Flash the Court

send me your irreverence

  • Are You a Writer?

    Are You a Writer?

    Welcome to Flash the Court. This new venture is more about creation and curation than submission and selection. (Am I hoping to fly in the face of conformity? Yes. Am I hoping to break the mfing mold of mundanity? Yes. As in, am I trying to radically reinvent the online lit mag? Well…yes.)

    Send me your flash prose, fiction or nonfiction. Your choice. Or no choice at all. Hybrid is lovely.

    For your (very generous) $5 reading fee, I will also provide two lines of (extremely subjective) feedback: 1) what I love, and 2) what I don’t love. As with all advice, solicited or unsolicited, you can take it or leave it, as you wish—your prerogative. Either way, you’ll get your money’s worth, I guarantee.

  • “Transitions” by Jennifer Braunfels

    “Transitions” by Jennifer Braunfels

    Writers must debate and navigate endless choices. In “Transitions,” a flash creative nonfiction essay by Jennifer Braunfels, the writer has chosen a particular point of view (second person) and a specific structure (a series of transition words) to guide the telling of a painful, powerful story. Ultimately, those craft choices enable the writer to express the inexpressible.  —Court Harler

    Now, I have something to tell you. You may want to sit down. 

    Soon, you’ll be diagnosed with cancer.

    In turn, everything will change.

    For example, instead of taking that school trip to Germany with your son that’s been planned for two years, you’ll begin chemotherapy.

    Yes, the ticket says you’re flying out tomorrow morning.

    But instead, at 3:30 a.m., you’ll drive your son to the transportation center, where he’ll board that plane without you.

    Of course, you’ll put on a brave face on the drive to Portland, telling him how much fun he’ll have. You’ll try to sound upbeat, even though you’re drowning in a storm of grief.

    Finally, you’ll arrive. Park. Help your son unload his suitcase. Ask him if he wants you to go in and help get him settled. He’ll say no, but he means yes. You know this. But because you’re about to break, you hug him. Then leave him.

    Unbeknownst to you, while you’re sobbing on the drive home, he’ll experience his first panic attack. Alone. A stranger will catch his limp body as it slumps to the floor. A detail he won’t share with you for weeks because “you already had enough going on.”

    At home, you’ll unpack your suitcase. Throw fistfuls of clothes around the bedroom in a frenzy, screaming.

    Then comes the first round of chemo.

    Later, with that poison snaking its way through you, you’ll become weak. Your mouth will taste of metal. There’ll be nausea that’s so intense, it’ll be hard to put into words for your husband, who is on the phone with the cancer center explaining your symptoms, because he’s convinced you’re actually dying.

    Sadly, for months, you’ll be bedridden. Not having enough strength to climb the stairs to your bedroom, you’ll take up residence in the office on the first floor. A prison without bars.

    As a result of treatment, you’ll become dependent on others for everything. Rides. Bathing. Cooking. Walking. A dependence you’ll detest.

    Eventually, they’ll cut your boobs off. You’ll awake from anesthesia, feeling like you have a truck parked on your chest. Four times daily, you’ll empty the surgical drain tubes jutting out of you.

    Next comes radiation five days a week for five weeks. Your skin will blister and boil.

    Understandably, you’ll have lows.

    However, there will also be highs.

    For instance, ringing the bell on the last day of chemo. Feeling stubble on your bald scalp. You’ll take a school trip with your son his senior year—this time to Iceland.

    Accordingly, your life will forever be in two segments, like lightning splitting a tall tree down the middle. Everything in two categories: Before cancer. And after.

    But you’re going to be okay. I promise.

    After, you’ll find joy in simple things. Uneventful days. Moonlit nights. Sunlight streaking across a wooden floor in the afternoon.

    Until then, know that I’ll be with you the entire time. I’ve got you.

    JENNIFER BRAUNFELS lives in Maine. Her first novel comes out in the spring of 2026 through Apprentice House Press. Her work has appeared in The Masters Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Stonecoast Review, and various other places. She lives with her husband, children, and unruly dog, Sissy.

