'Whistle down the wind my lass' by Sandra Arnold

Every Spring the woman digs her garden wearing the riding boots her daughter wore the day she galloped her horse through the river his hooves shooting spray high into the air each drop twisting and turning in the sunlight and glittering like gems and the horse’s white mane flying in the wind and the rider’s red hair flaring like flames as she raced her horse towards a steep bank that the horse jumped with ease his hooves flicking up the bare earth as he landed at the top with the girl laughing and whooping as they raced towards a higher bank and the sweat glistening on the horse’s flanks and clouds of breath steaming from his nostrils and horse and rider flying in perfect harmony and each Spring when the woman plunges her spade into the earth she remembers every detail the farmer told her about standing on his tractor watching a horse and rider galloping through the river and the sheer heart-stopping beauty of the frothing water and the clattering hooves trying to get a grip on the highest bank and the scattering of earth and the whistling wind and the startled birds and the girl’s laughter as she went flying up and up and the horse’s whinnying and then the silence and the pervading scent of wildflowers and the woman feels each beat of the story pulsating through her veins and in her heart when she wears her daughter’s boots to dig in the garden so she can sow the wildflower seeds that grow so sturdy they withstand the strongest wind and bees and butterflies will cover the flowers and birds will scatter the seeds until every last bit of bare empty earth in her garden is filled with their scent and sound and colour.   

 

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Sandra Arnold has published seven books with her eighth book Below Ground coming out with Impspired in June 2024. She writes fiction, non-fiction, short fiction and flash fiction and has been published widely. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from Central Queensland University, Australia.

'POV: You Are the Brown One at a Table Full of White Mental Health Workers' by Sumitra Singam

POV: You Are the Brown One at a Table Full of White Mental Health Workers

And you’re all discussing this young Indigenous woman, and everyone is shaking their heads, how could she not have known she was pregnant? And it’s so lucky we sectioned her, because that poor baby doesn’t need more drugs. And they furrow their foreheads with middle-class bewilderment, but why does she keep trying to run away? And they all look at you to explain this ingratitude. And you are immediately filled with a bushfire of rage in your belly that you must gestate like a phantom pregnancy because you think of her ochre skin, lit from within, lit by this land, and how it is slowly dimming in this place, and you think of how you also have taken something from her by your migration here. And somehow you must be the bridge, birth the right words to unblind these people, stop them shrugging, I suppose she doesn’t want her baby taken away, and instead wail, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

 

 

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Sumitra Singam is a Malaysian-Indian-Australian author who writes in Naarm/Melbourne. She travelled through many spaces, both beautiful and traumatic 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

 

'Hauntings' by Madeline Anthes

Something had happened to Mother. She had started staring past me, looking at something I couldn’t see.

I first dropped a finger, hoping Mother would notice and wake up. Look at it and look at me.

She had stopped cleaning herself. She ate slivers of carrot and sips of milk. She was feather thin and only stayed in a room for several minutes before floating to the next.

She didn’t notice the finger. I left it on her nightstand. She just picked up her glasses and ignored the pinkie lying next to them.

So I dropped an ear – something larger, something soft – on the coffee table. But she didn’t see it either.

When I left my leg near the bottom of the stairs, I thought she’d stop, finally, and look. I thought she’d pick it up, jiggle the calf, and look for its owner. But she just stretched a step over it and glided away.

She didn’t see any of the pieces I left around for her. By the time I was nothing but neck and tendrils of hair, I was getting desperate.

But when she overlooked my head, I had nothing left to leave her. Her eyes just grazed the room, over the top of my scalp, and drifted away.

Now we haunt this home together. She is a ghost of the woman she was, and I am all around her, my voice an empty echo asking her to come back.

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Madeline Anthes is the Assistant Editor of Lost Balloon. Her chapbook Beautiful, Violent Things is now available from Word West Press. You can find her on Twitter at @maddieanthes, and find more of her work at madelineanthes.com.

'Hauntings' was first published in Third Point Press in 2017.

'Radium Girls' by Kathryn Silver-Hajo

Those trusting young women moistened and pointed their brushes with pursed lips, dropped tiny dots of radium on the digits of watch faces, magicking them to glow a luminous green in the dark. Their meticulous labors aided the war effort as well, bringing light to cold, lifeless military dials. They’d wear their favorite frocks to work, let the radioactive dust coat them so they’d glow like fireflies when they danced with their sweethearts at night, their broad smiles lighting up the room with radiant teeth as they twirled ‘round and ‘round. But it wasn’t long before those glowing ivories began to ache. Gums to ulcerate, bleed, and ooze. Jaws to crumble and fall like soldiers in the trenches. Yet, people craved those luminescent watches and business was booming, thanks to the radium girls. One by one the companies commissioned special studies which concluded that mysterious illnesses were the cause of their trouble. Come hell or heavy water, it couldn’t be the curative miracle called radium. Some even saw fit to implicate the women themselves, proclaim that their symptoms were the result of syphilis, that the women’s shameless behavior was to blame. Even when science shone the hard light of truth on the dangers of the element, the companies soldiered on, happy to sacrifice young women to the cause of their profit-making as long as they possibly could. Until the dying women decided to sue and their former employers began dropping like the jaws of the radium girls.

