Flash the Court

Tag: Imagery

  • “To a Flame” by Christie Chapman

    “To a Flame” by Christie Chapman

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Featured image by Max Kleinen, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Balance Exercises” by Brian McNely

    “Balance Exercises” by Brian McNely

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    In a week, she’ll be ten.

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

    Featured image by Andréas BRUN, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “The Bus” by Callin Naddy

    “The Bus” by Callin Naddy

    “The Bus” by Callin Naddy is a horror story, a love story, a ghost story. What the second-person narrator “can’t remember” will haunt the reader as well. Note the crafted use of poetic devices: the rhythm of repetition, the bold and impulsive imagery, the blend of interiority and exteriority. This flash fiction provokes a physical journey into the psychological unknown.  —Court Harler

    The coins jangle into the farebox, and you wipe a sweating palm down your pantleg. Your hands draw back into the cavern of your pockets, gaze dropped low, fidgeting the plastic cap of a bottle, as you slink to the next closest seat.

    It takes two stops for the cap to loosen, for your fingers to stutter inside the red-stained plastic casing, for your weeping skin to exhale against the pills.

    The bus windows dye the city the same red as your palms. Or the pills. One by one, they slip onto your tongue, and the hair of your spine erupts. They taste of his pebbled flesh, and that’s fine. He’s still yours, isn’t he?

    Only, you can’t remember. You know he told you he couldn’t do it anymore, over the sweat of your stained bedsheet, and you said he’d threatened that before. He said, “This time, I mean it,” and watched you paint three more pills across your tongue.

    You blink, and the memory bifurcates. He peers like Jesus from the bus’s crimson-stained glass, a concerned tilt to his mouth as he gazes down on you, then the bottle. It is not mercy; this is the gaunt skeleton of his need to help, full-bodied and breathing, his fingers kneading the soft skin of your collarbone then digging deeper until—

    You swallow the pills before his memory taints them. They scavenge your throat, your esophagus, the turmoil of your stomach until you can’t remember what you, communal, did. You can’t remember what you, singular, did. You conjured the severed vein of his carotid across your eyelids each time he vanished the pills, like you might not notice their gaping wound, and now your gaze ekes past the other version of him in the window, neck seeping as he stares past you, laid bare and quivering beneath your body.

    The bus screeches to a halt, and you slam against the seatback. The knife struggles through his neck.

    Another commuter offers their hand. You do not immediately recognize the danger, but then the knife yanks again—into you—and the dual image in the window splatters. His cruor glistens between you both.

    You freeze, wait for them to notice: Jesus gazes down at you, only he is not Jesus any longer. You always knew he was not, and now his crucified blood lies hot on your palms. His empty promise breaks from your lips.

    Another pill slips through the cracks. The bottle is almost empty again, and finally, the blood slivers away—

    you feel it still.

    You cannot remember which is true.

    CALLIN NADDY writes fantasy novels and short stories. Her short stories have been published in Belladonna’s Garden and pinky. Her nonfiction has appeared in the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, EDDA, and Co.Milesplit. Find her online @callinnaddy.

    Featured image by Aleksandr Popov, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “White” by Barbara Krasner

    “White” by Barbara Krasner

    In “White,” an enigmatic microfiction by Barbara Krasner, the mystery of the artwork mirrors the mystery of the narrative. Who is the mystery man, and why does he do what he does? The resolution of the story opens like a green blossom, like a paint splatter come alive.  —Court Harler

    There’s white and then there’s white. I’m standing before Malevich’s White on White, the faint square inside a fainter one, whiteness studying itself. People call it a polar bear eating marshmallows in a blizzard. I think of the Benjamin Moore fan deck, hundreds of whites: Opulence, Alabaster, Atrium, Cotton, Whisper, Moonlight. Then a man bursts into the gallery shouting Down with white supremacy! Guards run after him. He throws a bucket of green paint. The square blooms into drips, a sudden Pollock. Paint streaks the wall, catching the light. The guards pin him down. A docent says, almost kindly, He meant Suprematism. The room goes still except for the slow descent of green. The white, of course, always meant something.

    BARBARA KRASNER holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has appeared in more than seventy literary journals, earning her multiple Best American Short Stories, Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and Pushcart Prize nominations. She lives and teaches in New Jersey.

