When my widowed father was the age I am now, he married a woman the age I was then. The thirty-year difference didn’t bother his friends, though some objected to his haste, claiming he had but transferred my mother’s…
The monsoon our mother delivers a boy, we’re saved from our father’s anger. Our hands are raw, unrecognizable, carrying hot water, tugging clean sheets beneath our mother’s heels, taut like our names. The baby looks whittled out of a…
CH1 Grandpa Choi once sat me down and said, you’ve got a face that begs to study. “Jang Mi-in, you’ve got a face that needs education.” Needs. There wasn’t wiggle room in his vernacular. I knew what he meant;…
And that’s when I know what I want to be. Not the cowboy, flailing all spaghetti in the afternoon sun. But the horse bucking and shaking that small man off his back. My father was out of work again.…
Essay by Kristin Tenor • There is a certain longing found within Cheryl Pappas’s debut flash fiction collection, The Clarity of Hunger. The sixteen pieces included in the collection, many previously published in well-established literary journals such as The…
I followed Horace’s horns as he walked ahead of me into the tearoom. No matter how many times he visited me, I couldn’t seem to keep my eyes off the silky brown pelt of his neck, or the gentle…
From a distance, you can see the lights. The air is mosquito-thick, damp. The usually desolate backroads of Butler County, PA have become a caravan of motor enthusiasts. From the grassy shoulder, a deer struts with meticulous posture as…
1. Ambigram In isolation, I mark time by the movement of sunlight across my walls and floors. I awake each morning to the desert sun blazing through the east-facing back door. The sun conspires with the automatic pool cleaner…
I want to be a better person, so I hide my bad habits. When I lived alone, in a chilly, oceanside city, I let the evidence accumulate like flotsam around me. Now, I’m twenty-seven and I live in my…
I was ten when I discovered I had a womb. It bloomed red. The same year I learned about space. Booster rockets to escape gravity, separated and lost forever. My mother bagged items in a grocery store, Mary, an…
I have always been intrigued by the idea of motherhood—how a mother and a child are born at the same moment and how different and yet convergent their lives turn out to be. A rebellious daughter finds her mother simpleminded and feels she would never be a mother herself, and yet, after her mother’s death, she follows the footsteps into marriage and motherhood. Writing this piece in first-person point of view felt intimate—a voice with full access into itself. First person is a heavily subjective perspective, not an objective, wholesome reality. It brings out the characters, like the narrator and her mother, like me, as we discover how we think our children belong to us, when, in fact, we belong to them.
TARA ISABEL ZAMBRANO is a writer of color and the author of Death, Desire, and Other Destinations, a full-length flash collection by Okay Donkey Press. Her work has won the first prize in The Southampton Review Short Short Fiction Prize 2019, a second prize in Bath Flash Fiction Award 2020, and been a finalist in Bat City Review Short Prose Contest 2018 and Mid-American Review Fineline Competition 2018. She lives in Texas and is the Fiction Editor for Waxwing Literary Journal.