    Featured image by Claudio Schwarz, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “She won’t survive this” by Salena Casha

    “She won’t survive this” by Salena Casha

    In “She won’t survive this,” Salena Casha artfully blends speculation and personification, interiority and exteriority. We might also mention elements of post-apocalyptic flash fiction, though readers will encounter very little “post” in this environmental apocalypse, except for nameless “mutants,” endless “shades of tan,” and one last courageous soul.  —Court Harler

    In her time, she’d known storms, but not like this with all its shades of tan. Clay on canvas, camel hair on Gobi dunes, clouds choking on their own dusky exhaust. The winds made the brackish water in her ribs tremble. In the 2340s, she’d sacrificed her outgrowth pads and threaded her roots between the salt plank grains of Earth’s changed topsoil. Just to keep her in one place, even if it was Ohio. 

    For comfort, she thought about how she’d outlasted humans. How those chlorophyll-less mutants ill-governed what sunlight there was left behind window slats. Her ancestors had complained about millennial plant parents and their inconsistent watering cans, but she’d always found them innocuous, if sadly misled, beings. Some of them, the scientists mainly, said cacti would never grow in Cleveland. All wrong, all gone. Sure, she was alone, but she still counted.

    Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Once, someone said that cockroaches would survive the apocalypse, but they hadn’t thought about snails. Those land crustaceans with their spiraled shells and belly mucus. A decade ago, one had chosen to circle her roots. Every day, she watched them collect gravel. They’d been particular, choosing chipped detritus in camphor speckled with chartreuse, chrome veined with cherry. Slate and canary and emerald sea glass. She hadn’t realized what they were doing until one morning, they took their collection and stacked the stones like bricks on their entrance. Walled themselves inside and never came out. Their tomb stayed beside her, too heavy for the wind, and on days when a sliver of sun pierced the landscape, she watched the light play off its self-made stained glass, a spiraled church in miniature.

    So, no, she hadn’t always been alone. 

    The day of the storm, she hunkered down more than she’d hunkered down over the decades gone, her grips tightening around the hallucination of loamy soil. It was one of those feelings that never left her, after all these years, the sticky particles of wet Earth. She pretended that below her, worms still sifted the Earth’s layers. The air picked at her, but she held fast. She couldn’t see the snail’s shell through the percolated landscape and panic thrummed through her. She was tired. Old, beyond measure. As the gusts enveloped her, she let herself whisper it aloud. 

    Maybe I’ve fought enough. 

    While she’d wondered it before, she wasn’t sure she’d meant it this time more than times past. The air roiled, full of what she’d put into the universe and the ground slipped beyond her and she wasn’t sure if she let go first or the Earth finally became slick as a bald pate. Somehow, the wind lifted her, shredding her anchors into silk dust. As it swept her up, away, elsewhere, she thought about how she could change again. Become a bird. Or, maybe, something else entirely. 

    Perhaps even become the light that flickered through azure glass.

    SALENA CASHA’s work has appeared in over 150 publications in the last decade. Her most recent words can be found in HAD, Metaphorosis, and Flash Frog. She survives New England winters on good beer and black coffee. Subscribe to her substack at salenacasha.substack.com.

    Featured image by Pete Godfrey, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “The day they bomb the art gallery” by Belinda Rowe

    “The day they bomb the art gallery” by Belinda Rowe

    “The day they bomb the art gallery” by Belinda Rowe is a flash fiction with the beating heart of a prose poem. Note certain poetic techniques, such as the well-placed repetition of the “enigmatic smile.” Or how the images of color burst upon the page in fits of sensory delight. The narrative itself is a puzzle that both resists and relishes its completion.  —Court Harler

    I sweep up a scrap of canvas with a woman in a bright-blue robe being abducted by a soldier. My sister picks up the intact face of an unremarkable woman. People are looting scraps of Poussin, Raphael, Renoir, Géricault, da Vinci, Matisse, Caravaggio, Delacroix. Art is jigsaw. Art is carried on the wind – my sister and I are swept up in the fervour.

    Our mother’s at home when she hears the news and calls. Are you both okay?

    A man on a raft waving a scrap of red-and-white fabric sails past us on the wind. Buildings collapse, ravens caw, the air is acrid.

    Art is everywhere, I shout. Emile found a young woman’s face –

    – describe her, our mother urges.

    She’s nondescript – black shoulder-length hair, dark eyes, long nose, an enigmatic smile.

    Is she painted on canvas? our mother whispers, as if someone might hear.

    Wood –

    – quick, put her in your backpack, don’t let anyone see you.

