It’s our neighbor Manny’s 50th birthday and we are hosting his party even though he has a wife, who is sitting on our couch in her linen overalls laughing at something my husband Leif just said. She has bangs. I can’t decide whether I want to be her or kill her. I understand there’s likely a middle ground, but right now I can’t find it.

            Leif looks at me and tilts his head in a way that says, “I know you think I’m flirting but I’m just being social,” and I smile at him in a way that says, “I know you are thinking about her breasts,” and then he smiles back in a way that says, “I definitely wasn’t thinking about her breasts until you brought it up,” and I turn back into the kitchen to check on the crab lasagna, which is Manny’s favorite meal.

            I know it’s Manny’s favorite meal because sometimes he texts me late at night when everyone is asleep and tells me things that don’t matter. In addition to the crab lasagna, I know that he has a tattoo on his right thigh, that he thinks a side effect of climate change is that chipmunks are getting larger, that he wants to put a fence in his back yard, that cantaloupe is the best fruit, that he thinks his wife is having an affair, that there are over 40 cities in the world named Paris. In return, Manny knows nothing about me.

            The lasagna still has ten minutes to go, so I wipe my hands on my apron and tell Tina I’m all set, that I don’t need help, and I laugh at something Kelly says even though I didn’t hear it, and when Steven offers to fill my glass by pointing at me with a wine bottle, I nod yes and grab the first glass I see on the counter, which I don’t think is actually mine, and I hold it out to him and he fills it too much, but I don’t pull it away, and then I say “Cheers” to the room and then, “I’ll be right back!” and I say it with an exclamation point so everyone knows I’m happy and that everything is okay and that I’m having fun at the party and that I’m not at all worried or sad or furious that Leif is now touching Manny’s wife’s knee, casually, as if she is saying something profound, as if he wants to show her he’s really listening, and I go upstairs, run upstairs, but in a happy way, a light way, a way that makes people think I’m just popping up to grab something I forgot or to change my shirt or to get a photo I’d promised to show someone.

            “Be right down!” I yell, smiling so they will hear that in my voice.

            In the bathroom, I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth. I drink my wine. I lean over the sink and look at my face. I take the tweezers out of the drawer and pluck a hair on my chin that is dark, long enough that someone should have pointed it out, someone should have noticed. The sting feels good. I pluck another just below my nose and my eyes water. I can hear voices downstairs but no words. I lean closer to the mirror and stare at my left eyebrow. I pluck a grey hair out of the middle. I know the timer is going to go off any minute now and that I will make it into the kitchen just in time to pull the lasagna out of the oven–pluck!–and everyone will say how great it smells and how hard I must have worked and how lucky Leif is–pluck!–and he will come up behind me and put his hands on my shoulders and kiss the top of my head and I will smile–pluck!–and smile–pluck!–and smile–pluck!

***

Emily Rinkema lives and writes in northern Vermont, USA. Her writing has recently appeared in Ghost Parachute, Okay Donkey, JAKE, and Frazzled Lit, and she won the 2024 Cambridge and Lascaux Prizes for flash fiction. You can read her work at https://emilyrinkema.wixsite.com/my-site or follow her on X, BS, or IG (@emilyrinkema).

We recently published Sarp Sozdinler’s impeccable “Golden Hour.”

Here, we ask him two questions about his story:

1) I love the idea of perfection in this piece, taking the form of omelettes. Especially because my omelettes never turn out! But really, the woman becomes lost in the creation of perfect omelettes until she is utterly lost.Does anyone remember the woman she was? Or only her perfect omelettes?
I think the most important question is for her: Will she remember who she is? Who she becomes along the way? Her domestic labor, it seems, is the only time she feels alive, present, and useful within the confines of her reality. The omelette becomes her signature of sorts, the only part of her that’s legible to the people benefiting from it. That’s the trap of perfection, too: it’s flattering, rewarding, even endearing in a way, but it’s also a form of manipulation. The better she gets at it, the less anyone needs to think about who she is, because the answer is in the omelette. In that sense, she is neither recognized nor remembered for who she is (a woman with a soul and complexity), but for what she represents (a preordained social role she inherited from other women in her position). And yet the ending gives her an almost mythological status, one that won’t offer her any consolation or fame but a kind of problematic permanence. Her personhood may be forgotten, but her legacy will remain: someone will always crack eggs at the same counter, in the same light, chasing that brief golden moment of perfection and simplicity. I find something unsettlingly poetic, even evolutionary, in all that.

2) What made you choose omelettes for this piece, and not, say, pancakes or waffles? Perhaps a nice frittata? What drew you to omelettes to tell this woman’s story?
I’d guess it’s because an omelette is humbler, cheaper, and more accessible worldwide. In my Turkish homes, pancakes and waffles were pretty much nonexistent; omelettes were the everyday currency of our care-giving and gathering. They let the labor of love stay intimate and small and effortless and repetitive without turning the whole thing into a spectacle. You can make them for one person or twenty. You can make them every day. They are fast and hot and perishable. They vanish as soon as they’re eaten. (There must be a reason why there’s no leftover omelette culture anywhere.) That kind of ephemerality works twofold in this story: the work disappears on schedule, so is the worker. There’s an almost ritualistic zen to it all, this small and semi-meaningless morning liturgy you repeat over and over and over, until the day you die or fall out of use like a well-loved (yet under-appreciated) household appliance. I apologize for the grim turn of phrase, but that’s the story’s hinge: devotion and obligation can sometimes look like the same thing and be mistaken for one another in the wrong light. Like in a complicated relationship, omelettes can punish you for taking them for granted. It all but takes a second of crisis of confidence for everything to go awry. That kind of frustration for some reason feels right in a story about endless search for perfection: perfection as a perpetually moving target, something you can almost hold, but never for too long.

