Debut Flash: 'Sweet Fruit for Tired Wings' by Mizuki Yamagen

I turn the soil with my spade. This year, we’re attempting strawberries, snap peas, and tomatoes, in addition to what we grew last year. 

“Wrennie, you want to help plant these?” 

My eleven-year-old mmhmms at me. 

She flips through the pages of Birds of Britain and Europe spread heavy across her lap, announcing, “Sylvia atricapilla—the Eurasian Blackcap.” 

She gestures at two new arrivals. One on our apple tree. Another in the branches of our soft-budding lilac. 

“Mum, I think they’re a pair. That one’s a male. And that’s a female.” 

Karim jokes she’ll be the next Attenborough. I say, better, because she’ll be a woman.

“That’s lovely. Maybe we’ll have some baby birds soon.” I loosen the plants from their black plastic containers, breaking apart small rootballs. 

“Some Blackcaps overwinter in the Middle East, then migrate here for breeding.” 

Karim thinks strawberries are audacious to grow ourselves. But imagine, I said, how sweet they’ll be from our own garden. 

“That’s where Auntie lives, right? Where the war is?” 

Eleven’s a tricky age. They read a whole lot, devouring entire encyclopedias. When you think they’re not listening, they are. They’re too old to be lied to. Too young to die. 

I wonder what I should say to be a good mother. I think of my sister-in-law with Wren’s cousins, holding them close as booming ash threatens from the sky. I wonder what these birds have seen.

She comes up beside me, pulling on her gardening gloves, bright blue ones adorned with birds in flight. 

“I reckon those Blackcaps will like the strawberries.” 

I hand her a shovel, my bangs falling over my eyes. I think of all the mothers—and what they’re supposed to say to their children. I think of the sweet summer fruit. 

“That’ll be lovely, won’t it?”

 

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Mizuki Yamagen is a writer from Japan, living in the Rocky Mountains. In her writing, Mizuki explores people in strange places and strange times. Her poetry can be found at Eye to the Telescope. Her writing is forthcoming at HAD.

'Break Point' by Coleman Bigelow

Let’s say I never set out on that shiny Schwinn that I thought was a special present from my dad, but which turned out to be just a free ten-speed the dealer had “thrown in” with his new truck. And let’s say I wasn’t taking the bike to the tennis courts because I had no other ride. Then we can forget how I hung my tennis racket through the handbrake wires, and how the racket dropped into the front wheel as I was flying down that hill and stopped the bike dead and sent me hurtling over the handlebars.

Because, if I’m not on that bike, then I’ll never land helmetless head first on the pavement and lay sprawled there for minutes trying to make sense of what’s happened until I hear car brakes and open my eyes to a find a strange woman kneeling beside my road-rashed body. And we can fast forward right past my parents’ eventual arrival at the hospital, and ignore the curses under Mom’s breath and the whiskey on Dad’s. 

Actually, let’s drop the bike altogether, and imagine that my dad does drive me to the courts. And that for the entire drive, Dad talks to me about building a game plan and sticking to a strategy. And while we’re stretching things, suppose my dad stays to watch. He sits there on the bleachers in his Izod and visor and cheers for my good shots and throws his big hairy arm around my sweaty shoulders. And if Dad’s too much to ask for, then I’ll settle for making it to the match on my own. I’ll settle for winning the whole tournament, and having a scouting pro who “likes my potential” and who begs me to board at his training camp—a camp which just so happens to be far, far from home.

 

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Coleman Bigelow's work has appeared recently, or is upcoming, in Brilliant Flash Fiction, Cleaver, Flash Boulevard, Ghost Parachute, Gooseberry Pie and NFFD. Find more at: www.colemanbigelow.com or follow him on Instagram @cbigswrites and Bluesky @cbigs.bsky.social.

'Grief Don’t Leap Years, Dickhead' by Angela Joynes

Tonight, February 28th, I turn fourteen and me and Chik are wearing matching Roots hoodies under jean jackets, sitting on Halifax’s Citadel Hill freezing our balls off. Every blare of the harbour’s foghorn shudders beer out of my Alpine can.

