Which finger was it that I should use to measure water for rice? Was it up to three quarters of one segment of my ring finger? Not my left ring finger though, not the finger I will tie myself to a man with, but the right ring finger that I will use to measure the rice that will keep me and that man alive. Mom, I’m sorry but the man I married did not come with a rice cooker, how do I cook rice on the stovetop? What is the name of the heart shaped herb in English? What is it in Vietnamese? Can I serve it with everything now that I am my own cook? And if I grow it in my backyard like you used to, will it purify the poisoned ground that we live on? Can we live on it when I’m too tired to cook? Mom, when did you hit menopause? Does breast cancer run in the family on my father’s side? Or was that a myth that I misheard as a child? Why did my father’s mother die so young? Did she die in the first war of her lifetime or second? Did she ever know peace? Will our family forget me since I’m all the way across the world? Will I be able to speak with them if I only learn a child’s Vietnamese? Mom, what was the humidity of the city you grew up in? Is that when my hair will look its best? Mom, what are the toxins you were exposed to? What about your father? And your mother? What about my father? My father’s father and father’s mother? Mom, what do you remember and what do you miss? Mom, where is home? And now, Mom?

***
Thao Votang is a writer. Her work has been published in Salon, Hyperallergic, Sightlines, Southwest Contemporary, and Lucky Jefferson. Her debut novel will be published July 2024 from Alcove Press.

We recently published Sara Freligh’s stellar “1986 .”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) I love the juxtaposition of the two tragedies here — the larger (?) one that affected so many people and this more personal, small-town loss. The narrators in this story seem to feel the Challenger loss more, but do you think, as time goes by, they will be equally (or perhaps more) affected by the missing little girl, the way their parents are?
Years ago, I wrote a poem, “Wondrous,” about my mother reading Charlotte’s Web to us kids, how she always cried when she got to the part where Charlotte died and we always laughed at her because “we know nothing of loss and its sad math,/how every subtraction is exponential, how each grief/multiplies the one preceding it.”
I’m thinking that’s at work in the story, too, where the parents are already familiar with grief on a personal level, whereas the kids just aren’t – they’re fascinated by the salacious details of the Challenger explosion and the little girl disappearing isn’t registering yet because they have no metric for loss. The parents, though: They have children. They understand the “what if” of fate and how danger is everywhere.

2) That ending imagery is so powerful. What might be a “television turned up too loud.” Do you
think that is what the sound is? Or is it only what it might be?
It could be a television or it could be something else, which is exactly what I was going for, that
ambiguity. Jayne Anne Phillips, whose book Black Tickets is the bible for generations of flash writers, has written about how an ending for a very short piece has to be “Over. But not over.” Meaning, I think, that while the ending is a fitting conclusion to the story, the characters’ stories are never over – they must linger on in the reader’s head and a good ending maybe does just that.
What’s changed from the beginning to the end in “1986” is that the narrator “we”– the kids in this story — have gone from being blithely unaware of the world and its dark places to understanding that the bad stuff is everywhere and as close as next door. So they’re hearing a television – or are they?

The little neighbor girl went missing on the same day the space shuttle Challenger exploded. There was smoke and then nothing. We watched it all at school, on a TV that our teacher wheeled into the classroom. We walked home from school the long way, imagining how it would feel to fall from the sky and slam into the ocean.

The week after the little girl went missing, our mothers began to watch from the porch whenever we rode our bikes in the street. Sometimes we tucked ourselves into small places and pretended we were astronauts rocketing toward a strew of stars. When our mothers called for us, we could hear the frantic in their voices rising like sirens.

A month after the little girl went missing, a poster with her picture—HAVE YOU SEEN ME?—showed up on phone poles and in the store on the corner where we stole strings of licorice and Tootsie Rolls. Police released a sketch of the suspect, a dad-aged man who could have been Mr. Marks from the blue house or Mr. Stephenson with his garage full of tools. Our mothers insisted that we play in the back yard where they could keep an eye out. We yearned to blast off and out of there.

Months after the little girl went missing, the remains of the Challenger astronauts were fished from the bottom of the ocean. The hedges hemming our yard grew up unruly, shrouding our view of the night sky and the neighbors, though sometimes on steamy evenings, when the windows were open, we could hear shouting and gunshots and screams from what might have been a television turned up too loud.

