Flash Fiction / Prose Poetry

The Venus of Merchants

Robin Wyatt Dunn

Her body’s as wide as the tub; in her mouth a cigar. In her hair are bones. Her teeth gold. Gold also in the enamel on her nails. Wrapped tight round her neck, a blingy necklace studding the diamond word: MIDAS.

Her voice is a thousand metric tonnes. Her animal cry an engine so large it is kept in the basement, where it vibrates whole neighborhoods.

She is a memory of what was, and of what is coming to be.

The men stand around her and weep, pouring their wallets over her body, in devotion, and in humility, to abase themselves before her. She accepts it all, as the best temple whore, with her secret god she keeps inside, of no name at all. The escape god, like the escape hatch, unknown to her worshippers, perhaps it only is: the knowledge of the sham of it all.

Torrents of cash flood the basement; the dump truck scoots in, honking, turning Charleston Heston bodies in soylent-green-ways, turbulent and righteous it thrusts the men in their suits into the cement to make way for the promissory notes.

At the heart of the maelstrom, she is screaming.

Inheritance

Joshua Wann

The family farm had once grown cotton. The place is north of Interstate 20 and west of Texas state highway 277. The father couldn’t afford the upkeep of the crops and sold off the farming equipment and bought bourbon. His boy, Tyler, watched the last tractor get hauled off. His father’s bottle was at the boy’s eye level as the tow truck kicked dust and coughed exhaust. His father kept the land for hunting but left in the mornings, before Tyler was awake. With no tractor or knowledge of the game trails, Tyler made his own way. Now, the land housed Tyler’s trailer. Inside was grey smoke and crushed cold medicine. A new labor of sorts. Summers and sons grow hotter and more disappointing.

Early Morning Fishing Boats

Stanley Jenkins

Up early and watching the fishing boat lights pass across the dark Lake Michigan horizon like a series of broken mirror shards. The lake is very loud this morning but the lights are silent, reflecting something louder than light and surf. I wish all those fishermen well. But I wish the fish well, too, hoping they might find food that will not pierce them. Something louder than bombs. More silent than light.

Three White Dogs

Theodore Worozbyt

From our parlor, the living room, the cloud there seemed to be, across the angle, a colorful snake silently sine-waved across the woven symbols of the Iranian carpet. The white dog spotted with spilled coffee would be poisoned by its fangs if it had fangs. But I was not convinced. While the undulance and pumpkin orange diamonds rowed along its spine suggested a viper I thought too that I was seeing yellow and red like a king’s ambulance through the grass. Something burst on the asphalt. I stopped beside the copper deep freezer to fill it with thin oblongs from bags. An uneaten roasted turkey floated in a five gallon bucket when I opened it but had no smell. I thought how old it was, how beige. The snake became a calico kitten over and over that I would capture with a bucket. Either way was in the road up the hill. Crawling onto my chest the two white dogs were biting through each other’s lips and could not be pried open as their faces came to me.

I Stagger Toward the Future

Daniel Shapiro

When the West needed rediscovery, the powers sent a clown with a camera to compile the spotless carnage. This was before viral. Reptiles ate the strings off guitars. Townspeople wandered with eyes covered to block the awkward flips from color to black & white to color. The new colonists let their hair explode, posed with mannequins for selfies. This was before selfies. Reinvention meant erasure, but not of natives. This was after immigrants started pretending to be natives. The five men who appeared to be human formed a band that could stand alone in the desert, look good in grayscale. They had not thought past the moment, past the four minutes it would take to embed the psyches of whoever was left, whoever would dare to put on the greasepaint.

I Wish My Skin Could Stand the Pace

Daniel Shapiro

They paint some white women black, turn them into tables, paint other white women brown for telephones. They say they don’t see color. Synthesizers must be played with rubber gloves. They dress you in a hooded robe, show you what you think is a miniature of your city. Even the sculptures are fitted for sunglasses. The bases the space aliens attack in video games look like your city, your miniaturized city. What you think is the throb of bass of drums is the sound of your pixelated city falling square by square. They tell you it’s OK; your eyeglasses are just too thick. A man will give you a ride home on a Prophet-5, show you the lights of your darkened city. You’re sure these must be correct, these lights that compete with what can only be sleep.

Spoons in the Garden

Caroline Brooke Morrell

Yellow clouds lean into the coalfish. It’s midnight and the world moves alone in her daughter. I remember breath brushing up against the hours. It was my own breath and I let it touch me while you spoke. When I wake up before winter you cannot know. Trying to keep the robins on the table. Late showing, slow growth.

What I was thinking as I kissed you

Ryder Collins

There’ve been way too many mens trying the gates to my garden. Trying to force their ways in or crawl under the fence or jump over with a big pole or bribe my big dog. My dog knows only fur and fangs, respects only the biggest of dicks because he’s so patriarchal in his beastieness. Don’t stalk my garden smoking those spliffs you got from my ex, either. Leave the garden alone. Have you seen my house? Have you smelt my pillowcase or fondled my toilet handle yet? Just a jiggle. Come in, come in. I’ll aeropress you coffee the way I know you’ll like it. I’m feeling your taste buds, those mushroom-bumps raise in meeting. It’s night. I’m on the sidewalk outside my house. Under the streetlight & so obvious. I’m feeling sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami. Eeny meeny, I’m thinking. Miney mo. There’s racism all around me. In me. I’m thinking, The sidewalks are rough & cracked here. I’m thinking, There are so many tastes on this one tongue.

Cobb & Co.

Mark Young

We didn’t realize he might be somebody’s grandfather. The age of the char-à-banc had passed us by, & the advent of VistaVision, with its futile attempt to emulate the golden ratio, was something our teachers wouldn’t talk to us about. Dogs fought in the street & distracted us. The town grew dustier by the day. The Town Hall collapsed under the weight of woodworms & the local records all went with it. We coughed, & carried on as we always had.

Bone Yard

Melissa Kwasny

There is an earth below the body, white gleam in what is otherwise sage. You are unafraid, even curious at death now. Ravens pick through the catalogs. In their beaks, the red-brown stain. They hang, a glossy black in the greening house. Today, you walk right into the bone yard, recognizing first a shod hoof. The ribcage further on, the long neck spreading. What is strewn like feathers is hair caught in last year’s grass. You can almost make out an ear. A stillborn calf? A deer? But you, you say, have had enough now. You return to the farmer’s field of right and wrong. Widow’s weeds, or the heavy curtains that signal to the neighbors the house is closed: these are grief rules few of us practice any longer. Shall you say he was released? Did he step out of his mind, or was he flung? You have followed the path back to the river, where you cast river pebbles from shore, as if it were up to you to send him on. You watch them sink, which is, of course, thy will be done.

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