One year ago today, or maybe tomorrow, depending on how you count, Dad waited for us to climb Bus 22, then he went to the veranda, turned his plastic blue Adirondack chair to the lawn, and fired. Volunteers hosed the blood-and-brains snow, but for weeks our gutters dribbled pink icicles.

Chik pokes my elbow. “Hey, look up, buddy. At least this ain’t leap year. Let’s go warm up.”  

My answer is a long, silent cigarette-frozen-breath cloud. I used to talk, even laugh, never would’ve dreamt of smoking or drinking.

At Dad’s funeral reception, our lousy PE teacher who can’t even sink a layup or free throw, whispered, “Good thinking, though, doing it on the 29th so the kids only have to face the date once every four years. And outdoors is much tidier.”

I heard every scuzzed word from his greasy ham lips and I charged. 

Only one brisk shin kick connected the sucker before Chik hauled me off. Does Pukie Pelkey actually think that an anniversary every four years lessens the pain? Grief don’t leap years, dickhead. Maybe leap year mourning is even worse — Dad missing, calendar date missing too.

Every day my guts slick and snake through black freezing fog, at once hungry and full, loving Dad, missing Dad, hating Dad. When, I want to ask Chik, will this ever end, but I don’t. Chik’s as clueless as Pelkey about leap years and shit, but at least he’s here freezing his ass off.

 

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Angela Joynes, a disabled Canadian who publishes short fiction, lives for laughter and beautiful words. What more needs to be said?

'Violets' by Iain Grinbergs

My fiancée leaps out of the armchair and raps on the living room window. “Hey!” she shouts.

I say, “What now?” 

“Look,” she says. 

A Pomeranian’s in the violets by our mailbox. It cocks its leg. She raps on the glass again. The dog slinks into the nearby azaleas.

“Whose damn dog is that?” she says. 

“The corner house’s.”

“Go talk to them,” she says. “I just planted those.” 

I open the front door and step outside. The dog pops its head out, almost grinning, and then yaps. “Get!” I shout, grabbing the broom and shaking it, my socks soaked from the grass. Across the road, a black-haired girl on a pink bike giggles. The iridescent streamers flutter. 

Then I realize: I’m becoming Mr. Walker, the old army vet from childhood who hated even the mailman. After his kids died, he got worse. I once saw him slash my dad’s tires. I never told my parents. I didn’t want to. They were too busy yelling, breaking things. I put the broom back and go inside. 

“It’s in my violets again,” my fiancée says. 

I tell her to stop as I sit down. 

“No,” she says. “My daddy would’ve kicked that dog into Georgia.”

I turn on the TV. A masked man’s robbing a bank. Gunshots. A woman screams and leaps out of her flats. 

“You always avoid things.”

“I don’t.”

“Like the other day,” she says. “It was just a question. For the future.” 

I get back up and grab my keys before getting in the car. My fiancée yells something out of the door and points as I reverse the car, flying backwards, feeling something give. 

 

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Iain Grinbergs (he/they) is a professor of English. Recently, Bottlecap Press published Vanity Twist, his first poetry collection.

'Violets' was first published by Furtive Dalliance Literary Review in 2018.

 

'While Reading My Story about a Girl Fishing with Her Father to My Own Father, He Drums His Fingers' by Debra A. Daniel

“Put a gun in it,” he says. He exhales a cigarette breath even though he hasn’t smoked in months.

“It’s not that kind of story,” I say. “It’s about family connection.”

“Without a gun, you won’t get a movie deal,” he says.

“When you put a gun in a story, someone gets hurt or dies.” I reach for his hand to stop his galloping fingers.

I look into his eyes. Most of him is still there. The opinionated part, at least. He gives me his that’s-the-way-it-is look.

“If the story’s up to snuff, someone has to die,” he says. “It makes readers care.” Our hands let go of each other.

“My stories aren’t about death,” I say.

“Yes, they are. What happens to the fish?”

I sigh. My hands hold each other. 

“Don’t you care about them?” he says.

“I do,” I say. “I’ll revise it so they catch and release.”

Now his fingers on both hands drum. “Cop out,” he says.

I take a deep breath. “It isn’t about fish. It’s supposed to show the father and daughter casting out and reeling each other back. It’s a metaphor for holding onto something elusive.”

“Malarkey,” he says. “Add a gun.”