    The streets are filled with people stuffing sacks with splinters, details, fragments of Naples yellow, vermillion, carmine, azurite blue, malachite, bone black. We step over marble limbs, the torso of a bare-chested woman carrying a blue, white, and red flag, then slip through a storm drain into the catacombs, wend our way home along dark, dank passages, our phone torches lighting the way.

    On the black market and the dark web, people trade art, barter for potatoes, cheese, bread, offer cash, whatever they have. People want to reconstruct: ‘Has anyone found John the Apostle and Judas from The Last Supper? I’ll trade you for a scallop shell with the feet and legs of Venus.’ 

    We decorate our houses, workplaces, car windows: a philosopher meditating, swirling clouds, stars, a crescent moon, Aphrodite’s marble head, a pearl earring, tiny skaters on a frozen pond, sunflowers, a young lacemaker peering at her work. People wear fragments of canvas, marble, and jade around their necks; fashion hats, trousers, sundresses from medieval clothing. Someone puts an intact porcelain urinal in their loungeroom window.

    I search for the poplar-wood panel depicting the sixteenth-century dress – raven black, elegant, simple, possibly silk with subtle gold embroidery – that belongs to the woman with the enigmatic smile. When no one replies, I make quick work detaching the woman dressed in the bright-blue robe from the soldier abducting her, trade him for a piece of poplar-wood panel and oil paints, enough food for two years.

    I set to cutting, splicing, gluing the woman with the enigmatic smile onto the piece of poplar-wood panel – apply lead white pigment, blacks, browns, greens – bring her chest, her low-cut bodice, her dress, her right hand resting on her left wrist, to life, a blurred soft smokiness. Art is compulsive, tenacious. Time contracts, my fingers smooth, blend, layer. We aren’t flies you can squash, I whisper.

    BELINDA ROWE is an emerging short-fiction writer. Born in Aotearoa (New Zealand) she now lives in Walyalup (Fremantle), Western Australia. Her recent fiction appears in Unbroken, Literary Namjooning, Fractured Lit, New Flash Fiction Review, and Vestal Review. She was a SmokeLong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow in 2025.

    Featured image by Ashkan Forouzani, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Christmas” by Betty Stanton

    “Christmas” by Betty Stanton

    We can name a day, even a holiday, but can’t know what it holds for those other than ourselves. In “Christmas” by Betty Stanton, “the calendar doesn’t mean much anymore,” but a new name, “something secret—something with edges,” may mean everything to the character called Angel. In this gut-wrenching, enigmatic flash fiction, Stanton asks us to reconsider “real names” as well as their personal and societal implications.  —Court Harler

    She says her name is Angel. It isn’t. No one uses real names anymore. Real names are too soft. Too easy to scar. Too easy to burn.

    Her girlfriend goes by something harder now—something secret—something with edges. Something that breaks you open when you touch it and not the other way around. Angel writes that name in notebook margins, folds it into receipts and the empty packs of cigarettes. It keeps the shadows orderly.

    They have new coats. Army surplus green. Warm enough to forget what month it is.

    This is Christmas, apparently. The calendar doesn’t mean much anymore. Days run together, blur like spilled ink. One long gray smear of hunger and cold. Sometimes she sings. Sometimes they eat. Sometimes they make love.

    Sometimes they make money. They don’t talk about how.

    In her bag: two shirts, torn jeans, pens, pencils, ten notebooks full of black. This is survival. This is art. This is what’s left when the world stops remembering you.

    Angel sings when she’s happy. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does it almost sounds like light breaking through.

    It doesn’t last.

    This is Christmas, apparently.

    Tomorrow will be, too.

    BETTY STANTON (she/her) is a Pushcart-nominated writer who lives and works in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She received her MFA from The University of Texas at El Paso and holds a doctorate in educational leadership. She is currently on the editorial board of Ivo Review.

    Featured image by Lawrence Aritao, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Re-Womb” by Rebecca Evans

    “Re-Womb” by Rebecca Evans

    “Re-Womb” by Rebecca Evans is a speculative creative nonfiction essay that redefines the form. Evans uses the technique of “perhapsing” to imagine a new integrative reality as the narrator becomes sensuously attuned within the wider world, “in celebration of / another / and another / and another.” Marvelously lyrical and metaphorical, “Re-Womb” is a study of language, a study of self.  —Court Harler

    If I rebirthed, I’d return as an orca and dance with my pod—us three—female, calf, escort. Perhaps I’d be the female, stifle humankind in the Strait of Gibraltar, remind man of his place, his fragile femur and filament and, remind him—every. single. man.—I am royalty.