***

Sarah Freligh is the author of five books, including Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City
Press Poetry Prize and the 2015 Whirling Prize from the University of Indianapolis, and the
recently-released A Brief Natural History of Women, from Harbor Editions. Sarah’s work has
appeared in the Cincinnati Review miCRo series, SmokeLong Quarterly, the Wigleaf 50, and in the anthologies New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (Norton 2018), and Best Microfiction (2019-22). Among her awards are poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Saltonstall Foundation.

The first thing we didn’t know about ghosts, until we met our granddaddy six months after his funeral, was they feel whatever temperature it was the day they died. And since our granddaddy died in a blizzard, he stood there shivering, despite visiting us on a 90-degree day in June. The second thing we didn’t know about ghosts was they wear the same clothes they had on when they died, and not the ones they were buried in. Which was a shame because our grandmother died wearing nothing but a thin hospital gown that didn’t quite close all the way when she walked. And the third thing we didn’t know about ghosts until they showed up at our house one day was they fixate on whatever final thought they had, no matter how many times you try to steer the conversation in another direction.

Our granddaddy’s final thought, as he stood there shivering in big leather boots and big leather gloves and denim on the rest of him, was whether he still should have rolled the trash bin to the end of his driveway despite how much it was snowing.

“Probably should have,” he said.

“But the roads were closed.”

“That truck still would have come.”

And our grandmother, in her hospital gown and sweat beads on her forehead, repeated her final thought as a question we were supposed to answer: “Is any of this real?”

“Any of what?”

“Any of…this?”

Our grandparents came to see us on that hot June day mostly to complain about how little they saw eye-to-eye now that they were ghosts. Our granddaddy couldn’t keep up with our grandmother’s depth of thought, she claimed. And our grandmother couldn’t answer a simple goddamned question about the trash, our granddaddy said.

But if there were a fourth thing we didn’t know about ghosts, it was that they miss being a child. If you asked a ghost—or at least these two—what they’d do to come back as themselves, they’d say, “Nothing.” To return as an eighty-year-old? “Hell no.” Sixty, fifty, twenty-five? “Nuh-uh.” But if you took them to the creek behind your house, a few miles from where they both grew up as neighbors, they’d stop worrying about the trash and how one defines reality, and tell you about the time they ran from home and found each other digging for crayfish beneath the dirt and stones. And if you gave them time to look at each other, you’d think they were seeing the ghosts of themselves from all those years ago, how they were suddenly shy, a little timid to hold each other’s hands. And you’d feel like you were seeing something you shouldn’t, a part of themselves they’d buried while still alive, which led us to the fifth thing we didn’t know about ghosts. That they aren’t afraid to be seen, if you’re willing to stand there and look.

We looked. And a part of us was disappointed to learn these things. That the ghosts we love can’t feel the heat of a summer day, that their minds get stuck in loops, that they don’t even get to dress well. But the sixth thing about ghosts is they won’t tell you to feel sorry for them. They’ll run your hands through the same water they ran through. They’ll show you all the places the crayfish hide. They’ll annoy the hell out of you half the time. But then they’ll pinch your cheeks and you won’t quite feel it. And damn, you’ll wish you did.

***

Matt Barrett holds an MFA in Fiction from UNC-Greensboro, and his stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Sun Magazine, The Threepenny Review, The Baltimore Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, River Teeth, the minnesota review, Best Microfiction (’22 & ’23), Best Small Fictions (’23), and elsewhere.

We recently published Avitus B. Carle’s zesty “Salt.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) I love the transmutations of “salt” in this piece — from “the opposite of sugar” to “real mothers” and “real fathers,” to sand and stories. Though it burns the girls’ noses, it’s a necessary substance. Do you think they realize how necessary it is?

The older orphans at the end realize the necessity because we see them licking the tears from the younger orphans, not wasting a drop. The younger orphans, before some separate themselves to become the older orphans, do not. Salt is one of the only things they have in abundance – that they can find anywhere – and they take advantage of the fact that they can even produce it. This is why they experiment freely with salt or mimic the adults they’ve seen interacting with white substances, not fully understanding what they are doing.

2) The imagery here is so amazing! You give us all this emotion and character through its power. What is your favorite image from this story? Or, more specifically, what is your most necessary (going back to necessary!) image?

