Flash the Court

Tag: Sentence Structure

  • “Five-Star” by Vallie Lynn Watson

    “Five-Star” by Vallie Lynn Watson

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

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

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

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

    “Fab!” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

    “Fab!” he said.

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

    Featured image by Jez Timms, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Carrion” by Oliver Cubillos

    “Carrion” by Oliver Cubillos

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

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

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

    Featured image by Antoine Pouligny, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “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.

  • “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.