Flash the Court

Tag: Significant Detail

  • “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.

  • “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.

  • “Water Tower Views” by Liz deBeer

    “Water Tower Views” by Liz deBeer

    In “Water Tower Views,” Liz deBeer captures the intricacies of budding young love—it’s both charming and crude, both bashful and brazen. The reader is given a glimpse of young love’s potential future as well, which grows ever more complicated amid fraught family dynamics. Surveillance and supervision also act as key motifs in this bold flash fiction.  —Court Harler

    Pushing aside homemade floral curtains, I watch neighborhood boys bike toward our street’s dead end, supervised only by the town’s water tower, a silver globe atop long legs, like a giant metallic spider.

    The next morning at the bus stop, they laugh and elbow Billy, mimicking him climbing up the long ladder to the water tower’s top railing, swearing it’s over one hundred fuckin’ feet. How Billy spread apart his legs to pee on the wildflowers below, bellowing, “I can see the whole damn world up here!” They shake their pelvises as if they too are spraying Queen Anne’s lace and black-eyed Susans from the heavens. They suck on imaginary cigarettes, blow out phantom smoke puffs, hack from fantasy fumes.

    A few yards away, the other girls and I pretend we aren’t listening, aren’t visualizing a yellow stream watering the wildflower field, aren’t wondering if we could make smoke circles too or if we’d choke-gag-retch at all of it.

    When the bus pulls to the curb, the boys strut down the aisle to sit in back rows, as far from the driver’s view as possible. Sliding into a middle seat, I wonder what else Billy saw from the water tower. Could he see into our houses? Mom yelling at Daddy when he spilled spaghetti on the carpet? Or my older sister smooshed against her boyfriend on the motorcycle Daddy had forbidden her to ride? Or later, Daddy guzzling glasses of Seagram’s Seven and Seven, cursing the goddamn Mets?

    As we bump toward school, I wonder if Billy could see me from my window wishing I were with him, looking out over rooftops, yelling, “I can see too!” Or if he sees me now, thinking of him and the boys.

    LIZ deBEER is a teacher and writer with Project Write Now, a writing cooperative based in New Jersey. Her latest flash has appeared in BULL, Fictive Dream, Flash Fiction Magazine, Bending Genres, and others. She has written essays for various journals including Brevity Blog.

    Featured image by Dana Kamp, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Christmas” by Betty Stanton

    “Christmas” by Betty Stanton

    We can name a day, even a holiday, but can’t know what it holds for those other than ourselves. In “Christmas” by Betty Stanton, “the calendar doesn’t mean much anymore,” but a new name, “something secret—something with edges,” may mean everything to the character called Angel. In this gut-wrenching, enigmatic flash fiction, Stanton asks us to reconsider “real names” as well as their personal and societal implications.  —Court Harler

    She says her name is Angel. It isn’t. No one uses real names anymore. Real names are too soft. Too easy to scar. Too easy to burn.

    Her girlfriend goes by something harder now—something secret—something with edges. Something that breaks you open when you touch it and not the other way around. Angel writes that name in notebook margins, folds it into receipts and the empty packs of cigarettes. It keeps the shadows orderly.

    They have new coats. Army surplus green. Warm enough to forget what month it is.

    This is Christmas, apparently. The calendar doesn’t mean much anymore. Days run together, blur like spilled ink. One long gray smear of hunger and cold. Sometimes she sings. Sometimes they eat. Sometimes they make love.

    Sometimes they make money. They don’t talk about how.

    In her bag: two shirts, torn jeans, pens, pencils, ten notebooks full of black. This is survival. This is art. This is what’s left when the world stops remembering you.

    Angel sings when she’s happy. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does it almost sounds like light breaking through.

    It doesn’t last.

    This is Christmas, apparently.

    Tomorrow will be, too.

    BETTY STANTON (she/her) is a Pushcart-nominated writer who lives and works in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She received her MFA from The University of Texas at El Paso and holds a doctorate in educational leadership. She is currently on the editorial board of Ivo Review.

