FlashFlood

Saturday, 14 June 2025

'Chickens Remember One Hundred Faces' by Janna Miller

Gather the fertilized eggs in your warmed pocket apron, one at a time. Gently relocate the orbs to your stomach incubator. You will feel them inside when they start to rock and peck, like undigested energy.
Watch your belly until the birds have cracked though. Do not help them! If they do not have the ability to cleave their shell, they will not survive.
Pull them from your middle and warm them in your hands. Radiate as their mother.
Once dry, transfer them to the nursery, 98 degrees. Their mother from afar.
Only then: clean the incubator, discard the unhatched eggs.

Do This Last.

Sometimes one will hatch late, unwilling to leave the soft world of birth. Remember when you were brought online? The twinge of fresh ocular sensors?
The late eggs will struggle to peck and crack their shells.
One might pull through with a final moment of strength and pant in your hands, wet and droopy. He might slowly dry and feather while you hold him. He might stand and peck at your warmed enclosure. He might escape from your belly and run up your arm. Chirp near your auditory speaker.

Before you put him in the nursery, let him look into your lenses, run over your body, as a maze, as an exploration. Bring him to your cheek. Chickens will tell the flock of your face.
We all have the same face.
Let him tell his siblings of their mother.

Librarian, mother, and minor trickster, Janna has published in SmokeLong Quarterly, Shenandoah, Whale Road Review, Citron Review, Best MicroFiction, and others. Her story collection, All Lovers Burn at the End of the World is forthcoming from ELJ Editions. Generally, if the toaster blows up, it is not her fault.

'The Coast of Saigon' by Binh Do

Every day, Hai runs along the coast of Saigon. He says that it’s his way of getting over his unrequited feelings for Lan. These days, however, his journeys are only getting more unforgiving. Some of Saigon’s streets are now filled with wet muck and debris, while others are covered in a beautiful sheen of water. There are many, if not most, that the ocean has already taken back outright and thus they are nothing but brine up to your ankles or your thighs or your stomach even and that’s no kind of place for a young, innocent boy like him to be running, though if he must, which is to say if he really has to trudge or wade or swim across all the risen waterways in order for him to feel better about everything, then so be it.

Ever since the tides have encroached further inland, the look of Saigon has changed. The rivers are wider, deeper. There are still some people we’re searching for underneath the mess of the crumpled, mangled buildings and perhaps my own lover really is buried underneath the bent steel of those wrecks that fell in the dead of night but maybe, just maybe there is some off chance that Lan is still alive and feeling her way in the dark of it and looking for a way out of all of this so that we can finally be together. I hear the same kind of tragedy is visiting the other coasts too—like Jakarta, or Venice, and even Miami—and yet there is nothing that any of us can do about it. Thus, every year, it seems like the coast of Saigon will only get smaller, and smaller, until it is finally nothing, and so, too, will the size of Hai’s heart, and mine.

Binh Do is a writer of Vietnamese descent. They are currently based in New York City and at work on a short story collection.

Debut Flash: 'The Moments Between' by Peter A Hanink

While you, of course, already know about the loom and the needle and the curse and the princess with the flaxen hair and azure eyes who slept motionless until awoken by true love’s kiss to rule the land alongside her beloved with fairness and justice ‘til the end of their days, you may not know about the intervening time, when the curse still lay over the land and all the fauna, from soaring eagles to slithering worms, fell into sympathetic somnolence with their princess fair, leaving the flora to run rampant over all human works, from grandest edifice to humblest hovel, with sinewy grape vines encircling the mighty castle’s highest towers, their leaves jealously hiding the keep’s stones from the warmth of the sun’s rays, and great towering oaks bursting through the parade grounds where once knights in gleaming armor competed for garlands made from the same roses whose thorny thickets now threatened pain and blood to any who might try to push past them and whose roots tunneled deep beneath the ramparts, before bursting forth to drink dry the murky moat, which was clogged with algae and muck as the catfish that had previously kept the waters clean dozed at the bottom, and whose blooms withered on their stems waiting for the loving kiss, that would never come, of pollinating bees who, droning dozily in their hives, jilted all their former lovers, leaving orchards barren and fields fallow, until even the very earth trembled in anticipation.

Peter Hanink is a college professor who lives in Long Beach, California.

'Signals' by Michelle Furnace Brosius

Poised like a discus thrower, my husband hurls the sandwich-board sign advertising $5 beers at the bar window. The flimsy plastic pings off the glass. He shouts, fists curling, "Stop fucking with me!” We have come on a whim, lured by cheap alcohol, escaping the apartment and its sulfuric smell from lingering arguments. But the bar is closed. As a child, I'd stand frozen in our hallway, chest taut, listening for my father's drunken prowl, his rage echoing through the house. My husband circles the darkened bar window, an animal on the loose. Behind me, the crossing signal beeps. Walk.

