On the settee, and smoking, Susan Dunn watches out the glass door to the yard, where one squirrel rapes another. She feels no need to stop it, hasn’t creased a brow or pursed a lip, and goes on smoking…
Aboveground I was twelve years old when I last saw Blanca Esperanto. She lived at the end of the road. Their house was a brown, dry affair of rustling wood and dark leaves. She loved sitting on the ledge…
4. It is prom night. A group of us are out to eat at The Urban Hive, on the rooftop. Couples sit in pairs around a table forged of meteorite. Smoky black, with a network of tiny bubble cells,…
Content Warning—domestic abuse He likes to wear a cowboy hat when he fucks her. She is eighteen, wears her hair traditional—its length snaking down her athlete’s body, a body slowly giving way to womanly curves. She doesn’t know enough…
My father, after slipping backward on a stretch of rooted Alaskan ice and hitting his head, miraculously walks the three miles to get back home—heavily concussed and alone—with our two unleashed labs directing him in the winter dark. He…
By Jennifer Murvin • There are two quotations I often turn to when thinking about ending a short story; the first comes from Flannery O’Connor, in her essay, “On Her Own Work,” which reads, “I often ask myself what makes…
After Lorna Simpson’s Head on Ice series and using language from testimonies of eleven Jane Does in the lawsuit against the handling of their sexual assault cases at Eastern Michigan University. Sandra No woman I know got ready with…
Couch You could call the color of the upholstery rust, but it was rust chasing a pattern. Blanket Harshly fibered, it was never quite white. Arrangement She couldn’t arrange herself after what they’d done to her. Then It started…
My wife wants to know what my new job is, the title, so I tell her what the woman at dispatch told me, that I’m a nonemergency medical driver, which means I’m there when the situation isn’t dire, when…
The way Appa held the sponge-tipped brush of white shoe polish. The way he ran the snowy viscosity over my scuffed canvas shoes, on top of the laces, around the eyelets. The way he placed my shoes under the…
My father died seven years ago. Right after, I allowed mundane activities to overwhelm the profound, life-changing event. For a while, everyday chores offered numbness. They formed a wall behind which I tucked away the loss and the grief I wasn’t able to confront or absorb, much less articulate.
A year and a half after he died, random memories began to peek and tease from behind the wall of time, like gleaming gems. Eventually, they formed a beautiful slideshow of moments, offering both comfort and joy.
We’re not big on words of love in our family. But my father showed us how much he cared through his actions, every single day he was with us. What he did for us speaks loud enough to linger, to stay. And now, I am putting them together in words, so his love can live on.
SUDHA BALAGOPAL’s recent work appears in Flash Frog, Fractured Lit, Monkeybicycle, and Hypertext, among other journals. Her novella-in-flash, Things I Can’t Tell Amma, was published by Ad Hoc Fiction in 2021. She has a story in Best Microfiction 2021 and is listed in the Wigleaf Top 50 for both 2019 and 2021. Her work has also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions.
