Jul 24, 2026
by Dino Parenti
One unremarkable March day, a man began puncturing random holes in his withered pasture with a post-hole digger. Not deep holes, but shallow, exploratory exhumations, as if testing for integrity, or moisture for some future well.
First, he pockmarked the center of his lot before spiraling outwards from there, ending eight hours later with hundreds of punctures. He was a scoured man: skin and joints far too cragged and knotted for middle age. A man who had gone off to Iraq with a boxer’s bearing in 2004 to drive tanks, only to return pummeled and slumped by crusade.
Years later, he became known only as the neighborhood hermit. No wife, no children, no callers stopping by. Every other morning, come 9am, he would drive his rust-beaten hydrostatic mower in circles around the yowling dog he kept chained to a barren flagpole in the middle of the yellow crabgrass pasture, blaring drunken, unintelligible inquiries of the animal, of the ground, of the sky.
At night, slouched in a back-porch recliner molting its limp, brown leather, he would sip in silence, glaring askance at the moon, paying the caterwauling dog no heed. The neighbors knew less of the man than they did the animal: Millie, an equally battered cur of some hybrid wolf stock. A wholly neglected beast, howling hunger and isolation in the middle of the night whenever not engaged in her singular entertainment of gnawing at wilting sunflower stalks. Every fifteen minutes, her owner would yell at her from the back porch, or from inside his sagging, cavernous house: NOT MY FAULT! And for a few minutes she would, perhaps expecting him to come and split his forlornness with her as pals might a beer. But he never did, and Millie never failed to remind him of his neglect.
Then, one especially foggy day, Millie was gone. The rope that had moored her to her fifty-square-foot universe sat frayed at the end like a bridesmaid’s spray of baby’s breath.
Shortly thereafter, the man began digging his holes, mumbling as he went; meek, under-the-breath vocalizations with no discernable words, though one woman gardening behind a dried tangle of sumac would later claim to have heard him growl repeatedly “Where is it?” and “Bad intel” through gritted teeth as he plunged oxidized spades into his barren earth, drawing apart the handles with the grunts of a power-lifter, as if trying to split prehistoric wishbones.
By the time he was done, hands blistered and shaking, he had scooped out some two hundred eight-by-twelve-inch craters. That night, he propped up work lights around the four corners of his lot and flared them inwards, then sat squinting from his recliner as if expecting something to climb steaming and wailing from one of the pitch-black cavities.
One dawn, the light blue and the mist stitching between the hillocks, he overturned his mower and hosed down the undercarriage with one hand while the other crabbed over his face, his shoulders hitching as if shrugging off some private interrogation.
The next day, he went out and returned with sacks of dog food. He filled every hole until they mounded over with kibble. For days after, he sat in his recliner, watching the holes and the horizon. At night the pasture came alive with raccoon and opossum chitter, and he would bolt out naked, wading through tracers of fireflies, his drunken shrieks scattering the critters as he wept his apologies to Millie’s pole, and slowly the holes became unearthed anew, albeit by opportune tooth and claw.
Another day, he wandered into the pasture with two large clear bags of tea lights and plunked one into the bottom of each tiny crater. It took hours, some of the initial candles snuffing out in the last of their wax before he could replace them. Tiny cauldrons flickering orange—as if molten metal sloshed within.
He isn’t all there, his neighbors would mutter. Still others would suggest that maybe the war had turned him psycho. No one ever approached him.
One Friday, he ramped the mower onto the bed of his truck, only to return with the bed brimming with fertilizer. He scooped some into each hole, doled in what looked like seeds, then added more fertilizer until the darker soil bumped proud against the gray-brown loam like a smattering of moles across a sallow back.
In two weeks the sprouts crept through, and the man watered throughout, and he watched from his porch, and he drank, and in a couple of months, two hundred perfectly contained sunflower plots were thriving, gazing east.
And still he watched and drank.
The last time anyone saw him alive was some time in summer. One neighbor claimed to have seen him wandering into his forest of sunflowers—by then as tall as the man himself—a bottle held behind him as if clutching the hand of a coquettish sweetheart.
Late fall, as the sunflowers drooped and the cold rehoned the air, a utility worker on his first month home from Kandahar found the man’s body, desiccated amongst his flowers. Inside his house, charts drawn on the floor and walls of every room. Gridded plots of the property superimposed over tanned maps smattered in Arabic towns. Parabolic courses and coordinates. Intricate lists of dates and times he’d mowed and which areas, along with percentages and question marks. Arrows pointing to a variety of holes, adorned with progressively larger question marks. All figures ending in question marks. Numbers dwindling fast as they moved east.
Bewildered and curious, neighbors prodded the worker for more information, but he shared nothing else—not of seeing the man’s body fetaled and hugging a sheaf of sunflower stalks, nor of the dog collar clutched in his hand, severed clean before the buckle.
