FFlash Fiction

The Woman Who Grew Gills

Two weeks after the man moved in with the woman, the woman began to grow gills. They hurt coming in, like the pain of an emerging tooth. She hid her neck with scarves at first, partly because she didn’t want the man to see and partly because she didn’t want to.
CCreative Nonfiction

PSYCH402

The only book about a black or brown person and the main character is a black girl whose black friend got shot. I’m not paying $20 for this book centered around a dead black person. I’m spending $32.99 to buy some boxing gloves from Amazon so I can get ready to show these girls what’s good; so I can look my teacher into her bespeckled face with its green eyes and, right before I tell her to put her dukes up to defend herself before I actually start swinging. tell her that I cannot believe that she has the audacity to decide the one book about a person of color will be about death.
PPoetry

GirlGod

My favorite iteration of God is 12-year-old GirlGod — God of watermelon bubblegum and Dr. Pepper LipSmackers. Of hologram stickers and locked diaries. GirlGod of 1994.
FFlash Fiction

The Loosening Grip

Of course she asks if she can keep it. She usually hoards whatever she finds floating near the stern—empty beer cans, folded tourist maps, shredded bike tires—without asking permission. But this is something else, and she must know it.
FFlash Fiction

Only a Little Bit Less Than I Hate Myself

Knausgård smells like cigarettes and not just like he just smoked but more like he is actually made of ashtrays and then loosely covered with hair and skin. “I’m quitting, I know,” he says and it’s clear he is accustomed to being called charming, but I’m not falling for it.
PPoetry

The Wet Body

Returning the whale was soso still It did not complain when I crawled inside with my one can and my no candle The mouth the humid mouth was like a tunnel of warm sponge I thought A whale is smaller from the inside I thought This is what my heart would look like from the middle
FFlash Fiction

Bear

Once upon a time, no one believed her. Even when Bear stands toe-to-toe with the sheriff, they do not believe her. Even when Bear huffs, or rudely shimmies against the living room wall, marking it with her scent, or crams blueberries into her snout—still, they do not believe her.
CCreative Nonfiction

maybe even the sea

This run-down, rusted-out trailer park was the first place in years that wasn't someone else’s farm with frozen pipes in the winter, far from everyone including school friends. There were other kids here.
CCreative Nonfiction

Calculus of Nightmares and Nieces

Am I the missing girl, my perfect niece? Am I her devastated mother, staggering towards us? Am I her devastated grandmother, crying into her fist? Her devastated grandfather, immobile at the table? Am I the silent Uber driver? Am I the men, grinning with their axes?
SShort Fiction

Cautionary Distances

She said that she’d like to go out to the lake in the afternoon and she pouted her lips and blew Richard a kiss and he pretended to follow it slow and long across the room and watched it fall into his cupped hands and when he looked up Elaine was just shutting the door.
FFlash CNF

We Are Lions

The line to get into the club is down the block. That’s how you know it’s poppin’. At least that’s what Tripp says, rubbing his hands together so quickly I’m afraid he may start a fire.
SShort Fiction

Beautiful Dreamers

Her mouth folds down, that puppet face of hers, eyes sad and pleading, yet she raises the empty point of gun to his chest. You know, she says, but I have such an incredible urge to shoot you.