Flash the Court

Tag: Significant Detail

  • “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.