“The 2024 election will be all about Taiwan,” our boyfriend, Jeremy, says. We’ve turned off all the lights except the one over the stove in the attached kitchen, and now we’re getting high on the plaid sofa in the…
The smell of weed did nothing to calm Roland’s nerves as he reached the bottom of the stairs. He found her, the smoker, splayed out with a book on the long end of the couch in a bright blue…
Content Warnings—death by suicide, gun violence One morning a science teacher at the high school found the window of his lab smashed and a dead possum on the floor. In my memory, the teacher is all gray: gray pants…
Gale Massey and Louise Marburg met in 2016 at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference over a tarot card consultation. Discovering a shared interest in exploring the dark side of human nature, they immediately clicked and have been friends and writing…
September Every day we met for lunch in the art classroom in the school’s east wing. It was the woodshop before the woodshop closed—a cavernous space full of defanged band saws and belt sanders stewing in desuetude. The art…
I am humming along to Lucky Dube’s voice over the radio on the windowpane. The cavernous room swallows his tenor, leaving his words bare, airy, like scattered feathers in the sun. I do not know what it means to…
Thea Prieto and Peg Alford Pursell first became acquainted when Pursell submitted her hybrid flash writing to The Gravity of the Thing, a literary journal edited by Prieto, and over the years their conversations on writing have grown to…
We shall leave, for remembrance, one rusty iron heart. The city’s rusty heart, that holds both the hustler and the square. Takes them both and holds them there. For keeps and a single day. —Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on…
By Patrick Thomas Henry • Wherever I write, I stow props: photographs and notebooks, found objects, mementoes of life away from the page. Despite my effort to shake off the strictures of my own workshop experiences, I still believe…
The way Appa held the sponge-tipped brush of white shoe polish. The way he ran the snowy viscosity over my scuffed canvas shoes, on top of the laces, around the eyelets. The way he placed my shoes under the…
My father died seven years ago. Right after, I allowed mundane activities to overwhelm the profound, life-changing event. For a while, everyday chores offered numbness. They formed a wall behind which I tucked away the loss and the grief I wasn’t able to confront or absorb, much less articulate.
A year and a half after he died, random memories began to peek and tease from behind the wall of time, like gleaming gems. Eventually, they formed a beautiful slideshow of moments, offering both comfort and joy.
We’re not big on words of love in our family. But my father showed us how much he cared through his actions, every single day he was with us. What he did for us speaks loud enough to linger, to stay. And now, I am putting them together in words, so his love can live on.
SUDHA BALAGOPAL’s recent work appears in Flash Frog, Fractured Lit, Monkeybicycle, and Hypertext, among other journals. Her novella-in-flash, Things I Can’t Tell Amma, was published by Ad Hoc Fiction in 2021. She has a story in Best Microfiction 2021 and is listed in the Wigleaf Top 50 for both 2019 and 2021. Her work has also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions.