Dino Parenti is a writer of dark, speculative fiction. Author of the novella, Bitter Breed, as well as the Imadjinn Award Finalist short-fiction collection, Dead Reckoning and Other Stories, he also won the first annual Lascaux Review flash fiction contest and was featured in the Anthony Award winning anthology Blood on the Bayou. He lives in Los Angeles.
Sep 23, 2025
“Interior,” oil on canvas, by Vilhelm Hammershøi, 1914.
by Emily Rinkema
I’m ten minutes late to the interview to be my mother’s daughter. I’m confident, as her actual daughter, her only child, that I’ll have a leg up, but when I walk in the lobby of the memory care facility I see four other women waiting. If they are here for the job, three of them have no chance—Too Old, Too Blonde, Too Connecticut—but one makes me question all of my life decisions. She’s slim, athletic, exactly what my mother has always wanted in a daughter. I am not slim, not athletic, so unlike my mother, she used to joke that my father had slept with the mailman.
Tom, my mother’s nurse, who I pay to be with her when I cannot, comes down the hallway. He holds a clipboard. “Next,” he says, looking around the room. He seems amused. When he called me yesterday to tell me about the interviews I told him no fucking way.
“Remember,” he said, which I found ironic. “No fighting her delusions.”
“It’s fucking ridiculous.”
“Oh Sweetie,” he says, putting his arm around my shoulders. “Don’t worry. I think you’ve got a real shot at this.”
*
The interview is short. My mother sits with pen in hand, a notebook open on the desk in front of the window. She is in the only chair in the room, so I sit on the bed, which feels unprofessional. She is wearing a sweater I have never seen.
She asks me questions: How often will you visit? What will you bring? Are you married? How many kids do you have? Do you own any nice clothes?
I answer them: Almost every day, magazines and muffins, not anymore, you know the answer to that, are you fucking kidding me?
Tom puts his hand on my shoulder and I sit back down, breathe, smile.
She tells me I can go now.
Tom walks me out.
“What’s next?” I ask. I can’t wait to drive out of this parking lot. My pants are too tight. My feet hurt. Fifteen years of therapy have been erased in less than an hour.
“She’ll be in touch,” he says.
*
Tom calls to tell me I made it to the final round, which happens to be on the only day of the week I don’t normally visit my mother. I spend an embarrassing amount of time deciding what to wear. Nothing screams “I’m Actually Your Goddamn Daughter,” so I choose my comfortable jeans and a blouse with tiny blue flowers. Tom tells me I am supposed to bring a presentation, so upload three photos into a slide show. I stop on my way to get muffins.
In the facility lobby I am surprised to see only one other candidate, the slim, athletic one. She looks a little less catalog-ready today, anxious, tired. She has a briefcase by the leg of her chair and is working on her laptop, finalizing her presentation, no doubt. There’s a part of me, not as tiny as I would like to admit, that’s rooting for her.
My mother seems distant in the interview, confused. She asks me why I am there and I go all in, tell her I’m prepared to be her daughter, that I am honored to have made it this far in the process, that I think I’m a natural. She’s in bed this time, sitting up, but reclined slightly. I pull my chair up next to her, open my computer, and show her my presentation.
She smiles at the first photo, one of us on the steps of my childhood home. I’m maybe three years old and it’s clear I’ve been crying. Mom is next to me, wearing a green sundress and a floppy hat. She’s laughing and looking at the camera. She touches the screen and her eyes fill with tears, and I think that maybe I’ve been wrong about everything, maybe she does love me. But when I look closely I see that she is touching her own face in the photo. I click to the next one, us at my high school graduation. She shakes her head. She doesn’t even look at the third.
She tells me they are poisoning her food here. She grabs my wrist, her nails digging into my skin, and tells me George, my father who has been dead a decade, is fucking the nurse. She tells me I’ll never get married if I stay this fat. She tells me her handsome son visits her every day and that I have to leave now because she doesn’t want me there when he arrives, which would be fine, only she doesn’t have a son, handsome or otherwise.
Tom is sitting outside the door. He stands when I come out and raises his eyebrows at me. He seems to want it to have gone well. He rolls his shoulders and cracks his neck. I hadn’t noticed before, but he looks exhausted and I wonder why he chooses to spend his days with other peoples’ parents. Maybe it’s easier when there aren’t so many layers, when words are just words.
“How did it go?” he asks, walking me to the door.
“I’m hopeful,” I say to him, because I’ve got to believe there’s a chance.
“The Interview” originally appeared in Variant Literature.
Emily Rinkema lives and writes in northern Vermont, USA. Her writing has recently appeared in Variant Literature, Flash Frog, Fictive Dream, Ghost Parachute, and Wigleaf, and she won the 2024 Cambridge Prize and the 2024 Lascaux Prize for flash fiction. You can read her work at https://emilyrinkema.wixsite.com/my-site or follow her on X, BS, or IG (@emilyrinkema).