    Featured image by Pawel Czerwinski, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “The river rolls over” by David Ward

    “The river rolls over” by David Ward

    In his haibun titled “The river rolls over,” David Ward presents nature as a dreamer: “…the river rolled over in its green June sleep and began to dream.” While nature is the traditional topic of the haibun and haiku, Ward also emphasizes a speculative sense of intertextuality between nature and the speaker. The speaker’s name, a word “revealed,” becomes a catalyst for “regard” in “weird water.”  —Court Harler

    The teenager fishing on shore recognized me just as he reeled in a bluegill and, in calling out (my boy once put a bicycle together with him) to me, revealed my name to the fish who, being too small and polluted to eat, he released. The fish carried my name to the river and the river rolled over in its green June sleep and began to dream.

    In the dream, the river flowed backwards, from Lake Erie inland. This was mightily uncomfortable for the river, who, in the dream, began to take on a whole new character, flowing west with the burden of new, weird water, and when my name dropped hookish from the fish’s lips and settled into the riverbed there came, from the depths of that dream, a moment of regard—

    in my canoe, all the eyes

    of duckweed bedeck

    the oars, the gunwale, my shoe—

    DAVID WARD is a lecturer at the University of Michigan, where he has taught writing in a variety of genres for the last fifteen years. He has had poetry published in Black Warrior Review and is a co-founding editor of the poetry and craft journal Public School Poetry.

    Featured image by Michael Niessl, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Bobcat Trail” by Swetha Amit

    “Bobcat Trail” by Swetha Amit

    In “Bobcat Trail” by Swetha Amit, readers meet two characters in the process of radical change. The young narrator is about to leave for college, while the narrator’s unhappy mother begins a very different type of personal transformation. Amit imbues this speculative fiction with precise, unforgettable imagery and impeccable subtext.  —Court Harler

    After Dad abandoned us for another woman, Ma felt more comfortable in the garden than in the house. Beneath the starless sky, on the damp earth, nestled between the rustling bushes and the oleander tree. I would sometimes see her crouching. Her knees close to her chest, her brown eyes tracking the movements of a finch or a squirrel with uncanny stillness. One afternoon, the summer before I left for college, I found her almost motionless near the oleander tree. Her silhouette seemed to shimmer in the heat. Her floral-patterned sundress appeared to melt in the dazzling sunlight. Her soft velvet hands were now elongated and curved into claws that clutched the murky brown mud. A short bobbed tail twitched and brushed against her ankles.

    “Ma?” I gasped.

    She slowly turned her head to look at me. Her warm brown eyes were now wild, with golden irises and vertically slit pupils. The bridge of her nose protruded, and long whiskers grew from it. Her face was sharpened and framed by tufted ears. A low guttural chuff escaped her throat instead of the human words that included my name and insults hurled at Dad over the phone. Words that pierced my gut and made me retreat into the solitude of books and art. For a moment, we held eye contact. There was no fear or regret in those eyes—just a cold, steely look.

    A squirrel emerged from the bushes looking for fruit. With a quick leap, she gave chase. I watched her move along the fence with a grace that Ma’s sluggish body had forgotten when she’d feast on Oreo cookies relentlessly or wipe out tubs of ice cream, weeks after Dad left. I watched her now partly in awe, partly anxious, wondering if fatigue would catch up with her aging body and she’d be found breathless, clutching her chest. Like the time she attempted a power yoga session while watching a video, only to find herself panting on the floor. I watched her and the squirrel disappear into the muddy trails behind our house. I waited until sweat trickled down my forehead. Until my throat became parched, and I forced myself to get a glass of ice water from the kitchen table. I came out. Ma was still not back. I waited until the sky turned pink to bruised purple, then a hollow black. The ice in my glass melted. I stood outside for a long time, listening to the sounds of the crickets chirping, the distant honking of passing cars, and an owl hooting. 

    A rustling in the bushes startled me.

    “Ma,” I called.

    I squinted to see two golden blazing spots. They were just fireflies.

    I waited all night under the starless sky, inhaling the scent of the mud, for Ma to emerge from the trails, panting. I held my glass of half-full water tightly.

    SWETHA AMIT is an MFA graduate from the University of San Francisco. She is the author of a memoir, A Turbulent Mind, and three chapbooks. Her words appear in HAD, Bending Genres, Ghost Parachute, Gone Lawn, cream city review, and others.

