Flash the Court

Tag: Narrative Voice

  • “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.

  • “Red Saturday” by Shira Musicant

    “Red Saturday” by Shira Musicant

    In “Red Saturday,” Shira Musicant focuses on a singular pivotal event, a common technique for micromemoirists. Less commonly, however, Musicant utilizes third-person instead of first-person point of view, which helps to convey the sheer unbelievability of the moment. The child narrator of “Red Saturday” “sits on the curb” and, all alone, “wonders if it was real.”  —Court Harler

    She sits on the curb at the corner, banished from the house. Dad has given her his old tee shirt, and Mom has cut the pomegranate into pieces, revealing the crevasses where the red seeds hide. She digs her fingers into the fruit. She is red and pink and fuchsia, the tee shirt, her hands, her mouth. The juice is tangy and sweet, the seeds crunchy in her teeth, the voices from the house sharp and bitter.

    She sits on the curb, her feet in the gutter, and a car speeds around the corner, around her resting feet and her red-stained face. She feels the hot whoosh and the way it lifts her hair from her face. When it is gone, she wonders if it was real.

    It happened so quickly, there was no time for fear to take hold.

    After the car, she sits on the curb at the corner wondering if the driver saw her, if she almost died, if Mom and Dad knew what had happened. She has no words to explain the car, no words to explain how big the world and how small her feet in the gutter. The only words she has in that moment are the words she doesn’t know, but hears flung through the house, angry red biting words.  

    She peels back white skin in the pomegranate, uncovering another hidden red cluster of seeds, waiting for her parents to call her back inside.

    Later, Mom throws the tee shirt in the washing machine and scrubs the juice off her face and hands. Later, Dad leaves in his car, backing down the driveway into the street past her corner. She watches him go from the window, waving goodbye, and pressing her hand into the glass, a hand still pink from the scrub and the pomegranate.

    SHIRA MUSICANT, recently retired from her practice as a somatic psychotherapist, writes short fiction and creative nonfiction. Her work has received four Pushcart nominations and can be found in various literary journals including Star 82 Review, Vestal Review, Fourth Genre, SmokeLong Quarterly, Bending Genres, and Milk Candy Review.

    Featured image by Karyna Panchenko, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Rush Hour Ghost” by Fred Muratori

    “Rush Hour Ghost” by Fred Muratori

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

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

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

    Featured image by Frenjamin Benklin, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Drop by Drop” by Melissa Llanes Brownlee

    “Drop by Drop” by Melissa Llanes Brownlee

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

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

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

    Featured image by Ty Feague, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “My Favorite Day of High School” by Alaina Hammond

    “My Favorite Day of High School” by Alaina Hammond

    How much can a writer convey in one hundred words? In five tiny paragraphs, Alaina Hammond delivers all that readers can crave from an irreverent microfiction, and more. Often, less is more: what’s not said, says volumes. High school, indeed, may be the test we can never quite complete.  —Court Harler

    It’s Saturday morning. I’m at a high school. Not mine, but it smells roughly the same.

    There’s a poster, announcing auditions for a play. For a split second I consider auditioning, then remember I can’t. Whatever, I’m in a play next week.

    In the classroom where we wait for our tests, I notice a cute guy next to me. Whatever, my boyfriend’s hotter.

    Mr. Cute Guy gets a calculator, which means he’s planning to be a STEM teacher of some sort. Me, I’m taking the English teacher’s test.

    ​My confidence is solid. High school’s easier to handle, when you’re twenty-eight.

    ALAINA HAMMOND is a poet, playwright, fiction writer, and visual artist. Her poems, plays, short stories, nonfiction, paintings, drawings, and photographs have been published both online and in print. A four-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize in fiction, her novelette, Jillian, Formerly Known as Frog Girl, was published by Bottlecap Press. Find her on Instagram @alainaheidelberger.

    Featured image by Ivan Aleksic, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Family Dinner on the Overnight Train” by Lisa K. Buchanan

    “Family Dinner on the Overnight Train” by Lisa K. Buchanan

    “Family Dinner on the Overnight Train” by Lisa K. Buchanan is a flash creative nonfiction essay that playfully subverts expectations of the form. Told in third person instead of first, the piece is based on the author’s fond memories of family dinner-table games and train vacations. Each family member is effectively and entertainingly characterized by an alias, and the essay’s events unfold with dreamlike, childlike wonder.  —Court Harler

    First Place Prize of indigestion went to Big Engine, whose role at the table was to maximize speed and consumption. Last Place Prize, achieved by dawdling interminably over onion rings and sirloin, went to Young Caboose for whom rushing—through a meal or maintenance check or sublime landscape of jagged lava—would violate true train travel. Air Whistle announced each station-stop with adrenalized squeals. Dining Car’s pleas for mealtime civility did not prevent Engine and Whistle from shoveling succulent pink prime rib into their maws the way sweaty shirtless men had shoveled lumps of coal into bygone-era fireboxes. By the time Caboose brought up the rear, Dining Car’s favorite forbidden-fruit cordial had sold out, and Engine and Whistle were immersed in glops of French Apple Pie with Nutmeg Sauce.