    Featured image by Lawrence Aritao, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Self/Other” by Gargi Mehra

    “Self/Other” by Gargi Mehra

    In “Self/Other,” Gargi Mehra’s self-conscious and self-reflexive mother-narrator spies herself in a fellow soccer mom. She compares and contrasts, converses and reminisces, though eventually decides, “But our miens are the only factors in common.” What may be deemed an everyday exchange soon develops, through carefully chosen and depicted detail, into a glimpse of contemporary feminism, into a peek at the conflicted woman within.  —Court Harler

    At the football ground I run into my younger self – the one that bounces while she walks, and perhaps gyms while she sleeps. She’s leaner than I’d ever been, her calves smooth, biceps flexed, arms buffed, skin de-spotted, eyes fiery, chin firm, lips curled. She’s definitely not the early-twenties version of me that’s bitter and broken and teary-eyed and forever scouring the horizon for the male pillar that will bear the weight of her sculpted shoulder.

    We trade names, birthdates (but not years), family trees (but not mental disorders that may have passed down), and even veer into dating histories. But our miens are the only factors in common. I struggle to scrape out the little details – it’s like poking at the grooves between my premolars, hunting down that elusive morsel just to find something, anything, that we share.

    Then it turns out that even our mothers aren’t the same. She says her mom flatlined even before their wedding – only then do I look past those cheekbones that pierce the air, and glimpse the resolve etched into pimple scars just like mine.

    Our little girls trot up to meet us (look at us – aren’t we progressive by getting our daughters to football and not the usual dance-craft-cooking-painting kind of classes?), hers bereft of shin guards, hair tucked into a tight bun, while my little czarina has fixed a tiny pink bow to the scrunchie of her ponytail.

    The smartphone rings and other-me toddles off to bark into its electronic butt, the sunlight bouncing off her hair, feet springing off the turf, while I scour the landscape for a woman that misses perfection but mirrors me.

    GARGI MEHRA is a writer, a computer engineer, and a mother. She plays the piano, smashes her lessons on Duolingo, and thrives on word games including crosswords, Scrabble, and of course, Wordle. She lives with her husband and two children in Pune, India.

    Featured image by Alberto Frías, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “The Day It Rained Stone” by Kathryn Kulpa

    “The Day It Rained Stone” by Kathryn Kulpa

    In her newest flash fiction, “The Day It Rained Stone,” Kathryn Kulpa entirely reinvents the contemporary genre of the coffee-shop story. In such a story, usually set in a diner or eatery, readers are gently treated to a light narrative, a humorous or illustrative slice-of-life moment. Instead, Kulpa stuns the reader with the horror of the mines and the generational echoes of grief. The result is a vivid but weighty story that honors the dead and counts the blessings of the living.  —Court Harler

    Every day when I go in to work to pull espresso shots I see the picture on the wall at Tunnel House Coffee, men with pickaxes and miner’s caps. Men who built the tunnel. Great-Grandpa Chuck was one of those men. Charles Henry Walker was the name on his tombstone, d. 1934, but the old pictures in Grandma’s album have “Pop” or “Chuck” on them, in liquid brown ink, in old-time cursive writing. The men were up by dawn. Out on the mountain before the sky did more than pink the edge of the horizon. Great-Grandma packed his lunch, never fewer than two sandwiches in that heavy steel lunchbox, two hard-boiled eggs, salt and pepper wrapped in a twist of waxed paper, thick scones split with a thread, then sealed back together with a smear of honey butter, the way Grandma still fixes them. Wives, sometimes kids too, waving goodbye as their men disappeared into the mountain, into caverns of stone that grew bigger each week.

    Every day, the blasting. Whistle blowing, once for caution, twice for all clear. Vibrations that went on so long you heard them even in stillness, your teeth rattling, fingers tapping out syncopated rhythm as you trailed off to sleep. Everybody knew fine china wasn’t safe on shelves. Everybody knew, when the men were in the tunnels, glasses would dance, lights would flicker, clean clothes would wear a topcoat of powder, like a girl going out for the evening.

    The Dark Day was the one everyone remembered, even Grandma, and she wasn’t more than three. She says her bones remember. Still won’t drive through a tunnel, still won’t ride an elevator. Like my mother, with her fear of tight spaces. Like my nightmares of being buried alive. That day the blast rumbled on, too loud, too long. The day they blew the whistle three sharp shrieks, again and again. SOS. SOS. Dogs howled along, tails tucked low. The day of long night, they called it, as if the sun never rose, blocked by the haze of stone dust in the air. Ambulance horns, arOOga, arOOga, and bucket brigades for when fire hoses no longer reached, but it wasn’t smoke that blacked the sky, only stone. Only mountains of stone, blasted, crushed, turning a tunnel into a tomb, sealed forever, so that all they buried of Great-Grandpa Chuck was the wedding band he wouldn’t wear into the mountain, lest the initials on it get too dust-choked to read. That ring lay, gold under earth, and not far off Great-Grandpa lay, with two hundred other men, bone under stone, and when the old folks ride that tunnel they still take off their hats, still bend their heads and whisper a quiet blessing to the dead we all live with.

