FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Alice, Rewritten" by Despy Boutris

Alice, Rewritten

By Despy Boutris

My throat was sore with shards of mirror, glass. Outside, the moon hung low, wide and white, starred like an open eye. I felt blood begin to flood my mouth. Why had swallowing the sight of myself felt like a good idea? Outside, fields stretched for miles, sky swelling with smog. An engine revved in the distance. I shivered so I put on a sweater, and then a winter coat. And another. I lay in bed and traced thistles and letters onto my pillowcase. Opened my mouth and watched blood bloom, stain the sheets red. I turned the radio dial and listened to static. I strained my mouth to speak. Sound of gravel, screech of tires. Grate of metal. Was that my voice or scrape of mirror, glass? I stood up only to fall to the floor. It felt moist. I rested my cheek on the hardwood. Burning up. This room the aroma of mildew. I reached into my mouth for the shard slicing my tonsils, and my fingers turned to thorns. Outside, a flash flood, rain battering the windows. Convulsing trees, sway of spurned bottles hanging from branches—not wind-chimes but -rackets. I sipped my tea that had gone cold. It tasted like copper, far from the chai it was supposed to be. The rain was unforgiving. The pain unforgiving. Throat on fire.

Landing by Thomas J. Philbrick

Landing by Thomas J. Philbrick


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About the Author:

Despy Boutris's writing has been published or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Ploughshares, AGNI, Crazyhorse, American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. Currently, she teaches at the University of Houston and serves as Editor-in-Chief of The West Review. You can find her on Twitter at @itsdbouts.

FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "I Ask Medusa" by Emma Kaiser

I Ask Medusa

by Emma Kaiser

Ocean Mist by Britnie Walston

Ocean Mist by Britnie Walston

I ask Medusa what it is like to be seen. That stare turned venomous, face that stuns to stone. They say you were a great beauty—but beauty can wound as much as ugliness. Poseidon gazed on you and took you in, then took you by force, defiled Athena’s priestess in her temple. As punishment, Athena cursed you. Gave you serpents in place of the curls she envied, forced you into exile. They say you feared your own power, even grieved the violence of your gaze. But I wouldn’t.      

You don’t look like a cursed woman to me. Equipped with a defense against that which seeks to possess you. Unclaimable, untouchable, even the thought of you unobtainable. I’d like to believe my gaze that dangerous. What is it like being the last face they ever see? Your reflection fading and pooling like milk in their sockets?

*

I’m fascinated by how my image can exist apart from my body. Stagnant still lives of the self caught up in film, in paint, in memory. I hate seeing my body caught unaware in candids, a reflection without consent. It’s then I see it: my crooked posture, bloated middle, lips pulled back over my gums when I show teeth, all these projections I can’t see or control.

When I was a child, I imagined a book that contained everything anyone had ever said about me—gossip, praise, my name passing through conversations—and though I knew it would wound me, I also knew that I would read every word. The book never appeared, so instead I review old photos of myself, try to survey my form through different eyes. I take turns looking at myself as my ex, my mother, an almost lover, a woman I envy, a man at the bar. I want to peer through their eyes at my body, understand what they see, what I do not. I try to recognize myself as someone not filtered through someone else’s gaze but find I can’t. So I hide myself away, reclaim myself only when no one else is there to see.

*

At an outdoor concert, a man twice my age working security lets me know I am being observed—by himself and others. Up until this moment I believe myself to be self-aware. I feel conscious of how I take up space, how I move in relation to other bodies, how fabric clings to my limbs, the way I walk and position myself. But then the security guard with a mustache and beer gut stands over me, makes me take a step back. “Me and the boys been watchin’,” he says. Points to other men standing near the stage, leering. They project stares I hadn’t felt until pointed out. They hit like cold water on my skin. The man asks if another man is coming to claim me, that he’s stupid for leaving me here alone. As I walk away,  I turn back to see him filming me. Now he is the one laying claim. Set on possessing and preserving me there—this record of my body, my movements, that he will later do with as he pleases.

I think of the friend from high school who admitted to jerking off to a photo of me in a blue dress. I think of showing up at a guy’s house in college and being informed by him and his friends that we’d be playing strip poker. I think of being at the same bar as a man who had asked me for nudes, overhearing him ridicule a girl who had actually sent them. What would it be like to curse their thoughts of me? Petrify them before they could settle in their skulls?  

*

Aquatic by Britnie Walston

Aquatic by Britnie Walston

Medusa—meaning guardian or protectress. Even after they beheaded you, your dead eyes remained potent enough to kill. You face transformed from possession, to trophy, then weapon—finally inscribed upon Athena’s shield. Not even your curse was yours to keep. They couldn’t leave you in peace, unseen. I think about tattooing your image between my eyes, or wearing you like an amulet. My own shield against selfish want.

 

I both resent and yearn to be a thing beholden. So many pieces and clones of self walking around in too many minds, contorted in memory. A body fragmented in impossible inventory. Tell me, Medusa: what is it like to stop them in their tracks?


About the Author:

Emma Kaiser is the winner of the Norton Writers Prize. Her work is featured or forthcoming in River Teeth, The Normal School, Craft, Great River Review, Rock & Sling, and elsewhere, and she is the author of three children's nonfiction books. She is currently a Creative Writing MFA candidate at the University of Minnesota. You can find her on Twitter at @emmasharonkaiser.

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WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Cherry" by J. Matthew Gottwig

Cherry

By J. Matthew Gottwig

Dad was always a body man. He liked Mom for her body and would laugh his smoker’s laugh and spit in the dirt and kick more dirt over his spit, but he wasn’t my dad—just my sister’s dad, and I hated when he came home after drinking and told Mom to get her ass in bed, and after he was done, he’d go back out to his Stingray and wax and stroke it down like it was a sweeter woman. Mom said calling him dad would bring us closer, and she was right. I loved Dad for his car, and after Mom died and Dad ended up in County, I wanted to drive that car into the ground, but my sister wouldn’t have it. She quit school and took a job at the service station and made enough money to keep us eating but not much more than that, and I started taking Dad’s cherry Stingray out drag racing and helped bring in a little more, but when my sister asked where I was getting the money and found the fenders beat up, she hit me hard and wouldn’t stop until I swore I wouldn’t bring it out again, and every day after that, every goddamn day, she checked that car, and I called her a bitch for not trusting me, but she was right, because Jimmy from school… yeah! Jimmy Deffès! He’d say, Bring that car out again and race with us, and he wanted to lay some cash down on Dad’s Stingray, and I kept telling him, Yeah, Jimmy—I’ll bring it! Just tell me the time and the place, but I wouldn’t show. He’d smack me around the next day and say, What you think I’m messing around here? Car like that can make us some easy money, and you sure as shit ain’t doing anything with it, but Jimmy quit asking, quit talking to me at all, when I figured out I could hit back.

Most nights after that, I’d hear my sister out working on Dad’s car with the crickets and coyotes, you know, working the engine, swapping out parts and doing a bad job of it, and she’d swear at that car, call it a bastard, but she got better, and one day, I saw she’d painted it bright white, and after she’d waxed and stroked it down, it glowed like a cloud in a sunburned sky. I kept calling it Dad’s car, and she hit my shoulder and said, Like hell. It’s mine now, and we argued about that. Sometimes I still thought about taking it out drag racing and making some easy money, but I didn’t want to run it into the ground, not anymore, and one night after she was done with work, I heard the garage door go up and the engine rumble, and that engine shook the whole house, but I was playing XBOX and kept playing but could hear her car on the highway and go further than I’d ever heard her go before. It made me think of thunder rolling from far away.

THE END


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About the Author:

J. Matthew Gottwig is a programmer and librarian for the University of Maryland system. His work has appeared in such publications as Nature, sub-Q, and the CutBank, which awarded his story "Tether" 2018 Montana Fiction Prize. Although a parent of two young kids, he somehow manages to maintain a semi-regular writing schedule.

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

CutBank Online features one work of flash prose or prose poetry every Monday. Submissions are free and open year-round. Send us your best work of 750 words or less at https://cutbank.submittable.com/submit.

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Ten Bad Feelings" by Jane Kim

Ten Bad Feelings

By Jane Kim


After being told I needed Benzoid

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There weren’t even any triggers, but they started getting more frequent and severe. But even though doctors and pharmacists gave diagnosis and prescriptions that defined certain symptoms, that didn’t explain why my body did what it did, didn’t help me make sense of the shaking or involuntary contractions or hyperventilation, not in the moment, not after; why, how, why;

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If not why

After her first visit to the local gyno, she was put on birth control pills for her cramps and irregular periods. When she told her boyfriend, he asked if they could stop using condoms. She needed her boyfriend to be as fearful of pregnancy as she was, even if it was her body; when she explained this logic, he seemed unhappy, but didn’t push the matter. 

This wasn’t why they broke up, but later she wondered if that was when they had begun to break up. 

 

No Reason

It was at a party, not exactly black tie but formal, that a woman I didn’t know said, Can you hate someone for no reason?

I glanced at her, but she wasn’t looking at me, she was looking at a woman wearing a silky grey dress across the hall, who I recognized as one of the speakers from the dinner reception earlier that evening. She seemed to be laughing but we couldn’t hear her from across the hall, and she managed to look lovely ladylike even as she laughed through a mouthful of crudités. 

I wanted to say you probably have a reason, maybe it’s just not a very good one, but instead I nodded vaguely, and said, I guess, and realized that too was true, because just that moment I hated the woman in the grey dress. I hated her because the woman I didn’t know resented her, and that was probably no reason for me to hate anyone, but I did, so I stood sipping prosecco with the woman whose name I never learned in our brief shared unreasoned dislike. 