My favorite and most necessary image is the orphans creating an ocean in the girl’s bathroom. Not only do we get a lot of small moments in this scene, but it’s the first time the orphans really look at one another. The first time they notice their bare-boned bodies. This is also where the shift in the story occurs, pulling away from playtime as imaginary to playtime as a necessity. After their toilet ocean and after the abundance of salt betrays them, readers learn that there are some orphans who can read, some who play at being mothers and fathers even though they are older orphans. The decision to create an ocean in the bathroom creates this necessary shift that triggers some of these orphans to change, that divides them and shows readers that this once collective group is now broken, the older orphans now knowing better than the younger.

The opposite of sugar. The taste on the tongues of orphans. What remains on their plates. What burns their noses when they lean over the table, inhale through straws. Like their real mothers. Like their real fathers. Like the only people they remember. Orphans who ground it between their fingers. Flick it from beneath their fingernails at each other. At the walls stained from years of rainstorms. At the peeling wallpaper no one can afford to replace. At the rusty nail that’s claimed five of their feet. Orphans who let it run through their spread fingers like sand. Like the beach. Like they think beach sand would. Like the ocean. Like they dream the ocean would. One of the orphans has an idea. All of the orphans have an idea. They flood the girl’s bathroom, shed their borrowed clothes. Barely recognize themselves, their bodies. Their bare-boned bodies covered in white, their palms filled with it until it leaves them for the waves of the fountain, sink, and their toilet ocean. They swim and they laugh and they swallow it, their stomachs swelling, their throats and noses and eyes burn. Some will retreat while others stay and learn of the infections it causes. What leaves their bodies as they writhe in bed, dreaming of white whales and the sea, the only story they know. The one story hardly any of them can read. What those who retreated are able collect with rags stained with gasoline or cloth from broken toys. A teddy bear’s head. Sheets from one of the five. An article about unwanted children, where they gather, where they’re kept. The reason why some of the orphans are named mother or father. Depending on their floor, mothers will promise things will get better, that someone is always coming (they aren’t). Fathers will tell the little orphans to be strong, keep fighting, stop crying. The orphans who the little orphans call mothers and fathers will always lap up the tears of their orphans, their tongues tracing the way home. Their tastebuds drowning in seasoning and preservation and crystal and their lips crack when trying to form the word but, now, they will always remember how it sounds.

***

Avitus B. Carle (she/her) lives and writes outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Formerly known as K.B. Carle, her flash has been published in a variety of places including Five South, F(r)iction, Okay Donkey Magazine, Lost Balloon, CHEAP POP, and elsewhere. Avitus’s stories have been nominated for The Pushcart Prize, and her experimental flash, “Abernathy_Resume.docx,” was included in the 2022 Best of the Net anthology. Her story, “A Lethal Woman,” will be included in the 2022 Best Small Fictions anthology. She can be found online at avitusbcarle.com or on Twitter @avitusbcarle.

This is a surely incomplete history of Imperiala Genevieve Beatrice Vinistasia Schitz.

Whose parents made up for her terrible surname with a truly superfluous quantity of first and middle names.

Whose father doted on her, the only living child after fourteen miscarriages and nearly giving up hope.

Whose mother had to fetch her out of the cherry tree at the bottom of the garden on the day of her wedding because the cherries were ripe and she loved cherries more than anything, even her intended.

Whose husband promised they would stay close to her parents but took a job in Austria then Tunisia then Ireland, where her shoes were never dry, and her parents refused to visit after that first trip.

Whose womb was home to so many babies, but unlike her mother she carried them to term, carried them even when she didn’t want to anymore, until she was fed up with babies and milk and crying and shit and crying and milk and more babies with no one around to help her and only her mama on the phone who told her she should feel lucky because at least they weren’t in the ground like all her brothers and sisters.

Whose soul shrivelled when the children refused to speak anything but English and she was the only one who dreamt in the language of heat and elsewhereness and, after her mama died and her papa followed shortly after, she had no one to talk to in the old tongue and it slowly died away except in her dreams.

Whose pocketbook only sometimes stretched to buying cherries, expensive, sad little things that tasted like water and the plastic they came in, but which she ate one after another hoping the next would be sweeter.

Whose guts yearned for the learning her children had, some so booksmart they were like whips of knowledge and they left one by one, even the girls, so free and flighty and powerful.

Whose house was an empty shell defined by broken promises and indenture, words she learned from the books she borrowed from the library now that she had time to herself, and which left her enough time to manage the problem that had plagued her for years.

