Flash the Court

Tag: Tension

  • “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.

  • “After the Movies” by Susan P. Morehouse

    “After the Movies” by Susan P. Morehouse

    “After the Movies” by Susan P. Morehouse is a Southern-style slice-of-life story—a quiet but eerie homage to mothers and daughters and strangers and kindness and “the road unspooling before us.” The slow-and-steady-wins-the-race progression of the narration propels readers toward the inevitable end of the story, which surprises and blesses and satisfies and perplexes.  —Court Harler

    We’re driving home from the movies the long way, past the Beckley work farm, and Mom and me are talking about Butch and Sundance, how you can’t outrun fate no matter what or how gorgeous you are. I’m riding shotgun looking for deer to jump out the corn because we can’t afford to wreck. Mia’s in the back humming “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” and Freddie’s kicking my seat. They were too young for the movie, but we couldn’t leave them home alone.

    Our headlights barely pierce the dark. I turn around about to smack Freddie when Mom starts in on how it’s a men-who-roll-out-the-road night, for sure. “Look there,” she says pointing at a red light moving through the dark before us. “It’s three men with maybe twelve teeth between them and dirty faces throwing the road off the back of their truck that only has one taillight. Who knows where this road’ll take us.” Mom likes making things up, but this story gets to me and I’m looking more at that taillight than for deer.

    Up ahead, the light grows larger. I think we should go back the other way, but now Mom’s stopping for a skinny man in the road holding a lantern. Just a man. The light casts a shadow over his face. “Need a ride, stranger?” Mom says. He slides in the front next to me.

    Now Mom drives squinting into the dark, as if there’s a glare, which there isn’t. No one peeps from the back seat.

    The man’s clothes are too big for him; jeans dried hard on a line, tied with rope at the waist, and a shirt with the cuffs past his wrists. He hugs the door like he’s ready to jump out. He doesn’t smell like anything.

    We drive and drive, the road unspooling before us as if we’ve never been on it before, as if we’re lost, as if people we’ve never met really are making this up as we go along.

    At the bus station, the man thanks Mom in a voice that sounds unused to talking. She hands him something from her purse, and says “God Bless,” which we don’t say at home.

    Before he slides out, he leans into me, his breath hot on my skin. He says, “Girl, you try and grow up kind like your mama,” which I never thought of before.

    SUSAN P. MOREHOUSE’s flash and micros have appeared in Hippocampus Magazine, New Ohio Review, The Dribble Drabble Review, and elsewhere. Her stories and essays have been nominated for Best American Essays, The Pushcart Prize, and Best Microfiction, and she recently was the third-place winner of CRAFT Literary Magazine’s First Chapters Contest.

    Featured image by Guilherme Stecanella, courtesy of Unsplash.