 

Inverse and Irony

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Have I been to someone what you have been to me?

 

Habit

The first time he gets migraines, he goes to see a doctor with a pale grey face. He slips on the flat surface of the floor a few times, throws up a few more, and is put to bed in a dark room on some dissolving pills. 

He later picks up the migraine meds they prescribe. Imitrex. When the migraine revisits, he puts the Imitrex on his tongue, and within minutes has a throat constriction, he can almost feel the sternum closing in against his heart. It turns out he is allergic to some component of Imitrex, and they change his migraine medication to rizatriptan and zofran instead. He is secretly glad the new prescription is cheaper than the last, no particular difficulty breathing. 

This is how he develops the habit of perusing every word in patient education and drug information printouts. He knows reading them won’t reduce any risk, his body is his body and it’ll always be allergic to its allergies, but then again, no habit is reasonable.

 

In the produce section of Whole Foods

What are you looking for? I offer. The woman says, green onions, and I point to the scallions in the produce section, but she shakes her head, apparently they aren’t the right size or the right variety, though I don’t know what she’s looking for and can’t tell the difference. This is the largest local grocery store, so I tell her to perhaps look for them on the weekly farmer’s market. She nods, looking crestfallen, but remembers to says thanks, and with an awkward smile, says, there aren’t a lot of recipes from home that don’t use them. I want to say I’m sorry, I don’t know what I can say or do that would help, but she looks so apologetic, and both of us end up repeating, No, I’m sorry. 

 

Leave

My roommate tells me about his friend, who is on medical leave after being diagnosed with PTSD. She had to take time off from work because she needed breathing space, but the irony is, as she takes time off at home she can no longer seek therapy or treatment because her family cannot, will not, does not know, and so on the medical leave her family thinks is simply a leave she tries to touch a different word of her diagnosis each day by herself, nursing her invisible illness in solitude.

She would eventually like to get to what disorder is and how exactly it has tweaked or broken her apparatus, but she hasn’t yet gotten past what it means to be Post-anything. My roommate looks grim when he says he isn’t sure whether his friend should extend her leave, and I am thinking of how she will process what trauma is supposed to mean, post, past, or present. 

 

I don’t care enough

On her first date with a guy who could sport a beard and actually pull it off, she didn’t discover he was vegan until after she had ordered her food, the unfortunate choice of protein chicken rather than tofu. She hoped he would have straight up told her, but he didn’t. He flashed her an innocent grin over his kale and she wished she had thought to ask about his dietary restrictions before they chose the restaurant, or at least before she ordered the food. Having lost all appetite for the strips of chicken, she forked her meal less than eagerly.

The conversation went fine despite her lackluster replies and he delighted her with his manners, but she had been too out of it to hope for a second date. She did the math in her head and thought perhaps one in four of her friends now were vegan, or at least vegetarian. And though she recycled religiously and didn’t use to-go cups or plastic straws, she wasn’t either, she hadn’t really tried. The unusual September cold felt like another accusation of her failure, so she rolled up her car window, and thought to herself, I don’t care enough. 

 

Relationship

After dating Ben for a couple months, with whom things remained shockingly stagnant–sex remained satisfying, conversation interesting–she put him in exhibit B. He was getting dangerously close to the center, but there was no sign of either deterioration or progression in their relationship, and by this she suspected she might belong in some other, more peripheral category of his diagram. She was beginning to miss the simplicity of her relationships in exhibit A.

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Musician

A few nights ago I was sat at a bar
chatting to a poor old chap getting
mellow drunk with whiskey, and I do
not know if he plays music for a living,
but he did ask if I knew anyone kind
who does not love useless things.

 

About the Author:

Originally from Seoul, South Korea, Jane Kim started writing with the Vancouver-based Creative Writing for Children's Society since 2005. In 2014 she published a 400-page novel, Fallen, on Amazon Kindle, and currently explores experimental short stories and creative non-fiction. Her short story “Broken” has been featured in STORGY magazine in 2018, and her personal essay, “Umma, How You Break My Heart,” was published in Cherry Tree Literary Journal Issue V in 2019. After receiving her B.A. in Literary Arts and History of Art and Architecture at Brown University, she is currently completing her master’s degree in English at St. Peters College, Oxford. 

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

CutBank Online features one work of flash prose or prose poetry every Monday. Submissions are free and open year-round. Send us your best work of 750 words or less at https://cutbank.submittable.com/submit.

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WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Three Flash Fictions" by Hayley Swinson

by Hayley Swinson

The Wrong Question

“Why aren’t you eating?” the man asks his teenage step-daughter, seated across the table from him. 

She pushes her food around with her fork, watches the back of her mother’s head retreating to the bathroom. 

“Don’t you like it?” 

She nods. Looks at her mother’s empty chair. Under the table, she touches the cheap ring on her finger, relishes the way its peeling gold coloring scratches her skin.

The bell over the restaurant’s door tingles as a group of men and women files into the restaurant: feminine chatter with undertones of male laughter, the women clutching glittering purses and the suit sleeves of their dates. 

The girl looks down at her jeans and t-shirt and her face reddens. Her step-father’s eyes narrow as he takes in the new arrivals. “A little over-dressed for this place,” he mutters. He stuffs food into his mouth, speaks around it, points at the girl’s plate with his fork. “Your food’s going to get cold if you don’t eat.” He swallows a bite, barely chewed. 

“It’s a salad,” the girl says, spearing a leaf of spinach with her fork, bringing it to her mouth. The single leaf bends in half to fit between her lips, pursed in a heart-shape—as if preparing for a kiss. There’s a crunch as the stem breaks, and the girl chews it slowly, deliberately until the leaf is pulp on her tongue.  

Her step-father fidgets in his chair. Wipes his wet mouth with the burgundy cloth napkin. Saws at his food with his knife. “You know, proper etiquette says you’re only supposed to cut one bite at a time. But that’s not very efficient, is it?” He laughs as he chews, slicing a grid into his steak. The girl watches the edges of his mustache, the tiny crumbs lodged in its hairs, the way it moves as he chews, more expressive than his eyebrows. 

A smiling waiter seats the men and women in evening attire at the table next to theirs. 

The girl swallows. Sips from her water glass. Twists the ring on her finger, feeling its inner edges rub against her skin. Her eyes wander to one of the women’s evening gowns. It is a deep blue edged in a pearl beading that trails up her side and intertwines with the lacy bodice, like froth on a wave. 

The women laugh, flashing their teeth at the waiter as he pours them red wine. The woman in the blue dress places a hand on the waiter’s arm as she thanks him. A diamond glitters on her ring finger. Her nails are manicured, her teeth straight and white like sun-bleached shells. 

The girl tries to stab another spinach leaf, fails, moves shredded carrots around her plate. She imagines herself crumbling, vanishing like sand through open fingers. 

Her step-father brings the next bite to his mouth. “Your mom said I’m supposed to ask you about school.” He chews loudly as he looks at her, eyes expectant, fork hand gesturing for her to speak. 

The girl’s knife squeaks on the plate. 

With the tips of her fingers, one of the women at the adjacent table tears bread off the loaf in a graceful arc. 

The girl gulps from her water glass, swishes the water in her mouth. 

“What’s going on at school?” her step-father asks, moving the steak around his gum like a wad of tobacco. 

The girl puffs out her cheeks. There’s a shriek from the table next to them and she turns to look. One of the women laughs, head thrown back, eyes shut, fingers cupping her stomach. Her husband looks bewildered, hand hanging in the air between them, warm light flickering off his wedding band. The girl’s stepfather glares at the woman, clears his throat loudly. “Can’t even hear myself talk,” he says to no one in particular. He catches the eye of the woman’s husband and they exchange a commiserating look. 

The woman’s laugh ends in a throaty chuckle, and she grins at her husband, who frowns. He moves his hand to her leg, resting it there like a tether. 

Under the table, the girl slips off the cheap gold ring and places it in her pocket. On the other side of the restaurant, her mother emerges from the bathroom, heads for their table.

The man sponges the pink steak juice with his bread, refocuses on his step-daughter. “Tell me about school,” he says to the girl, shoving the bread into his mouth. 


Frozencamp Creek

When you asked me to cut your hair, I said yes without hesitation, even though I’d never done it before. We went down to the stream and you took your shirt off, threw a towel around your neck. 

“Nice out today, huh?” I said, as you settled down on a rock, wetting your feet in the stream. 

You looked up: towards the sun that baked the river stones, creating hot waves in the air, spreading the smell of decay from upstream. “Sure,” you said, batting gnats away from your eyes. Sweat was already beading up on your shoulders and forehead. 

“Can you wet it?” I asked.

Your eyebrows shot up.

“Your hair, I mean.” My cheeks burned. Why had I agreed to this? 

“Oh, sure,” you said, looking away, then bending forward into the stream, bringing your hands to the back of your neck to make sure your hair was completely submerged. 

As you worked, I could see your tendons running from neck to shoulders and down your back to your waist like a road map.

You pulled your head out of the water, dripping from the ends of your hair, spreading little ripples in the stream. And when you sat still on the rock, towel back in place over your shoulders, and I picked up the painted art scissors and a clump of your hair, you shivered.

“You’re not cold are you?” I asked, snipping off a curl. 

“No,” you said, watching the curl drift downstream, hands clasped tight over your knees.

