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Two Questions for Sudha Subramanian

We recently published Sudha Subramanian’s brilliant “It’s Not So Bad That Appa Is Dead.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) I love the lie of the title. I love that it is a lie that the narrator is trying to convince themself of. I love how the reader sees through the lie almost instantly. Does the narrator see through the lie as well?
This is such a great question. The narrator tries to believe the lie and doesn’t want to see through it until they see through the inevitable truth. In a way, the unwillingness, the conviction, helps in coping with grief, yet it falls apart like in this piece towards the end.

2) The parent-child relationship here is so relatable and so beautiful. Thank you for sharing it with us! The distance between them, and yet the closeness — is that something the narrator holds onto?
I think a parent-child relationship is always this – distance and closeness. Although we prefer to hold on to the closeness, the distance (like in this piece) can make the complexity of relationships more endearing.

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It’s Not So Bad That Appa Is Dead ~ by Sudha Subramanian

otherwise, he will call me, or I will call him,

and we will talk about his allergies, his prostate, his knees and elbows. He will ask about my day and I’ll tell him what I cooked. “Do you really know how to make that mango curry?” he will ask and I’ll roll my eyes. “Appa, I’ve been cooking for twenty years!” and he will sigh, saying, “Wow, you really have grown up so much!”

         and our conversation won’t end there. He will recall that relative I don’t like. “Visit them,” he will pester and I’ll come up with an excuse. “How about the weekend?” he will persist, and I’ll nod, saying, “I’ll try,”

         and at that moment, sensing the uneasiness hanging between us across the continents, he will recall a snippet from his boyhood — a story I can narrate verbatim. My irritation will drag at its seams. “I know this, Appa!” I’ll say with a straight face. “Have I told you about the time when I took that long walk with my grandfather to the temple?” His eyes will sparkle like little pearls. “Yes. That too!”

        and he will try again, “Even that time when I almost burned my tongue?” His face will touch the screen of the iPad and my heart will melt. “OK. Maybe not that,” I will lie,

         and he will sit up straight and tell me about how he went to a wedding and had piping hot payasam and scalded his tongue, and flutter his fingers to mimic his memory,

and he will and I will, and he will and I will, and all that remains now is I wish I could.

***

Sudha Subramanian lives in Dubai. Her work has appeared in Cutleaf, Centaur Lit, Bending Genres, among others. She is a tree hugger and an amateur birder. Connect with her on X @sudhasubraman or on IG @sudha_subraman or on Bluesky @sudhasubraman.bsky.social 

Posted on by lokifire

Two Questions for Heather Bell Adams

We recently published Heather Bell Adams’ searing “What Kira Packed.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) The absolute devastation in this story — from what Kira packed to go to what Kira returned home with: it’s all so layered in meaning and heartbreak. Do you think there’s anything Kira wishes she could have left behind, either on her way to camp or on the way home?
Thank you for this insightful question. I think Kira would like to leave behind, or slough off, what other people think of her, the crippling weight of their expectations and judgments, the sense that she is always disappointing those who have raised her or been in positions of authority over her.

2) Kira is so young here, and so influenced by the cruel things she’s been led to believe. Do you think she will be able to break free of what she has learned at camp and realize there is nothing wrong with her? Or will this “sin” always be something she carries with her?
This is such a great, thought-provoking question. As she gets older, I envision Kira growing into a more mature sense of self. She has rejected what she was told in her teenaged years and found some degree of happiness, although it’s at the expense of her relationship with her family, especially her dad and grandfather, from whom she is estranged. It would take a lot (maybe a whole novel’s worth ;)) to work on healing those rifts.

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What Kira Packed ~ by Heather Bell Adams

What Kira packed for summer camp: expired sunscreen, face powder, the pink Bible her grandparents gave her when she was born, tampons, hairbrush full of shed hair she never cleaned out, grape-scented lip balm, a mental image of Lauren’s bird-bone clavicles, her diary/scrapbook/photo album, mascara, the memory of her grandfather/pastor yelling that she couldn’t be baptized after all, not after her deviant behavior, which broke his heart as her grandfather and embarrassed him as her spiritual leader, an oats and honey granola bar, store-brand deodorant, toothbrush and toothpaste, an arrowhead necklace her mother used to wear before she left, faded underwear and mismatched socks, t-shirts from the wildlife conservancy where she donated her allowance money, the memory of the sweet-apple powdery taste of Lauren’s nipples.