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Kathryn Silver-Hajo’s work was selected for the 2023 Wigleaf Top 50 Longlist and nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and Best American Food Writing. Kathryn’s work appears in Atticus Review, CRAFT, Emerge Literary, Ghost Parachute, New Flash Fiction Review, Pithead Chapel, Ruby Literary, The Phare, and other lovely journals. Her publications include flash collection Wolfsong and novel Roots of The Banyan Tree. Kathryn lives in Providence, Rhode Island with her husband and curly-tailed pup, Kaya. More at: kathrynsilverhajo.com; facebook.com/kathryn.silverhajo; twitter.com/KSilverHajo; instagram.com/kathrynsilverhajo

'The Sky Around Us' by Annie Q. Syed

The two of us were doing a jigsaw puzzle, our most challenging one to date. So many pieces appeared alike.  The milky way is hard to untangle in cut-out shapes. Nothing glowed to guide us.

You said the solstice was a time of divine rebirthing in ancient Egypt. I was just happy you knew today was the longest day of the year. You said, in the Dendra Temple in ancient Egypt, the sound of drums would fill the walls during the solstice celebration. You placed one of the pieces just right.

I couldn’t understand how anything fit. Puzzles were not my thing. I am not sure if I did them for you or me. Maybe that’s where ‘us’ comes from.

We moved the pieces between our fingers as if they were antique gems. The pyramids weren’t built in a day, I said as I called it a day. I moved the cardboard box on which the puzzle lay and placed it on our oak cabinet you had once made when your hands were more stable.

We left the puzzle there until the winter solstice. You didn’t ask for it this time, but I brought it out anyway, knowing to leave a few pieces on the cabinet, so we could never finish. This way, next summer solstice, we would again sit across from each other, and you would tell me stories about the constellation which looks like a bird, and the one that looks like a lyre, remembering all the facts from all your years of research, but not remembering a single one about us. 

 

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Annie Q. Syed is a reader, writer, and teacher. You can find more of her work at www.anniesyed.com.

'My Father’s New Dad-Suit Loves Ice Cream' by Marie-Louise McGuinness

Ice cream is the texture of my father’s lies. If I try to eat it, it swells in my mouth and I am unable to swallow. He brought me for ice cream on the last day we spoke— chocolate fudge for me, mint choc chip for him— I thought we were bonding, he knew he was cutting the cord.

Now, ice cream smells ripe of the dad suit my father shed like a snake. It lay at our front door for years, shrivelling up at the edges, becoming slimy, oozing betrayal, yet open and willing to welcome him back.

But he crawled into another dad suit, one lying open in another hallway, in another house. A boy’s dad suit like he wanted all along.

I never saw him wearing it, only pictures posted online.

It seemed to itch him in the early years, when he stood cheering on the sidelines of the football pitch, or built sandcastles with plastic buckets too small for his hands, but time smoothed it to his contours until you’d never guess it wasn’t made for him.

And the dad-suit he discarded without a backward glance, melted away slowly with photos of graduations and weddings. And lots and lots of ice cream.

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Marie-Louise McGuinness has work published in numerous literary magazines including The Forge, Flash Frog, Milk Candy Review, Splonk and Gone Lawn. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and enjoys writing from a sensory perspective.

Debut Flash: 'Alexandria Oxiana' by Lion Summerbell

The shivering had stopped. Only the fire moved in his eyes now; otherwise, he was still. “A bell was ringing somewhere far away…. I rode after, over mountains, rivers, then a desert, until at last it brought me to a city, fast asleep in the sand. Alone, wandering, I came to the marketplace, where a tribe of old women appeared, surrounding me. They wore jackets sewn from scraps and on their heads were rags mortified by filth. But I was surprised; I knew these faces: the lips of my nurse, my mother’s eyes. I come from Syria, I said, Antiochus is my king, murdered by the Parni tyrant Phraates at Media. I fled east because we say Alexander founded a city there, and Fate led me here by a pealing of bells. I must return with an army to save my country. Help me, please. But the old women only giggled, flashing empty gums as they searched my pockets; finding nothing, they lost interest and made to leave. Following them through street after street of bleached and broken stone, I came to a tower in which hung a rusted iron bell. I cried out, seeing on it a face I knew like my father’s: Lizard-Killing Apollo, on whose marble feet Antiochus had bled a calf the morning of his death. The women went round and round, laughing and sparrowing in their mad argot, sometimes reaching for a bit of stone or wood fallen from the ceiling to strike the bell. They struck it like they laughed, in short, sharp reports that leapt to their end in the desert all around, when they would laugh all the louder, laugh and laugh, at city, desert, godhead, bell: hyeh, they laughed, striking, hyeh, yeh, yeh; and it rang, laughing, and rang.”

 

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Lion Summerbell wrote this on the road from Madrid to Marseille. He'd like to credit that setting for the mythic tone, but aside from some decent mountains, there’re a lot more outlet malls and service stations than you’d think. Still, looks good on paper.