We fell silent, listening to the water bubble and flow and the sharp schick schick schick of my scissors until that, too, became another natural sound. 

When I was done, I dug my hands into your hair at the roots, drawing it to its ends between my fingers to measure evenness. The muscles in your neck were taut and unmoving, resisting the jerk of my fingers. Before I thought better of it, I put a thumb at the apex of your spine, pressing against the tension that had grown there. 

You groaned and bowed your head towards your lap. In the distance, the lunch bell tolled, but neither you nor I made any move to leave. 


Surefire

Mama and I stare as the neighbor’s house burns; we stand just outside the circle of heat. Grandpa has gone in search of Mr. McNair to see if he can help. My palms are damp, clasping Mama’s hand with both of my own. Is our house going to be ok? Shouldn’t we be worried about us? Mr. McNair’s hounds bark and carry-on down the way. I wonder if their pen is heating up from the fire, and I think about going to let them out. 

Far off in the direction we came, there’s the wail of a fire engine, soft but getting louder. I wonder if it will make it down the dirt driveway, if it will get stuck between the trees. I wonder if there will be anything left for them to save.

I ask Mama if we shouldn’t just go down to the lake and bring water in buckets to put the fire out. She squeezes my shoulder. “That’s a nice thought, sweetheart.” 

The fire truck arrives, but the house is a mass of fire by then, glass exploding out from the attic windows. Grandpa reappears with Mr. and Mrs. McNair, all three sweating and beet-colored. They stand with their hands on their hips next to us and the firemen and watch their house burn to the ground next to the lake. 

Mrs. McNair is crying silently, her hand covering her mouth. All that water and nothing doing to put the fire out. One of the firemen, shouting to be heard over the fire and the hounds, says, “Good thing it rained last night or all these trees’d be caught, too.” Mrs. McNair takes a deep, rattling breath and her husband looks down. 

“Small blessings,” Mama says. She is trembling. 

Grandpa kicks a rotten log on the ground, and it falls apart round the middle.

At home, Mama picks ash out of my hair as she bathes me in the tub, pouring cup after cup of water over my head.


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About the Author:

Hayley Swinson has a Masters in writing from the University of Edinburgh and an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. She is Editor-in-Chief of 'The New Southern Fugitives' literary zine, and works as a freelance copy-editor and writer in Wilmington, NC. Follow her on her blog, hayleyswinsonwriter.com

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

CutBank Online features one work of flash prose or prose poetry every Monday. Submissions are free and open year-round. Send us your best work of 750 words or less at https://cutbank.submittable.com/submit.

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "To Begin" by Mariya Poe

To Begin

By Mariya Poe

It was sometime during those years we lived in a one room house on a vast plot of land with dying soil, fox babies, buzzsaw cicadas, and ten-foot cattails. Evenings, we were alone while our pregnant mother tended to our father’s depression in ways we weren’t allowed to see. One of my brothers would walk until he sunk beneath the hills and the other went somewhere else. 

We must have had neighbors because a man was there with me, not for the first or last time. I wore the same dress that whole week and he bent down to touch its hem. He pulled lemon slices from the pockets of his jeans. Their wetness had soaked through down the front of him. The fruit was sticky and frayed, already squeezed. He lay the slices in the dirt of the garden and along the pond’s edge. The idea, he said, was to see what would show up to feed on the juice. See the disruption. Our mut followed me close, sniffing each slice, then us, trying to put it all together. The man wound his way through my hair. After he got started, he moved slow. I remember how it was worse because of the citrus on him.

The city’s teaching me to be a different person but the dying soil is in my body. When I’m with a man, as I am right now, my apartment flips. Everytime it’s something like this: we’re having sex on the bed, or the floor, and then we’re clinging to the ceiling. My fingers stick to the plaster. He keeps going. He sees the ceiling behind me but he thinks it’s the floor. His hands search for my hands. I want him to tell me what to do and how to feel. Footsteps from the place upstairs beat against my back. You’re so good, he’s saying. You’re so good. A drop of his sweat falls down, down. Wind blows through the kitchen window and rushes across the apartment below us. 

We flip back again and land on the bed right before he’s done while his eyes are shut tight. I imagine his stomach drops like mine but he doesn’t know why. I roll off the mattress onto the hardwood to press my forehead against the cold, hard grooves, and he slides into the sheets.

There was so much light left. I twisted my neck to look at the lemons with dirt and ants all over their yellow. I hoped for some kind of magic. I wanted to see minnows catapulting themselves out of the water, flopping their bodies forward, inch by inch, toward the sour, mysterious thing. 


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About the Author:

Mariya Poe earned a BFA in writing from the Pratt Institute. She’s the winner of the 2015 Stony Brook Fiction Prize and her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Hobart, wildness, New Orleans Review, The Collagist, Mid-American ReviewThe Adroit Journal, and Sonora Review. She’s the associate editor for Carve Magazine and an editor at 101 Words.

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

CutBank Online features one work of flash prose or prose poetry every Monday. Submissions are free and open year-round. Send us your best work of 750 words or less at https://cutbank.submittable.com/submit.

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Big Mood" by Margie Sarsfield

Big Mood

By Margie Sarsfield

Six years ago I dropped a bowl of buttered spaghetti on the carpeted floor of a dorm room in Colorado. I wasn’t in college. It wasn’t a dorm room. It was employee housing. It was a ski resort. It used to be a club med. I say dorm room because that says it best. Someday it won’t be six years ago. I lived there with some guy I lived with – but it was my spaghetti – it was all I had. // I was twenty-three and drunk all the time: fifths on the bathroom floor next to the tub with the shower running so I could smoke cigarettes and talk to my friend about the songs he cried to in high school, always a good listener and only sometimes on pills anymore: my greatest achievement. // I have always eaten too much. Spaghetti has always calmed me. Hungover all shift (probably) standing on my feet eight hours (probably) fighting with the guy I lived with (probably) coming back from the club med communal kitchen, I dropped my one thing and do you think I ate it anyway? Do you think I squatted down and fisted spaghetti back into the bowl and left the carpet dirty in a circle of butter and parmesan? 
Is that what you think I did?


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About the Author:

Margie Sarsfield is a Pushcart-nominated writer living in Columbus, Ohio. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in The Normal School, Seneca Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Hippocampus, and Quarter After Eight. She is the winner of University of Louisville's 2019 Calvino Prize and Midway Journal's 2019 -1000 Below Flash Prose Contest.

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

CutBank Online features one work of flash prose or prose poetry every Monday. Submissions are free and open year-round. Send us your best work of 750 words or less at https://cutbank.submittable.com/submit.

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "The Importance of Lighting in Relationships" by Rachel Laverdiere

The Importance of Lighting in Relationships

By Rachel Laverdiere

Stage 1: Electric Lights 

When considering new relationships, ensure optimal lighting. Bright electric lamps highlight cobwebs and other unsightly refuse—including ghosts—and aid in the discovery of lingerie abandoned in the bottom bureau drawer, baggage stashed in his master bedroom closet.  

Warning: Do not fall under his charm before spending sufficient time in harsh lighting. Study your potential companion’s features. Determine whether he has shifty eyes. Do not ignore small twitches, ticks or subtle shadows. Upon returning from powdering your nose, confirm he hasn’t tampered with the dimmer switch. Do not get caught in the dark.

Disclaimer: Spend evenings on bright public patios with those who know him well. Red flags will appear. If he has few close friends, he must be hiding something. Like corpses in his basement. Remember what you are looking for.  


Stage 2: Candlelight

Baby-step your way from electric lighting to candlelight once you determine the relationship is worthy of pursuit. Proceed with caution. The ambiance adds romantic undertones, softens features and conversations and forces lovers to lean toward murmurs. 

Warning: Do not over-spritz his gift of cheap imitation cherry blossom perfume nor overextend yourself to decipher mumbled words, or you risk singeing your eyelashes. Insist he speak up, repeat, speak plainly. Never assume truths spill from his lips if your gut insists otherwise. 

Disclaimer: Consider the amount of wine you’ve consumed before allowing the flame to grow. A blaze burned to a certain brightness is near impossible to extinguish. 


Stage 3: Moonlight

By the light of the moon, you’ll believe he makes the future glow. And the sex will be incredible! Better enjoy it while it lasts because soon enough you’ll yearn for sleep before the earth swallows the sun.

Warning: He’ll promise you the universe, swear he hung the moon among the stars. Beware the dimming of stars drained by a hefty mortgage, his child support payments and jalopy forever-in-need-of-repair. The man sleeping next to you will become a stranger. His snoring will push you to sprawl out in the spare bedroom where your mind drifts back to a man you once knew well. He smelled of fresh rain and ink, and Oh! how his eyes twinkled when he made you laugh…

Disclaimer: Lightning often strikes in troubled seasons. Is it your fault that your heart fluttered? That a flush bloomed on your cheeks? You cannot deny batting your lashes, nibbling your freshly glossed lips. Or that when his hand brushed your thigh, you squeezed your knees together and revelled in the jolt. 


Stage 4: Gaslight

Propose a camping trip to rekindle your moonlight desires. Play dice by the glow of kerosene. Morning will find you at a campfire where coffee percolates, bacon sizzles and beans pop in their tin.

Warning: Study the 1944 movie Gaslight. Wife asks Husband about the flickering lamps. Husband, who secretly and repeatedly dims and brightens the lanterns, accuses her of having a wild imagination. Wife doubts her sanity. Will she discover Husband’s the demented one?  