Whose husband lay in a box carefully chosen by weeping children while she stood silent and sombre and everyone around her commented how brave she was, how foreigners always seemed to have to wail about everything, but she was so calm, so different from those others.

Whose travel back home brought her closer to her history and future, to where she would finish her days against the wishes of everyone except for herself, each step of the way carrying the promise of cherries.

***

Emma Burnett is a researcher and writer. She has had stories in MetaStellar, Elegant Literature, The Stygian Lepus, Roi Fainéant, The Sunlight Press, Fairfield Scribes, Five Minute Lit, Microfiction Monday, and Rejection Letters. You can find her @slashnburnett, @slashnburnett.bsky.social, or emmaburnett.uk.

When the branches of the willow, rutted and gnarled, break under the layers of brocade, chiffon, and lace that is Ophelia’s dress, she is neither surprised, nor unhappy. She tumbles down into the stream below in a flurry of delicate cream ruffles.

Some minutes pass but she remains afloat, buoyed by the billowing fabric. The ribbons and satin cords unfurl in the currents of the river like the tentacles of a jellyfish. The sky above is the blue and white of a perfect summer day and she stares up unblinking. From here on onwards she has four possible pathways.

She can drown. Eventually, the soaked textile cupola gives way and she is pulled down into the alluring deep. The water closes over her head with the softest whoosh. Caught in the cocoon of silk descending towards the dark benthic currents, she can no longer see the way up. There is a moment of intense fear as her mind wakes from slumber, and then the water rushes into her lungs putting an end to everything.

She can thrash and scream, hitting the water with tight white fists in a way she has never hit anything in her entire life. A farmer, passing by on his way to the market or some such mundane affair, fishes her out of the stream. He takes Ophelia back to the Elsinore castle where he gets a generous reward and she is locked up forever in the tallest tower like that unfortunate cousin of hers that spoke up too much during family dinners.

Since thrashing and screaming appears to be a viable strategy of survival, she can stick with that a bit longer, leaving the farmer behind to reach a bend in the river where a handsome knight comes to her rescue. In this version of events, she can feign shock and memory loss and pretend she has never set foot in that grand castle up on the coast. The knight gets to take her back to his own, somewhat smaller estate, where she whispers the words of the marriage vows before a small domestic altar. Then she is locked up—yet again—this time in the boudoir, to remain there forever, bearing children and completing endless embroidery patterns.

Ophelia finds none of these appealing, and as the water of the river reaches for her, pulling her down into the dark, she reaches back, daring to grasp and embrace the power hidden in its flow and ebb.

The river laughs with a thousand voices. One playful current tugs at the end of Ophelia’s sash and it unwinds, setting her free, the tasseled ends wavering with newly found joy. Bubbles pour from her mouth in an endless stream, and as she walks across the riverbed paying no mind to the undertow, there is a definite spring in her step.

She makes it back to the Elsinore castle just before the dramatic finale. Takes the swords away from the boys, turns poison into so much benthic gunk. Tumbles the cheap theater decorations down from the battlements.

Hamlet is pale, his lips a dark ruby red, and he is looking at Ophelia as if he sees her, properly sees her, for the first time. “I love you like forty thousand brothers could not,” he says, and his words carry an echo of a thousand different voices booming against proscenium arches in the theatres of past and future.

Ophelia sighs. Leaning forward, she kisses Hamlet lightly on the tip of the nose, and says, “It has never been about you, silly.” She turns on her heel and walks away, carmine and gold carps playing in the air around her head.

***

Laila Amado writes in her second language and has recently exchanged her fourth country of residence for the fifth. Instead of the Mediterranean, she now stares at the North Sea. The sea still, occasionally, stares back. Her stories have been published or are forthcoming in Best Small Fictions 2022, Cheap Pop, Cotton Xenomorph, Flash Frog, and other publications. Follow her on Twitter @onbonbon7.

The house is full of ladybugs like it is every spring, and I haven’t killed any yet. They are everywhere. One tangled itself in my hair in the dark last night. I saved two drowning in the shower this morning. They vibrate the warm air inside the light fixtures and knock themselves against the glass in all the windows and yes, I still don’t like them at all. But don’t worry. I am saving the silly soggy dizzy things. I’m trapping them like I promised I would last year after your second-grade class learned that they eat aphids and are good luck and something about fate and a complicated story from Japanese folklore that you couldn’t remember most of. I’m your mom, and I promised.