    KATHRYN KULPA is the author of A Map of Lost Places (Gold Line Press) and For Every Tower, A Princess (Porkbelly Press). She was a 2025 Writer in Residence at Linden Place in Bristol, Rhode Island, and has stories in BULL, Flash Frog, Ghost Parachute, matchbook, and Your Impossible Voice.

    Featured image by Nick Osipov, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Widow Training [Field Notes]” by Eileen Toomey

    “Widow Training [Field Notes]” by Eileen Toomey

    “Widow Training [Field Notes]” by Eileen Toomey is a micromemoir that moves and moves— we’re shopping, we’re driving, we’re walking, we’re ferrying—until suddenly, we’re stopped: cold in our tracks, begging ice for a “warm beer.” The joy of movement is lost, now suspended in grief.  —Court Harler

    Saturday morning. We went to Sickles, an urban market in the old Anderson building that reminds me of DeLuca’s in Boston with expensive cherry tomatoes clinging to the vine. But we were in Jersey, with branzino lip to lip, dead eyes appraising us from the fish counter.

    Dropped the car off at the shop. The old Lexus might need a jump here and there, but she’s like driving a couch. Maybe that will be me, my middle softening like nice leather, the same texture of Mother’s body as she aged.

    Who knows how many more miles we will travel? Road trip warriors, we laugh like kids in the car with the music and memories. “Do you remember the Oregon Inn?” one of us will say each time we pass the Cedar Point exits on 80 in Ohio. “Dusted perch and prime rib,” the other one replies.

    Now when I’m writing at our kitchen table, I listen for your breath, the creak of the floorboards as you cross to your dresser. Damn this old house, each room stacked with books and dusty lamps. When I hear the rattle of your pills, I know you are awake.

    We went to Memorial Sloan Kettering outpatient, just for a day. In preliminary tests, they found cancer everywhere—and kept you. Because of COVID, they wouldn’t let me stay. I walked thirty blocks, past piss-stained eating sheds, and took the ferry home instead of getting a ride from Denny.

    Then I did this funny thing that I never do alone, and never during the day: I ordered a beer on the boat. I hoped they had something local like a Cape May, but I settled for a Heineken in a giant can. I hate warm beer, so I asked for ice. The bartender looked at me funny, and I thought, Fuck you, I’m widow training.

    EILEEN TOOMEY’s works have appeared in The Rumpus, Cleaver Magazine, Oyster River Pages, and more. Her poem “Immunotherapy” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Eileen is currently shopping around her memoir, You Were All Average: Tales of a Canaryville Girl.

    Featured image by Peyman Shojaei, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Family Medical History” by Maggie Russell

    “Family Medical History” by Maggie Russell

    Health is a heritage we are bequeathed without our consent. Call it DNA, or call it destiny—we are more like our parents than we may care to admit. But “care” is the key term here: how we care for ourselves, how we care for one another. In her flash creative nonfiction essay simply entitled “Family Medical History,” Maggie Russell explores the confounding complexity of the bodies we are given.  —Court Harler

    You never told us the proper names for your diseases. Never called your arthritis by its full name, ankylosing spondylitis. You never used your full name either, the J stood alone in J. Robert.

    My stomach issue was introduced at seventeen. Too young for an ulcer, you told me hopefully, only to be crushed at the diagnosis. With my prescription in hand a litany of worry crossed your face. Your tone was no different from how you spoke of your unliked uncle, the one who drove Grandma to our house for Easter. His visit cut short whenever he mentioned the guys he knew, who fixed problems.

    You hoped for the same: my ulcer and your ulcerative colitis to stay distantly related.

    As to all things undigestible, there was no debate my genes were yours. All your other kids had tough marble façades that reflected yours. Yet they could drink a bucket of queso, but not us. We can’t trifle with lactose, you said, when I called you about my self-inflicted wound rendered from cheesy alfredo. It was the result of suddenly stopping veganism at a Macaroni Grill dinner, with the boyfriend you were never sure about.