Disclaimer: Say you have a tiff. After you’ve poked holes into his misstatements, take your coffee into the camper. Read while he chugs another beer and sulks by the fire. Grumbling, he fumbles in and snatches his keys. You ask where he’s going, but his response is the flicker of sunlight on a slamming door, the spit of gravel as he drives away. He wanted your attention? He’s got it.


Stage 5: Emergency Lighting and Exit Signs

Emergency lights are standard safety feature in modern high-stakes relationships. These battery-charged devices are automatically activated by a power warpage. Especially if one partner is an egocentric in disguise. Tell me you made him sign that pre-nup.

Warning: Emergency lighting work for minimal time. Locate the nearest exit. Do not fret over how you’ll explain to your mother how you’re leaving another marriage. Burying your head in the sand is easier, but eventually you would suffocate.

Disclaimer: For optimal security, consider adding sirens. Neighbours who witness the commotion will confirm that danger lurks—even when he insists it doesn’t. 


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About the Author:

Rachel Laverdiere is a language instructor and writer from southern Saskatchewan. Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction pieces are most recently published or forthcoming in journals such as filling Station, Blank Spaces, Entropy, Atlas and Alice, and Barren Magazine. Her flash fiction was shortlisted for the Geist 2015 Short Long-Distance Writing Contest. 

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

CutBank Online features one work of flash prose or prose poetry every Monday. Submissions are free and open year-round. Send us your best work of 750 words or less at https://cutbank.submittable.com/submit.

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Mum's Dream of the Eternal Arms" by Sammy Salem

Mum’s Dream of the Eternal Arms

By Sammy Salem

Mum had a dream about a bar.

The bar is in heaven. It’s where A-List alcoholics go after drinking themselves to death. It’s called ‘The Eternal Arms’.

In ‘The Eternal Arms’ the absence of time means no last orders and a tab that’s never called. There are no hangovers, cirrhosis, DUI’s or interventions. No heartburn, heartache, social services or children wetting themselves in the car while they wait for you to finish up that last, last drink.

A paradise for the permanently pissed.

The doors swing open and a sweaty breeze carries you into the stale smell of beer, vinegar, and urine.

Hemingway and Bukowski are arguing. Their raised voices bring Jackson Pollock back online and he’s surprised to find himself pissing on the bar. Despite the splashback, Judy Garland hasn’t noticed, she’s busy trying to convince her eye to catch the bartenders. An attempt at a wink goes awry as her right eyelids stick together. Pollock wipes his hand on the now snoring Judy’s dress and slides back onto his stool. 

Meanwhile, Charlie Parker leans across a sticky menu to pour Edith Piaf another glass of wine and Tennessee Williams tries to shake off Billie Holiday.

‘You getting me a drink, sugar?’

Williams, still waiting for that click, waves Holiday away. 

She spits then shifts her weight onto her other hip and looks down the seasick line at the bar.

‘How about you, handsome?’

Jim Morrison necks his beer and unzips his leather trousers.

Serge Gainsbourg shakes his head in disgust before noticing a wobbly Veronica Lake being escorted into the disabled toilet by Montgomery Clift. Gainsbourg drops his cigarette in Patricia Highsmith’s gin and follows. Highsmith downs the gin and mumbles lovingly to her handbag full of snails.

Suddenly laughter breaks out at the back by the fruit machine. Hunter S Thompson has put Toulouse Lautrec on his shoulders and is running in circles around the room. On a tight corner, the diminutive artist tumbles over the bar and takes Hank Williams’ bottle of bourbon with him.

Staring down at the place the bottle used to be the singer is confused, but before the tears and questions can form, Dorothy Parker slides a beer down the bar to him with a wry smile.

She then returns to the entertainment of watching Jack Kerouac drool over Jean Rhys as a dark patch grows wider and wider on the crotch of his beige slacks.

 

‘Back on earth, they’d all be barred by now,’ mum chuckles as she reaches for her glass.

I put my hand on hers.

I feel it shake.

As her dry lips crack into a smile, she eases her hand free and raises her glass to the glamorous afterlife of the alcoholic.

Now, with the world a person lighter, I raise my glass in this toast too.

I hope you made it mum. You drunk piece of shit.


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About the Author:

Sammy is a published writer and recording artist from the North West of England. They currently work in an antiquarian bookshop in London and are assembling what Leonard Cohen called ‘a manual for living with defeat’.

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

CutBank Online features one work of flash prose or prose poetry every Monday. Submissions are free and open year-round. Send us your best work of 750 words or less at https://cutbank.submittable.com/submit.

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Autumn Everywhere" by Cathy Ulrich

Autumn Everywhere

By Cathy Ulrich

The astronaut isn’t an astronaut yet when her mother dies. Her mother will never get to say my daughter the astronaut. Her mother is a quiet on the other end of the line and the astronaut saying mother, are you there.

The astronaut is away at school when her mother dies. The astronaut has a stack of books beside her bed and a dorm mate who cuts photos of boy bands from magazines like she is a middle school girl, puts them up on the mirror that stretches across their room. The astronaut feels haunted by her own reflection. The dorm mate is always smiling, covering the mirror bit by bit with pictures of pretty boys with perfect hair.

The astronaut has been writing letters to a girl from her neighborhood that she doesn’t dare send.

I have been thinking of your hands.

I have been missing your hands.

The astronaut buys postcards at the campus store, mails them bare but for the address of the girl she will someday marry.

The astronaut watches the leaves turn when she walks across campus, the yellowing, oranging of them, the skeleton-whisper of their rustle. Boys from her classes are always coming up behind her, asking if they can carry her books, asking if she’d like to study together. Their tongues linger on the slither of the s.

They say: I’ve seen you in the mornings, running.

They say: Where are you running to?

The astronaut smiles. The astronaut is good at smiling at boys; they always end up smiling back.

I’m not running anywhere, she says.

The astronaut’s father wants her to book a flight home when her mother dies. His voice hitches on the line, and the astronaut pretends it’s just the distance.

I’ll drive, she says.

You won’t make it in time, he says.

I’ll drive, she says, all night.

The car is from high school. The astronaut paid for it with money from tutoring, handing a stack of twenties to the neighbor selling it, sorry about the cracked windshield, but I checked all the tires. It was the first thing the astronaut thought of as hers, hers alone.

She parked it in front of the girl down the street’s house, come ride with me, and the astronaut watched the girl dip her fingers out the passenger window, thought now we can be free.

When the astronaut gets home — she thinks of it as home yet, home still, and will for a while, until her father sells the place and moves south, stops answering her calls — her grandparents are there, and her grandmother is crying in an arid way, shoulders shaking, face twisted.

She says: oh, my baby, and the astronaut turns her face away, looks out the window.

Oh, she says, it’s autumn here, too, and her grandmother embraces her, tight, tight, tight, your mother would be so proud.

The service is a small service. The astronaut winds and unwinds her program in her hands. The photo on the cover is of her mother when she was young, her mother when she was a girl.

I hadn’t seen this one before, the astronaut says.

You resemble her, says her grandmother.

After the service, the astronaut takes the program in the mortuary restroom, flattens it on the sink counter, holds it next to her face in the mirror.

Someone knocks on the door, are you all right in there?

The astronaut turns on the water in the sink, drops the program in the garbage can.

I’m fine.

The astronaut’s father had the mortuary limo take them to the chapel, has it take them home. The astronaut sits in the limo seat beside him in the suit dress her grandmother picked. She has chewed off the red of her lipstick, puckers the fabric of her skirt clutching it in her hands.

Her grandmother says: Will you stay?

The astronaut says: I shouldn’t get behind on my studies.

She rolls down the back window with the push of a button, drifts her hand outside. The girl from down the street is standing on the corner when they turn onto the road, like she has been waiting. She sees the limo, the astronaut’s reaching hand, stretches her own hand out, curls her fingers up in a small, light fist.

Is she waving, says the astronaut’s grandmother.

No, says the astronaut.

She says: No, she’s taking my hand.


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About the Author:

Cathy Ulrich paid for her second car with a handful of twenty-dollar bills that the seller counted back one by one. Her work has been published in various journals, including Cream City Review, Puerto Del Sol and Black Warrior Review.

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

CutBank Online features one work of flash prose or prose poetry every Monday. Submissions are free and open year-round. Send us your best work of 750 words or less at https://cutbank.submittable.com/submit.

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Lumberjacks Pound Their Dead into the Ground" by Michael Mark

Lumberjacks Pound Their Dead into the Ground

By Michael Mark

At first Gary called her name, crooned it, like when dinner was ready, then he turned off the radio and leaned toward her in the passenger seat to see if he could hear Gladys breathe, held his breath so he could be sure. By Pine Bluff, he turned on the warning blinkers, and pulled to the side of I-80, shut off the engine, and put his ear near her open mouth, his cheek on her side, before he pronounced her dead to himself. And then - what else could he do, Nebraska in December, the ground frozen - he went on driving, radio off. After some time, maybe it was the familiarity of I-80, the comfort of the landscape’s monotony they drove together on their annual vacation for 13 years, the memories taking over, her bakery smell, he forgot she was dead and he switched on the radio, started singing. Then he got the sense something wasn’t right with Gladys. He looked at her, curled up, said her name, slowed down, leaned toward her, still not sure, thinking maybe he made up that he knew she was dead, the daze of all the miles playing tricks on him. He put the blinkers on, pulled over, still on I-80, this time in Cheyenne, rested his head on her side, and kissed her, knowing. He looked out  at the hard land and drove on. This kept happening. He’d drive away thinking about Gladys, happy pictures in his head, then somewhere in the flat miles he’d be singing until he’d get that bad sense. He’d pull over, and realize, almost like it was the first time. And he’d drive on, and he’d forget. This is Gary’s story and he should be the one telling it but I just love it.


