Flash the Court

Tag: Metaphor

  • “Tufts” by Miriam Mandel Levi

    “Tufts” by Miriam Mandel Levi

    “Tufts” by Miriam Mandel Levi is a ghost story of a flash fiction. You’ll sense a weird chill, and not quite know why. Maybe it’s the way the author captures the ineffable, or the sublime. Or maybe it’s the way the narrator suffers, so alone. Either way, you’ll feel the season’s fear: solitary rambles, falling leaves, peripheral apparitions.  —Court Harler

    A piece protrudes behind my ear, at my waist, so I adjust my hat, tuck in my shirt. You wouldn’t believe how many times I go to the bathroom to check, and it’s a rare bathroom these days that has a full-length mirror.

    Once, in a conversation with a guy at a work, I noticed a piece jutting from my shoulder. I brushed it off with a toss of my hair as if it were a flake of dandruff. Another time, at a bar with friends, I found a few pieces at my feet, and kicked them out of sight. What was that? someone asked. Straw, I think, I said. Maybe by day the bar is a barn and at night they delete the n. They laughed. It takes so little to throw people off your scent.

    In the past, I worried about my dusty, musty scent. Avoided confined spaces, overdid the perfume. I made my movements small and circumscribed so I wouldn’t crackle. Mercifully and sadly, not a single person has ever noticed or let on that they know. True I hid, but only in order to be found.

    My mother used to admonish, Stay out of the wind, remember a cow could take a chunk out of you, don’t get too close to a fire. Of course I know how sorrily and abruptly it could end for me. But after all these years of concealment, I can’t say I’d miss it: life, or loneliness, I mean.

    Over the years, I have searched for someone like me. Looked for a lightness of step, listened for a rustle. I’ve come across people stuffed with cotton batting, wool, feathers, foam, even ball bearings—all trying to pass themselves off as flesh and blood, as if it were some standard of normalcy.

    Sometimes I imagine tearing off my clothes, grabbing tufts from my head and belly, and tossing them into the air like dry fall leaves. You see! I’d shout at no one, until my voice grew hoarse and my clothes sagged and the wind whipped up the long crisp strands and scattered them.

    MIRIAM MANDEL LEVI is a retired speech-language pathologist turned writer and editor. Her work has appeared most recently in JMWW, Flash Frog, The Forge, Under the Gum Tree, River Teeth, and Bending Genres. She is an editor at Under the Sun: A Journal of Creative Nonfiction.

    Featured image by Nellie Adamyan, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Brief Lives of Garden Insects” by Frances Gapper

    “Brief Lives of Garden Insects” by Frances Gapper

    In “Brief Lives of Garden Insects” by Frances Gapper, bugs are sexy. And fascinating. From “The Dreadfuls” to the “Best in Show,” these miniature, pesky creatures flash in to and out of their own lives. In each numbered segment, they posit quirky but poignant questions about friendship, courtship, and partnership.  —Court Harler

    1

    Jane’s partner Maria’s fifty viviparous adult daughters, aka The Dreadfuls, are visiting in midsummer; staying aeons. Maria says, ‘Spit for luck!’ and Jane gobs up nectar. It’s her own fault for having opted to remain wingless, sans alpha female equipment.

    The Dreadfuls pierce leaves and suck sap, demolish pies, colonise hooks and pegs, flutter-float while eyeing Jane. And give birth. Happening once upon a Dreadful squatting to extrude, Jane detoured around her, pink but smiling.

    After the visit, Maria lies on her back and waves her legs in the air. Grateful for Jane’s billion cups of green tea: ‘I owe you,’ she says.

    Jane’s ex-loves forged independent lives but later grew desperate. She more cautiously chose to attach herself to a thriving family. Or horde, scourge, intrusion. Whatever.

    2

    Jane loves one of her co-grandkids, Jimmie. Anxious re his weakling status – butt of sidebites, target of gunk – she cherished him. Tickled his tum and endured his earwig jokes, beetle jokes, jokes about ants, thrip jokes.

    But getting smart and ignorant, he joined the superhighway. She chased after him: ‘Jimmie-Jim, give me a kiss?’

    ‘Fuck off, Nanny.’ He really said that. And she laughed.