Sep 5, 2025
“An Overgrown Pond (detail),” oil on canvas, by Vasily Polenov, 1879.
by Jessica Jo Staricka
The city drained the quarry and closed the park for the search or rescue or recovery or whatever, so naturally after dark we snuck through the empty parking lot and under the gate arm and down the narrow gravel, Cassy and me. We didn’t wear swimsuits because the water was supposed to be all gone, and who’d want to swim in dead-ten-year-old-kid soup anyway?
The night was its own hot soup. The mosquitos needled us while we traced the path that wrapped between young trees around the quarry we’d floated upon in tractor tire innertubes all summer. We’d turned fourteen within a week of each other, Cassy and me, and shared an August birthday party out here. Everybody jumped off the thirty-foot-tall cliff except me. Classmates and respective cousins, some mine, some Cassy’s, promised me there were no deadly boulders under the surface and demonstrated so again and again by soaring off the edge and exploding into the water below before resurfacing a terrifying ten or more seconds later. I couldn’t admit to them that meeting nothing but water, down and down and down, was what I feared, not boulders.
Now, the drained quarry was a vast, jagged mouth that seemed to go down forever because we hadn’t thought to bring flashlights, and honestly, even if we had, their beams would never have reached the bottom. A halfmoon lit one blurry cloud way up above and cut silver outlines out of the pumps and hoses and excavator that sat on the floor of the quarry among black patches of mirror water.
Cassy said as we squinted down into the dark that her dad thought he used to go to church with the parents of the missing kid, except he wasn’t one hundred percent sure, because it was a common first name and a common last name, and Cassy’s dad didn’t go to church anymore anyway. I stunned myself by forgetting the disappeared kid’s name. Lucas Wilson. Liam Williams. Cameron Walker. Something with that same blond baseball player flavor. I asked Cassy, and she didn’t remember the name either, but she didn’t seem too shocked about it. She was four inches taller than she had been at the start of the year. All lithe, never shocked about anything. Why didn’t her dad go to church anymore? I wanted to ask, but my parents had never gone to church, so what would I know about it anyway? Had Cassy ever gone to church? Did she believe dead kids who drowned in quarries went somewhere else afterward? But Cassy and I didn’t ask each other things. We just went looking and stood before jagged, damp, vacant enormity and talked about whether dead kids floated or sank.
That summer, cheered on by Cassy and our shared partygoers, I’d trotted toward the edge of the cliff intending to launch myself off, but the hungry water droned up at me from below, its greed so loud it shrank me and chased me scrambling back from the edge. That humming vertigo was the inverse of this drained-quarry-at-night vertigo, which instead of shrinking me made me crave sailing off the edge, like freefalling a hundred feet into slimy, rough granite was welcoming compared to deep, unknown waters. Maybe he was down there in some undiscovered cranny. The kid. Colton Anderson. Landon Adams.
Cassy wanted to find a better vantage point down into the pit, so we strode on along the ledge. We had talked for days about the kid who disappeared in the quarry, about how the city had pumped the water out and probably killed the fish, about how thrilling it would be to explore this alien version of the park after dark and maybe, just maybe, catch the police or paramedics or coroner pulling a soggy Levi Watson or whatever his name was from the slick rocks he surely rested among. She didn’t ask me if I actually hoped we’d see this kid corpse. And I didn’t ask her if we were out here because we were envious and wished we could disappear, too.
Jessica Jo Staricka grew up on a dairy farm in Minnesota. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of New Orleans. Her work has appeared in Fourteen Hills, Beloit Fiction Journal, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. When she isn’t writing, Jessica can be found drawing or exploring.
Aug 27, 2025
“Ophelia” (detail), oil on canvas, by Friedrich Wilhelm Theodor Heyser, before 1921.
by Tommy Dean
You used to cook for four, now after the kids have gone to college, and the divorce is finalized, and you and your husband, you keep forgetting to put the ex in front of this yoking title, have downgraded to shared-walled duplexes, because the kids begged for a one-stop shopping experience of familial love, you cook only for yourself and only on the days that you have the energy, after sitting on dirty, and often rotting floors of trailers and modular homes, and apartments with subsidized rents, trying to coax developmentally-delayed children to roll over, to tolerate foods and sounds and touches that might be forever unfamiliar.
You and your husband (ex) used to watch TV for hours. Unsolved murders, half-cooked salmon, and the dating shows where no one was happy even as the Caribbean sunsets bronzed their skin and the wine flowed as they perched in the crystal blue waters of the ocean. Get me those chips, why don’t you, either of you would say, instead of what are we doing and did we ever love like that, and why don’t we go somewhere warm, and how long can we keep doing this, until you both agreed, somehow, through the labyrinth of legalese that there was nothing wrong, but boredom and a little contempt, but no more than you had for yourselves each time you looked in the mirror, and wondered where your youth had gone, and if you had only known how to spend it.