Michelle Furnace Brosius is a writer who lives in beautiful Oregon with her husband and two cats. Her stories and essays have appeared in Roi Fainéant, Bending Genres, Scarlet Leaf Review, the (late) personal finance site The Billfold, Medium, and other places. Follow her at @michellefb.bsky.social

'Rise, Tip, Fall' by Dana Cann

It’s nearly eleven, the time we go to bed, but you want to walk to the ocean. I follow your lead—coat (yours is your full-length down), hat (the black cap our daughter knitted for you one Christmas), boots. You take my gloved hand in yours and lead me down the front walk. The streetlight cycles off. Shelly, our puppy, perched on the back of the couch, wonders where we’re going, and for once I resist the urge to narrate aloud what she’s thinking.

Our neighbors’ houses are dark. The sky is moonless. Stars wink between racing clouds. You lead me down to the ocean, the black mass at the end of the street. It grows larger. White caps blossom. Waves rise, tip, fall, illumined by the lights along the beach road where a car trundles past before we cross, silent down the wood planks to the soft sand the waves won’t reach except in the fiercest storms, the highest tides. The wind gusts, stings our eyes. Mine water, even in mild weather. We turn our backs until they subside. You lead me down, and, when we’re close enough, when you’re satisfied we’re close enough, you hook your arm in mine. Darkness descends, envelops, seals off distances, though I sense these, too, as we gaze out into the vast, near-infinite depths, while behind us the wind has shifted, our neighbors sleep, the bars along the beach road close, and our children, adults now, in different time zones, live lives we can only imagine, can only compare to memories from when we were young, and hope they’re okay as we were okay and sometimes happy. You flex your elbow and pull me somehow closer. Waves rise, tip, fall. I brace myself against you, boots rooted in the sand.

Dana Cann is the author of the novel Ghosts of Bergen County (Tin House). His short fiction has been published in The Sun, The Massachusetts Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Florida Review, and elsewhere.

'Our Daughters Never Seem to Come Home to Us' by Ani King

We watch from the water as they meet in the morning before the sun comes up. At the edge of the lake, our daughters shed shoes, socks, jeans, hair clips, hair ties, t-shirts, our frantic air-choking fish girls, we watch them run-trip-run half-dive towards us, wearing their matching one piece speedos, all in shades of swim team gold, every one of them a champion, and we used to wear the same color swim suit, and we gave them those breast-strokes, not that they appreciate it, we birthed them all sleek as eels, our girls untethered by waves, they slip under, we wait for them to surrender to the suck-pull of the weedy lake bottom, didn’t we feel the same rip currents that stroke their sleek calves and tug-tangle all that hair; and every time, our girls turn back, in the slippery light of the disappearing moon, together as one towards shore, and it’s on their faces, the weight of turning back towards morning and the sticky, grasping hands of children, the open, waiting mouths of lovers, our daughters are dragged under the hours, under breakfast and laundry and dog walking, homework-helping, husband-talking, all of it rising tidal, crashing over, and we wonder do our daughters drive by lakes, oceans, rivers, and see us waving, do they have to try not to jerk the wheel, to abandon the car, doors gaping open, leaving babies groceries dry cleaning, we wonder are they like us, when will they say yes to leaping over the guardrails, yes to shedding their bodies, we wonder are they coming home soon?

Ani King (they/them) is a queer, gender non-compliant writer, artist, and activist from Michigan. They can be found at aniking.net, or trying to find somewhere to quietly finish reading a book without interruptions.

'Before the Flood' by Sara Fraser

Before the Flood:

A delivery of fencing arrived in my neighbor’s yard. The sky low and yellow as a corn-fed chicken breast. I approached the wall that separated our properties, and asked did he really think fences would keep out water? He sticks his chin in the direction of his house and says if I want answers I should talk to his wife, a gal I’ve seen around town a bit; her eyes shimmer blue when they peek out from under funky long lashes.

Last week I was behind her at CVS when she plunked an air purifier on the counter and said it was a present for her man. She told the cashier he’d been sneezing nonstop.

What did he do to deserve her?

She turned and smiled like she recognized me but wasn’t sure where from.

Was I crazy to think you can’t stop water with a fence?

To get over there, I’d have to walk along the sidewalk, and the wind was already sweeping through, ahead of the storm. I turned to go back inside, but then she was at their door, fluttering lashes and a cup of something steaming in her hand. If I asked, I knew she’d have a kind answer, though probably inaccurate. Neighbor says, kind of gruff, “I gotta get this done,” and leans down to slice through the plastic tape holding the boards together.

I nod and go back to my own house, start moving electrical appliances to the second floor.

Sara Fraser has published two novels, Long Division and Just River. Both are available wherever books are sold online. She splits her time between Spain and Boston.