    Through the night, Engine snored louder than the clickety-clack of steel wheels on steel tracks. Dining Car dreamt of forbidden fruit and sweaty shirtless men. Caboose stayed open late, wide-windowed and happily alone, while even Whistle was rocked into a soothing stupor and the most memorable of sleeps.

    Decades later, with Engine retired, Dining Car reduced to a snack counter, and Caboose gone largely remote, Air Whistle fondly recalled those family-of-four vacations aboard the overnight train from Los Angeles to Albuquerque. Rail travel in the region may have honeymooned decades earlier with mink stoles and felt fedoras, but another era might yet arrive—couplings strengthened, energies electrified, and those great gleaming windows ever saving.

    Writings by LISA K. BUCHANAN appear in CRAFT, The Citron Review, and elsewhere. Foes: fellow bus passengers with shoulder bags near her nose. Friends: people not preceding her in line for chocolate sorbet. Heroes: public librarians. Current favorite banned book: They Called Us Enemy by George Takei.

    Featured image by Patrick Fore, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Twenty-One Grams” by Carolyn R. Russell

    “Twenty-One Grams” by Carolyn R. Russell

    “Twenty-One Grams” by Carolyn R. Russell is a speculative flash fiction that never quite relinquishes its sense of mystery. The setting is reminiscent of the fevered religious revivals of olden days, but Russell cheekily infuses both the plot and the perspective with an otherworldly, new-age sensibility: souls are “weighed” but also consoled by a “perky college girl” with Hello Kitty Kleenexes. Readers will long ponder this narrative’s final reckonings.  —Court Harler

    Our host has a pointed beard that metronomes back and forth as he describes the ancient means by which he says human souls can be weighed and measured. Twenty-one grams, he gargles out, his spackled eyes half shut. Tonight he’s barely bothering to hide his disdain; I should have adjusted the footlights to soften the contempt that rolls off him in waves.

    While he lectures, before a transaction, he never moves from behind the podium on the raised platform. We tried that once and it was a disaster; our host in motion was too much for the crowd, resulting in bleeding eyeballs and aneurisms that left our marks incapable of consent. Something about the way he moves is impossible to disguise inside any kind of gear or clothing.

    He begins to hit his stride now; centuries of practice guide the rhythms of his pitch. The room is warm and ripe with the sharp stench of cortisol and adrenaline despite the December air blasting through the open windows that showcase the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Twenty-one grams, he hisses, only twenty-one grams, the weight of a mouse, or a fava bean, or a double-A battery. That’s it!

    As he talks I roam the carpeted periphery of the auditorium. That’s me, a perky college girl with a short skirt and an empathetic smile, quick to offer vitamin water or Hello Kitty Kleenex. I watch and listen. This part can be tricky.

    A woman sitting near me to my right starts to speak. I approach her and ask her to stand and direct her question to our host. She asks if partials are acceptable. Like we’re talking about a liver, like maybe she thinks it will grow back whole. I smile and put my hand on her shoulder to ease her back into her chair, and there it is. That electric jolt that travels up through my wrist and singes my eyelashes.

    We’re finished here.

    I nod to our host and he is before her in an instant; later no one will remember his elated stroll down the aisle. He extends to her a surprisingly dainty hand; he knows how delicate are these first moments of desire, of decision. The woman rises; he puts his arm around her waist and walks her back up the aisle toward the lectern, his new catch a vision in Lilly Pulitzer florals.

    As soon as our host’s back is turned there is the usual stampede for the doors. It always makes me laugh. A teenage boy looks at me over his shoulder as he runs. I place a closed fist on my chin and then raise my index finger straight up over my lips; the boy flings a different finger in my direction, the whites of his eyes lacey with red veins like a road map to hell. We’re in town another few days, and I wonder if he’ll be back.

    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 Roman Kraft, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Ben Stiller’s Friend Flipped Me Off at a Restaurant in New York City” by Rachel M. Hollis

    “Ben Stiller’s Friend Flipped Me Off at a Restaurant in New York City” by Rachel M. Hollis

    “Ben Stiller’s Friend Flipped Me Off at a Restaurant in New York City” is quite a long title for a rather short story. A microfiction, in fact. In 140 words, Rachel M. Hollis tells the immersive tale of an urban love affair, partially set in an “apartment, both cramped and impossibly empty.” And while the title may seem flippant, the narrator is anything but insincere.  —Court Harler

    Because I tried to take a sneaky picture of them on my BlackBerry. Blurry, lopsided, famous.

    Before Ben Stiller’s friend flipped me off at a restaurant in New York City, my boyfriend and I were arguing on West Forty-Sixth Street. He loved that the city never slept and I couldn’t remember the last time I had.

    Before we were bickering on a busy street, we were staring at our phones in our Williamsburg apartment, both cramped and impossibly empty.

    I didn’t realize what had happened until we got home and I opened the photo. Ben, ignoring us. His friend’s middle finger—perfectly in focus.

    “I still can’t believe we saw Ben Stiller,” he said, like it meant something. Like we’d had a moment.

    I packed a bag and left while he was still staring at the photo. He never looked up.