One morning, she cooked an omelette for herself. It was perfect. Golden at the edges, soft around the middle. The smell hung in the air: butter, heat, a little salt. She cooked another one, this time for her children. It slid from the pan like silk. She wiped the counter. No crumbs, no trace. She cooked ten omelettes and her hands moved without thought: crack, whisk, pour, tilt. She cooked for the whole neighborhood, fifty in a day, and her husband slapped her in the back. She worked through the sweat. She could tell the right moment to fold by the smell alone. She cooked nearly five hundred omelettes and that was a whole week gone. She cooked five thousand omelettes and that was a year. The cartons of eggs changed brands, but her rhythm stayed the same. The skillet memorized the outline of her palm. The pan would have waxed lyrical about the warmth of her touch. She cooked fifty thousand omelettes and that was a lifetime. Her wrists buzzed even at night. Her shoulders hummed with ghosts of flips long past. Her clothes were lined with crumbs and yolk. She cooked four hundred thousand omelettes and then she was gone. Her husband complained about the quality going down. Decades turned. The house changed hands. Whole families died and eggs hatched with new life. Nobody remembered the woman who’d cooked all those omelettes, but every morning, someone still cracked eggs at the same counter. The butter hissed. The smell rose. And somewhere in that brief golden moment, the world felt simple all over again.

***

Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, Pithead Chapel, Flash Frog, and Fractured Lit, among other journals. His stories have been selected and nominated for anthologies, including the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Wigleaf Top 50. He’s currently at work on his first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam: www.sarpsozdinler.com | @sarpsozdinler

The mermaid’s story is not her beauty. Her story is not creamy skin and lustrous hair, shell-smooth breasts unencumbered by gravity, small waist giving way to scaled hips. That is a story of fantasy, of fetish. She is beautiful, in the way of an angler fish or riftia, terrifying but perfectly and efficiently built for what she needs.

Her story is not how she traded her voice—so angelic, sweet, and resonant the whales give pause, sailors would gladly give their lives, and gods become jealous—for legs, her gills for lungs. Her story is not the excruciating pain of rendered tail, bloodied feet, broken heart. Lies, she says of these stories, told only to diminish her power. She has been many things, but she has never been frivolous.

Her story is her love, not the love of a girl for a prince, wide-eyed and stupid, needing only to be looked at, to be seen. Her love is as instinctual as hunger, forceful as the sea, powerful as a god. Her story is her garden, adorned with statuary on the sea floor. Red algae-covered and salt-aged stone. Sea grasses, kelp, anemones, polyps, tended with the care of a mother—watchful, pruning, possessive. And the statues: boys, precious looks of wonder in their immovable eyes. A variety of ages and sizes, but all in their youth. The youngest a new walker, the oldest not yet adolescent. Found on the beach by the mermaid, where she waits under the jetty. Where she watches for the most beautiful of them, the most inquisitive, the boldest. The ones who will wander off to explore a curiosity. The ones who do not doubt the existence of a being of another world. She waits under the jetty, calls them with a quiet song, a song only for those who still know how to listen.

The mermaid’s story is not what she gave up, a bad deal she made, a body hurled into the foam. She has been many things, but she has never been foolish. Her story is the way she draws the boys to her, the way they take her hand, so eager, so willing. Her story is the way she pulls them toward the water and down, gently, because they don’t think to let go of her hand. Her story is how they don’t struggle, not even when it’s too late, when they’re frozen to stone in their state of pure wonder.

Her story is that, though she will live a long life, when she dies, she will dissolve into the waves, as if she never existed. She has no soul to live beyond her body, and this is the source of the enduring pain of her story.

Her story is how she arranges the stone boys, each one in his place, here and here and here, expanding her garden to make room for them, all turned toward the center where she takes in their unwavering gazes, their outstretched hands reaching for her, forever. Their palms open, offering their lives to her, not to be stolen, but preserved. Her story is one of benevolence, taking them at the peak of boyhood. She takes only the innocent, the unsullied, the ones who have not yet sullied another. Her story is how she keeps them safe. Or, rather, how she does not keep them, but frees them, these boys with still-clean souls that will go on forever in a glorious, unknown place. She gives them the forever closed to her. Her story is how she loves them not despite, but because.  

***

Stephanie Frazee’s work is forthcoming from or has appeared in Bending Genres, Gooseberry Pie Literary Magazine, Centaur, Sundress Publications’ Delicate Machinery: Poems for Survival & Healing, Midwest Weird, Variant Literature, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. She is online at www.stephaniefrazee.com and @stephieosaurus.bsky.social. 

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 

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.