You host on the holidays, because your husband (ex) wouldn’t know where to start. He means well, but everything he does comes with a whiff of desperation, of waiting for you to save him, the outcome the same, the children nodding their heads, agreeing with a laugh, that of course dad forgot the cranberry sauce, that the gifts were still in the plastic shopping sacks, that the necklace was on back order, that maybe he could just give you this cash, a wad he unceremoniously took from his back pocket. Here, he’d say, and that was supposed to be I love you, that I care, but I can’t get the timing right. While you were expected a certain precision, a certain perfection, to remember clothing sizes, and preferred tastes, and that Sean needed to stay with his father, sleeping on the other side of that wall, because of his allergies, and why did you have to get a cat?, and never mind that you were lonely, that Sean only visited four times a year. Vanessa seems to understand, but she takes the men’s side, by only nodding her head, never echoing her mother’s concerns, your desires as unknown to her as they are to your husband (ex).
But you find yourself together, now, in the back of your square yards that abut the sprawl of a town you swore you’d leave when the kids graduated, when they finished college, when they got their jobs, and had their kids, and you were needed again to hold the babies while your daughter cried about her lack of sleep and while your son told you about his investments, and his wife took a nap, but you’ve allowed yourself to sprout here, to dig into the loamy structure of the suburb, of your clients, the babies with their disabilities and their parents without a clue, and so he finds you there in the yard that you’ve dug up, his and yours combined, tilled into neat rows for flowers, and never vegetables because you need something beautiful, alive only for its visual grandeur, and not to be harvested or ripped from the ground. So you fertilize, and water, and cut away the weeds, and scheme against rabbits who thieve from your sprouts in the night.
Until, late in the season, your husband (ex) comes with hands behind his back, a Dick Van Dyke to Mary Poppins, and your knees ache from being so old, the veins like highways through your calves to places you’ll never go. “I sold it,” he says. The house. And my half of the garden, I suppose.” And hasn’t he been supposing his entire life? “Where will you go,” you say, careful not to point the trowel in his direction. “To Sean’s. An in-law suite,” he says. “But what will you do? We’re too young for that, surely? A touch of the grass, the dirt between your feet. You could live for ages,” she says. “For you, I would try,” he says. So you sit at his feet and untie his laces, prod him to lift his legs, taking off each shoe and socks. His toes are bone-white, almost iridescent. He helps you up, the first touch between you in years, not since the divorce, the last time you made love, before signing the papers.
You link elbows, him wobbling over the soft ground, his feet too sensitive for the unmown grass. You position his feet between the flower stalks, their colors a wash of delight even against his intrusion. “Wiggle them toes. Really settle in,” you say. “It’s colder than I thought it would be. I don’t know how you can handle the squish?” With a quick cut, you snip off a rosebud, twirl it in front of his eyes, the vision of those umbrellas from one of Vanessa’s dance numbers, the way they had collided during the show, how Vanessa had cried, and vowed to never dance again, how it was another ending, how you were never prepared for when things would wilt, how you could never know how much to give, how much is luck and perseverance. You put the flower in his pocket, refrain from a gentle kiss on the cheek, the scruff of his face not yet forgotten, and walk toward your side of the house, and when he asks, where you’ll go, you won’t turn around, won’t stop walking, but you’ll point to the sky, and say, “I’m already there.”
Tommy Dean is an associate literary agent with Rosecliff Literary, the author of two flash fiction chapbooks and a full flash collection, Hollows (Alternating Current Press 2022). He is the Editor of Fractured Lit and Uncharted Magazine. His writing can be found in Best Microfiction 2019, 2020, 2023, Best Small Fictions 2019 and 2022, Harpur Palate, and elsewhere. He has taught writing workshops for the Gotham Writers Workshop, The Writers Center, and The Writers Workshop. Find him at tommydeanwriter.com and on Twitter @TommyDeanWriter.
Aug 3, 2025
“Homer Saint-Gaudens and His Mother,” oil on canvas, by John Singer Sargent, 1890.
by Dawn Tasaka Steffler
Because the internet said, children who lose a parent to suicide are more likely to die from suicide. Because for Tyler’s fourteenth birthday, I took him to Disneyland and thought we were having a good day, until his eyes brimmed with tears while we were in line and he mumbled, “I’m sorry, Mom—I don’t think I want to be here anymore.” And I knew he wasn’t talking about Space Mountain. Because my therapist said, “I know you’re angry. But you need to hold space for Tyler to grieve.” And I remember thinking, does no one give a fuck about me?
