Flash the Court

Tag: Language

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    – describe her, our mother urges.

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

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

    Wood –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Featured image by Ashkan Forouzani, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “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.

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

    “The Lilacs Even the Purple Ones” by David Guiotto

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

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

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

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

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

    Featured image by Liana S, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “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.

  • “Sherry’s Migraine Drops By Unannounced” by Kathryn Silver-Hajo

    “Sherry’s Migraine Drops By Unannounced” by Kathryn Silver-Hajo

    In “Sherry’s Migraine Drops By Unannounced,” Kathryn Silver-Hajo captures the essential insidiousness of chronic unseen disability. Through personification, the migraine is somehow made both corporeal and ethereal at the same time. Add the striking companion images of the “crab-footed sparrow” and the “ribbons of purple and yellow,” and we have a powerful flash fiction piece that pierces and provokes.  —Court Harler

    It watches through the picture window. She’s bent over her keyboard frowning, shoulders brick-and-mortar. But it’s an impatient disorder and before long it slithers through a crack, sneaks up behind her and presses on her eyeballs, almost gently at first. Sherry knows it’s right—screen glare and flashing lights are no good for people like her. She should take a break, brew a cup of Darjeeling, sit in the garden, watch the crab-footed sparrow hobble toward the birdbath, tipping one eye toward the water, singing and fluttering its wings in anticipation. But she has a story to complete, a deadline to meet. She ignores her migraine. Maybe this time will be different from all the others. Don’t do this, she pleads. Not now.

    She knows it’s not listening, so she decides to hedge her bets. Close her laptop. If she can’t work, she’ll read. But as she flips the pages of the giant Restoration Hardware catalog that dropped unbidden through the mail slot, the migraine exhales a fiery breath, flips ribbons of purple and yellow across her line of sight, readies its daggers. She drops the catalog, clamps her eyes shut, succumbs to the sofa. I warned you, it hisses.

    KATHRYN SILVER-HAJO’s work appears in Atticus Review, Centaur, CRAFT, Emerge Literary Journal, Ghost Parachute, Gone Lawn, Milk Candy Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Pithead Chapel, Ruby, The Phare, and others. Her award-winning books include flash collection, Wolfsong, and YA novel, Roots of the Banyan Tree. Find her on Facebook @kathryn.silverhajo, Twitter @KSilverHajo, and Bluesky @kathrynsilverhajo.bsky.social.

    Featured image by Laura Barry, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Attica Forke” by Philip Dean Walker

    “Attica Forke” by Philip Dean Walker

    In “Attica Forke,” Philip Dean Walker treats the reader to a sensory experience centered on delicate cuisine and meandering memory—and perhaps, just the tiniest tidbit of self-indulgence. The narrative style is sly and cheeky, but also, lush and generous. Let yourself sink your teeth into this delicious flash fiction and enjoy, enjoy, enjoy.  —Court Harler

    Attica let the penne rest on her tongue. There was a fresh, buoyant, somehow elastic quality to it—the texture was firm, yet also tender. It was a quiet, unassuming pasta. Al dente didn’t quite capture its consistency, but she couldn’t think of any other way to describe it. She had not added any Parmesan cheese (emulsified with a garlic butter finish) because the chef at Scarpetta preferred that his dishes be served “naked,” which meant without any garnish added after they left his kitchen. Attica agreed.

    She rolled the penne around in her mouth. Each vertical ridge seemed to slope down farther toward an even more flavorful taste, the sauce dripping off onto the back of her tongue. A light tomato and basil sauce lent a predictable flavor and it clung nicely to the pasta, but there was something else. Some other elusive flavor. Attica tried to coax it out. There was something spring-like and victorious about the sauce that set it apart from your typical Italian pasta dish. It was innovative, yet still familiar. She concentrated harder, took another forkful, and brought it quickly to her mouth, hoping that a rough, ravenous chew might finally yield the secret ingredient. She bit down and, yes, there it was again, unmistakably.

    The taste seemed perched outside of the normal realm of saucery: that tricky task of concocting a perfectly melded, delectable sauce, something upon which any ambitious chef might stake his entire professional life—getting out of bed quietly in the morning so he doesn’t wake up his wife, coming into the restaurant early in order to amass all the necessary ingredients, the overhead kitchen lights casting a shiny tint on all the stainless steel cookery and on the floors, mopped and waxed to a royal gleam the night before because, undoubtedly, the kitchen must be the cleanest part of any restaurant, a holiness sprinkled over the place, like a recently scoured church, still giving off the lemony smell in a charwoman’s wake; and so he begins, mixing in just the right amount of ground carrots, fresh plum tomatoes, chili powder, celery salt, minced garlic cloves, cumin, dried basil, a pinch of sugar, a hint of oregano for tradition’s sake—not too much though, you don’t want to overplay it like, at first, Attica had thought her grandmother Poli had done with her own sauce, overpowering and invasive as if the Italian Army itself had lathered themselves up in it before boarding one of Mussolini’s fabled trains, before she’d come to actually appreciate Poli’s sauce for being just as obvious and wonderful as the old woman behind it—heated up at just the right temperature, bringing it all to a slow boil, red bubbles sputtering just below the placid surface, to get all the ingredients talking to each other in a language they all knew, a conversation to which they were all contributing equally, the sonorous language of the sauce, this sauce, with its goldenrod aftertaste—was that it?—its sweet, playful flavor, a taste that was almost like a garden after a warm late spring rain, the kind of gentle storm that comes abruptly out of nowhere on a sunny day and leaves behind it the flowers dewy and glistening; it was almost…rosy.