What Kira packed to bring home after summer camp: one leftover tampon, a mix tape of praise hymns, the pink Bible, the mental image of Lauren’s clavicles, the charred remains of her diary/scrapbook/photo album, which she snatched from the flames at the last minute and was punished by not getting anything for supper except a cornbread muffin, mascara, her clothes and deodorant and toothbrush and toothpaste, the fading memory of the taste of Lauren’s nipples, a sparkly-clean hairbrush, a Patrick Swayze poster, a booklet explaining the dangers of unhealthy lifestyles (prostitutes, gamblers, runaways, junkies, homosexuals), her mother’s arrowhead necklace, a VHS video tape with a picture on the cover of a sunbeam streaming down from a cloud, which promised a new life, the knowledge that what she’d done with Lauren was a sin just as bad as murder, grape-scented lip balm, a hatred of herself, the desire to hurt herself, a scab where her left nipple used to be, the size of a penny, same copper color, dried blood.

***

Heather Bell Adams is the author of two novels, Maranatha Road (West Virginia University Press) and The Good Luck Stone (Haywire Books) and a novella, Starring Marilyn Monroe as Herself (forthcoming Regal House). Her work appears in New Letters, North Carolina Literary Review, Raleigh Review, The Thomas Wolfe Review; Orange Blossom Review, Reckon Review, and elsewhere.

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Two Questions for Matt Kendrick

We recently published Matt Kendrick’s illuminating “Nothing Certain.”

Here, we ask him two questions about his story:

1) I love the certainty that Mr. White begins the story with and the way he becomes unmoored as he stops to really think and not just accept things at face value. We see what he thinks of his wife (and how biased his perspective is). What do you think she thinks of him?
This is such a great question. It can be so easy in a scene that revolves around two characters to only focus on the POV character, but here, for me, it’s Mrs White who’s the more interesting individual. When the idea for this piece was first waltzing through my mind, I was thinking about the novellas “Mrs. Bridge” and “Mr. Bridge.” With both those (the dual perspectives of her POV then his POV), I find Mrs. Bridge much more fascinating as a character, and I hope there’s a little of that in my piece as well (and I would love to one day write this scene from the opposite perspective). Mrs White is trapped in this marriage in the same way her husband is trapped in his denial. On the surface, she stays calm, but underneath I like to think she’s full of rage, both at his condescending treatment of her and at his refusal to accept the truth of his own feelings. I think she has a complex mix of sadness, sympathy, weariness, confusion, love and disgust swirling about as well. And there’s a horrid irony to how she has to contain all of this because of the ways she’s been trapped. Although I haven’t necessarily stated it on the page, this is set in the 1960s, so Mrs White is trapped in this seemingly loveless marriage both by the unbending (i.e. certain) expectations of the time period and by the fact that her husband represents her own last certainty, her last anchor to her dead son.

2) The “dependable earth.” Oh, god, the “dependable earth”! That reveal tells us so much and in such a casual, beautiful way. Does Mr. White look at the sun and the earth and all of these inhuman things as dependable because life isn’t?
All of my short fiction at the moment stems from a saying (here it was “nothing is certain but death and taxes”) and I like to start by giving that saying a bit of a prod. While they contain a lot of wisdom, a lot of these sayings feel like they veer very much into absolutism. Are death and taxes both completely certain? And aren’t there other things like gravity, illness, embarrassment, discovery, and loss that are equally certain? For me, as writer, Mr White is a medium for these contemplations. I’ve purposefully chosen someone who I’d place in the category of MAMCASAW* man (*Middle-Aged, Middle-Class, Able-bodied, Straight, and White). He clings to what he’s always been told because he thinks that’s the “correct” way to behave. By extension, he believes in keeping a “stiff upper lip.” He also believes the husband “should rule the wife.” This is all he knows. He isn’t emotionally developed enough to approach his shared grief in any other way. These “inhuman” certainties are thus a bit like a shield. But that shield is wearing thin. His certainties are crumbling, and through that shift from certainty to doubt, I wanted to present a buried truth. Not that “nothing is certain but death and taxes.” But a new truth. That nothing can be taken for granted and that burying our heads in a false “certainty” (as Mr White is determined to do) leads nowhere good. In that way, I hope Mr White is multi-layered. I hope he comes across as a unique individual. I hope he comes across as a type who echoes outwards into universality. And I hope he comes across as a medium for philosophical contemplation. I’m not sure I accomplished all of that, but that’s what I had in my mind when I set out to write.