My husband hovers. I hear songs on the radio that croon “I’m sorry,” or I’ll see a heart-shaped cloud, or the Mexican place has a new banner, “Life is hard, tacos help.” I always ignore him. But two hours ago, Tyler barged into my bedroom, he’s receiving an award at tonight’s Senior Ceremony and his dress slacks are too short. I wanted to say, You’re just like your Dad, always leaving stuff to the last minute! But I didn’t. I said, “Would you like to look in your Dad’s closet?” And Tyler examined each hanger, the scrape of wire on wood, the rustle of fabric. He selected a navy suit and a pinstriped shirt still in the dry cleaner’s plastic sleeve. And when he emerged, I felt like I was looking at a ghost, except this ghost’s hair was shaggy and falling into its eyes.
And now I’m standing at the back of the gym. When Tyler accepts his commemorative plaque, the flyers on the table next to me flutter and ripple. And I whisper, “Fuck off.” I whisper, “Yes, he turned out amazing. No thanks to you.” I whisper, “Well, thank you. That means a lot.”
Dawn Tasaka Steffler (she/her) is an Asian-American writer from Hawaii who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was a Smokelong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow, winner of the Bath Flash Fiction Award, and was selected for both the 2024 Wigleaf Top 50 long list and 2025 Best Small Fictions. Her stories appear in Pithead Chapel, Fractured Lit, Moon City Review, The Forge, and more. Find her online at dawntasakasteffler.com and on BlueSky and Instagram @dawnsteffler.
Nov 17, 2024
“Bathers at Asnières,” oil on canvas, by Georges Seurat, 1884.
by Tommy Dean
They sit in camping chairs, at the edge of the lake, the water murky as they wait for the dark to crown the night and the fireworks to start. Half the town behind them, a buzz over their shoulders of kids running and screaming, of firecrackers exploding, of teenagers holding hands and kissing under the buzzing tennis court lights. In their early forties, they’re embarrassed by their yearning, to leap into the water, to put their hands near the intimate unshaven hollows of bodies skinny with youth. Remember, he says, but her knee pops as she readjusts, pulling her shirt down over the soft mound of her belly, the same one he couldn’t keep his hands off of, the way he could feel her muscles, the way she’d shiver, and with her eyes ask for more.
“I’ve been seeing someone,” he says, between bites of kettle corn. The burnt sugar smell comes between them, and she wishes he’d stop chewing.
“Like a doctor? Or a therapist?” She sees him in his letterman’s jacket, the leather sleeves cartoonishly big, his runner’s arms more bone than muscle. He only runs on weekends now, getting slower with each mile.
“Never mind.” He swats at a bug, shreds of white dot his chest. Where were the days she’d licked them off, had bitten his ear, made him mewl with desire. The TV was turned on more than either of them, bodies orbiting, but never colliding. Even his jokes can’t roll her eyes anymore.
“I don’t want to know, Matty. Keep it hidden, don’t let anyone know, see or smell it on you.” She plucks out a handful and puts it to her lips, inhales, thinking how she could split him right down the goddamn middle with what she’s enjoyed in the safety of her head. For him. For their daughter. “I won’t be the gossip.”
The spark and sizzle of that first flare, the splash of color, the boom rattling the windows of the swanky house on the manufactured island at the edge of this greasy lake. A weeping willow and a tire swing, shadowed against the water. A place of envy. Postcarded with each flash of the light.
He reaches for her hand and she lets him hold it, fingers intertwined, knuckles already aching, his ring still fat on his finger. She tugs on it, knows how easily hers comes off each time she lotions her hands, but his won’t move past the knuckle. The scene of her standing and chucking it into the lake float away like smoke. The body holds onto what it needs. All she can think of is her hunger.
She leans in, stage whispers in his ear, a caught sound between flares, “At least she’ll know who you’re coming home to.”
She beckons for the bag and he gives it to her so willingly. A bit of mirth coloring his face, and she doesn’t know if it’s for her or for her. She dumps the popcorn on his lap, coating his chest and crotch with the popped kernels. “Enjoy your little snack.”
“It wasn’t on purpose,” he’ll tell her later on their walk back to the car, up the lengthening hills, past the church, and its cracked parking lot, dodging around the slower couples, those flagged by kids threatening to bob into the street.
But he never did anything on purpose. An argument so old it might as well have been sewed into their vows. Not even me, she doesn’t ask. Those colors, lilac, rose gold, Irish green, and blood red, superimposed over her eyes, promising something deliberate. A future as rooted as that ring on her husband’s hand, filthy with germs and grease, barricaded by knuckle and muscle and fat, and memory.
“The Body Holds Onto What it Needs” originally appeared in Arrowsmith.