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About the Author:

Michael Mark’s poetry has been published or forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Copper Nickel, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, The New York Times, The Sun, Waxwing, The Poetry Foundation's American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily, and other places. He’s the author of two books of stories, Toba and At the Hands of a Thief (Atheneum).

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

CutBank Online features one work of flash prose or prose poetry every Monday. Submissions are free and open year-round. Send us your best work of 750 words or less at https://cutbank.submittable.com/submit.

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Nothing is Easy, Hurley" by Rebecca Bernard

Nothing is Easy, Hurley

By Rebecca Bernard

Standing in the kitchen, before the flattop grill, Hurley feels the buzz in his pocket, and no way is this a good sign. Dana, who sleeps till noon. Dana, champion of the fishnets. Dana, the so-far love of his life who, probably, maybe, tried to break his idiot heart last night—

Hurley cracks one, two, three, rereads the ticket, four eggs onto the blazing grill before him. The soft egg bodies wiggle and flail on the hot-ass surface and calmly, coolly Hurley waits to flip them. To end their misery. 

Or like—she didn’t exactly break his heart, more like—put it on ice. I don’t know, Hurley. Takes a large bite of falafel. I don’t know anymore. That Dana with the dyed blond hair and the longboard and the eyelashes like tiny feathers all meticulously painted in black goop. 

Four slabs of bacon hit the deck and the air smacks with grease. The trick is to let the bacon fat make its way toward the eggs but not to invade the flavor entirely.

And Hurley out afterwards, buzzed, drunk, wasted, with Stupid Rick and Stupider Mikey. One more Jager, Hurl, one more. And so, of course, last night’s, late-night series of fuck-yous and tear stained emojis. Dana, I need you, baby. I love you. Puh-lease.

The phone in his pocket buzzes again, and Hurley looks up to see Suzanne in crisp green polo shaking her head.  

“You almost got table 6? Two over easy, two over medium, three sides of bacon?”

The order printer begins to heckle, and Hurley sees the tickets spit out and hang down and his own jaw hung down last night, just like that. Sad, slack, lame. 

“Order up!” Hurley plates the eggs, the meats. Suzanne adds toast, parsley, anemic slice of orange and off they go in the steady hands of Emily, server, waitress, whatever.

Hurley takes the new tickets from the printer and adds them to the line-up. They look like the saddest string of Tibetan Prayer flags, all off-white and cheap paper and focused on food, like food is on anyone’s mind now at seven in the morning when the best, hottest girl might no longer love you if she ever really did in the first place. 

Buzz. Must check, can’t check. 

“Hurley—what’s the matter with you?” Suzanne frowns. 

“How’s table 14 coming?” Emily again, capable hands dusting powdered sugar onto a stack of French toast.

“Almost up.” Hurley focuses his almost wet eyes on the tickets. Ladles out pancake batter onto the grill and sees the bubbles rise then disappear. Everything disappears. It is the nature of everything. 

“Ephemeral.” Hurley says the word out loud in the hot kitchen, the breakfast onslaught just now beginning, everything, just now beginning or ending.

“What?” asks Suzanne.

“What?” says Emily.

“Nothing,” says Hurley. No more buzz in his pocket. No more buzz in his heart, his brain. 

Hurley, Dana had said. Tahini in his beard. Lettuce in his teeth. I just don’t know if we want the same things. 

Hurley flips the pancake and part of it is burned, not burned, but well done. Passable. He adds four links of sausage to the grill. Two patties. Then pours four servings of scrambled eggs onto the hottest part of the grill and watches the writhing, the squirming of so much protein all at once, vulnerable and ugly. 

Like what, Hurley said. Flavor of tomato still on his tongue, sweetness of hummus. Like, Hurley—I just don’t know if you’re hardcore enough. I mean, Hurl. Can you really call yourself punk rock?

“Order up table 14, table 2.” Hurley plates the eggs, Suzanne garnishes, Emily whisks them away. 

Hurley, lamely, I mean, I could get a faux hawk, gauges. Dana, head shaking. Feather earrings whistling back and forth like so long, see you later. 

Spatula inches into the mass of scrambled eggs and fluffs, flips, fluffs again. 

It’s not me, Hurley. It’s you. 

Beyond the swinging doors of the kitchen, Hurley pictures the bevy of hungry diners. The emptiness in their bellies. The faint sticky syrup grazing their arm hair as hands grasp coffee cups like desperate, ceramic lovers. The hunger of it all. The need. And Hurley?

Table 17. Four orders of sunny side up eggs. The eggs, perfect in their white halos. This is your brain. He pokes an egg, the yolk spills drunkenly across the grill. This is your brain on Dana. “Order up. Table 3!” He cracks a replacement egg onto the grill. 

There is something clean about the sunny-side up egg. There is promise in its face. Its unblinking, yellow eye.

Suzanne out on the floor. Emily garnishing, reaching for the plates. “Hurley, are you okay?” 

Hurley looks up, meets Emily’s eyes, nods. Then, reaches for the phone in his pocket, pulls it out, hesitates. Clicks to black. Egg is flipped, bacon is prodded. “Emily?” 

“Yeah?”

“Do you think I’m punk rock?”

Emily looks up, pushes her tongue against her front teeth, blinks her non-crusty eyes. “Definitely not.”

Hurley frowns. Feels a sudden warmth, the grill, the steam of frying meat. Puts his phone back into his pocket. There are so many eggs.

The kitchen is empty. The heart is empty. Steam and grease envelop the space, the man in the space. Hurley, wearer of the Vans. Hurley, listener of the Blink 182, not the old stuff, the new stuff, the shame.

Emily in the kitchen again. Taking the ticket. Piercing the ticket on the spike. “Hurley?”

“Yeah?” The spatula is grasped. The eggs drying out, abandoned.

“I always thought you were metal.”

The mouth swallows. The apron, once white, now stained with the greased hand’s wiping. “Metal?”

Emily smiles. Hand tucks a strand of blond hair back behind the ear. Teeth white, but crooked. Pretty. “Yeah.”

Hurley, his mouth a line. The phone abuzz. The heart abuzz. “Okay.” 

The head, the heart. See how they bang anew.


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About the Author:

Rebecca Bernard is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of North Texas where she serves as Managing Editor for American Literary Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, Southwest Review, Pleiades, Meridian and elsewhere. Her work received notable mention in the Best American Short Stories of 2018.

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

CutBank Online features one work of flash prose or prose poetry every Monday. Submissions are free and open year-round. Send us your best work of 750 words or less at https://cutbank.submittable.com/submit.

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "The Man Running the Hiring Committee" by Sara Schaff

The Man Running the Hiring Committee

By Sara Schaff

You've got the search narrowed to two solid candidates—one man, Candidate A, and one woman, Candidate B. A is obviously the better fit. By all reasonable measures, he's accomplished more than most in his career: Ivy League education, glowing recommendations, paid speaking engagements, being white and straight.

But it isn't just the sheen of his accomplishments or his prior experience with six figure salaries. You genuinely like him. And when you bring him in for an all-day interview, which includes dinner at the place with the cute waitresses, it turns out everyone else likes him, too! He reminds Jack of his buddies from boarding school. He's just like David's frat brothers at Duke. Ambitious, of course. But he also knows how to have good time! Everyone agrees: he's the one.

Well, everyone except Jane, the woman on your hiring committee, who you had to include because, well, diversity. Not to knock Jane, who's pretty enough, but kind of a downer.

"I don't think we should hire him," she says.

Quintessential Jane. "Why not? He's perfect."

"I just…got a bad vibe."

You try hard not to laugh. She sounds like your tween daughter.

"A bad vibe," Jack says. He and David exchange glances.

Jane takes a breath. "He kept staring down my shirt when he thought I wasn't looking."

Now you and David exchange glances. There's not much to look at under her shirt, for crying out loud!

You don't plan to give Jane's whining a second thought. But later that night you tell your wife what Jane said, while you're crawling into bed. You think you're on your way to a quick, sleep-inducing roll in the hay, after a mutually satisfying laugh at Jane's expense. But your wife gives you that look.

"What?"

"Listen to Jane."

"Jane's a killjoy. You said so yourself! You never want to invite her to our parties."

The look your wife continues to give you is one you've seen all your married life, but there's something new about it: she's not just annoyed; she's fucking pissed. And suddenly you realize she might actually leave you for her hot and sensitive yoga instructor, Raphael.

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So the next day, imagining Raphael going down on your wife, you call up one of Candidate A's recommenders, his old boss, a guy who’s been at it for a long time, who knows what's what.

"Oh, A!" he cries. "Everyone loves A. He gets great results."

You're about to say thanks and hang up, but you think of Jane. You think of Raphael bringing your wife breakfast in bed. You ask, "Was there ever any—"

"Any what?" There's a long, potent pause.

"Was he ever, you know. A creep? With women?"

The pause extends.

A's boss answers finally, slowly. "Well, there were, ah, rumors. Some women didn't feel…"

"Didn't feel what?"

"There were a couple of complaints to HR."

Later, you repeat this information to the hiring committee.

Jack frowns. "So?"

Jane frowns. "What do you mean, "so"?"

David says, "You can't let a couple of rumors ruin a guy's' life."