    Or perhaps I re-womb, tunnel myself within and without. The darkness but a blanket—a blanket fort, a blanket of snow, an electric blanket. Me, cocooned and healing. Here, I snip stitches and strip screws. Here, I tenderly pull thread and metal. Here, my surgical reparation of heart and bone. I allow my body to finish her job. Oh! how she knows. Knows more than me.

    I hope when I die, I leave an imprint, not just an impression. Not the pressure-outline left on my bed or embossed into another. No. A signature of my stories, my songs, impressed beneath the skin of those who damaged me most. My words flaming through that cage, the place they held me

    hostage.

    Snow melts.

    A blanket returns

    to fiber.

    One flicker extinguishes darkness. Think, Small candle that someone,

    somewhere lights in memory of

    or in hope for

    or in celebration of

    another

    and another

    and another.

    Maybe I do not return as a female orca. Even while they sleep, they guard. Vertical “resting” buoyanced by water.

    I wonder, Does a mother ever rest?

    Perhaps I un-womb, return as words—a language still unspoken. One that you feel before you note the shape of it leaving your lips. Before your tongue presses to the back of your teeth.  Like song. Like whale humming. Like vibration massaging your weary bones.

    Think, Cello against your chest.

    Think, Babe turning in your womb-waters.

    Think, Hummingbird in your heart.

    You no longer feel the boundary—where you end and all else begins. Oh! how we have forgotten. We are instruments and whales and wings. Me, as language, will swoop through hearts like storm and ocean.

    Think, Dervish.

    Think. Cliff diving.

    Think…

    anything that sets you free,

    brings you warmth,

    reminds you

    that you, too, are all of these.

    REBECCA EVANS writes the difficult, the heart-full, the guidebooks for survivors. Her work includes a full-length poetry collection, Tangled by Blood; a collection-length poem, Safe Handling; and a forthcoming collection of flash essays, AfterBurn. Her work offers social commentary on surviving sexual assault by combining visual art, literary craft, and empowerment coaching.

    Featured image by Sixteen Miles Out, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Beard” by Eric Machan Howd

    “Beard” by Eric Machan Howd

    In the prose poem “Beard,” Eric Machan Howd explores the very concept of the contemporary ubiquitous beard: what it reveals, and what it conceals. As an objective correlative, the beard represents both living and dying. Through historical touchpoints, the revered beard is placed upon a continuum of irreverence.  —Court Harler

    He lets it grow, curling around dimples and smirks and the places where his father slapped regret into his cheeks. Whorls of silver strands gleaming in the few days of sunlight left before the cold and dark. To be healthy it must be fed regularly; almonds, avocado, carrots, pumpkin seed, spinach, broccoli, and salmon keep it strong, while various oils and balms save the skin beneath and coax new growth. Sleep makes for strong roots. Hair is dead. He hides behind it, covers scars and pox left by shingles and a father who roofed too much. The mouth is grown over. He parts his lips, strokes aside gray flyaways and blond wisps with thumb and index and makes way for fork, cup, and spoon. How difficult eating becomes. A bowl, for instance, must be held outstretched from chin to avoid dipping; it demands attention with soup and cereal, and faith in the steady hand. Pope Honorius III, to disguise his disfigured lip, let his grow, and Saint Peter’s was dedicated to the name of Lutheran churches. Leo the III was the first shaved Pope. He avoids plastics and statics, the electric charge that kills what is already dead. Thomas Edison used beard hair when searching for the strongest filament for his bulb. Someone’s hair brightened the room then burnt out. Combs of wood and horn smooth growth, a natural progression. Soon his lips will disappear. His beard will cover his heart and reach for ground and grave. He is already invisible to some, seen and not heard. Doors are not held for him. He grows it because he doesn’t want to be seen while speaking, because he wants to forget his bugler lips, rusty embouchure, what connects him to his father’s strict rhythm. Small seeds of protein gather in little pockets below the surface, form roots that steep in blood vessels. Hair breaks the skin, passes glands that soften and shine, and by the time it emerges the hair is dead. By the time it reaches his knees he will be alone and sing to the many shipwrecks sunk in it and speak to the dead that rise from its darkness at soul’s midnight. The story of hair growing after death is a myth, it is the skin that retracts from the follicle that gives the illusion of growth. He finds Saint Peter’s beard is now a fabric pattern, Warhol repetitions of His Holiness, dead but in stock across the world. Friends ask if he grows it for religious purposes. He answers: Somewhat, masks don’t work.