Tommy Dean is the author of two flash fiction chapbooks, Special Like the People on TV and Covenants, and a full flash collection, Hollows. He lives in Indiana and is currently the editor of Fractured Lit and Uncharted Magazine. A recipient of the 2019 Lascaux Prize in Short Fiction, his writing can be found in Best Microfiction 2019 and 2020, Best Small Fiction 2019 and 2022, Monkeybicycle, and numerous litmags. Find him at tommydeanwriter.com and on Twitter @TommyDeanWriter.
Nov 12, 2024
“Memory Circles #8,” watermedia and ink, by Janice Phelps Williams, 2018. Used with permission.
by Chris Cottom
The old lady raising her arm at the Co-op bus stop has a jaunty feather in her hat, like William Tell.
“You don’t need to wave, you know,” I say as she shuffles aboard. “I always stop here.” The Felixstowe loop: eight times a day, five days a week, more if I want weekend overtime. Which, since Mandy left, I do.
It’s mostly passes and contactless now, but this one’s fumbling in her bag for so long she’s endangering my timetable targets. I’ll lose my bonus if I’m not parked up in bay seven within the four-minute window allowed by a management that doesn’t believe in roadworks. She’s got to be pushing eighty, probably from the wrong side.
“Do you want to sit down, love? You can show me your pass when you get off.”
Shit, she’s proffering a coin.
Except it isn’t a coin. It’s a button.
In twenty-seven years I’ve been offered plenty of fags, a few swigs of Special Brew, the occasional spliff, and even a blowjob. But never a button.
“Where to, love?”
“Fairyland please.”
I click the cab camera off. There’s an override switch I’m not supposed to know about.
“Single or return?”
“Could you decide for me?”
“Best make it a return.”
I take the big green button and check my mirrors. I wait for her to sit down but she doesn’t move.
“Excuse me,” she says, holding out her hand. “You haven’t given me my change.”
*
She waves me down again on Tuesday.
“Return to Toyland please young man.”
I laugh. “No one’s called me young for a long time. Sure you don’t want Specsavers?”
She giggles like a schoolgirl and pays with two buttons, a flowery blue one and a red one with black spots like a ladybird.
I’m ready this time. I hand her one I’d snipped off a jacket I’d earmarked for the Age UK shop.
She waves it away. “Keep the change.”
*
On Wednesday she’s carrying a battered chocolate box. The lid has a faded gold bow and a picture of a thatched cottage against an impossibly blue sky.
“My life savings,” she says. “I’m off on my holidays.”
“Lovely jubbly. Where’re you going?”
“Well,” she says, handing me the box. “How far will this take me?”
“Scotland I should think. Easily.”
“Oh! I’d love to see Scotland.”
I lift the lid. The box is a coral reef of buttons: cerise hearts and serge-trouser greys, lilac toggles and imitation leathers, wooden-rimmed blues and flower-shaped pinks, filigreed silvers and Celtic knots.
“Best go and sit down, love.”
There’s a guy in a cheap suit lurking at the stop by the Leisure Centre: a spot-check by Audit Central. I can clock those company clipboards from fifty yards. Some wet-behind-the-wipers graduate smartass desperate to assess my mirror management and count my smiles per mile.
The Button Lady is my only fare. I put my foot down.
“Scotland love?” I call. “Hold tight.”
“Button Bus” originally appeared in A Cast of Crabs from Retreat West Books.
Chris Cottom lives near Macclesfield, UK. His stories have been published by Cosmic Daffodil, Ellipsis Zine, Flash 500, Free Flash Fiction, Heimat Review, and elsewhere.
Nov 3, 2024
“Sandy Beach with Breakers,” oil on canvas, by Winslow Homer, c. 1869.
by Emily Rinkema
One
When you called me to tell me about Charlie, I was weeding the garden, my knees pressed into the soil and the sun sharp on my neck.
I hadn’t seen Charlie in so long, but when you said his name I saw him clearly. We spent a lot of time together once, the three of us, but the time that came to mind as you told me what happened—how you found him—was that trip we took to the Cape. It was the last vacation we took, the two of us, and you asked Charlie to come. You didn’t want him to be alone. I didn’t want him to come with us. Things had been hard for so long, and I thought we needed time alone.
Charlie looked good on that trip. He’d gained weight. He was strong. I watched you watch him swimming the first evening, your eyes always on him, even as we talked, and I thought, this is how it will be.
Two
When you called to tell me about Charlie, I sat back in the dirt and listened to your voice, steady even in grief. I used to love how unflappable you were.
His first year in college, Charlie called you. You were chopping tomatoes, so you put him on speakerphone. I thought at first he was laughing, but then I realized he was crying. He told you about something he learned in class, a study done decades ago. The scientist tried to measure hope, Charlie said, by timing how long it took rats to drown. He was crying so hard he couldn’t breathe, and you, you were so calm. You took him off speakerphone and went outside to talk him down the way you always did, by asking him to find five red things. “One,” you said, and then, “Four more, you got this, look around.” It was a strategy you picked up from some therapist, something about re-focusing the brain.
