Flash the Court

Tag: Imagery

  • “Five-Star” by Vallie Lynn Watson

    “Five-Star” by Vallie Lynn Watson

    Sometimes it’s difficult to define why a flash piece works so well. It just hits you hard, in the gut. “Five-Star” by Vallie Lynn Watson is one such flash fiction. Maybe it’s the cheek of the narrator, or the cheese as a multilayered metaphor. Either way, this piece will make you smile, and squirm.  —Court Harler

    The hotel is fab, he had said. Not fabulous. Fab. Did I want to go into a room with a guy who kept saying fab? The more he said the word, the unlikelier it all sounded, but then he surrounded the word with other words like champagne, fromage, and salmon.

    So I followed him, tottered down the sloped cobblestone to the shoreline, and then, I saw that he was right. The hotel was fab! An ocean liner carved into the cliffs.

    “I want one of those rooms,” I said, and pointed to the top, balconied floor.

    “Fab!” he said.

    When we crossed the threshold and were in the room, I looked for you in the closet, our old tradition, but of course you weren’t there.

    Then I looked out of the porthole, swept my eyes along the sparkling water of the channel, across the sparkling water to the other side, swept my eyes up to the sparkles of the stars, but I didn’t look for you in any of those sparkling places, either.

    When I turned my gaze back to the room, he was on the phone, saying something like Camembert. When he hung up, he beamed and said, “Fab!”

    I squealed lightly, because I knew he’d like that, and while we waited for room service, I skirted around him, grazing and nipping, flitting and dipping, and then the room service guy knocked on the door, surprised but delighted to see me in my current state. 

    When it was just two of us again, he said, “Fab,” and fed me cheese, let some warm Brie drop onto me, then gently teethed it off. Then he was less gentle while I sipped champagne and watched him be less gentle, then I turned the giant diamond on my left hand inward, into my palm, and scraped it across the top of his head, drawing a red line through his balding spot, drawing a little blood, and then I leaned down to lick the blood from his head.

    “Fab!” he said.

    VALLIE LYNN WATSON is the author of the novel-in-flash, A River So Long (Luminis Books); her work has recently appeared in Midway Journal, Moon City Review, and Bending Genres. Watson teaches in the MFA program at McNeese State, and edits the magazine Boudin. She is an avid sea glass collector. Find her on Facebook @VallieWatson.

    Featured image by Jez Timms, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “On the Anniversary of My Mother’s Death” by Amy L. Bernstein

    “On the Anniversary of My Mother’s Death” by Amy L. Bernstein

    “On the Anniversary of My Mother’s Death” by Amy L. Bernstein is a flash essay about the fundamental nature of memory. Is memory a “Scottish castle in ruins” or a “distant star that shimmers in peripheral vision”? As Bernstein meditates on memory, she not only laments what’s been lost, but also illuminates, and commemorates, what’s worth remembering.  —Court Harler

    I forget.

    My brother texts a photo with a note. Otherwise, I’d have forgotten still.

    A quarter century on, I’ve forgotten the sound of my mother’s voice. How she entered a room. The feel of her kiss on my cheek. The date she died.

    This is unsurprising.

    My memory bank lies like a Scottish castle in ruins, its boulders worn and scattered, half hidden by grass. Dates, smells, sounds, the vivid contours of when-and-where all trampled by a conquering army stealing away with the spoils.

    The spoils of memory.

    I dwell in a particular uncanny valley, where my husband or a friend might say, Remember when we…. Remember how you…. I’m shown a photo proving I was in situ, but I cannot reconnect with the time, the place, the day, the prevailing mood, the last great meal. Sometimes, I do not recognize my own clothing.

    Entire chunks of my life, from every decade, have fled the tumbled walls of this memory castle—never a memory palace, never grand enough for that. My mother is one casualty among many.

    Have I been a careless custodian, allowing memories to flee, never to return? Is there some trick to remembering that I never learned and am now too old to master?

    And what is memory, if one cannot remember? Is it like perceiving a distant star that shimmers in peripheral vision, vanishing the instant you try to look straight at it?

    How many nights have I stared up at the sky, trying and failing to unmask those stars in hiding? Wondering, where will I have gone when my “now” turns to “then”?

    A central fact of my life: I am a champion forgetter, an uncooperative witness interrogated by a squad of truth officers trying, and failing, to nail memories to the wall.

    “One minute you’re a grown-ass woman,” Mary Karr writes in The Art of Memoir, “then a whiff of cumin conjures your dad’s curry, and a whole door to the past blows open, ushering in uncanny detail.”

    Oh, uncanny detail, where are you? I wish to be flooded—to drink my fill of remembering itself…. The name of the girl at summer camp who believed she came from outer space…. The face of the first boy I kissed, reduced to a hank of long hair…. The first mountain I climbed…. The words I must have uttered to my newborn daughter….

    But I won’t be greedy. I’d settle for just one memory, after all: my mother and me, talking, touching, laughing, ever present, and absolutely unforgettable.

    AMY L. BERNSTEIN writes award-winning fiction and nonfiction that lets readers feel while making them think. As the author of six novels, including Tent City, and a book of inspiration for creatives, Wrangling the Doubt Monster, Amy brings a compassionate and insightful voice to writers’ conferences and podcasts around the country.

    Featured image by martin bennie, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Carrion” by Oliver Cubillos

    “Carrion” by Oliver Cubillos

    Nature can soothe, but it can also disturb. In the new flash fiction, “Carrion” by Oliver Cubillos, nature presents itself as a harbinger of—death? destruction? or perhaps even, desire? The “you” of the piece seems to not know what’s wanted, asking the reader for the answer.  —Court Harler

    It’s the second time this week. On the curb by the driveway. Laid out against the concrete. You notice the skull from far away. A trail of ants stretches from yard to street. All marching. There’s a cluster of feathers. Black feathers. There’s something warm in your throat. You swallow it down. One gulp. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Two gulps. The ants have journeyed far and wide for this. Food for the colony. You wonder if this crow knew the other. An opossum or seagull or skunk. A roadside corpse. You can’t possibly remember. That was long ago. This one’s different. You take another glance. Three gulps. There’s a Dixie cup and candy wrappers in the gutter. All those birthday parties. Years of piñatas. It occurs to you that all birds end up flightless. On the ground. It’s late spring. Fog rolls over the hills. There’s a dark stain there on the pavement. All around the body. The messes these sidewalks have seen. Popsicle stains or dog shit or chalk. You suppose it’s time to clean it all up. What a pain it was last time. The boys did it for you. The sky blossoms with dark gray. There’s storm clouds rising. You feel it start to rain. There’s water in your shoes. You watch as the skull and blood and all those littered feathers are swept away in the gutter. The dead crow’s beak tilts upwards like the mast of a schooner. It crests over a wave. Then another. You watch until you can’t see it any longer. Eventually it carries on.

    OLIVER CUBILLOS is currently pursuing an MFA in creative writing at Colorado State University. His work is published in Heavy Feather Review, BULL Magazine, Expat Press, Bright Flash Literary Review, and elsewhere.

    Featured image by Antoine Pouligny, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “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.