    We were made of squishier stuff than the others. We, the wholehearted ones, saw kin in everything. You, wet-eyed at the kids washing windshields while we were stuck in Bronx traffic. Me, pleading to save the small creature on the side of the road, my teary face smearing the inside of the window. Again.

    I can’t remember when the back pain began, an uprising of aching bones. Mine was at twenty-four. Would you have known it would turn, as yours did? You could smell trouble, truffle-sniff it in the air. In Rome once, I remember you shushed us past the fountain, quickly away from a growing crowd. We cobblestumbled from the cathedral up to an arched bridge. You’d heard the words of rapidly rowdier protesters and caught in the crowd’s grumbling what we couldn’t comprehend: a full-body riot.

    We heard nothing of your diagnoses, only the unreadable groans. Only pills rattling in bottles like shoes on ancient streets.

    I need those names now, Poppa, to answer this rheumatological rampage. I need to fill in these blanks on family diseases.

    MAGGIE RUSSELL is an essayist and poet who writes professionally about law. Raised by the woods in Connecticut, she now lives in Nashville where she volunteers with prison poetry projects. Maggie’s work has appeared in January House, Last Leaves, and the anthology If You Ever.

    Featured image by Jose Arias, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “It Was the First Day of Fall When the Sumo Left the Dohyō…” by Mathieu Cailler

    “It Was the First Day of Fall When the Sumo Left the Dohyō…” by Mathieu Cailler

    Fall is a time for favorites: your favorite cozy sweater, your favorite apple, your favorite cat named for your “favorite singer.” As the seasons shift, so too, do you. In this time of transition, read and reflect upon “It Was the First Day of Fall When the Sumo Left the Dohyō…” by Mathieu Cailler, a flash fiction just in time for the autumnal vibe.  —Court Harler

    …and championships and cultural nobility behind. He changed into a Thelonious Monk T-shirt and gray slacks, leaving his mawashi in the changing room at the Gap. He traded in his high-calorie chanko nabe for a crisp Fuji apple at the farmers’ market and downed a glass of buttery chardonnay at the wine bar across town. He abandoned the forceful moves of sumo—yori-kiri, oshi-dashi, uwate-nage—for ballet lessons on pas de bourrée, rond de jambe, and soubresaut. He stopped by a pet store and adopted a cat, which he named Ella, after his favorite singer. He stroked her coat and listened to her purr as he strolled home.

    Maybe the oak tree in his yard had shed some of its leaves. Maybe Ella would like to nest atop them. Maybe he could take pictures of her and post them to Instagram, or maybe instead he’d simply lie down beside her in the soft autumn foliage.

    MATHIEU CAILLER is the author of seven books. His work has appeared in over 150 publications, including Wigleaf, The Saturday Evening Post, and the Los Angeles Times. He is the winner of a Pushcart Prize; a Readers’ Favorite award; and the Paris, Los Angeles, and New England Book Festival prizes.

    Featured image by Aaron Burden, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “House Rules” by Jeff Harvey

    “House Rules” by Jeff Harvey

    Some of the best flash fiction is haunted flash fiction. “House Rules” by Jeff Harvey is shadowed by the twin spectres of childhood abandonment and abuse. The piece is driven by a coolly deceptive voice that descends from the darkness; the tone hits as supernaturally chilling, but the horrifying situation itself: all too devastatingly real.  —Court Harler

    Keep your shit locked up. Can’t trust nobody around here. Miss Kendall is okay, but she’ll hit you sometimes after she’s had too many beers. And don’t fucking cry, you’ll get it worse from the others, especially Wayne; stay away from him. Dinner always at six-thirty. Tomorrow’s Saturday so after cleaning the house and laundry, we might get to see a movie on a VHS player. Last week we watched The Breakfast Club. It was cool but nobody famous. After the movie we got lemon cookies and raspberry Kool-Aid. Miss Kendall was happy about something; I’d never seen her smile before. I got some oxy that’ll help ease the pain if you want some. Only ten bucks. And don’t ever ask about going home. That place doesn’t exist for kids like us. Only another house to bide our time.

    JEFF HARVEY lives in Southern California and edits Gooseberry Pie Lit Magazine. His fiction has been published recently by Ghost Parachute, Your Impossible Voice, and Bending Genres. His work has been nominated for Best Microfiction.

    Featured image by Nathan Wright, courtesy of Unsplash.