Right?! You give an internal fist bump to Jack and David. Your wife's not going to leave you for fucking Raphael! He's got terrible BO, and your wife is very sensitive to smells.

"Innocent until proven guilty, right?"

Jack and David nod. Jane does not nod.

She says, "This is a god-damn job interview, not a criminal investigation. Candidate B has no rumors about misconduct following her. And she's got basically the same resume."

"But she's not a good fit," Jack says.

"She really isn't," David says.

"Not the best," you agree. She had a lot of ideas, and she wasn't above inserting them into the conversation.

In the end, you're willing to make the call: Candidate A all the way. Even if it means losing your wife. Because that's the kind of sacrifice you have to make sometimes. To do what's right for your fellow man.


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About the Author:

"The Man Running the Hiring Committee" is from Sara's second book, The Invention of Love, forthcoming in June 2020 from Split Lip Press. Her first collection, Say Something Nice About Me (Augury Books), was a 2017 CLMP Firecracker Award Finalist in Fiction. She's an assistant professor of English at SUNY Plattsburgh. Read more of her work at saraschaff.com.

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

CutBank Online features one work of flash prose or prose poetry every Monday. Submissions are free and open year-round. Send us your best work of 750 words or less at https://cutbank.submittable.com/submit.

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "87th Street, NYC, January 3rd" and "What We Now Live With" by Andrea Marcusa

By Andrea Marcusa

87th Street, NYC, January 3rd

They lie in street gutters, exhausted, anorexic, and balding like feather-plucking birds. 

Once thick and green and smelling of pine, now with limbs that snap like toothpicks and shed a flurry of brown needles on white snow. Worse are still partially decorated trees, with silver icicles tangled on branches, broken bulbs swinging, a string of dead lights snaking its way towards the trunk. Leftovers like washed up seaweed after a storm or a forest devoured by swarms of locusts. But worst of all is my neighbor’s full green one, which I’ve walked past for weeks after it was dumped early before heat and lights could wither it. Because of the daughter. Mowed down on a street corner, the driver as young as the victim and as high as December stars. The building handyman took the tree down and lay it on the street corner a week before the holiday. That bejeweled tree too vibrant, too cheery to remain upright and lit.

Now two days after New Year’s, the tree’s still there, rich and dense among other tired-out discarded ones, reminding me.  It’s been a harsh holiday season.

In the next weeks, the dumped trees will be chewed up and spat out and turned into wood chips. A sanitation worker will feed each one, watching the jaws shred wood, needles, and bark and then spray it into green and brown piles for bagging. All that joy, happiness and heartbreak.

Bound, shipped, scattered.


What We Now Live With

As I pulled the door to our beach bungalow closed for the last time this summer and felt the lock click into its hollow, I looked up and saw the sun had already shifted and now bathed the back porch in pale fall light. I knew that the real world was almost here again.

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My children and husband were already in the car, so filled to the brim it sat low to the ground and although soft jazz was playing on the car stereo, we were all in our own worlds. I considered the winter months ahead and didn’t know what they would bring.  A spray of angry bullets in a classroom, a flood of dammed-up bitterness surging in our streets, a headstone with an unexpected name?

I imagined our neighborhood in the city, how when we left, last century’s houses were being pulled down and turned into piles of bricks, and week after week concrete and glass floors were pushing higher and higher, casting long shadows that had never been there before. Would they be so tall that they’d scrape the clouds when I returned? Would winter storms batter our shores again or pile up record-breaking peaks of snow or send rescue boats into our streets?  Only a few years ago, such worries would never have filled my mind with the simple shift of seasons. 

I settled into my seat, buckled my belt, and I listened to the gravel churn under the wheels as my husband backed the car out the driveway. When we turned onto the road, I just couldn’t look back on all the shuttered peace and happiness we had found in the safety of a home away from assaulting headlines and posts, and warring TV news people and heads of state. For four weeks, we’d lived in a news and internet void filled with the sweet calls of birds, the citron glow of fireflies blinking haphazardly into the night, the flights of herons as they dipped into the bay and flew off with a fish that gleamed in the sunlight, the sound of dice rolling onto a Monopoly board, and the whistle of badminton shuttlecocks. Our weather forecasts came from the heavens: “Red sky at night, sailors delight.  Red sky at dawn, sailors forewarn.”

As our car pulled farther and farther away, the feeling I’d put to rest for four weeks stirred. The one that made me feel as though I was living on borrowed time and that this happiness that I savored for a few weeks was not mine to possess, but only taste. That despite the peace and joy still circulating in the car carrying the four of us forward, a fear of what I couldn’t foresee gripped me so that even the traffic lights turning green, yellow, red, seemed to count down.

As we pulled farther and farther away, I thought of the millions of parents all over who, like me, were holding this huge untenable thing called family.

Forever wondering how to keep it whole.


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About the Author:

Andrea Marcusa’s literary fiction, essays and poetry have appeared in The Baltimore Review, Booth, Citron Review, New South, River Styx, River Teeth and others. She’s received recognition from the writing competitions Glimmer Train, Third Coast, New Letters, and Press 53 and been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes. Andrea divides her time between creating literary works and photographs and writing articles on medicine, technology, and education. To learn more visit: andreamarcusa.comor follow her on twitter @d_marcusa .

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

CutBank Online features one work of flash prose or prose poetry every Monday. Submissions are free and open year-round. Send us your best work of 750 words or less at https://cutbank.submittable.com/submit.


WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "The X-Ray Machine at the Buster Brown Shoe Store" by Timothy Reilly

The X-Ray Machine at the Buster Brown Shoe Store

By Timothy Reilly

For Jo-Anne

Eight-year-old Larry Nolan decided to secretly stay up all night and watch the sun rise from his east-facing bedroom window. He devised a few activities to keep from nodding-off. In the dim moonlight, he gazed into his fishbowl: watching the otherworldly neon tetras swim in and out a submerged shipwreck. He used a flashlight to read from a book of heavily-illustrated ghost stories. With the same flashlight, he charged a walnut-sized glow-in-the-dark human skull and also a 5x3 glow-in-the-dark likeness of Christ’s face: whose eyes would open or close when tilted. With his Lone Ranger Binoculars, he looked out the window at the pockmarked face of the waning gibbus moon.

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Sometime after midnight, Larry snuck out to the backyard to find where the moon had gone. He found the moon clinging to the top branches of an Italian cypress. He then aimed his binoculars at a large oak and caught sight of a Great Horned owl. The owl hooted but Larry wasn’t scared. He felt privileged to be part of the night.

Back in his room he struggled to stay awake, until he heard the clinking of milk bottles. He opened the window and felt a soft breeze rising in direct proportion to an orange glow. He saw the sun rise. It was miraculous. Now he could sleep.

His parents woke him three hours later. They had promised to buy him Buster Brown shoes for his First Communion.

The shoe store smelled of shoe polish and cigarette smoke. Larry was groggy. The poster of Buster Brown gave him the willies. Buster had hair like Prince Valiant and a weird, turn-of-the-century sailor’s outfit. Who was this ancient child? 

When the shoe salesman went to get shoe boxes, Larry went to the foot x-ray machine and pondered the bones of his feet. This is my skeleton, he thought. This is what I’ll look like when I’m dead.  


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About the Author:

Timothy Reilly had been a professional tubaist (including a stint with the Teatro Regio of Torino, Italy) until around 1980, when a condition called “Embouchure Dystonia” put an end to his music career. He gratefully retired from substitute teaching in 2014. He has published widely, including works in The Citron Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Iron Horse Literary Review, Zone 3, Fictive Dream, Grey Sparrow, and Superstition Review. He has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Timothy Reilly lives in Southern California with his wife, Jo-Anne Cappeluti: a poet and scholar.

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

CutBank Online features one work of flash prose or prose poetry every Monday. Submissions are free and open year-round. Send us your best work of 750 words or less at https://cutbank.submittable.com/submit.

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Shallow Roots" by Christina Simon

Shallow Roots

By Christina Simon

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Mama and Sterling’s absences are long shadows cast in front of me, moving with the sun, disappearing at night, then reappearing long and dark again in the day. On the sidewalks of Los Angeles, I dodge these shadows, walking carefully to avoid them, never forgetting they are there.

The roots of a palm tree form a ball, fairly shallow, but wide enough to keep the tree from toppling over. I feel like these roots, a tangled mess of assorted, frayed brown strings, a woman who could be shattered by a gust of wind.

Mama, who told my little sister Sterling and me “Black is Beautiful” so many times we believed it. Homeschooled, we strolled along the Venice boardwalk holding hands. In my child’s mind our closeness would last forever.

I stare up at the palm trees until it hurts, tears pelting my bare arms. Towering, graceful, aloof creatures who gaze down on me, batting their lovely, long-lashed green eyes, lids half-closed, bored with the hot empty sidewalks below. Thin, tall bodies, wispy and willowy in the wind, clustered together, the palms whisper down to me, they can see up into Heaven.


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About the Author:

Christina Simon is the nonfiction editor for Angels Flight Literary West, an online literary publication and curator of author salons at The Last Bookstore in Los Angeles. Her essays have been featured in Salon, The Broken City, Proximity’s blog, True, Entropy, Barren Magazine, PANK Magazine’s Heath and Healing Folio, and forthcoming in The Offing. Christina received her B.A. from U.C. Berkeley and her M.A. from UCLA. She is a volunteer with 826LA where she helps kids write their college essays. Christina lives with her husband, two teenagers and their rescue pit bull, Piper Spot.