    The chef must have infused the oil for the sauce with rose petals. Rose petals and maybe even some currants? That was it, she was almost certain of it. How exquisite. Penne with rose petal-infused oil tomato and basil sauce.

    PHILIP DEAN WALKER is the author of At Danceteria and Other Stories, Read by Strangers, and Better Davis and Other Stories, all of which were named Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2017, 2018, and 2021, respectively, with all receiving starred reviews.

    Featured image by Empreinte, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Mrs. Luzajic as Hebe” by Lorette C. Luzajic

    “Mrs. Luzajic as Hebe” by Lorette C. Luzajic

    “Mrs. Luzajic as Hebe” by Lorette C. Luzajic is part poem, part essay; part dream, part terror. Hebe is the ancient goddess of the prime of life, but “when you’re dying, nostalgia kicks in the way desire once did.” The narrator journeys near and far, searching for chardonnay and ceviche, but also seemingly never leaves her own kitchen. There, she brews espresso and spins stories. There, eventually, she lives and lives and lives, thank the goddesses.  —Court Harler

    a love poem for Brent Terry

    Under the knife, under the needle. I can’t even say I was determined to survive. The reaper had followed me for so long, in different disguises, with an impressive array of tactics, I was not certain I’d outwit him again. I hoped for the best and planned for the worst. I took my medicine. 

    When you’re dying, nostalgia kicks in the way desire once did. Hard and hungry. Tantalizing flickers of foolish yesterdays: I had my middle finger to the world and an arsenal of dreams left to shatter. Then, there, driving through Dakota. The stars from the back of the pickup. Patti Smith growling her poems from the front cab radio. A bottomless bottle of bourbon. Now, here, you are a deer caught in the headlights. You’ve been caught with your pants down. Life has you by the balls.

    When you are careening along that winding hairpin cliff, the Pacific Coast Highway, everything you know unravels. You are unbecoming. You let go of unfinished things. The details whir past in a slurry, intangible. I took that highway again, later, further south, in Mexico, on a bus, splattering iguanas. Reeling into the turquoise forever with a gone friend, who was, then, there, mirror Ray-Bans and eggshell linen trousers. I prayed my heart out for the driver. And we made it to the sea.

    There was more: the portent glow of a bright moon and the sound of silence in the southern swamps. The bats in Barcelona. Their swooping, and the swallows.

    What you find here in the valley of the shadow of death is how every moment matters. The beauty, of course, yes, sublime: Spanish guitar; pastels de nata; head-back laughing; good chardonnay that tastes of cigars. But also: every single fucking hurt and hell is a magic spell.

    And then, sometimes, you come back. You find yourself in the kitchen, measuring out Lively Up espresso beans, getting ready for work. You find yourself at a table with good friends, slurping ceviche and lime. And you realize you really don’t have a clue how you got there. But here we are.

    I grew so much closer to God. And so much further away from knowing what that even means.

    There were times when I didn’t know who I was. And then I did. And sometimes, I felt like I had always known. Sometimes when I was flickering in the liminal, I saw the ghost light: beacons in the dark loam that slowly swallowed me, the lighthouse that was a friend.

    I had spells where I thought about strange things. Like, what if, you already were? What if your whole life was really the story of your unbecoming?

    LORETTE C. LUZAJIC reads, writes, and teaches flash. She is the founder of The Ekphrastic Review and The Mackinaw: a journal of prose poetry.

    Featured image by The New York Public Library, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “on the brink” by Carolyn R. Russell

    “on the brink” by Carolyn R. Russell

    A cliché is a well-meaning tidbit of wisdom, built upon a solid generational foundation, even it’s meant to be made a mockery of itself. In “on the brink,” Carolyn R. Russell interrogates the very idea of the cliché—why we do and don’t say them, why we do and don’t (or can’t) believe them. In the end, we are only our irreplaceable selves, as diverse as we are divine.  —Court Harler

    most of us can’t afford to go big or go home or do one thing every day that scares us or fail forward. can’t throw a mix of seed and compost into the wind and wait for it to land in the deep pocket of a father’s friend or the ear of a mother’s former lover. if we’re lucky we might conjure a single slender stem, true-leaved and pale, and urge it into a bright and stubborn bloom. the sum of my father’s best intentions and my mother’s cheerful madness: one scrawny green moonshot to carry us all beyond reproach.

    A Best Microfiction winner and a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions nominee, CAROLYN R. RUSSELL’s short stories, poetry, and creative nonfiction have been featured in numerous publications. Her collection of cross-genre flash is called Death and Other Survival Strategies (Vine Leaves Press, 2023).

    Featured image by Artiom Vallat, courtesy of Unsplash.