    ERIC MACHAN HOWD (Ithaca, New York) is a poet, musician, and educator. Their work has been seen in such publications as SLANT, SLAB, Cæsura, The Scop, and Nimrod. Their fifth collection of poetry, Universal Monsters, was published in 2021 by The Orchard Street Press.

    Featured image by Joshua Harris, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “The Lilacs Even the Purple Ones” by David Guiotto

    “The Lilacs Even the Purple Ones” by David Guiotto

    Note the inherent lyrical tension of David Guiotto’s flash fiction, “The Lilacs Even the Purple Ones”: the stream-of-consciousness effect created not only by lush poetic language but also by the omission of the comma. In the third paragraph, readers will sense a tightening of the line as the unnamed woman leans into her internal resolve, only for the sentence structure to start to unfurl again into a fresh if uncertain world of impending possibilities.  —Court Harler

    The lilacs even the purple ones were fading and she thought that was a bad sign. But then as they followed the street down the hill and came to the old road that curved under the locust trees their white clinging flowers smelled just like he’d said once they smelled vanilla like the cookies his mom would bake dragging the raw fragrant clusters through batter and baking them in the oven a ragged oily sumptuous cookie even though they weren’t acacia trees of the Veneto but close and oddly wonderful like an old family memory and that was a good sign. She took his hand as they walked.

    He squeezed her hand back and watched the trees and had no idea what she was about to tell him or ask him and her decision frightened her like when how long someone could go on being ignorantly happy while the death of a loved one went unknown. That was an exaggeration of course and she released his hand and grazed his forearm as he lead them across to the sidewalk just as a couple teenage girls loped by on bicycles. It was a good town she had to admit, his hometown that he loved with its river and pine ridges and old pals at every corner it seemed slapping him on the back inviting them to dinner sparking up stories about their college days or high school days hell even grade school days she heard no end to the heroics; a pleasant city even if the art scene wasn’t exactly the Mission but she’d grown weary of the big city and ready to like Boise leafy and parks and a safe place to raise their daughter and they’d gotten lucky to buy a house right after the crash my goodness what houses cost now.

    They’d almost left then, she remembered. After three years a little spitefully after not finding a house he’d parted for Sonoma to work a winery, then come back a couple weeks to see them and on the second day she’d spotted the listing, a mid-century in the lower foothills needing work but just the place they could afford and by that very afternoon the owner, the son of the old gal who’d raised her family there but was lying in hospice, Dolores was her name, he accepted their offer like it was a miracle even to him to sell the home to a working family like his and not the two lowly investors who’d tried to lowball him a week earlier. She knew right then they weren’t returning to California. Moving into that handsome house in need of new floors and plumbing but windows to feast your eyes on the seasons in the big trees of the neighborhood. Knew right then her life and their life was to take a new course and returning to SF or Sonoma wouldn’t be in the cards for years or more until a morning like today, when she opened the letter announcing her grad school acceptance two states over in Colorado, and later she suggested they walk down to Hyde Park for an early dinner just the two of them while their girl slept at her besty’s, and the locust blossoms like white grapes in the rusty branches and her hand touching just inside his shirt his warm skin and unsuspecting gate as he quoted Williams on the anarchy of the poor delighting him, and she bolstered her courage for what she’d have to tell him, or ask him. But tell him it would be. 

    DAVID GUIOTTO is the author of the geographic poetry collections Sawtooth Country (Limberlost Press) and Holocene Trail Guide to the Boise Front (Wolf Peach Press). His prose has appeared in The Limberlost Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, CyclingTips, 3 Syllables, The Cabin, and Street Mag.

    Featured image by Liana S, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Self/Other” by Gargi Mehra

    “Self/Other” by Gargi Mehra

    In “Self/Other,” Gargi Mehra’s self-conscious and self-reflexive mother-narrator spies herself in a fellow soccer mom. She compares and contrasts, converses and reminisces, though eventually decides, “But our miens are the only factors in common.” What may be deemed an everyday exchange soon develops, through carefully chosen and depicted detail, into a glimpse of contemporary feminism, into a peek at the conflicted woman within.  —Court Harler

    At the football ground I run into my younger self – the one that bounces while she walks, and perhaps gyms while she sleeps. She’s leaner than I’d ever been, her calves smooth, biceps flexed, arms buffed, skin de-spotted, eyes fiery, chin firm, lips curled. She’s definitely not the early-twenties version of me that’s bitter and broken and teary-eyed and forever scouring the horizon for the male pillar that will bear the weight of her sculpted shoulder.

