#flash nonfiction

[claybefree]

Tulip Poplar

Sorrow is my own yard

where the new grass

flames as it has flamed

often before but not

with the cold fire

that closes round me this year

William Carlos Williams- The Widow’s Lament in Springtime

Every spring I have to ask for the name again. Tulip poplar, Saucer Magnolia, something like that, you’d think I wouldn’t be surprised by her anymore. Whereas last week empty arms cast veins of silhouettes across a cold carpet of previous year's leaves, today I’m able to come home from a long day of work, and face her canopy of flowers, half open like teacups, and that is miraculous news. I take it as further evidence that after two years the sucking wound in my chest has finally closed.

Each March was a celebration, a maelstrom of pink hung beneath the blue, pinks so dark along thick shouldered leaves, almost purple, and then bleeding out rapidly to porcelain white, there was no ignoring it. I notched one end of an eight foot pallet we brought home into the main cluster of stems, six feet up and propped the other end with a door. Of course the kids never climbed into the blossoms, but we did.

Now everyone’s gone but me and the whole yard creeps more every year, abandoned gardens filled with weeds crawling out of their beds, privet’s relentless march choking everything in between. A cold wind brushes the tulip against the rafter tails outside my bedroom, waking me. Limbs resting on roof shingles, a stitch of yellow rope left from a swing I hung years ago cut deep into the bark like a tourniquet. Her blooms will turn brown and slimy and clog the already rusted gutters. Neither tree nor house belong to me but as far as I’m concerned, I’m the steward of both, for now.

So I spend sixty dollars that I do not have on a bright orange pole saw from Lowes which I run up into underbelly pierced with morning light, trying not to focus on saw teeth tearing past bark into white flesh, or sap raining onto my cheekbones. I’m grateful for the strength I have in my arms for this work today but I worry I got started too late in the season and the half dozen or more wounds I’ve left will become infected and kill her. Despite all this I work for the better part of a morning, and pile up branches tall as me in the burn pit in the middle of the yard. In the fall I’ll light it up and likely scare the new neighbors. The blossoms lining the crooked pile go for broke and open their white faces wide to the sun.

The days are consistently warm enough and the new tires on my motorcycle beg to be chewed up, but my heart’s not in it. Not yet. One morning soon I’ll blast out 64 sometime before eight thirty, get away from the Florida interlopers that keep trying to kill me and hit the Blue Ridge Parkway and adjacent counties on this side of the mountain- Nelson, Rockbridge and Amherst.

The best road out there is also the most dangerous, and yet with half a dozen ways up to the Parkway, I still find myself on route 56 more often than not. A million years ago I guess, before someone gave it a name, the Tye river cut a gorge out of the mountains, twisting impossibly through the rocks and at some point homesteaders ran a road alongside and named that 56. Highly technical, it’s not the curves that will dump me. Every rental cabin and vacation home has a driveway cut into the shale and sandstone hills which provide, after every good rain, an opportunity for gravel to spill out on the tarmac. If I’m not on top of my game that’s what will kill me.

But before all that, when it breaks off from the Rockfish Valley highway, 56 passes through a couple thousand acres of farmland on one side, and the Tye river on the other. For some reason I think a good bit about the people who work that land. Last year the fields appeared to be left fallow, two years previous, in the fall, thousands of pumpkins were left scattered and rotting on the vine, collapsing into orange pulp. All I could think was that the pumpkin patch contract fell through.

I want to find the old timers and see if anyone will talk to me about August 1969, when Hurricane Camille dumped two foot of water in three hours and drowned birds in trees. When the Tye jumped its banks, broke the back of every bridge that dared cross it and cut the census of Massies Mill nearly in half.

Sometimes I see the pictures they post and get jealous of my friends who travel abroad, but I’ve decided what I need is to ride a motorcycle entirely too fast through the middle of some fields in Nelson county every three months and do that in perpetuity. I’ve been in that valley headed home late in the day with the sun low under the clouds turning everything golden, worried that I’m too far out. I’ve encountered the Tye river in a spring flood, washing across 56 nearly to the point where I had to turn back and find another route. I’ve ridden it half frozen in a driving rain, tucked behind the fairing with a mother of three on the back seat holding onto me for warmth.

