stories have appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies, and podcasts, including Shenandoah Literary Magazine, Sci-Fi Shorts, Night Terrors: Scare Street (Vol. 12), and Creepy Podcast. Read selected stories for free at shellstjames.com.

    Featured image by Peter Herrmann, 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.

  • “Transitions” by Jennifer Braunfels

    “Transitions” by Jennifer Braunfels

    Writers must debate and navigate endless choices. In “Transitions,” a flash creative nonfiction essay by Jennifer Braunfels, the writer has chosen a particular point of view (second person) and a specific structure (a series of transition words) to guide the telling of a painful, powerful story. Ultimately, those craft choices enable the writer to express the inexpressible.  —Court Harler

    Now, I have something to tell you. You may want to sit down. 

    Soon, you’ll be diagnosed with cancer.

    In turn, everything will change.

    For example, instead of taking that school trip to Germany with your son that’s been planned for two years, you’ll begin chemotherapy.

    Yes, the ticket says you’re flying out tomorrow morning.

    But instead, at 3:30 a.m., you’ll drive your son to the transportation center, where he’ll board that plane without you.

    Of course, you’ll put on a brave face on the drive to Portland, telling him how much fun he’ll have. You’ll try to sound upbeat, even though you’re drowning in a storm of grief.

    Finally, you’ll arrive. Park. Help your son unload his suitcase. Ask him if he wants you to go in and help get him settled. He’ll say no, but he means yes. You know this. But because you’re about to break, you hug him. Then leave him.

    Unbeknownst to you, while you’re sobbing on the drive home, he’ll experience his first panic attack. Alone. A stranger will catch his limp body as it slumps to the floor. A detail he won’t share with you for weeks because “you already had enough going on.”

    At home, you’ll unpack your suitcase. Throw fistfuls of clothes around the bedroom in a frenzy, screaming.

    Then comes the first round of chemo.

    Later, with that poison snaking its way through you, you’ll become weak. Your mouth will taste of metal. There’ll be nausea that’s so intense, it’ll be hard to put into words for your husband, who is on the phone with the cancer center explaining your symptoms, because he’s convinced you’re actually dying.

    Sadly, for months, you’ll be bedridden. Not having enough strength to climb the stairs to your bedroom, you’ll take up residence in the office on the first floor. A prison without bars.

    As a result of treatment, you’ll become dependent on others for everything. Rides. Bathing. Cooking. Walking. A dependence you’ll detest.

    Eventually, they’ll cut your boobs off. You’ll awake from anesthesia, feeling like you have a truck parked on your chest. Four times daily, you’ll empty the surgical drain tubes jutting out of you.

    Next comes radiation five days a week for five weeks. Your skin will blister and boil.

    Understandably, you’ll have lows.

    However, there will also be highs.

    For instance, ringing the bell on the last day of chemo. Feeling stubble on your bald scalp. You’ll take a school trip with your son his senior year—this time to Iceland.

    Accordingly, your life will forever be in two segments, like lightning splitting a tall tree down the middle. Everything in two categories: Before cancer. And after.

    But you’re going to be okay. I promise.

    After, you’ll find joy in simple things. Uneventful days. Moonlit nights. Sunlight streaking across a wooden floor in the afternoon.

    Until then, know that I’ll be with you the entire time. I’ve got you.

    JENNIFER BRAUNFELS lives in Maine. Her first novel comes out in the spring of 2026 through Apprentice House Press. Her work has appeared in The Masters Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Stonecoast Review, and various other places. She lives with her husband, children, and unruly dog, Sissy.

    Featured image by Claudio Schwarz, 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.

  • “Re-Womb” by Rebecca Evans

    “Re-Womb” by Rebecca Evans

    “Re-Womb” by Rebecca Evans is a speculative creative nonfiction essay that redefines the form. Evans uses the technique of “perhapsing” to imagine a new integrative reality as the narrator becomes sensuously attuned within the wider world, “in celebration of / another / and another / and another.” Marvelously lyrical and metaphorical, “Re-Womb” is a study of language, a study of self.  —Court Harler

    If I rebirthed, I’d return as an orca and dance with my pod—us three—female, calf, escort. Perhaps I’d be the female, stifle humankind in the Strait of Gibraltar, remind man of his place, his fragile femur and filament and, remind him—every. single. man.—I am royalty.

    Or perhaps I re-womb, tunnel myself within and without. The darkness but a blanket—a blanket fort, a blanket of snow, an electric blanket. Me, cocooned and healing. Here, I snip stitches and strip screws. Here, I tenderly pull thread and metal. Here, my surgical reparation of heart and bone. I allow my body to finish her job. Oh! how she knows. Knows more than me.

    I hope when I die, I leave an imprint, not just an impression. Not the pressure-outline left on my bed or embossed into another. No. A signature of my stories, my songs, impressed beneath the skin of those who damaged me most. My words flaming through that cage, the place they held me

    hostage.

    Snow melts.

    A blanket returns

    to fiber.

    One flicker extinguishes darkness. Think, Small candle that someone,

    somewhere lights in memory of

    or in hope for

    or in celebration of

    another

    and another

    and another.

    Maybe I do not return as a female orca. Even while they sleep, they guard. Vertical “resting” buoyanced by water.

    I wonder, Does a mother ever rest?

    Perhaps I un-womb, return as words—a language still unspoken. One that you feel before you note the shape of it leaving your lips. Before your tongue presses to the back of your teeth.  Like song. Like whale humming. Like vibration massaging your weary bones.

    Think, Cello against your chest.

    Think, Babe turning in your womb-waters.

    Think, Hummingbird in your heart.

    You no longer feel the boundary—where you end and all else begins. Oh! how we have forgotten. We are instruments and whales and wings. Me, as language, will swoop through hearts like storm and ocean.

    Think, Dervish.

    Think. Cliff diving.

    Think…

    anything that sets you free,

    brings you warmth,

    reminds you

    that you, too, are all of these.

    REBECCA EVANS writes the difficult, the heart-full, the guidebooks for survivors. Her work includes a full-length poetry collection, Tangled by Blood; a collection-length poem, Safe Handling; and a forthcoming collection of flash essays, AfterBurn. Her work offers social commentary on surviving sexual assault by combining visual art, literary craft, and empowerment coaching.

    Featured image by Sixteen Miles Out, 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.

  • “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.