    We trade names, birthdates (but not years), family trees (but not mental disorders that may have passed down), and even veer into dating histories. But our miens are the only factors in common. I struggle to scrape out the little details – it’s like poking at the grooves between my premolars, hunting down that elusive morsel just to find something, anything, that we share.

    Then it turns out that even our mothers aren’t the same. She says her mom flatlined even before their wedding – only then do I look past those cheekbones that pierce the air, and glimpse the resolve etched into pimple scars just like mine.

    Our little girls trot up to meet us (look at us – aren’t we progressive by getting our daughters to football and not the usual dance-craft-cooking-painting kind of classes?), hers bereft of shin guards, hair tucked into a tight bun, while my little czarina has fixed a tiny pink bow to the scrunchie of her ponytail.

    The smartphone rings and other-me toddles off to bark into its electronic butt, the sunlight bouncing off her hair, feet springing off the turf, while I scour the landscape for a woman that misses perfection but mirrors me.

    GARGI MEHRA is a writer, a computer engineer, and a mother. She plays the piano, smashes her lessons on Duolingo, and thrives on word games including crosswords, Scrabble, and of course, Wordle. She lives with her husband and two children in Pune, India.

    Featured image by Alberto Frías, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “Ladies Prefer Blonds: Fragments of an Undoing” by Ali McKenzie-Murdoch

    “Ladies Prefer Blonds: Fragments of an Undoing” by Ali McKenzie-Murdoch

    “Ladies Prefer Blonds: Fragments of an Undoing” by Ali McKenzie-Murdoch is a prose poem that fixates on one deceptive word: rubio, which means blond but with bloodred roots. But it’s also a flash fiction that tells the story of a woman enmeshed in an obsessive love: “Red says danger.” Readers must parse blond from blood, light from dark.  —Court Harler

    Rubio, they call him. It makes her skin burn. Clio mouths it like a secret, as if saying it will bleach her tongue. Golden, honey, caramel, strawberry. Blond as seduction, as light, as warmth.

    Rubio comes from rubeus, red—not golden. Bloody. Not the chill flaxen tresses of northern fairy tales, but the burn of the south, the sun, his gaze.

    In German fairy tales, gold is the reward. The endless braid. Escape, spun from strands.

    Real or from a bottle?

    In Renaissance Venice, women bleached their hair with horse urine and lemon juice, lying on sun-soaked roofs. Blonde, they believed, was closer to the divine. The sting, the smell, the heat.

    The first boy Clio ever kissed had hair tousled with salt and sand. She remembers his cool blue sun-cream scent but forgets his name.

    Blond is not a colour. It’s an obsession.

    Toria once told her, “You like blonds because you think they’ll be softer.”

    Later, Clio will learn that blondness cuts.

    When did she start seeing only fair-haired men in every room? Not the albinos—all sunburnt necks and white lashes—but sand-coloured men, sculpted from the beach. The ones who fall between the dark and the light.

    She thinks she’s chasing illumination. Or is she chasing erasure?

    Ru-bi-o. Almost Rubicon. The river Caesar crossed—a point of no return.

    He calls her morena. Dark. Sometimes it feels like a compliment. Sometimes it presses against her skin.

    In Rome, ruber meant red like rust, wine, wounds. The raw underside of things.

    His comrades call out Rubio across the parade yard, across the beach, their voices laced with soft mockery. His hair clipped close, but not sharp. More like a dull-edged sword.

    Blondness is recessive. Like power, it must be fed.

    Clio kept her childhood hair in a box, wrapped in tissue paper. Her mother burned it when she turned twelve, leaving the room smelling like melted sugar and loss.

    She once wrote his name in lipstick on her inner thigh. Not a blond mark, but rubeus. A red closer to violence than romance.

    The light in Ceuta bores into Clio, hard and brilliant as peroxide.

    Sometimes she catches herself staring at the backs of fair-haired men in cafés, in airports. Not desire, but recognition of blanched hope.

    In Marrakesh, she saw girls selling blonde hair extensions. Gold packaged in plastic. Dreams plastered over darker scalps.