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

CutBank Online features one work of flash prose or prose poetry every Monday. Submissions are free and open year-round. Send us your best work of 750 words or less at https://cutbank.submittable.com/submit.

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Big Al's Pet Emporium" by Kari Treese

Big Al’s Pet Emporium

By Kari Treese

Alabama was Tom’s cat. He left her in a closet too long when she was a kitten and she’d been skittish as hell ever since. A dark calico, black and orange all over, her colors matched her personality—dark and wild. “The cat was non-negotiable,” he’d said; I could have Tom and Alabama or I could have neither.

After I moved in, we had to keep the bedroom door shut because she kept pissing on my pillow. She took to hiding in the laundry basket, launching attacks when I came too close. She refused all my attempts to pet her, preferring instead to wander in figure eights through Tom’s boots when he returned from the field, skitter onto his shoulders, purr into his hands while he watched TV. We enjoyed a tenuous peace, Alabama and me, while Tom was in the house. 

She turned into a real bitch when Tom deployed. She took to wailing outside the bedroom door at night, loud enough to wake the neighbors. MP’s knocked on my door 3 times in Tom’s first month gone. 

“What do you want me to do,” I’d say. “Reason with a cat?”

“Just have to ask ma’am. We keep getting noise complaints and housing won’t be renewing your lease.”

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“You got it sir. I’ll ask my cat to keep it down.”

I took her to a vet who prescribed kitty Xanax. I slept a full 8 hours for the first time in weeks. 

Tom returned on R & R 4 months in. We had two weeks to make up for lost time and prepare for the next 8 months gone. Within hours, Alabama was staking her claim. She hissed whenever he kissed me, started lunging at my ankles, claws bared, from under tables and around dark corners. Tom started locking her into the travel crate every time we disappeared behind the bedroom door. Otherwise, she’d paw at the door scraping and caterwauling until we relented. 

When Tom flew back to Afghanistan to finish what was left of his 12 months, I started looking for no-kill shelters. I’d tell him she ran away, scooted out the front door while I was carrying in groceries, and just like that, lost. 

“We’re full on cats,” I heard again and again. I even checked one state over, un-phased by the 4 hour drive. One of the wives at an FRG meeting suggested I try Big Al’s—a pet store on route 83.

“They take cats sometimes. I was out there buying a bunny for Macy last week,” she said. 

The clerk at Big Al’s Pet Emporium asked, “How’s her temperament?” while Alabama hissed and spat in the crate. 

“Oh, fine. She’s a real sweetheart.”

I felt good driving away. I imagined tossing out the last box of kitty litter, the last plastic bag of piss piles and little round turds. I rolled the windows down, crooned with Chris Isaac singing, “things go wrong, but I still love you.”

Tom took it hard. “I should’ve waited to tell you,” I said. “The other wives warned me not to give you bad news.”

“No. It’s fine,” he swallowed loud enough for me to hear through a country, a continent, the whole world between him and me. “Really.”

When 12 months was extended to 15, I thought I saw Alabama in the Westfield mall parking lot. I chased her under a car, tried to coax her out. “Bammy, come here sweet girl. Come,” all the while making that sound thkk, thkk, thkk, and rubbing my thumb into my fingers feigning a treat. The cat stared at me. I stayed there stretched, belly on the asphalt, hand jutted under someone else’s sedan, pleading “Come, come here girl.” 

Her eyes held me there, stuck on a taut line. When I blinked, she flashed gone. I was dizzy when I stood up, head swimming with the cat, the man, and the smell of Big Al’s Pet Emporium stuck for 3 months in my nose.


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About the Author:

Kari Treese is an MFA candidate in prose at Mills College where she is the managing editor of 580 Split. Her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Lunch Ticket, Rivet, and others. She is a fiction reader at Atticus Review. Before writer, Kari was a casino customer service rep, hostess, Baker’s drive-thru extraordinaire, military spouse, and mother. She’s a fish person, for whatever that’s worth.

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

CutBank Online features one work of flash prose or prose poetry every Monday. Submissions are free and open year-round. Send us your best work of 750 words or less at https://cutbank.submittable.com/submit.

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Red like Gold" By Taylor Flickinger

Red like Gold

By Taylor Flickinger

I wanted to go to Colorado for the long weekend. A trip away from people, I told Natalie. A real vacation. But Nat wanted to go to California, said she liked the beach. There are beaches in Colorado, I said, and the water doesn’t kill you like it does in California. A real beach, she said. I asked her what that meant. She shrugged and said beaches have oceans. 

So we took our kids to California. On the first day, right after we unpacked from the long drive, Nat said she wanted to see the bridge. Okay, I told her. I’ve seen it, and it’s disappointing. Just a big red thing. God knows why we call it golden, it’s not even yellow. Why do we call things by what they’re not? Nat and I got in an argument once, when we were first married. She thought coconuts were actual nuts. It’s a fruit, I told her, but she just wouldn’t believe it. Nuts have two layers, I said, coconuts have three. I even drove to the supermarket and bought a coconut, still in its husk, just to show it to her. See, I said, a fruit

It’s in the name, she said. Coconut

We ended up going to the bridge, driving nearly an hour just to get to it. We left late because Nat couldn’t find the stupid camera. I told her to leave it, there would be too many people to get a good picture anyway. But she kept looking. She said how else would we remember the trip without a few pictures?

Nick and Mitch cried the entire way there. We should have turned around right then. I should have turned the car around, packed up, and driven to Colorado, to the mountains and the trees and freshwater lakes. God knows I wish I had, but I didn’t. Nat turned on the radio to distract the kids, and twenty minutes later they were quiet.

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The sun was setting when we pulled into the parking lot. There were a lot of people, most of them with cameras taking pictures of the not-gold bridge. Walking around, looking out at the ocean. Cars passing by. A fog was starting to roll in, painted pink and orange from the setting sun. The clouds looked like breaths of fire. I wanted to leave then. I was hungry, and the boys must have been too. I didn’t want to walk out on the bridge. We saw it, it’s not like it changes from red to gold if you walk on the damn thing. But Nat insisted, and the boys wanted to throw rocks into the ocean. Fine, I told them, just don’t hit anyone. Imagine, seeing someone getting hit in the head with a rock that fell from so high. Imagine trying to live knowing that you basically killed someone.

I guess what matters is that we went. We walked on it and had a fine time. Nat took pictures as the boys threw their rocks and counted the seconds until they hit the water, leaning over the railing to watch. 1… 2… 3… 4… Nat didn’t like that. Come on, she said, I’m worried the boys will fall. I told her the boys were fine, that they aren’t stupid enough to jump. But I swung Nick up into my arms anyways and grabbed Mitch’s hand, and we finally started to leave. 

Wait, Nat said, we forgot to get a picture with everyone. I rolled my eyes, but Nat was already walking up to someone, asking to take our picture. But before she got more than a few words out, some middle-aged guy pushed past her, almost knocking her over. I admit it, I lost my temper. I turned around and yelled something at him, but not to be nasty, I just wanted him to understand that the bridge wasn’t going anywhere, or the ocean or the city. I wanted to tell him that nothing was going anywhere, that he could take his time to take as many pictures as he wanted without pushing anyone out of the way. But right when I yelled out he looked at me the way Nat looked after she miscarried. I mean, he stared at me with starving eyes for three or four seconds, but it felt like it would never end, I just couldn’t look away. Eventually he blinked like he was waking up. He looked out over the ocean, glanced at me one more time, and jumped over the railing, just like that. He just fuckin’ jumped without even stopping to think about it. 

Someone screamed when they realized what happened, but the man had already jumped for God’s sake and nothing we could do would change that. Mitch and Nick were watching his arms flail like he hoped to learn to fly. Nat’s mouth was open, her eyes dull with disbelief. I picked up Mitch in my other arm, somehow found Nat’s hand, and started pulling my family away before we heard it, the wet noise of his body smacking the black water like so much wet cement. 

The car was quiet as we pulled away from the parking lot. Nat started crying when we passed an ambulance, lights flashing as it sped toward the beach below the bridge. I gripped the steering wheel, starring at the broken yellow lines painted on the road. When we got back, I got the boys ready for bed while Nat sat stiffly on the couch and stared through our hotel window at the night. Kids were swimming in the pool outside, playing while their parents sat quietly in the hot tub. Their muffled shrieks and splashes were the only noise. I was remembering how the man just jumped, how his body made that slapping sound, how someone started taking pictures as we pushed through the crowd. Nat said she was going to our room after the boys were in bed, but I wanted to watch tv to clear my head. 

I turned it on and sat down. The news was on. They were talking about the man who jumped off that red bridge. I raised the remote to change the channel but stopped when they put up a picture of the victim (their word, victim). It was taken just two weeks before he jumped. He was wearing an orange vest and holding up a fish as big as his arm, leaning in like he wanted to kiss it. I remembered how he looked at me right before he jumped, like his brain had done it long ago and his body was hurrying to catch up. I thought of how I was probably the last person he ever saw and wondered if he thought of me before he hit the water. I remembered how quiet the crowd got right before he hit, like his fall was a prayer and the slap of his body against the black ocean was the amen.

I didn’t like looking at the picture, so I closed my eyes as the program continued. They talked about how five percent of people survive the fall, but most of them drown anyway because it’s too goddamn hard to swim with busted bones. Some of them manage to swim but die from the cold, and the ones who somehow survive everything talk about how they regret jumping the instant their feet leave the bridge. I turned the tv off then, imagining it was me that jumped, kicking with shattered legs as icy blackness pushed into my burning lungs.