    Featured image by Giorgio Trovato, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Still Drowning” by Dawn Tasaka Steffler

    “Still Drowning” by Dawn Tasaka Steffler

    In “Still Drowning,” Dawn Tasaka Steffler uses the repetitious form of the pantoum to allow the poem’s protagonist to return, again and again, to her grief and regret. Variations of designated lines permit the devastating details of past events to “bleed” into the woman’s present moment. The poem focuses on an impossible loss—one impossible to remember, one impossible to forget.  —Court Harler

    As part of her yearly physical, the doctor orders a full blood panel.
    That night she is thirsty but she’s fasting, she can’t have food or water.
    There used to be a swimming pool in the backyard but she filled it in with dirt
    years ago, after her friend’s toddler son fell in and drowned.

    She is thirsty but she’s fasting, she can’t have even a sip of water.
    Before going to bed, she brushes and flosses her teeth so hard they bleed.
    She often dreams about her friend’s son who fell in her pool and drowned.
    After which her friend moved away; they aren’t friends anymore.

    Before going to bed, she brushes and flosses her teeth so hard they bleed.
    Clean clean clean, she thinks, imagining the bright red arteries in her body.
    She understands why her friend moved away, why they aren’t friends anymore.
    She, not her friend, had found the boy, eyes open, at the bottom of the pool.

    Clean clean clean, she thinks and closes her eyes, imagines bright red blood.
    She sees hands and hair floating up like a kelp forest. At least
    she was the one who dove in, sparing her friend those eyes, open but unseeing.
    Meanwhile, her own son sleeps in a dorm room so very far away.

    Years ago, she turned hands and hair floating up like a ghostly kelp forest
    into a garden of flowers in a swimming pool full of dirt.
    As flowers drowse, because the sun is so very far away, she decides,
    if tomorrow her doctor orders her to give away all the blood in her body, she will.

    DAWN TASAKA STEFFLER had a highly commended story in the October 2025 Bath Flash Fiction Award and her most recent stories appear in Fractured Lit, New World Writing Quarterly, and Gooseberry Pie.

    Featured image by CHRSNDRSN, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Capsule” by Adele Gallogly

    “Capsule” by Adele Gallogly

    “Capsule” by Adele Gallogly is a vividly depicted microfiction about mothers and daughters: their coded conversations, their unspoken understandings. Set at a local carnival, Gallogly activates the senses with “pink popcorn,” “sunset clouds,” and “seawater upset by boats.” Above it all hovers the “refused” Ferris wheel, and one significant secret.  —Court Harler

    You refused the Ferris wheel twice that day with teenage politeness, almost poise. I first asked while sucking on pink popcorn, a snack you’d devour for weeks afterwards. I’m good, Mom, thanks. After we conquered another ladies’ room wait, I offered to pay for the express ride line. Still good, thank you though.

    I didn’t get it. While young, I loved those rising seat pods in the sky, that gift of flight without free fall, those views huge and safe. Your dad and I didn’t always kiss up there; sometimes I was content to watch sunset clouds the colours of our tongues. He didn’t tease me with unwanted rocking, like most boys did (yours, too?).

    We split a sauceless corn dog. I worried about my own possible nausea, a souring gut complaining only to me. You didn’t admit you’d grown blisters in one carnival hour of wrong shoes. Near the boardwalk, I laughed at painted spaniels in red lace bonnets. You strode ahead, towards seawater upset by boats. The familiar rims of your shoulders seemed steady and strong as you moved across the stained wood. Already you were lifting your secret news into the future, my freighted daughter.

    I caught up enough to see your expression, indescribable then. Now I know. You looked dutiful and worn, like the host of a suddenly sparse party, like some mother up late with a sinkful of plates, brushing off crumbled food with no good memory of making or desiring it.

    “Capsule” was highly commended in the 2025 Bridport Prize Flash Fiction Award and first appeared in their winners’ print anthology.

    ADELE GALLOGLY is a nonprofit writer/editor and an emerging flash fiction writer living in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Her stories have appeared in the Bridport Prize 2025 Anthology, FlashFlood, Six Sentences, 50-Word Stories, Paragraph Planet, and elsewhere. Find her on Bluesky and Instagram @AdeleGallogly.