    With age, his hair has darkened—like bruised fruit, like lead white in an old painting. Blackening.

    Later, she will see his name as a warning. Rubio. Rubious.

    Red says stop.

    Red says danger.

    Red spills when skin breaks.

    In the end, it won’t be his blondness that undoes her, but his distance.

    Ash. Platinum. Dishwater.

    These are the shades Clio will paint herself in shame.

    Naming the lightness won’t keep him from slipping into shadow.

    To know him will leave her marked with a darker hue.

    She thought she was chasing light.

    Now she knows it was only heat.

    And heat leaves ash.

    ALI McKENZIE-MURDOCH’s work appears in X-R-A-Y, Fractured, Your Impossible Voice, Litro, Bending Genres, and more. Her work was shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award 2025. She’s working on a novella-in-flash about liminal spaces—theatre stages, no-man’s-land, the foreshore—places where boundaries blur.

    Featured image by Paolo Gregotti, courtesy of Unsplash.

  • “The Day It Rained Stone” by Kathryn Kulpa

    “The Day It Rained Stone” by Kathryn Kulpa

    In her newest flash fiction, “The Day It Rained Stone,” Kathryn Kulpa entirely reinvents the contemporary genre of the coffee-shop story. In such a story, usually set in a diner or eatery, readers are gently treated to a light narrative, a humorous or illustrative slice-of-life moment. Instead, Kulpa stuns the reader with the horror of the mines and the generational echoes of grief. The result is a vivid but weighty story that honors the dead and counts the blessings of the living.  —Court Harler

    Every day when I go in to work to pull espresso shots I see the picture on the wall at Tunnel House Coffee, men with pickaxes and miner’s caps. Men who built the tunnel. Great-Grandpa Chuck was one of those men. Charles Henry Walker was the name on his tombstone, d. 1934, but the old pictures in Grandma’s album have “Pop” or “Chuck” on them, in liquid brown ink, in old-time cursive writing. The men were up by dawn. Out on the mountain before the sky did more than pink the edge of the horizon. Great-Grandma packed his lunch, never fewer than two sandwiches in that heavy steel lunchbox, two hard-boiled eggs, salt and pepper wrapped in a twist of waxed paper, thick scones split with a thread, then sealed back together with a smear of honey butter, the way Grandma still fixes them. Wives, sometimes kids too, waving goodbye as their men disappeared into the mountain, into caverns of stone that grew bigger each week.

    Every day, the blasting. Whistle blowing, once for caution, twice for all clear. Vibrations that went on so long you heard them even in stillness, your teeth rattling, fingers tapping out syncopated rhythm as you trailed off to sleep. Everybody knew fine china wasn’t safe on shelves. Everybody knew, when the men were in the tunnels, glasses would dance, lights would flicker, clean clothes would wear a topcoat of powder, like a girl going out for the evening.

    The Dark Day was the one everyone remembered, even Grandma, and she wasn’t more than three. She says her bones remember. Still won’t drive through a tunnel, still won’t ride an elevator. Like my mother, with her fear of tight spaces. Like my nightmares of being buried alive. That day the blast rumbled on, too loud, too long. The day they blew the whistle three sharp shrieks, again and again. SOS. SOS. Dogs howled along, tails tucked low. The day of long night, they called it, as if the sun never rose, blocked by the haze of stone dust in the air. Ambulance horns, arOOga, arOOga, and bucket brigades for when fire hoses no longer reached, but it wasn’t smoke that blacked the sky, only stone. Only mountains of stone, blasted, crushed, turning a tunnel into a tomb, sealed forever, so that all they buried of Great-Grandpa Chuck was the wedding band he wouldn’t wear into the mountain, lest the initials on it get too dust-choked to read. That ring lay, gold under earth, and not far off Great-Grandpa lay, with two hundred other men, bone under stone, and when the old folks ride that tunnel they still take off their hats, still bend their heads and whisper a quiet blessing to the dead we all live with.

    KATHRYN KULPA is the author of A Map of Lost Places (Gold Line Press) and For Every Tower, A Princess (Porkbelly Press). She was a 2025 Writer in Residence at Linden Place in Bristol, Rhode Island, and has stories in BULL, Flash Frog, Ghost Parachute, matchbook, and Your Impossible Voice.

    Featured image by Nick Osipov, courtesy of Unsplash.