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Nothing certain ~ by Matt Kendrick

The day the sun forgets to rise, Mr White sits down for breakfast at precisely twelve minutes past seven. This is in the dining room. It is Tuesday. His Tuesday breakfast is a soft-boiled egg opened with a swift beheading. His wife is flustered by the absence of the sun, but he pays her no mind. She has a habit of working herself up over inconsequential events. Last week, it was the lengthening of a day to more than twenty-four hours. A week before, it was the weight of the air. She is dependable like this. There is a new thing every week. She has been this way since that wintered Tuesday in the long shadow of the war, the one they never talk about. This morning, as she babbles about the sun, he knifes a lean skin of margarine across a thick slice of granary bread. Then he cuts the bread into ten soldiers to dip in the egg. This is precisely how it is every Tuesday. The egg. The soldiers. Mrs White in a fluster. Her emotions rising. Her voice tumbling over itself like a house of cards knocked flat. ‘Can you pass the salt?’ he asks. When she doesn’t answer, he reaches for it himself. The silence is yawning. Mrs White has her mouth in a humble cleft. She is staring out the window now, having no doubt realised her mistake—the sun is simply behind a cloud. No doubt, this will be the end of it. There is a reliability to how things go with Mrs White just as there is a reliability to the sun and the hours of a day and the very laws of nature herself. He picks up the paper. The paper is another source of reliability. Every day it echoes the days before and foreshadows the days to come. There is always the same masthead, the same layout, the same font. The main headline today is about the autumn statement in which the chancellor has declared a tax rise. When Mr White remarks upon the tax rise, Mrs White doesn’t answer. This isn’t surprising. Her mind isn’t constructed in a way that does well with monetary matters. Not like him. Not like their son who, before his deep sleep in the dependable earth, was such a maestro with numbers. He was going to be an accountant. He would have made partner by now. He would perhaps be sitting at his own breakfast table in a grey suit and crisp white shirt. Dipping the last of his soldiers in the yolk of his egg, Mr White pictures his son in this very fashion. Then he glances at the clock and sees it has stopped at twelve minutes past seven. ‘The clock has stopped,’ he says to Mrs White. ‘The sun has forgotten to rise,’ she says in response. ‘I am sure you are wrong,’ he says. Then he explains that the sun isn’t capable of forgetfulness, it is a ball of fire, unperturbed by memory or emotions. But even as he says this, he is overcome by a sense of doubt, a belligerent unsettling that marches through his mind. This sensation has troubled him before. It has been troubling him for many months. Years perhaps. A sense of doubt about the sun. About the weight of the air. About the stretching of time. About all these things that used to feel quite certain.

***

Matt Kendrick is a writer, editor and teacher based in the East Midlands, UK. His work has been featured in various journals and anthologies including Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, Cheap Pop, Craft Literary, Fractured Lit, Ghost Parachute, MoonPark Review, Tiny Molecules, and the Wigleaf Top 50. Website: www.mattkendrick.co.uk

Posted on by lokifire

Two Questions for Pamela Painter

We recently published Pamela Painter’s powerful “The Warning.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) I love the brilliant characterization of Hank, how you reveal piece by piece what kind of person he really is. His justifications and rationalizations are so perfectly displayed! While we — the readers, the writer — know who he is, do you think Hank will ever admit to himself that he knows it too?
Thank you for those words “brilliant characterization of Hank.”  Well, first off you say that we– the readers and the writer (me)– know what kind of person Hank is, and I agree that his character is on display.  But I leave it up to the reader to decide if his warnings are harmless– the musings of a man who finds Chrissy attractive–or are they sinister.  If they are sinister, then they might foretell how the story really ends.  

