When the bomb rolled out of Rennie’s mouth and smashed down onto the dinner table, there was just time enough for you to marvel at how something as tiny and weightless as a single word could land with such impact, but then the shockwave blasted you into the exosphere, where you hung by ice-numbed fingertips on the dark curve of space, gaping at the devastated table below; the splintered wine glasses, the slap of burgundy on white linen, crystal shards winking from the spinach salad, and the gravy-spattered guests, who avoided looking at where you were or where you had been because Ellen had put so much effort into the Chicken Marsala and Rennie didn’t mean it like that, of course, and because as long as they didn’t look toward your chair or see you fighting to breathe at the edge of space, dinner would not be ruined, nothing would have happened, so they continued to eat with their heat-twisted silverware, picking at mushrooms from between the cracks in their plates, crooning in such soothing honey-sweet tones that you found yourself descending back to the table, eating alongside them, wondering whether there really had been a bomb and whether you really had gone to space, and you were almost convinced that you’d imagined it all except that with every bite, glass crunched between your teeth, and your tongue was absolutely lacerated.
Barbara Diggs’s flash fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Wigleaf, SmokeLong Quarterly, Fractured Lit, Emerge Literary Journal, and Your Impossible Voice and Best Microfictions 2025. She has also won Highly Commend awards with Bath Flash Fiction and The Bridport Prize. She lives in Paris, France. Bluesky: bdiggswrites.bsky.social.
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