Later, getting ready for bed, you told me all about the hope study.
“The scientist put rats in buckets and timed how long it took them to drown,” you told me from the bathroom. “The average rat treaded water for 15 minutes before dying.”
You turned the water on, raising your voice a little to carry over the sound as you told me about the next phase. You said that this time, right before the rats gave up and drowned, the scientist took them out of the buckets and held them for a minute, letting them catch their breath. You paused there, maybe to wipe your mouth on a towel.
“And then he put them back in the bucket and timed them again until they drowned,” you said, coming into the bedroom.
“That’s terrible” I said, angry at you for telling me this.
“Which part?” You asked, climbing into bed next to me.
“The whole fucking thing,” I said, and then, “How long did they last after the scientist held them?”
“No idea,” you said, “But long enough to forget.”
After you fell asleep, I looked up the experiment on my phone. Some of the rats treaded water for 60 hours before drowning.
Three
When you called to tell me about Charlie, I took my hat off and wiped my face with the back of my dirty hand. I hadn’t heard your voice in almost two years and it entered my body like water.
You told me the first night we met that your world was complicated. I ordered us another bottle of merlot. Everyone’s world is complicated, I told you, putting my hand on your thigh.
“I have a son,” you said, and because I didn’t understand the weight of it all, I laughed, “Is that all you got?”
The first time I met Charlie, after almost a year with you, I thought, maybe it’s not that complicated after all. And then the next week we were in bed after calling in sick and Charlie was at school and the phone rang and I laughed, “Just ignore it,” but you were already reaching for it, swinging your legs out of bed, and the first thing you said, before you even knew who it was, was “I’m here.” And then you talked him down, one red thing at a time, and I sat naked next to you.
But I stayed, didn’t I? I stayed longer than you thought I would.
Four
When you called to tell me about Charlie everything stopped—the sun, the breeze, the ant crawling over my boot, the swaying plants, the clouds, the river, the cardinal, the clock, my breath.
And then everything started back up.
Five
After you told me about Charlie, I didn’t know what to say. I sat there with your voice on speakerphone, staring at the dirt on my fingers. There was so much I wanted to tell you—how mom has Alzheimer’s, how Denise lost her house in the fire, how I had to put Kimmo down in March, how the bluebirds have come back to nest in the houses you built, how I planted a sea of poppies behind the house, like we always talked about.
I don’t remember what I said. I must have said something. I must have said I’m sorry, or asked if there was anything I could do. I must have offered help, to bring food, to water plants, to call friends. But I just remember the dirt and the heat and your voice.
Charlie sent me a photograph after I left you. It’s black and white, the beach from that last trip. I don’t know when he took it, but the beach is empty. No people, no birds, no dogs, no towels or beach chairs or coolers, just sand turning into water turning into sky, the lines between them barely visible. I printed it, had it framed. I look at it every morning. It’s beautiful.
That’s what I should have told you.
“Five Things” originally appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly.
Emily Rinkema lives and writes in northern Vermont. Her stories have appeared in The Sun Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly, Phoebe Journal, and the Best American Nonrequired Reading and Oxford Flash anthologies. You can read her work on her website or follow her on X or IG (@emilyrinkema).
Dec 10, 2023
“Hope, II,” oil, gold, and platinum on canvas, by Gustav Klimt, 1908.
by Kathryn Kulpa
You look forward to marriage and want yours to be the holiest and happiest possible. Thus you are preparing yourself now by practicing self-control, by acquiring the virtue of purity.
—from 20th-Century Teenagers, by “A Friend of Youth,” St. Paul Editions, © 1961
You gave up chocolate for Lent but it didn’t take. You aren’t good at saying no. To hamburgers on a Friday. Glasses of pale beer at a college party where none of his friends guess you’re only sixteen. You’re a wild girl. A hungry girl. Hungry girls want everything.
You want to see everything. Stars and elephants, titan footprints, dinosaurs, meteors, galaxies expanding, spilled milk and moondust cupping the horizon like the hand that cups your breast. Your gauzy peasant blouse slipping from one bare shoulder as he kisses lower, lower, on the dark balcony of his off-campus apartment with the whole world watching. No one is looking, he whispers. Mr. and Mrs. America are in bed, they’re watching Johnny Carson, and you think of the pamphlet your mother gave you, the boy and girl in a lover’s lane, arms reaching for each other, but they can’t touch because Jesus sits between them in the car. Jesus in the picture is shiny and half-invisible, like a jellyfish you don’t see until it stings. You could pop him like a soap bubble if you put your hand through, and you do. Too late to stop now, you think, and three months later, bent over the bowl, stomach hitching, you know it’s too late for everything. Woodstock this summer, he’d said. Europe, later, but now he won’t take your calls and the nuns say what your mother says: Why buy the cow?
