Flash the Court

Tag: Third Person

  • “A Boy Wants His Mother” by Lisa Thornton

    “A Boy Wants His Mother” by Lisa Thornton

    “A Boy Wants His Mother” by Lisa Thornton is a moving flash fiction with a circular structure. Thornton uses third-person narration to allow the point-of-view character, a grieving grandmother, to ask the difficult questions about her daughter and grandson. In fact, the story hinges on questions. What can be done, when the situation seems impossible?  —Court Harler

    What should a grandmother say to the classroom teacher when she calls in the middle of the day on a Tuesday? Or the school secretary on a Friday morning? The words Carline Elementary appearing on her phone screen while she is buying Cheerios or pairing small socks.

    Should a grandmother tell them that a boy sits and stares? A boy throws his cereal, milk arcing through the kitchen before the bowl bangs on the linoleum. A boy slams his head against the wall in the hallway, leaving a dent in it and white paint in his curls. A boy runs up the stairs and down the stairs and up the stairs and down the stairs until his face is red and his breath comes in spurts. A boy slams his bedroom door. And slams. And slams. And slams.

    Should she tell the school about when her daughter drops by, always unannounced, always sorry, always happy to see them, sometimes during Jeopardy and sometimes on a Saturday, and a boy runs to her like a magnet drawn to its opposite? About when he attaches himself to her arms and her waist and snuggles up against her on the couch where they stay for hours, legs intertwined, his sweaty hair stuck to her face, their chests moving up and down in unison as this beloved stranger shows him videos on her phone of people falling down, people walking into pools, people falling off skateboards. Should she describe the sound of their braided laughter drifting up the staircase like some kind of sweet-smelling soup that she knows will go cold?

    They should realize that a boy wakes. Always the next morning or the morning after and looks for her. A grandmother listens to his bedroom door creaking open, his footsteps down the stairs. She pours his juice. She feels his eyes spy the empty couch. She sets the table with napkin and spoon. She hears his feet pad down the hall. She hears them pick up pace to the bath. She sets his cereal at his place and stands straighter, centering herself in front of the sink, each hand gripping the edge of the counter. She looks out the window at the hickory tree and sees her daughter when she was the boy’s age. Before the bad times. Before the lying, the crying, the inpatient stays. Back when her curls were easy to manage. A grandmother hears the boy run into the kitchen and stop. She hears him behind her, searching. She is aware that the back of her head tells the boy all he needs to know.

    What should she tell the school when they call? Alright, she says to the principal, to the licensed behavioral therapist. He’s hitting again, their cool voices deliver. We can’t control him. They don’t ask why, just can she pick him up? They call her ma’am, but he can’t stay. What should she tell the world about her grandson when no one is asking the question?

    LISA THORNTON is a writer and nurse. She has stories in SmokeLong Quarterly, Pithead Chapel, and other magazines. She has been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, and Best Small Fictions. She lives in Illinois and can be found on Bluesky and Instagram @thorntonforreal.

    Featured image by Sascha Bosshard, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “The Missing Notes” by Jeff Friedman

    “The Missing Notes” by Jeff Friedman

    “In the silence of memory,” loss lingers but refuses to reinstate itself. The trombone joins the saxophone as each “listens for the music in the quiet rooms.” In this sonic prose poem called “The Missing Notes,” Jeff Friedman attempts to reunite lost friends with a remembered melody, but the tune remains uncatchable.  —Court Harler

    There’s always a run of notes missing, a trill gone, a vibrato he can’t quite remember. The song stalls in his chest, in his throat, on his lips. Now he listens for the music in his saxophone, in the shaky windows overlooking the giant plane trees and the scuffle of people headed toward the subway or the grocery, listens for the music in the quiet rooms under the rumble, but it’s not there. In the silence of memory, he hears a sound awakening, his old friend’s laughter like a door creaking slowly, then swinging open wide. His friend lifts his trombone, with its golden light, and the run of notes plays loudly and the song comes back to him like a bird flying through a window. He plays it over and over until he thinks he’s got it, memorized deep inside his bones, but his friend shakes his head and smiles, deep in his own silence.

    JEFF FRIEDMAN has published eleven collections of poetry and prose, including his most recent, Broken Signals (Bamboo Dart Press, August 2024). His work has appeared in Best Microfiction, The New Republic, New England Review, Poetry Magazine, and The American Poetry Review. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship and numerous other awards.

    Featured image by Andrew Konstantinov, 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.

  • “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.