FlashFlood

Saturday, 13 June 2026

'Philodendron' by Emily Hall

After he dies, his daughter places his taxidermied body in the bay window. Tilts him towards the sun like a philodendron. Rubs his leathery lips with Pabst Blue Ribbon.

In death, so in life, she says each morning when she changes his socks. Although, in life, things had been much different. When he was still alive, she’d had it down to a science. The way he walked down a hall. The sudden swing of his words. The uncertain rhythm of her heart.

Now, he’s all surprises. When she weeds in front of the window, he looks with interest at the marigolds and petunias. After dinner, as she washes dishes, he stays quiet while she sings along to showtunes. And sometime later, when a date swings by to pick her up, he watches as she glides down the front path, his brown eyes beaming with approval.

Emily Hall's prose has appeared in places such as Passages North, 100 Word Story, Gooseberry Pie Lit, and Cherry Tree. She has a PhD in English from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, is a prose editor for Pictura Journal, and lives in NC with her husband.

'Night Swimmers' by Karen Regen Tuero

They were the night swimmers dutifully doing their laps in this pool in Buenos Aires on this warm evening because they would never be this young again.

Each time they descended to the pool, in the high rise’s elevator, they could check the backs of their heads in the bright 360 degree mirrors. How much less hair on this ride than on the last? they’d joke to each other. Sixty three years old was not fifty three. But it also was not seventy three, they agreed.

Focus on the moment, she told herself. Maybe meditation is the answer. Her late father, ahead of his time, had taken up that.

Was he as scared as she was of what was ahead? she wondered.

I’m sorry I never asked you. I was busy with my life.

But he never blamed her, she knew. He had been the one who taught her to swim, she thought as, cap on, she dove into the pool.

Karen Regen Tuero has published short fiction in North American Review, New World Writing, Gargoyle, Lunch Ticket, Potomac Review, Iron Horse, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. For links to many of her published stories, go to: https://linktr.ee/kregentuero

'Soybeans' by Jeremy Nathan Marks

F sat on the outside steps. There was no shade but inside was much worse. Several operators had fainted and one had been sick at his machine. F lit a cigarette and stared across the fields. The factory was surrounded by brown soybean fields in all directions. It reminded him of his time at the farm upstate.

F went back inside. The foreman, in shirt sleeves and with a pencil tucked behind his ear, marched up to F and started shouting in his face, as was his habit. F noticed a gold crucifix dangling from the man’s fat neck. He seized it, breaking the chain. Then he tucked the tiny Jesus in his pocket. The foreman’s face turned deep red. He started cursing F’s religion, diet, and personal hygiene. Without a second thought, F flattened the foreman with a jab to his face.

F turned and left the building. No one called after him or tried to stop him, though he was certain he heard applause in the distance.

Outside, the heat was terrific. F strolled to the edge of the fields and plucked a bean pod from a stalk. He bit the end off the pod and chewed on the seeds. They were very flavorful. F had watched the sprayers douse the field many times and he wondered whether that mattered now.

Jeremy Nathan Marks lives in the Great Lakes Region of North America. Recent poetry/prose pop up in places like Studio One, Fifty Word Stories, The Medley, 365 Tomorrows, CommuterLit, and a variety of other spots. Jeremy works in adult education.

Debut Flash: 'Bird Tag' by Nicole Savage

The sky is bright and welcoming today, calling for me to sit outside and enjoy its company. It is early spring, and the season has sprinkled a light dusting of pollen on everything like pixie dust. The birds sing their songs and chase each other around from phone line to phone line in an elaborate game of tag. The trees make abstract art with the light shining through their branches, splaying it out onto the pavement for my enjoyment.

It is harder to see things as they are, to resist metaphor. The birds are not playing tag, they are being territorial. Everything is trying fiercely to survive, and I go and trivialize their efforts with literary devices, even now I anthropomorphize. I think it is my way of trying to survive. I need to believe that nature plays my childhood games.

I don’t want the wind to just blow, I want it to play with my hair, to be imbued with significance, to likewise make me of significance.

The sky is clear and vibrant today, so I decide to enjoy it. It is early spring and there is a fine coating of pollen on everything that sits outside for more than a minute. The birds are active, territorial, and full of song for their mating season. The light shines through the trees, splitting into countless thin beams. I have to focus to be able to differentiate them, lest they all blend together. I squint my eyes at the spectacle of scattered energy. For no good reason, I’ll pay attention.

Nicole Savage (she/her), is a writer and medical student from Memphis, TN, seeking to deepen her understanding of humanity through the arts of medicine and language

'Evergreen' by Athena Law

Without its glittery ornaments the small pine tree looked sad, its now-sparse branches drooping under the last string of fairy lights. I can take it from here, I said, stroking the yellowing needles.