You’re a cow in in a barn with bile-green walls, the home for girls who should have known better. Girls who come fat and leave skinny, nothing in their arms but a suitcase. Babies signed away to the church, to a fine family who’ll bring them up right.
Daily Mass. Mopping floors, washing dishes. Food so bland and boiled and beige girls fight over smuggled-in ketchup packets. Sometimes people get away. A girl whose boyfriend showed up late one night with a ring: they all tell that story. Another girl, with bedsheets: an ambulance driving away slowly, siren off. And Sheila, who swallowed soap so they’d have to take her to the hospital. Hospital doors aren’t locked, the girls say.
The girls say: carry low, a boy it’ll be; carry high, a girl you’ll see. The nuns say: You’ll get what you get. What God wills. You know you’ll have a girl. A girl who will someday imagine a thousand lives for the mother she never knew: truck stop waitress, call girl, party girl, runaway bride; bored housewife, teenage alcoholic, Bonnie to someone’s Clyde.
You imagine your daughter only one way. Free.
You put your hand against the window glass. It ripples like a jellyfish Jesus. Like a vow, so easy to break.
Kathryn Kulpa is the author of the flash chapbooks Cooking Tips for the Demon-Haunted, forthcoming from New Rivers Press, and Girls on Film (Paper Nautilus). Her work has appeared in Atticus Review, Flash Frog, Five South, and Smokelong Quarterly, and has been chosen for the Wigleaf longlist and the Best Microfiction anthology.
Nov 14, 2023
“The Art Lover,” oil on canvas, by Henri de Braekeleer, c. 1884.
by Partridge Boswell
In the museum of trauma, you stand back at least ten feet from each painting. Out of respect for other patrons mainly and the tacit rules of viewing. You don’t want the docent to sidle over in a loud whisper: Ma’am? Plus there’s always the chance of re-infection wedded to the benefit of distance—a wider lens that lends the full effect of an artist’s intention—each painstaking brushstroke melded into an overarching composition. The way say, at first glance, a Bruegel hamlet-scape renders a charming tableau of ordinary folk going about their quotidian; whereupon closer inspection, colored urgences burble to the surface: the same mundane individuals engaging in depraved acts of inane, if not insane, everyday cruelty.
In the museum of shattered dreams where you’ve attempted to grow from something raw, vestigial and two-dimensional an arboretum encased in two-way glass that lets you see out and no one but the sun in … the terrorist in your life slithers in through a sewage pipe—texts to apologize for thirty years of abuse and infidelity now that he’s found Christ. Asks you for forgiveness in a curt meaningless aside that may as well be a nail driven through your open palm.
Sunlight knifes the canvas between morning’s bare rim and roof of clouds. Your shared hostages older now, freed by time’s ransom. Safe in your new remove, you assumed you were done—obit written and shitshow shuttered at last—past praying to see him genuflecting in your rearview mirror. Now this—this nada footnote, one more scapegoat euphemized from the herd at random. Why now? and where to begin? the broken vow’s broken disc slipping as it skips over and over Thou Shalt Thou Shalt Thou Shalt … like anaphora like mantra like alphabet a victim never learns … abortions he scheduled unilaterally for your sons; the guns kept at arm’s length in case the vise of his manifold hands-on manipulations didn’t tighten tight enough; the time you were clutching your youngest on the ferry, he pushed you down the metal stairs with everyone watching and not one helped you to your feet.
How can a seed sprout without soil or sun? How can you begin to write a poem of your own atonement without specificity that might elicit him to own the slightest glimpse of your experience of him? If he can lift and take one, just one, from the litany hanging here and leave a blank wall for you to stare at to envision not a framed replacement but a ripening bright fresco, the wall itself espaliered, transfigured in freedom … How can a destiny reboot or reckoning take root without a rendering? How surrender to an alphabet that can’t articulate a single particular, that can only muster in a follow-up text: You don’t have to forgive me, it’s up to you. Up to you—like everything else: from hills of bills you climbed, to boys you raised to men, to peace you prayed for, if only in yourself.
You step back and take it all in. The artist, her composition. The gallery empty, except for a small unaccompanied child who enters the frame of your vision, beelines for the painting, his hand outstretched, pointing to a figure he’s sure is him, touching where soft bristles left their hardened mark. You wait for a docent that never comes to tell him what no one will, to remind him what sort of museum this really is.
Author of the Grolier Poetry Prize-winning collection Some Far Country, Partridge Boswell is co-founder of Bookstock Literary Festival and teaches at Vallum Society for Education in Arts & Letters in Montreal. He lives with his family in Vermont and troubadours widely with the poetry/music group Los Lorcas, whose debut release “Last Night in America” is available on Thunder Ridge Records. His Saguaro Poetry Prize-winning chapbook Not Yet a Jedi is also now a thing.