2) And poor Chrissie! Is there a part of her that understands what kind of a threat Hank is, or do you think she sees him exactly the way he wants to be seen? The way, it seems, her father sees him?
Sadly, both Chrissie and her parents are unaware of the threat that Hank could potentially be.  So, yes, she does see him as her father sees him.  He is “Mr. D” to her.  Just as everyone is “Honey” at the diner where she works

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THE WARNING ~ by Pamela Painter

Hank Drummond comes home from a fucked-up day at Link’s Hardware to find Chrissie’s father nailing a 2 by 3 foot sign to the fence at the top of their lane, just off the main county road.  Sure as shit Fred’s using the wrong nails, so Hank goes and grabs six 8ds from his basement workshop.  The sign reads “Well Done, Graduate” above what must be Chrissie’s senior photo.  She’s wearing a blue dress, no straps.  Blonde hair, bare shoulders.  Hank tells Fred maybe his kid’s photograph shouldn’t be on the sign.  “She’s too pretty,” he jokes, “someone might carry her off.  My ex-wife was always jealous of her blonde hair.”  Her father laughs, tells Hank, “Thanks for the nails, and don’t forget the party this weekend” as he hammers the last nail home.  Hank resists the urge to pull out the nails and hammer them in right. 

 Saturday evening, Hank stuffs three hundred-dollar bills in an envelope and drops by the party next door.  He gives Chrissie a fatherly hug and she peeks inside, says “Oooooo, Mr. D.” Her mother hands Hank a beer, and Fred waves from the smoking grill, where a neighbor corners Hank for advice about air-conditioners.  After two beers, a burned hot dog, guys beating up on the Red Sox, Hank returns home to his porch swing, also tired of the thumping noise his twins call techno.  He watches the Fred’s grill lose its glow.  Soon kids will be making out in the bushes or down by the pond.  Sure as hell, next day on his morning walk, Hank will gather up crumpled beer cans, a couple condom wrappers and their limp soldiers, maybe a pair of panties that from a distance look like a flower.  

Two weeks later the sign is sagging from a recent rain. Hank thinks maybe he’ll photograph the sign and send it to the twins. If only it didn’t look like a “Missing Persons” pic.   The twins adored Chrissie who used to baby-sit them before Hank’s wife sued for divorce and left, taking the twins with her.  Chrissie played kid’s games and taught them their first swear words.  “You don’t have to walk Chrissie home. She only lives next door,” his wife would complain after their evening at the movies or the Elks. But he wanted Chrissie safe. 

A month later he’s annoyed the sign is still up though he likes seeing Chrissie’s smile on his way to work.  Two dimples.  She used to sell girl scout cookies once a year.   Cookies his wife used to throw away.  Before he placed an order, he’d ask Chrissie to recite all the flavors—peppermint, peanut butter, pumpkin– her dimples dipping in and out. “Again,” he’d say, “I can’t decide.” 

By summer’s end he figures Chrissie is probably packing to leave for college and thinks about tearing down the sign himself.  Maybe keeping it. Even faded, it’s the same Chrissie who still wheels her bike to his garage to use the twins’ old bicycle pump. Her hair in a messy ponytail, she pumps and pumps, but the valve always pops out.  Finally she wails “Mr. D” and Hank comes to her rescue.  “Thanks again, Mr. D,” she calls, riding off to meet friends, or clock into her job at the town diner where she calls everyone honey.  It’s near Link’s, so two or three times a week Hank stops in for a burger and burned coffee.  Leaves a big tip.

Next weekend, Hank waits for her father at their mailboxes.  He tells Fred surely it’s time for the sign to come down.  Hank wiggles a loose nail as he conjures up a story about some guy obsessed with Chrissie’s photograph.  He says maybe some night the man follows her to the diner.  And maybe he sits slouched in his car and watches her through the diner window.  Her shift over, the man watches as she unties her apron, calls goodbye to the kid on the grill.  The man, still watching, as she unlocks her bike for the short ride home, then leaving his car, doors open, waving to her, calling “Chrissie. Chrissie.” 