The mantel clock chimed the half hour; nearly midnight. Nearly time. Outside, snow fell on the silent night, streetlamps bathing gold across the white. The rectangular glow of a front door as it opened across the road.

I gently unwound the tangle of wires and tiny bulbs, only losing a few more needles in the process. The moment the last strand came free the tree breathed out, a brief puff of resiny mist.

The clock chimed the three-quarter hour. Movement out in the street as several of my neighbours carefully shuffled their own trees down to the kerb.

Mine wept, oozing fragrant tears as I pulled the nails and the boards from the base of its trunk. It quivered as I smoothed off the rough bark around the base. Hefting it over my shoulder, I carried it down the front path.

Together we stood, waiting and watching. A whistle, which meant a minute to midnight. Wordlessly, we all stepped into the road and lined up our trees. Bedecked artificial versions stared back mutely from behind frosted windows.

See you next year, I whispered against the drifting snow, and my tree shook a branch—already lusher and almost glossy in the lamplight—to drop a single green needle into my hand.

On the stroke of midnight, limping on its weeping stump, it joined the silent procession of pines, spruces and firs moving through the snow-bright night, heading home.

Athena Law is an award-winning short fiction author & poet. She lives on a hill in the idyllic Sunshine Coast hinterland in Queensland, Australia, where she collects pencils and has all her best ideas at midnight. www.athenalawauthor.com.au

'Lunch' by Madison Ellingsworth

An afternoon of eel fishing. Uncle Harry hooked four, reeled them in, and yanked them into the boat. I held the wiffle ball bat and smacked at them without looking. I felt the plastic make contact with their rubbery bodies, and listened to Uncle Harry grunt with exertion as he gripped the rod.

The last one got tangled up in the line. A big knot. Uncle Harry cut the line at the rod's base with a knife as thick as my thumb. The eel smiled up at me with pinprick eyes that were all pupils. Uncle Harry balled the eel and string and blood and eyes up in his hands and threw them overboard. As it sank into the dark, I felt the eel watching me.

I sat on the rotted out seat with the hole in the middle while Uncle Harry sculled us back. Water sloshed out of the eel bucket with each grunt. The blood on the metal boat bottom streaked like rust, and crushed cans floated atop the bloody sea.

Three eels, Uncle Harry said, but just one would fill your belly. He grunted with laughter. I pinned my bat between the boat and bucket as water splashed onto my feet. My grunt was not quite a laugh—more like its nephew. Uncle Harry couldn't tell the difference with the contents of the cans pumping through him.

Water splashed over the lip of the boat, and the cans kissed my ankles, filled with nothing but bloody love. Uncle Harry grunted and grunted as the shore reached its fingers out to us. I tried to forget the big knot settling on the mud down below. But, somewhere down there, I knew the eel was still smiling up.

Madison Ellingsworth is a writer and ceramicist based in Portland, Maine. She has work forthcoming in several magazines, including Salt Hill Journal and Milk Candy Review. Her chapbook, Seven Stories, was published by Sand and Gravel Press in March 2026. More of Madison can be found at madisonellingsworth.com.

'Whisper' by Karen Arnold

In spring, I waded into water so cold it might have stopped a second heart. I let you go, released the soft ash of cremulated bone that was all I had left of you. The sea held me up, rocked and shushed me as you went out into the water like smoke. I shivered on the shore, wet through, brined and rimed with tears and sea salt, the knowledge of your silence bubbling through my veins.

On a summer afternoon, deafened by the fireworks of dahlias, I watch butterflies tremble on purple fingertips of buddleia, listen for you in the soft breath of roses and cut grass. I play back your last voice note until I want to smash my phone with a rock.

In the autumn I stood on the edge of another shore, under a sky purple with thunder heads, waiting for a storm to break. The grasses on the dunes hushed and whispered and the wind stroked the back of my neck just the way you used to. Above my head I saw the smoke of you and the pattern of you, in a murmuration of starlings wheeling through the air in the blaze of a burning copper, four o’clock sky. I thought I might hear your voice in the beating of all those tiny wings and I cried when I could not make out your words.

On a winter night white with frost and sharp-edged loss, when the air is still, paused, suspended in silence and you have been gone for a year, I stand beneath a star burning, year turning sky and I think about your voice, the space where it used to be, memory moving through me like a tide.

Karen Arnold is a writer and child psychotherapist. She came to writing later in life, but is busy making up for lost time. She is fascinated by the way we use narratives and storytelling to make sense of our human experience.