    3

    The way Ant Guy (‘Call me Gorge.’) used to milk Jane, it felt like being given a lovely massage. ‘You’re my favourite cow,’ he’d say. ‘Best in Show. Awarded a rosette.’

    They had a friends-with-benefits relationship. When Jane was being bugged by a predatory midge, Ant Guy zapped it.

    But one day: ‘Where’s Gorge?’

    ‘Deleted. Got too sociable with the livestock.’

    Farm life continues. They ant-handle her, she excretes the honeydew, they cart it off.

    FRANCES GAPPER’s work has been published in four Best Microfiction anthologies and lit mags including trampset, Splonk, Wigleaf, The Forge, Atlas and Alice, 100 word story, Literary Namjooning, and Trash Cat. She lives in the UK’s Black Country region.

    Featured image by Phil Mono, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Adrift” by Tracie Adams

    “Adrift” by Tracie Adams

    September is the season of gentle remembrance. Summer’s over and school’s back in session. Elementary or university, our children resume their inexorable paths toward more independence and, consequently, more distance, from us, their parents. In “Adrift,” Tracie Adams captures moments anew: what would we give to relive each (im)perfect family memory, just one last time?  —Court Harler

    Maybe it was the worst of times on that houseboat. The air conditioning was broken, forcing us to retreat to the sundeck to escape the sweltering heat of the living room, an Easy-Bake Oven that smelled like a urinal cake. Maybe it was the best of times, the perfect ending to a vacation that began at a waterpark resort in Phoenix, where my husband and I watched our teens swoosh through slides, shouting this is awesome!

    Maybe it was awesome. Or maybe it was another unblemished day soon to disappear as they left for college, marriage, their own lives. Like the day we explored a graveyard in a ghost town called Tombstone, its markers straight out of an old Western. Or when we drove ATVs through desert sunsets melting over Sedona’s red rocks, etching our names in stone, eating pizza under stars. Or when we held our breath in awe at the Grand Canyon’s south rim stretching as wide as a mother’s arms.

    Maybe the man who gave us directions to the marina at Lake Mead wasn’t a liar. Or maybe he was the best kind—don’t bring anything, we’ve got it all—which turned out to be hot dogs, Pop-Tarts, and energy drinks. The camp store shelves were bare. For days, we floated under a Nevada sun, drinking Red Bulls in a rooftop hot tub, where our words were movie lines and our jokes secrets shared with the galaxies.

    Maybe the day we spent slithering through red mud at Slide Rock Park was delightful. But maybe it’s the suffering—the absences, the gaps—that forged us in a crucible and gifted us our golden memories. Maybe years later when I say Arizona trip, we’ll all burst into stories and laughter. Magic will hang like a velvet curtain between us and the world.

    Maybe the days we had so little were the times we had the most. Perhaps our true strength emerged in our weakest moments, struggling, burning like chaff, devouring Pop-Tarts in a floating gas station bathroom.

    Maybe it was never about the perfectly choreographed moments like birthday parties, Christmas lights, or Thanksgiving tables. Maybe it’s the laughter echoing over the water, stars shining in bright eyes, and the stories that still float between us like driftwood.

    TRACIE ADAMS is the author of Our Lives in Pieces. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, longlisted for Wigleaf Top 50, and published widely in literary magazines, including SoFloPoJo, Fictive Dream, Cleaver Magazine, TRASH CAT LIT, and others. Follow her on Twitter @1funnyfarmAdams.

    Featured image by Dulcey Lima, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Naked Babies” by Julia Strayer

    “Naked Babies” by Julia Strayer

    In “Naked Babies,” Julia Strayer reexamines the institutions of motherhood and womanhood. The narrator’s voice drips with delusion and sarcasm, but she’s justified in her bold assessment of “mostly women” and “mostly men” who inhabit the world without thinking, without seeing. Flash work embodies the surreal with true verve, and this piece is no exception.  —Court Harler

    Strangers, mostly women, ask if I give the babies names. I stare unblinking and tell the people out loud in my head that they’re stupid for asking. I don’t have time for small talk, though I’m quite skilled at it.

    I ferry a pile of naked baby dolls in the trunk of my ’68 Valiant because I don’t have a station wagon. I unload them upside down by the legs, and I’ve mastered the ability to carry four in one hand at one time, plus my handbag. It’s quite something with all their hair hanging down. I used to cut my dolls’ hair when I was a kid, but I don’t do that anymore.