The kids outside had stopped swimming. I sat in the quiet darkness for a long time, it could have been hours, just sitting there feeling the weight of my body, the sofa pressing against me, the breath in my lungs, the heaviness of my life. 

Did you know it’s both? Coconuts, I mean. A fruit and a nut. And a seed, apparently. There’s always something else. I looked it up after California because it felt important, I can’t remember why. I don’t think I ever told Nat, but maybe that doesn’t matter. 

Anyways. When I went upstairs Nat was still awake. She wanted to talk about it, she said that we could have done something and the boys saw him fall and we should have stopped him because maybe he had a family like ours. I told her about the way he looked at me right before he jumped, how it wouldn’t have mattered what we said. He jumped a long time ago, I said. I told her about the picture of him I saw on the news, how you’d never recognize him as the man we had seen. Two completely different people, I said. It was like a lie, I said, or something close enough to break your heart.

Stop it, Nat said, so I turned the lights off and lay down, looking at the way the darkness covered everything around me. We both sat there for a long while, both of us awake, and I couldn’t help but think about how I counted the seconds before he hit the water. 1, 2, 3, 4. He just jumped, cool as autumn.


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About the Author:

Taylor Flickinger is a senior at Brigham Young University studying English and Creative Writing. After graduating, he plans on getting an MFA and eventually a PhD in creative fiction. He works as a teaching assistant for two non-fiction writing classes, though he's most passionate about writing short fiction. Aside from reading, writing, and teaching, his hobbies include analog photography and cooking.

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

CutBank Online features one work of flash prose or prose poetry every Monday. Submissions are free and open year-round. Send us your best work of 750 words or less at https://cutbank.submittable.com/submit.

WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Dracula Mountain" by Craig Buchner

Dracula Mountain

By Craig Buchner

They called it Dracula Mountain. The stony peak—rock like metal in the hard sun—cresting clouds. The crows cawing from the shadows, and that smell of ammonia choking every sense.

Then Carter, up the trail, staggered toward us. Lost for how long now? Seventeen years old, but pale and skeletal. Back from the dead. Bit by the beast, the story went. Harmon Barley, my Lizzie’s brother, said he saw the whole thing. “A creature with six-foot wings. Flew right out from the tree, grabbing him by the shoulders. Yanked him out of his own shoes.” Carter’s body supposedly fell to the ground, his arms and chest bit up. Gasping for air. Harmon left him for dead, but here Carter was, alive as the day he was born.

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Harmon Barley was known to lie when it served him, but his sister Lizzie said, “Nightwalkers been around for eons, and it was only a matter of time before they take this world back.” Dozens had disappeared before Carter, but only a few had come back to us. They all had the same bite marks, and they were quarantined. Incisors and canines extracted for safety.

Lizzie never lost hope that her boy was still out there. We searched the mountain for months. If the creatures didn’t have him, starvation certainly did. I never said this to Lizzie, because I liked her company, and now that she says she loves me, I owed it to her to keep looking.

In the beginning we were happy, mostly. Lizzie sold insurance, and I dreamed of sailing to Central America if I could ever save enough. She was on a work trip to Iowa when Carter went missing. Neighbors saw nothing but agreed one hundred percent she should have never left him alone. I stopped by once when she wasn’t home. Dark, deep pockets under his eyes. He blinked uncontrollably. “Allergies,” Carter lied. He was a mess who was always going to be a mess, but Lizzie was a good mom. If I’d have known I’d be searching for him night after night and her waking up screaming and crying out for him, I’d have handcuffed him in the basement with a bowl of water like a dog. Then he’d never break her heart.

Before the stories of monsters and before she said she loved me, the town had another problem. When the paper mill shuttered, people overloaded on uppers to work two or three part-time jobs to pay their mounting bills. They couldn’t afford the pace. They needed cheaper, stronger drugs, and a slew of underground concoctions were born. I heard stories of kids experimenting with their own recipes. The vilest of them burned through their veins like pure acid. Loose meat like slow-cooked brisket hanging off their bones.

The world got dark fast. And people quit living for any good future. Before we knew it, they were vanishing completely, including Lizzie’s boy.

When we found Carter, he could barely walk. Arms violent with pustules. I grabbed Lizzie from hugging him on the trail. “But he’s my baby,” she pleaded. I wrapped him in a blanket and carried him all the way downhill.

Before first light, Lizzie was finally asleep. Carter was in his own bed, moaning and babbling. He’ll be fine, I told myself, but I could hear him on the phone. I pushed my palms against my temples. That unbearable conversation. “I need it,” he repeated. “I’ll kill somebody, I don’t care.” If he didn’t tear us apart before, it was only a matter of time. The certainty of it helped me to my feet. I pushed open his door, said, “Get up.” Grabbing his face, his lips opened to speak, I forced all the cash I had saved for that sail boat and that bullshit dream into that black pit of a mouth. I said, “If you ever come back, I’ll live forever to make yours hell.” He gripped the cash and breathed out slowly—calm, proud. I was a monster, but to him I was nothing but a savior.


For exclusive “Dracula Mountain” video content produced by Emmy-nominated filmmaker Tim Van Horn, check out the CutBank Facebook page!

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About the Author:

Craig Buchner’s fiction and poetry have been featured in Tin House, The Baltimore Review, Hobart, The Cincinnati Review, and many other literary journals. He is also the recipient of the AWP Intro Journals Award for his fiction. Although he was born and raised in the Adirondacks of New York State, Craig calls Portland, OR, home, where he lives with his wife and daughter. To read his work, go to: www.craigbuchner.com

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

CutBank Online features one work of flash prose or prose poetry every Monday. Submissions are free and open year-round. Send us your best work of 750 words or less at https://cutbank.submittable.com/submit.


WEEKLY FLASH PROSE AND PROSE POETRY: "Coyotes" by Cameron MacKenzie

Coyotes

By Cameron MacKenzie

My friend recently came back from a trip to LA where he stayed in a house with a deaf and blind dog. They called the dog Roomba, because it roamed through the place bumping into things and scarfing up food. It was old but not tired, and had settled into a low and steady rhythm of life that it seemed it could sustain indefinitely. But my friend wanted to tell me about the dog so he could actually tell me about the coyotes. 

The coyotes roamed the edges of the neighborhood at dawn and dusk, big eared, serene, drawn tight as bow strings. Coyotes love to trick domestic dogs, to play with them and draw them away from their yard and out into the hills, where they then set upon them as a pack, kill and eat them. From this time-tested game Roomba was immune thanks precisely to his handicaps, so he’d patrol the back yard--protected by a ten-foot fence--with his nose to the ground, the coyotes darting in and out of the brush on the other side, curious, I’m sure, perhaps even frustrated, that their natural charisma, their superior athleticism and streetsmarts and dark and exotic draw of the wild had absolutely no effect on the snuffling trash compactor who labored diligently just feet away.

I don’t know about LA, but when I lived in San Francisco I used to run out in the Presidio by the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s all pine trees and crumbling cliffs dropping off into the pounding sea and, as the park is generally empty, the place is a runner’s dream. There’s wide honey-golden routes that run you past the main attractions, and then narrower paths out to wilder places--to beaches you wouldn’t otherwise know existed, to unannounced art installations in the woods, to old bunkers and rusting ballistic missile sites and radar towers surrounded by barbed-wire, their gray paint peeling in the wind.

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I once found myself down one of these side paths that then opened up into another and another until I found myself on a trail that was just about as wide as my own foot, nearly overgrown by the grass. The further I took this back into a grove of eucalyptus the more I began to wonder if it wasn’t some sort of water runoff or deer track. I soon found myself in a part of the park I’d never been in before, the papery leaves of the high trees rattling against one another as I came to a clearing--no underbrush, no scrub--and here the path petered out completely before a circle of what could only be described as beds, as worn indentations in the grass arranged in a rough circle before me, each one about two feet long. They looked like little nests, and I wanted to bend down and touch one--just brush it with my fingers. But I knew it was better to keep my feet, better to keep my hands free and my legs beneath me, just in case they should decide--against their nature but still--just in case they should choose to come at me all at once.

Coyotes come across the Golden Gate Bridge at night, lured by the smells of the city, and they’re not the only ones--they’ve got cameras on the thing so they can tell. You got possums and raccoons and skunks and deer and snakes, but it’s not at all unusual for mountain lions to pop over at night for a dumpster-dive, nap in the park for the daylight hours, then head back over after the sun goes down.

Roomba’s limitations saved his life on a regular basis, but the local coyotes weren’t so easily dissuaded. They had watched their prey and learned its habits and had taken to killing squirrels and mice and throwing bits of the carcass over the fence for Roomba to find. The owner had seen the meat himself, pink and bloody and flecked with bits of bone, laying on top his rich green fescue like a prank, or a reminder. 

“God knows how they get that crap over the fence,” the guy said, “but once those fuckers set their mind to something, they tend to find a way.”


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About the Author:

Cameron MacKenzie's work has appeared or will appear in The Michigan Quarterly Review, Salmagundi, The Rumpus, and J Journal, among other places. His novel, The Beginning of His Excellent and Eventful Career (MadHat Press) and monograph Badiou and American Modernist Poetics (Palgrave Macmillan) were both published last year. He teaches English at Ferrum College and writes for The Roanoke Review.

About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:

CutBank Online features one work of flash prose or prose poetry every Monday. Submissions are free and open year-round. Send us your best work of 750 words or less at https://cutbank.submittable.com/submit.