    RACHEL M. HOLLIS lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, child, and a deeply unmotivated dog. Her work appears or is forthcoming in River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, Midway Journal, Lost Balloon, Gone Lawn, Necessary Fiction, and elsewhere.

    Featured image by Wes Hicks, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Beth” by Shell St. James

    “Beth” by Shell St. James

    “Beth” by Shell St. James could be a contemporary, albeit chaste, roommate romance, but the narrator’s slightly elevated tone suggests otherwise for this flash fiction. In four dramatic scenes artfully condensed to their very essence, St. James utilizes poignant detail and evocative imagery to depict an indelible setting and deliver an unexpected storyline.  —Court Harler

    The first time I saw Beth, she was dragging her luggage through my front door, cursing like a sailor as the suitcase got caught on the threshold.

    “May I help you with that?” My lips twitched as I tried to hide my amusement.

    She pointedly ignored me, a spirit of fierce independence evident in her scowl. Palms up, I backed off and watched her struggle, squashing down my impulse to take the dratted case out of her hands.

    The second time I saw Beth, she was sipping a glass of Merlot, listening to my favorite piece by Chopin, with her eyes closed. I stood in the shadowed corner of the study, quietly observing, as the music inspired her to rise from her chair and dance barefoot across the room. I fell in love with her as the candlelight lit her face, her auburn hair swirling in a fiery cloud, her graceful limbs fluid and expressive, painting the air.

    That night I crept into her bedroom as she slept, unable to resist the temptation to touch her. I gently stroked her cheek, wishing I could confess my feelings.

    Her eyes flew open in alarm, and she bolted upright in a panic.

    Ashamed, I fled the room, retreating to the attic.

    The last time I saw Beth, she was packing her things, intent upon leaving. I broke down and wept, begging her to stay, but she looked right through me. At the door she turned back warily, her fearful eyes scanning the empty front room.

    “Please don’t follow me,” she whispered. “Rest in peace.”

    SHELL ST. JAMES is an author and artist living in an 1895 farmhouse in the foothills of North Carolina. Her short stories have appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies, and podcasts, including Shenandoah Literary Magazine, Sci-Fi Shorts, Night Terrors: Scare Street (Vol. 12), and Creepy Podcast. Read selected stories for free at shellstjames.com.

    Featured image by Peter Herrmann, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Beard” by Eric Machan Howd

    “Beard” by Eric Machan Howd

    In the prose poem “Beard,” Eric Machan Howd explores the very concept of the contemporary ubiquitous beard: what it reveals, and what it conceals. As an objective correlative, the beard represents both living and dying. Through historical touchpoints, the revered beard is placed upon a continuum of irreverence.  —Court Harler

    He lets it grow, curling around dimples and smirks and the places where his father slapped regret into his cheeks. Whorls of silver strands gleaming in the few days of sunlight left before the cold and dark. To be healthy it must be fed regularly; almonds, avocado, carrots, pumpkin seed, spinach, broccoli, and salmon keep it strong, while various oils and balms save the skin beneath and coax new growth. Sleep makes for strong roots. Hair is dead. He hides behind it, covers scars and pox left by shingles and a father who roofed too much. The mouth is grown over. He parts his lips, strokes aside gray flyaways and blond wisps with thumb and index and makes way for fork, cup, and spoon. How difficult eating becomes. A bowl, for instance, must be held outstretched from chin to avoid dipping; it demands attention with soup and cereal, and faith in the steady hand. Pope Honorius III, to disguise his disfigured lip, let his grow, and Saint Peter’s was dedicated to the name of Lutheran churches. Leo the III was the first shaved Pope. He avoids plastics and statics, the electric charge that kills what is already dead. Thomas Edison used beard hair when searching for the strongest filament for his bulb. Someone’s hair brightened the room then burnt out. Combs of wood and horn smooth growth, a natural progression. Soon his lips will disappear. His beard will cover his heart and reach for ground and grave. He is already invisible to some, seen and not heard. Doors are not held for him. He grows it because he doesn’t want to be seen while speaking, because he wants to forget his bugler lips, rusty embouchure, what connects him to his father’s strict rhythm. Small seeds of protein gather in little pockets below the surface, form roots that steep in blood vessels. Hair breaks the skin, passes glands that soften and shine, and by the time it emerges the hair is dead. By the time it reaches his knees he will be alone and sing to the many shipwrecks sunk in it and speak to the dead that rise from its darkness at soul’s midnight. The story of hair growing after death is a myth, it is the skin that retracts from the follicle that gives the illusion of growth. He finds Saint Peter’s beard is now a fabric pattern, Warhol repetitions of His Holiness, dead but in stock across the world. Friends ask if he grows it for religious purposes. He answers: Somewhat, masks don’t work.

    ERIC MACHAN HOWD (Ithaca, New York) is a poet, musician, and educator. Their work has been seen in such publications as SLANT, SLAB, Cæsura, The Scop, and Nimrod. Their fifth collection of poetry, Universal Monsters, was published in 2021 by The Orchard Street Press.

    Featured image by Joshua Harris, courtesy of Unsplash.