Back in 2022, at my lowest, whenever I talked about tulip flowers or graveyard moss carried home from a chapel where it crosses over the mountain and heads down toward Vesuvius, my closest friends would encourage me to move out. They’d point to the marks on the door casing in the kitchen chronicling each child’s growth, five years worth, both hers and mine, and yeah, I got it. My argument was I’d have to find something else just like it- a shed for my tools, a garage for my bikes, somewhere to write. I dunno, man, I would say, it just feels like I belong here.

One of these days, instead of waving to them on their harvesters, I’m gonna pull over and talk to one of these guys. Yeah me, a wild eyed weirdo biker from the city rambling on about something I don’t know if I could even put into words. The idea of the two of us having a shared language with a place, a connection, whether it be on a tractor or a motorcycle, bound by both sorrow and joy. The connection running deeper because you’ve seen it flood, seen it bake, seen it come alive every year in a blaze of green.

Clay Blancett, 2024

[carlyjohelm]

lil excerpt from a new piece called Hypochondriac

[shannonpurdyjones]

Welcome to the official author blog of Shannon Purdy Jones, a bi writer and bookseller endlessly curious about the messiness of human history. If you like magical realism, historical fiction, and stories about women and queer people behaving badly, this is the place for you.

My current project-in-progress is Wyrd Weaving, an historical fantasy novel that takes place in northern Europe in the earliest years of what we now call the Viking Age. A raid rippling with unintended consequences entwines the fates of a least-loved jarlsson guarding a shameful secret, and the peculiar maiden his crew abducts--a young weaver plagued by prophetic visions whose suppressed abilities take root and flourish in the ice-rimed land of her kidnappers.

Wyrd Weaving's plot and magic system are inspired by and steeped heavily in spinning and weaving history of early medieval Europe. Since I too spin, knit, and weave, I post a lot about textile history and fiber arts in addition to writing-related content. I also co-own a really cool indie bookshop.

I am a proudly trans-inclusive, sex-positive, BIPOC-loving-and-supporting, man-and-amab-loving, queer-loving intersectional feminist. If you bring hateful, discriminatory, or puritanical nonsense, you will be blocked. *heart hands*

Published works to date:

A Wild Litany of Nightmare and Lament: a Substack Historical Fantasy Newsletter

The Honeysuckle Weave (horror/dark fantasy, weaving, Appalachian gothic short story featured in issue 20 of Grim and Gilded)

Eggs (flash essay on motherhood, death, and moths, featured in Hippocampus Magazine July/August 2024)

[agirlnamedbone]

C.D. Wright (The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All, 2016)

[the-greatest-fool]

Hi valentine,

Thanks for the chocolates. Thanks for noticing I was missing last night. Thanks for the hugs. Thanks for letting me vent. Thanks for always looking out for me. Thanks for being a friend.

Thanks for all of this, even though we’re just two guys with gross roommates with girlfriends who annoy us. And I know you do all this just because we’re friends. I know that the idea of us is just a stupid fantasy on my part and impossible, maybe even wrong or weird, to you. But I love this stupid dream.

Because in my sleep, I find myself in red diner seats inexplicably placed in the middle of one of those old abandoned malls, and even more inexplicably staffed by a singular Japanese waitress who seems to exist only to test my memory of the language. In my heterotopic hallucination, who else holds me close, pushes me against the seat, and makes me remember what it’s like to be loved? Who else reteaches my lips to accept their fate, that they are best wedded to another pair? We let go, I can breathe, and your face is, as always, beautifully blushing, like a gala apple.

It’s you.

[devinsturk]

a 50-word micro essay on trans rage by Devin S. Turk

[stormcellarmag]

WINNERS! of the 2023 Force Majeure Flash Contest — full announcement: https://wp.me/p1tViT-19z

1st Prize "Pre-Elegy for My Sister" by Whitney Koo 

2nd Prize "A Brief World" by Uyen P. Dang  2nd Prize "Bones" by Nathan Long 

honorable mentions: "Garden Statues" by Kendall Morris, "Midnight Zone" by Caleb Tankersley, and "Taint" by Veeda Khan.