    I sometimes cut my own hair, and when the scissors don’t behave themselves in the back, I button my hair in a barrette and I don’t look. What I can’t see isn’t important enough for me to worry about.

    When I was little, I wore a scooter helmet inside the house even though I didn’t own a scooter. I found the helmet in the trash out back of Pancake Willy’s on my way home from school. I never found a scooter someone was willing to throw away. If I had, I might have left home forever. I pretended the helmet was an invisibility shield and, when my mother said I was stupid, or ugly, or weird, or that no one would marry me when I grew up, I couldn’t hear her.

    That’s why I practice with the babies, and, except for the naked, upside-down thing, I’m a good mother to them. I know they’re not real. They won’t need helmets if I mess up and become my mother.

    Some strangers don’t talk to me at all. Mostly men. I think it’s my hair. That’s okay. It’s better that way. No chance of having real babies. I can’t risk it.

    JULIA STRAYER has stories in Glimmer Train, Kenyon Review Online, The Cincinnati Review, Jellyfish Review, Flash Frog, HAD, Fractured Lit, Okay Donkey, and others, including The Wigleaf Top 50 and The Best Small Fictions. She’s a submissions editor at SmokeLong Quarterly and teaches creative writing at New York University.

    Featured image by Edz Norton, 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.

  • “Tar Pits” by Meg Pokrass

    “Tar Pits” by Meg Pokrass

    In “Tar Pits,” award-winning flash-fictionist Meg Pokrass takes us on a bittersweet ride in a pink convertible —only to discover that fame, like any other earthly accolade, can sink you, and your sister’s “skinny smile,” to the lowest depths. “Tar Pits” is a dexterous, provocative exploration of what it means to be a woman in the world today.  —Court Harler

    First time my big sister took me to the La Brea Tar Pits, we met an out-of-work actor wearing a wilted expression. “You’re my hope,” he said, as if he were sinking. She beamed him her smile, autograph pen in hand. “Don’t give up on your dream, my friend,” she signed, feeling funny for being spotted at the grave of the La Brea Woman’s skeleton.

    Wrapped in faded denim, my big sister’s middle-of-the-night skeleton drove us again to the tar pits. She was pretty, nobody knew she was funny. “You locked in the part,” said her agent, “because of that skinny smile.” I imagined him bowing to kiss her hand but accidentally pinching her bottom. She was soaring over pitch-black places where other actresses were sinking.

    “She was eighteen years old when she died there, asphyxiated while sinking,” she explained, nibbling carrots. Deep in her bathtub, I’d stare at my twelve-year-old skeleton. I wanted to tell her it was a bad idea to revisit those tar pits. “I can feel you wrinkling!” she’d say, rushing in, grabbing my hand, pulling me out. “I’m your La Brea Woman,” I’d sing, wanting to be funny. 

    “When playing a role, an actress is no longer a skeleton,” she said. That day her eyes were bloodshot and we were eating lettuce straight from the bag. When she got bad news after a big audition, I held her hand. The two of us worked up our skinny smiles in the mirror before hopping into her pink convertible. “You used to be funny, kiddo,” she said, as if I were the one who was sinking.

    Not every girl has a sister who haunts old tar pits, I told myself. Now thirty, her agent dropped her and she was sleeping. I was a teenager with undeveloped features, beginning acting lessons. “Disappearing is recommended if it keeps you famous,” she’d say in her pj’s, popping a NoDoz before falling back asleep again.

    No longer a skeleton, she was eating everything she wanted, and it was almost funny. “Let’s binge on donuts,” she’d suggest, pulling me by the hand. One time we ordered twenty maple donuts at Zucker’s, our stomachs rising and sinking. “Relying on anyone,” she warned me, “is dying in a tar pit.” 

    Now I’m driving Hollywood Boulevard in my sister’s car, proud of my skeleton. When I find myself wallowing in memories, I stop for donuts or drive past those tar pits. She left me her pink convertible, and with my hands on the steering wheel, I feel myself rising.

    MEG POKRASS is the author of First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories (Dzanc Books, 2024) plus eight previous collections of flash fiction and two novellas-in-flash.

    Featured image by Cash Macanaya, courtesy of Unsplash.