The children load me into the trailer. Padlock the tailgate. Take the dirt road past the sanitation plant, the tannery, the strip club, the gun store. I’ve known nowhere but the farm, the pen, the milk bottles & dust & feed. The children laugh in the cab, turn their muffled music up. I put my […]
*2025 Refractions: Genre Flash Fiction Prize 2nd Place Winner* “Choose to disconnect—yes or no.” The doctor turns a tablet toward Glettus. Glettus scans the med-bay, his hatchmates circling him, the other ailing bodies beyond his bed. He wants to feel angry—that delicious rage the hatch could stoke within each other ahead of a mission—but the […]
The Hand At eleven o’clock, with my family tucked fast asleep, I tip-toed to the door and tied the last knot on my combat boot, knots that reached my knees. Rounding the corner, I collided with Baba. “Where do you think you’re going this late?” he asked, rolling the checkered foutah tighter around his waist. […]
Don’t open your eyes. Don’t let them see where you’re going or what you’re about to do. In the darkness, let them think you’re still asleep in your apartment. Don’t wonder if anyone’s watching as Cygna guides you, hand in hand, down the long staircase into the bowels of the city. The metro is full […]
We were instructed to point the brush with our lips ––Grace Fryer, a dial-painter for The Radium Luminous Materials Corporation, 1930 1.Glow Twirling the paintbrush in our mouths to sharpen the point glow-in-the-dark watches airplane dials clocks in the company darkroom our glow-in-the-dark cheeks necks hands our radium tongues constellations of luminous dust drifting as […]
Claire was in the van across the street from the girl’s house. Ted was beside her. He had the gun. The girl – Margaret Stone – was bald and chipmunk-cheeked, just like her pictures. She was on the large front porch watering a plant, her movements like a child’s: broad, lumbering, graceless. She claimed to […]
He wonders if the bed springs know that they are different things from the springs in his body that clench and unclench throughout the night, instinctive in a helpless attempt to roll himself away from the fire burning in each of his bones. It’s the left side, hip to ankle, shoulder to ribs. He thinks […]