[academyoftheheartandmind]

Reflections

By Todd Adams I was watering our purple phlox with an absent mind, ruminating on things that might have been or worrying about those to come, when I caught sight of a dark shape flashing around my legs. I stood stock still, fearing it was a giant wasp or some other stinging creature, but then an iridescent, hunter-green form flitted toward the stream of water. My shoulders fell, my jaw relaxed,…

[vlad-theimplier]

I-93 @ I-95: A True Story

The minivan crawls, then swerves, jamming its fender into a putative gap in traffic. Horns greet the maneuver, but no one makes an editorial projectile of their Dunks. "Do You Follow Jesus This Close?" reads the bumper sticker next to the NH plate. Well, if He wedged his way into a mile-long line of cars six inches before the ramp splits off, I'd run Him off the goddamn road.

[matildazq]

Write the Year 2024—Week 36: Night Popcorn

The Poets & Writers CNF prompt from this week yielded this. At least it’s not Vogon poetry again. Title: Night PopcornWC: 500 The stove was ten feet from my bedroom door. Less than that when I moved from the boys’ room near the front of the house to the one off the kitchen that I shared uneasily with a sister. It would start with the snick of the light above the stove. Black knob on a harvest…

[howtopretendtobeawriter]

What Awaits on the Other Side

I stand now at a precipice, uneasy feet reluctant to peel away from that final inch of familiar ground as I stare over the edge. That last little bit of once-was, comfortable only in its familiarity. I had been standing here in one spot for so long that it almost began to feel safe, that this is where I was meant to be. But it was not the warmth of home that I felt, it was the pull of quicksand at my ankles, slowly dragging me down into the ease of stagnation. I know, as much as I am loathe to admit it, that things must change. That I cannot remain the way that I am forever, because I am so very tired of the way that I am.

I had been rotting for the better part of a decade now, quietly allowing the image of the man I had hoped to become wash away, picture perfect reduced into a murky, poorly defined mess. Entire days were eroding before me as I lay helplessly in my bed. Covers pulled up nearly to my ears, not because I was cold, but because they felt too heavy to peel away. This was not living, if anything it was the opposite. It was a slow way to die, sure, but it was a death all the same.

I knew that things needed to change, I wanted them to change more than I possibly put into words. But then, why was this so hard? Why did I feel that all too familiar swell of anxiety in the pit of my stomach? I was in no danger, still the urge to turn tail and run was almost overwhelming.

 It was just a door. It was just a handle, like so many others. Burnished steel covered with the fingerprints of all those people who had been far braver than I. Small reminders of their accomplishment, the very same one I had yet to make. I put my hand to it countless times, sucking in that same deep anticipatory breath, only to pull away in defeat. I’d be doing this ridiculous little song and dance for nearly fifteen minutes now, somehow managing to conjure up a new reason not to step past this seemingly insurmountable threshold.

Why bother? You know it won’t help.

It isn’t worth it.

YOU aren’t worth it.

But I was. I knew I was. I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be so afraid. They always say nothing worth doing is easy, which I had always believed to be a trite little platitude to pat yourself on the back with when you needed a little pick me up. But I had come to know that it was true.

“This is getting absurd, just open the goddamn door.” I whispered to myself, hushed under my breath, too worried about what some imagined reflection of myself on the other side of the door might think about me. There was no turning back now, I was tired of coming up with excuses for myself.

 One last moment of hesitation. Once more steeling my resolve, preparing myself for whatever manifestation of hell might await me. I grab the handle, and twist, fighting to keep my eyes from screwing shut. Whatever it may be, it surely can’t be any worse than what awaits me back in my bedroom.

Much to my shock, it was just a waiting room, like any other. Slightly-too-bright fluorescent bulbs bathing the sparsely decorated space in anti-septic lighting, a row of hard plastic chairs lining three of the four walls, faded carpeting, and a middle-aged woman with a kind face seated behind a chest high desk, idly tapping a pen against her chin in contemplation. She turned her head from the computer screen as I step in, offering me a smile. “Hello, how can I help you today?” Some nondescript pop song played on a radio I couldn’t see, just barely loud enough to drown out the electric hum of the building.

Maybe it was the timbre of her voice, soothing and kind, or maybe it was just the sudden realization that all my obsessive worrying had been, in fact, totally for nothing. I felt a great sense of relief wash over me. A weight lifted from my shoulders, allowing my posture to relax, my lungs finally able fully draw in air. “Y-Yes.” I said meekly, hands clumsily fumbling through my front pockets. “I have an appointment, with uh—” I stopped, casting my gaze downwards as I was able to extricate a folded piece of paper.