I clasp my hands as if prayer could help. “No gun,” I say. “If it’s there certain things will happen.” I give him my own that’s-the-way-it-is look.

He raises both hands. “If you put a fish in the story, nobody has to catch it. If you put in a cigarette, nobody has to smoke,” he says. “You’re the writer. Fix it so nobody uses the gun.”

My father—sitting in a wheelchair, stale breath, his fingers drumming—leans toward me. “You can still control your story,” he says. I nod and drum along with him.

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Debra A.Daniel has published two novellas-in-flash, A Family of Great Falls and The Roster (AdHoc Fiction), Woman Commits Suicide in Dishwasher (novel), and two poetry chapbooks, The Downward Turn of August and As Is. She’s a Pushcart and Best Short Fictions nominee. She won The Los Angeles Review short fiction prize, received the SC Arts Commission Poetry Fellowship, the Guy Owen Poetry Prize, and awards from the Poetry Society of SC. Work has been longlisted and shortlisted in many contests and has appeared in: Snow Crow, Legerdemain, LA Review, Smokelong, Kakalak, Inkwell, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River, and others.

'Kindness of Strangers' by Kim Steutermann Rogers

I watch through my third-floor hotel window, drawn to a woman, her back as stiff as the lampposts lining the circular drive, her shoulders set, her black trench coat accented with a striking poinsettia-red woolen hat, maybe Merino wool. She stands curbside, one hand resting on her rollerbag. I watch as the shuttle for O’Hare arrives in a splash of snow and ice, the woman’s reaction a second too late. As she wheels around, I see the slack of her cheeks gray as the salted slush sliding down her coat, and I note something about her as familiar. Sleet waterfalls down, and she raises her face to the pelting sky, and I imagine her saying to God or whoever else she thought ruled her world, “Really? What more? What fucking more?” And, in response, the more is a blast of wind rolling off Lake Michigan and down the alley of the Chicago River and lifting her beautiful hat off her head, and I watch as her shoulders seize. Last spring, post-treatment, with my energy returning, I went for a run along the lake and the same relentless wind ripped off the ball cap I thought I’d cinched tight to my slick head. Now, down below, I watch as another woman emerges from the hotel’s entrance and rushes forward with an umbrella, and the shuttle driver races over with his apology in hand—and the woman’s red hat, waterlogged from the puddle in which it landed. Recovered.

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Kim Steutermann Rogers lives in Hawaii. Her chapbook Denatured: Stories of Change will publish in June 2025 from ELJ Editions. Her writing has published recently in Moon City Review, Ghost Parachute, Gooseberry Pie Lit Magazine, and elsewhere.

 

'The Bluest Feather' by Beth Sherman

When my mother turned jay she screeched from the treetops, waking the neighbors, scaring the toddler next door. Her voice a rusty pump. Her body blue as sapphire, as an energy drink, as the earth viewed from a distant star. Her crest a black necklace. Her eyes flat as stones at the bottom of a river. She’s become aggressive. Become a thief, pilfering the nests of smaller birds, stealing their eggs, scratching shells open with her claws. Become a bully, pushing me backwards with her vein-riddled hands. She doesn’t apologize – can’t remember she’s done it. She says she’s pathetic. She says she’s too old. She screams and whistles, craving attention. Her raucous calls a warning. She won’t stop talking. A chatterer. A liar. She thinks her diagnosis is the stuff of fairy tales. She tells the doctor to f**** himself. Tells me to mind my business. Tells the checkout girl at Shop Rite she’s been kidnapped, been poisoned, been on The Price is Right. In the grass, she digs for ants, scooping them into her beak, barely pausing to breathe before stuffing the next one in. Mid-air, she flies slowly, the wind a ribbon of air. She’s too noisy, too bold. She likes shiny things. To get her attention, I wave a strip of aluminum foil. I coax. I implore. When I’m tired, I play along. At night, she shrieks and I shudder awake, fix us a pot of herbal tea. She buries her seeds where I can’t find them. 

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Beth Sherman’s writing has been published in over 100 literary journals and appears in Best Microfiction 2024. She’s also a multiple Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net nominee. She can be reached on X, Bluesky, or Instagram @bsherm36