Flash the Court

Tag: Language

  • “The Missing Notes” by Jeff Friedman

    “The Missing Notes” by Jeff Friedman

    “In the silence of memory,” loss lingers but refuses to reinstate itself. The trombone joins the saxophone as each “listens for the music in the quiet rooms.” In this sonic prose poem called “The Missing Notes,” Jeff Friedman attempts to reunite lost friends with a remembered melody, but the tune remains uncatchable.  —Court Harler

    There’s always a run of notes missing, a trill gone, a vibrato he can’t quite remember. The song stalls in his chest, in his throat, on his lips. Now he listens for the music in his saxophone, in the shaky windows overlooking the giant plane trees and the scuffle of people headed toward the subway or the grocery, listens for the music in the quiet rooms under the rumble, but it’s not there. In the silence of memory, he hears a sound awakening, his old friend’s laughter like a door creaking slowly, then swinging open wide. His friend lifts his trombone, with its golden light, and the run of notes plays loudly and the song comes back to him like a bird flying through a window. He plays it over and over until he thinks he’s got it, memorized deep inside his bones, but his friend shakes his head and smiles, deep in his own silence.

    JEFF FRIEDMAN has published eleven collections of poetry and prose, including his most recent, Broken Signals (Bamboo Dart Press, August 2024). His work has appeared in Best Microfiction, The New Republic, New England Review, Poetry Magazine, and The American Poetry Review. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship and numerous other awards.

    Featured image by Andrew Konstantinov, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Lucky” by Nate Methot

    “Lucky” by Nate Methot

    In this new flash essay entitled “Lucky” by Nate Methot, the author takes a hard look at luck. Luck is relative; luck is curated. Luck, good or bad, is a facet of life, but never uncomplicated. With lyrical prose and surprising sentence structure, the examination unfolds.  —Court Harler

    They said two to five years. It’s been fourteen. I’m lucky.

    Nothing and everything changed in an instant. All questions answered in the worst possible way. A death sentence in three words.

    It looks differently from here—I know what unfolds. If he could see the years, see the decline, experience the chasm between us, what would he think? It’s been so long—he was barely twenty-seven—is this lucky; am I lucky?

    I’ve lost so much, such freedom, hardly have a life of my own—no house, no car, no career, no family—depending on others, once-prized autonomy nearly extinguished. But I’m still nearer beginning than end: I eat, and talk, and stand, and breathe on my own. I’m not supposed to be here at all.

    They’re on Instagram, on TikTok, on Zoom, my peers, if that’s what they are. pALS is succinct—people with ALS. They advocate, gain followings, raise money, put their reality on view. They connect and share pain, spreading it out, relieving some pressure, and laugh with the darkness of the terminally ill—laugh at their mutual fucked-ness.

    I watch them progress, deteriorate, shrink. They shrink—collapse in on themselves. The cruel metamorphosis unfolds daily, by video. A young father types with his eyes, food port in his belly; an influencer is propped up with pillows, tube in her nose, body transformed into mush. It’s almost too hard to look at the future they tell me is coming. I scroll back to see the before—it’s been just a few years: he’s walking, stumbling forward in an unnerving gait, and she’s gorgeous, sharing the lighthearted ways she tells dates that she uses a cane. Those people are gone, the dichotomy excruciating.

    I tried to be one of them for a while, tried to find a place to fit in when I could no longer bear feeling lost and alone. They were pALS, a tragic, darkly unshakable identity and bond—all stages mixed together on my screen: energetic and imperceptible to bedridden and tube fed. Surely, I fit somewhere between, but even here, I couldn’t find the comfort I needed.

    I’m a slow burn, one match at a time, another handful of kindling on the way; they’ve been drenched through with diesel and engulfed. Our distance lies in the difference; labeled the same, we’re nothing alike. They have each other, but I have more days. I’m winning.

    I’m praised for this. Somehow. I fight harder, care more, have more to live for. I’m mentally tougher. Tenacious.

    No. I’m not. I’m lucky.

    But I don’t live amongst the pALS. When I roll out my door, I don’t see slumped, unmoving bodies, don’t strain to hear indecipherable speech. No. I see life. I see function and ease and marvel at the wondrous human body. I see the others—whole crowds of others wholly unaware of the pain, blind to my jealous, disconcerted, gaping eyes.

    No, I’m not lucky.

    NATE METHOT is the author of A Life Derailed: My Journey with ALS, a memoir. He was diagnosed with ALS at twenty-seven in 2011. He lives with his parents in Vermont and writes with a mouse and on-screen keyboard. His memoir, blog, and social media can be found at natemethot.com.

    Featured image by Devin Avery, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Croc Mother” by Rebecca Klassen

    “Croc Mother” by Rebecca Klassen

    “Croc Mother” by Rebecca Klassen is an edge-of-your-seat read, a speculative microfiction infused with danger from the opening sentence. But the writer doesn’t rely on mere suspense—instead, she delves immediately into the heart of the matter, yet without overexplaining the issue. Through subtext, the microstory’s narrative tension is expertly, terrifyingly, suspended in time.  —Court Harler

    When I was six, I jumped into the crocodile enclosure, compass-point snouts rotating on the water towards me. Mum ran to fetch Dad who I’d last seen hogging a swing in the playground. Not swinging, just scrolling as aggrieved children floated out of swatting distance, like they sensed the things he’d done, things that I never told my nosey teachers and neighbours about, or that social worker who kept steering everything back to Dad whenever I tried to talk about Mum. But the mother croc at the water’s edge was a fantastic listener, smaller than the others who were gliding closer as the zoo goers screamed and filmed me on phones. I told the mother croc about Mum’s delicious meatballs, funny stories about ghosts, feeding the ducks together, and the great raspberries she blew, and how all of it was the best, and she was the best but also the worst.

    Mum came back with Dad as zookeepers sprinted with crackly walkie-talkies, and Dad watched me with folded trunk-arms and that look, and Mum stood behind him with that helplessness that cancelled out the meatballs, stories, ducks, and raspberries. I prised open the mother croc’s jaws and climbed inside her gaping mouth and sat on her spongy tongue. The other crocodiles crawled out of the water towards us as I yanked down on her top teeth, ordering her to close her mouth to protect me, to help me, to just do something.

    REBECCA KLASSEN is co-editor of The Phare and a Best of the Net nominee from Gloucestershire, England. She won the London Independent Story Prize and was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and Alpine Fellowship. Her stories have featured in Fictive Dream, Mslexia, Flash Frontier, Scribeworth, and New Flash Fiction Review.

    Featured image by Dan Meyers, 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.

  • “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.

  • “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.

  • “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.