A year ago, we asked each other: what is direct address, really? We knew the craft definition, of course: a technique in which a narrator overtly addresses a secondary group or figure (such as a reader or another character).…
By Anne Elliott • One of the noble aims of fiction is the fostering of empathy across difference, including difference of beliefs. Most difficult for me is finding empathy for those with unpalatable beliefs. Softening my gaze puts my…
Honey, MS, 1973 I When it gets cold in the South, Mama puts Devilish-Daddy out, again. It’s where he belongs, she says, cold is like warm milk to funny daddies like the one y’all got. All it gone do…
Later, after my uncle’s suicide, the gun cabinet would be moved into the attic, but in the early eighties it still stood in the upstairs hall, just outside my bedroom door. An unassuming wooden display case with twin glass-paned…
Only two days have passed since they were banished to the boat but already the summer’s inevitable fractiousness has made itself apparent. They know there is always this period of adjustment, this is their sixth year now under this…
Ages 17–19 Aging English Rockstar Who Threatened to SueHe tells you about his daughter between mouthfuls of dragon rolls, dabbing the truffle off his upper lip scruff with the corner of a napkin. He lost her to cancer before…
In late August, his son began to insist aliens lived in the cornfields that stretched west from the outskirts of the town they lived in. Not playacting. Not childlike. They needed, his son solemnly said, to be ready for…
Shelly died first. Some combination of tuberculosis and an ancient family curse. Then her ghost killed Dan, strangled him with his own bed-curtains. They both agreed to leave Good Boy alive—the game is Ghost Children, not Ghost Dogs. Shelly…
Essay by Sam Risak • “Florida man arrested for calling 911 after kitten denied entry into strip club.” “Florida man once arrested for fighting drag queen with tiki torch runs for mayor.” “Florida man killed by alligator while hiding…
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.