The woman didn’t say anything, made no room to interrupt or finish my sentence. I can only imagine she’d seen this, and so much worse, a million times before. She simply smiled, waiting patiently.

“I uh, I have an appointment with… Greg? Greg, I think.” I tried to smooth out the surface of the paper, edges frayed and torn, before placing it in front of her on the desk. My own lips curling into an awkward facsimile of a smile. I was trying to fake it and failing miserably.

This too, did not seem to phase the woman. With practiced ease she pulls the paper toward herself, quickly scanning it over the rim of her glasses. “Of course, Mr…?”

“Kouzoukas, Steven is fine though.”

“Steven, okay. Greg will be ready in just a few minutes. Why don’t you take a seat?”

“Sure, thank you.” I felt a shift of perspective as she said this, a profound change occurring within my own psyche in real time. A lifting of the veil, a liberation from that all-consuming fear that had tried so hard to convince me to leave.

This was not the personal apocalypse I had been so sure it would be. This was not an end of days or some terrifying beast to overcome. This was just my first time going to therapy.

I’d be fine.

[praktice]

My father tells me of another cluster of "his" mushrooms (wild enoki, Flammulina velutipes) growing in a grove near the house. He is surprised to have found them there and plans on bringing them home, to fry with onion and egg - something he eventually does at night when mom's already in bed and I am taking a shower. A whiff of onion in the air, and a nutty, fishy smell from the mushrooms will linger in the rooms of the house all throughout the night, a backdrop for our dreams.

So my dad tells me about the mushrooms he saw and I smile. I don't understand why he is so excited about them. He might have entered into some devilish contract with the mushrooms, he won't let any cluster of them grow by uncut. That's an interesting way to go. Sometimes I have so little will to lead my life that I think it would be nice to let some mushroom guide me and use my life. Really it's a desire for a god.

My brother doesn't understand dad's enthusiasm either. A certain nihilism has slid into our still young minds. Because what is there to do? Why anything? Caught up in the hopelessness of this transience that is the everyday, caught up in some despair.

The mushrooms are "my dad's" because he is probably the only person around who forages these. People usually go mushroom hunting in the summer and fall when the more noble specimens pop out of the ground. The mushrooms my dad collects are largely unrecognized and niche. I've never had them myself. Maybe it's the fishy smell that draws me away, maybe it's that I don't really care so a chemical imbalance. It's nice to see a cluster of orange mushrooms growing on a stump in a dark February forest but I am not very hungry for life anymore. Maybe next time I find them, I should ritualistically bring them home and prepare them the way my dad does. Maybe that's in 20 years and it will mean something to me then.

Now it's just something to write home about, home being "neither here nor there".

[tribalephemeral]

The Set of Modernistic Identities

The Set of Modernistic Identities — Flash creative nonfiction and/or prose poem We get up and have coffee. We shower or not. Have that run or not. Turn on the TV or radio or other background noise. We drive to work or school or the grocery. We say ‘hi how are you’ and ‘im good’ and ‘thatll be seven fifty-one’ and ‘how was your weekend’. Occasionally we say ‘terrible’ instead of fine, but mostly…

[shannonpurdyjones]

Flash Essay featured in Hippocampus Magazine!

I'm so excited about this piece finally finding its home! I was more nervous than usual about sending this one out, not least because it's more personal than my fiction, but for better or worse it's out in the wild! You can read "Eggs" in the July/August issue of Hippocampus Magazine.

[kateub]

teen angst

for me, teen angst looked like a raw, visceral hatred for my prettier, more affluent peers. rich bitches who drove roaring broncos — a birthday present from daddy, the richest farmer in the county. girls who, come prom season, will roam the halls with too-warm spray tans and nails that click furiously on their phone screens. snakes in basketball shorts and boater shoes who treat their semi-circle of gripped whiteclaws like camp david.

i couldn't stand them, and i wanted nothing more than to be them. those girls were beautiful. they were smart, and teachers liked them more than me. they were never without someone to share the experience with — a friend to advise on prom dresses, cry on about the evils of #college app szn, and whine to about the boy in basketball shorts and boater shoes.

their lives were simple. they did school, cheer, hair appointments. their parents served warm, sit-down dinners every night. they had little siblings that annoyed them and parties to keep them busy. their last names bought them security.

they never had to wash clothes in the bathtub and dry them on the space heater. they never had to close the store at three and make it to school by seven. they never worried about how next month's rent was getting paid, and they never felt truly, deeply that the things they wanted were unattainable.

i thought they pitied me, and i hated them for it. they don't know me. my life makes me better, smarter, more equipped than them. i would never want to be them.

and yet, when i found myself in the midst of the elusive creatures, i fawned. i pretended. in my stained rags, i made myself like one of them.