There are sixty-seven now, trapped in every shape of cup and glass. Mostly caught at the windows where they gather to watch the frozen dew melting in the sun, and the dandelions turning gold into exploding white puffs of reverse alchemy. You aren’t here to pick the flowers so they are taking over the backyard and Mrs. Wheeler next door is worried that the sea of fluff will blow in her direction and infect her perfect lawn and I hope they do. I haven’t mowed since you and your dad left to transfer to the better hospital. It hasn’t seemed important.

I did think about vacuuming, but there are too many inverted glasses full of bugs to weave between now, and all I want to do when I get home from my shift is check in to hear any updates about you. There are six cups on the living room floor – all pint glasses, mouths to carpet, sealing in the gentle bugs. There were four in the hall before I kicked one over on my way back from the bathroom last week (I’m not sure where the captive went, but he is probably fine). There are five rocks glasses and two highballs in my bedroom. In fact, every room is littered with glasses except yours because I haven’t gone in there. Every windowsill in the house is full, crowded with the stemware, bottoms up, trapping the fizzing crowd there like spotted champagne bubbles. Mugs were scattered throughout the house too, but I felt like a monster keeping the poor things in the dark, so I switched them all out for shot glasses and consolidated the inmates. They are crowded but happier, frozen in light.

Please keep your half of the promise like I’ve kept mine. I’m gently trapping each one so you can let them go safely in the rose garden. When you are well enough to come home maybe I’ll be brave too and help you release the buzzy prickly-legged things to fight the aphids that munch my flowers. The rosebuds are swarming with the tiny pests already. When I ran low on cups, I started collecting more insectariums from yard sales and ladies at church and resale shops. My backseat is full of mismatched drinkware wrapped in newspapers and I won’t run out. I may have to figure out soon what to feed them all – it’s been two weeks since you were admitted. I’ll work my shift and sleep alone and catch bugs until your father and you come home. The bugs will wait too, for you to get well and save us all from this lonely house, where we are stuck until you free us.

***

Steven Hage is a writer, artist, and interloper living in Indiana. Steven studied photography and design at Goshen College, enjoys flash fiction for breakfast, and helps companies tell stories through marketing. To say hello and find out more, visit StevenHage.com.

I called you ‘anda’ when we first met. The pink shell of your mouth made a pearl of an assalamualaikum for me.  Our husbands were in the front room, and we went to the kitchen, sitting cross-legged with our feet tucked away for respect. I brought us a plate of piping hot jemput-jemput and you ate the sugary fritters, blowing through your mouth, using your hand like a fan. Your fingers seemed plump, juicy, like the succulents in my garden. I wondered if they would feel as soft and pliant to touch.

When we met at that satay place in Kajang, the air full of the smoky, earthy smell of roasting meat, I called you ‘awak’. I said, awak tak bosan? You said, no, you weren’t bored when your husband was away so much for work, and I wondered if I was a particularly ungrateful kind of wife. You said, can I try? pointing at my glass of pink bandung gently sweating in the humidity. You pursed your lips perfectly around the straw, taking greedy gulps. After you left, I fitted my mouth as closely as I could to the ring of bright red lipstick on the straw.

When I invited you to Port Dickson, I called you ‘kamu’. We bought rambutan from a roadside stall, and I made a joke about how the hairy fruit looked just like testicles. You frowned and swatted my arm, but your dimples peeked out anyway. We took a mat down to the beach, our bare feet crunching into the sand. I shelled the rambutans, handing them to you one by one. You popped the oval fruit, translucent like lychees into your mouth, making throaty sounds of pleasure. You pulled out clean seeds which you gathered in a pile on the sand.

I called you ‘engkau’ when you invited me to your place for lunch. We ate assam fish and rice, your right hand making a perfect bud when you gathered a mouthful together. Your food tasted like everything – spicy, sweet, tart, buttery. You called me ‘engkau’ then too. We reached for the dish at the same time, our hands brushing together, warm and soft. You didn’t snatch your hand away. You didn’t say the word ‘haram’. What you did say was, it’s beautiful, the Malay phrase for pronoun, ‘kata ganti diri’. A word to replace yourself.

***

Sumitra writes in Naarm/Melbourne. She travelled through many spaces to get there and writes to make sense of her experiences. She’ll be the one in the kitchen making chai (where’s your cardamom?). She works in mental health. You can find her and her other publication credits on twitter: @pleomorphic2