Her father laughs, whacks a loose nail, says “Nah.  I’ll give it another week.”

Hank couldn’t do more.  He warned them. They were warned. 

***

PAMELA PAINTER is the award-winning author of five story collections. Her stories have appeared in numerous journals and in the recent anthologies Flash Fiction America, Best Small Fictions 2025, Best Microfictions 2025 and the Wigleaf Top 50 List, 2025. She has received four Pushcart Prizes and her work has been staged by Word Theatre in New York, and LA. 

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Two Questions for Chris Scott

We recently published Chris Scott’s devastating “Go Bag.”

Here, we ask him two questions about his story:

1) The go bag’s contents go from the mundane and realistic (water, first-aid kit) to the unexpected and impossible (“ideas of a new world, a better world than this one”). In a situation like this, the unexpected items seem more useful than the mundane items — something to hold onto in the face of (at best) uncertainty. What will the protagonist cling most tightly to out of this go bag?
I briefly researched go bags about a year ago after reading Annie Jacobsen’s excellent Nuclear War: A Scenario, one of the most sobering and viscerally horrifying works of nonfiction I’ve ever read. I was surprised at how much that book upset me and infected my thoughts. Even though I’ve lived in Washington, DC for a couple decades now, that was really the first time I started kind of watching the skies and truly contemplating that level of catastrophe. This story is in part a dramatization of my experience thinking through the contents of my own go bag, realizing the futility of this (at least in the face of nuclear annihilation), and making my peace with what would hypothetically be actually important to me, or to anyone confronting a definitive end: your thoughts, memories, feelings, the present moment stripped of any pretense of security theater, planning, or fear of what’s around the corner. I don’t know that the protagonist is clinging to this so much as discovering that’s all there is.

2) Okay, but that ending: “call it a sunrise because there’s no one left to say otherwise”! The power here! The heartbreaking, stunning beauty. What if it really were only the sunrise? What then?
I don’t want to undermine the ambiguity of this ending, but after spending so much time dwelling on this topic, I will say I was attracted to the idea that there’s catharsis in considering something as inconceivable as total cataclysm, actual oblivion, and consciously, defiantly choosing to find peace anyway. This idea that an ending can be a beginning simply because you want it to be, because you choose that. That really moved me. Whether that’s resilience or resignation, wisdom or naivety, is up to the reader.

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Go Bag ~ by Chris Scott

One gallon of water, one first-aid kit, one pocket knife, two boxes of granola bars, three pouches of pre-cooked rice and beans, two hundred dollars in cash, toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, hand sanitizer, toilet paper, one flash light, eight double-a batteries, one map, no bridges, no tunnels, your phone, your phone charger (almost forgot your phone charger), one missed call from mom, one text, two texts, dropped signal, four vivid memories (the last truly excellent dinner you ate, the last movie you watched that you could honestly describe as perfect, your last great fuck, and for whatever reason a sunset, in college, from your dorm room, the night your roommate had a breakdown and moved back home), three instincts that would feasibly help a person survive something like this, two net-neutral instincts, one genuinely detrimental instinct, an image of his hands on your body, an image of your hands on his body, two shadows merging and separating against the wall, just panicked neurons firing at random now, distant sounds of gunfire (maybe?), a windshield shattering (maybe?), one flat week-old half-full bottle of cherry coke rolling on the floorboard, trying to remember how it got there, an image of that bottle against someone’s lips, imagination running wild now, ideas of a new world, a better world than this one, starting over, where you can go, what it would take, things you could do, people you could be, a sunrise, the sun rising from the highway (even though it’s still the middle of the night you’re pretty sure), but call it a sunrise because there’s no one left to say otherwise, repeating it like a prayer, the sunrise, the sunrise, the sunrise, the most beautiful goddamn sunrise you’ve ever seen.

***

Chris Scott’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, Okay Donkey, HAD, Flash Frog, ergot., MoonPark Review, New Flash Fiction Review, scaffold, Gone Lawn, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. Scott a regular contributor for ClickHole and an elementary school teacher in DC.