[poetryforventing]

The Language

You ask me how I am and I tell you I’m fine. It’s a front well practiced, one hammered and honed in the flames of a mind that has burned up and on and on and out so many times that it has forged an entire armory of defences.

But you ask me how I am and I tell you I’m fine and you think me plain, dull, awkward, unkind. Alright. But I don’t know that I have a better answer. The world is dying, and I have no hope left. I don’t believe that there is good in all of us. As we speak we’re spilling blood: foreign blood, poor blood, queer blood, girl blood, black blood, native blood in a genocidal fervour that has persisted millenia. And our violence leaves a gouging slash across our collective chest, staining the human consciousness with ever more eternal, immovable shame. I don’t believe everything will work out just fine in the end. I don’t believe we will all be okay.

I’m uncommunicative. It’s true, I’m sorry. But I don’t care about your sex life. I don’t care about your opinions on influencers. I don’t care about your shitty inherited politics. I don’t care what they said on Insta, or Reddit, or X, or Facebook, or TikTok. I don’t care what the hot topic is. Fuck your hot takes. There is blood flowing in the streets, native bones buried beneath the buildings of white settlers, there are generational stains on our souls and yet we work only to sear more grief into the essence of our very beings. Good god, colonialism really taught us nothing. We are killing every last ‘other’ until we are all that’s left, just so that when we kill our world too and go down with it we can claim that it was ours. In the ash of all that is left, perhaps, finally, earth will be as white as we wanted it to be.

You ask me how I am and I tell you I’m fine. You think me cold but I am an inferno inside. I have carved my life into a shell to surround these lashing flames of thought. I don't act how I feel–my whole existence is an energy shield–but, god, I feel hate like you won’t believe. I dream of ripping out throats with my teeth. Capital rules the world and has us kiss its feet, but even that is a lie. The mechanics of power subjugate us in entirety. Capital is just the tool of choice, the selected construct. It is nothing more than a rotten, violent euphemism that cradles us in its maw, waiting for the order to bite.

You wish I would speak more but I have so little to say if we’re not planning the deaths of the bourgeoisie, the policy-makers, the bigots and the land-lords the world over. Every throat I want to taste. Every drop of blood I want to spill in the sort of ritualistic vengeance we absolutely don’t need. Just, please, let me at them. When I'm done I will jump into the sea and it will all be over. Finally.

I can barely even bring myself to get worked up over our changing climate–though I know it’s another active tragedy and, in the moments I stop to think, it makes me sick–when apocalyptic radioactive annihilation is one bad day away, when women’s rights are those of livestock and POC are institutionalised into modern slaves, when we’re living in a world where autonomy and identity are dangerous things. It’s too much grief to contain in one life. It’s too much pain to even attempt to bear. I hope you are starting to see: it’s not any one of these things, it’s everything.

There’s nowhere even to run away. I flew to North America where Pride is sponsored by Target and they build Wendy’s on sacred native land. I returned to England where we practice monarchy and xenophobia as a matter of course, pine for the British empire and laugh openly at the murder of trans girls. Next I go East, where I am ignorant, but things are every bit as twisted, I just won’t put their particularities in my white words, I refuse to appropriate any more into my British Museum of atrocity. In the end I go to bed, where sadness makes sense.

If you’re not angry, you should be. If you’re like me, I’m sorry.

You ask me how I am and I tell you I’m fine. But really I don’t have the words. Even all of this despair and rage is nothing but the bubbling skin of the witch’s brew. The essence of the thing is a wicked magic, not communicable in words, it is violent and immediate and spanning and intrinsic and awful and consuming.

You ask me how I am and I tell you I’m fine. But the truth is I don’t have the language.