    Featured image by Devon Rogers, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Rush Hour Ghost” by Fred Muratori

    “Rush Hour Ghost” by Fred Muratori

    In the microfiction “Rush Hour Ghost” by Fred Muratori, the occasion for the telling is a too-long traffic light, or possibly a minor case of road rage. The narrator is full of salt and snark, not to mention doom and gloom, but read on to see how the story pivots upon a central object. Here, dark daydreams reveal the emotional core, the story beneath the story.  —Court Harler

    Daydreaming at the traffic light. It’s five p.m., the sun is out, and people in their cars appear to be wearing masks: Ms. Clown, Mr. Werewolf, the Piglet Twins. The light is red and reminds me I could die at any time, while I’m jogging next Sunday or even when this light changes, as a mother of three on her way to fetch a son from karate class speeds through the intersection in an SUV and dislocates my skull from my spinal column. The light is still red and there’s no SUV in sight but already I’m planning how I might haunt my careless murderer, making her garage door rise and fall at midnight, appearing as the Guilt Channel on her cable TV, leaving clues to her husband’s infidelity. My hands, as recommended in Driver’s Ed, assume the ten and two o’clock positions on the wheel. I notice the absence of my wedding ring, which I haven’t worn in years. It’s at home in a wooden box among tie clips and inherited cuff links. I’ll wear that ring when I’m dead and haunting my assassin. Semitransparent, luminous, I’ll hover above the terrified woman and her husband in their master bedroom. I’ll moan and wail, hum a grim pop tune from the early ’80s. “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell. They’ll see the wedding ring and assume I’m dearly missed, my absence an abscess in another person’s heart, and their grief will feed my own. Well finally: the light’s turned. It’s a beautiful day of blue and green and golden glare off the neat white houses, the first day of no one’s idea of forever.

    FRED MURATORI has published three full-length poetry collections. His poems and nanofiction have appeared in The Iowa Review, Poetry Magazine, Denver Quarterly, Vinyl, Unbroken, Barrow Street, The Best American Poetry, and others. His poetry reviews appear in The Manhattan Review, American Book Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Ithaca, New York.

    Featured image by Frenjamin Benklin, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Drop by Drop” by Melissa Llanes Brownlee

    “Drop by Drop” by Melissa Llanes Brownlee

    In “Drop by Drop,” the new lyrical microfiction by Melissa Llanes Brownlee, tension creates narrative structure. Consider the “compound bows” and the “cloud” of the cousins’ anger. Also consider the way commas demand moments of pause, akin to traditional poetic lineation. Like the narrator, the reader is both pushed and pulled through the piece.  —Court Harler

    Uncle takes me and the cousins hunting, our compound bows carried on our backs, uncle’s gun, holstered, for emergencies. A family of boar were heard rooting around up the mountain, so we had parked on the highway and followed the shape of uncle through the tall grass and trees. The cousins brag about getting a boar, their picture taken, the tusks saved for a necklace. I keep quiet, the borrowed bow, a weight I didn’t want. I hear a nip, a bark, and stop. Uncle is motionless, his head pitched to the side. He looks at me, pulls me with a wave. I drag myself to him, pulling the bow from my back, getting an arrow to notch. Uncle points through the trees and I see them, a mother and two babies, bristles dark, snouts edging around trees. Uncle nods at me. I hear my cousins whispering, their anger, a cloud around me. I notch my arrow, remembering uncle’s instructions, breathe, line up my sight, aim for the ear, pull, seeing his knife pointing to the soft bits of the pig at my oldest cousin’s wedding, the best places to aim. I let fly, my shoulder hurting from the tension, and my arrow pierces the mother’s side, missing the ear, missing the spine, and there is a scream, and I shiver. My uncle sighs, pulling out his gun, the shot echoes the boar’s charge in reply and all I see is the blood lit on trampled ground.

    MELISSA LLANES BROWNLEE (she/her), a native Hawaiian writer living in Japan, has work published and forthcoming in Moon City Review and Prairie Schooner. Read Hard Skin (2022), Kahi and Lua (2022), and Bitter over Sweet (2025) from Santa Fe Writers Project. She tweets @lumchanmfa and talks story at melissallanesbrownlee.com.

    Featured image by Ty Feague, courtesy of Unsplash.