Tag Archives: Flash Nonfiction

Shooter Flash: “Planting Hyacinth Bulbs” by Orah Dawn Levin-Minder

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When brittle leaves begin to fade and fall, my four-year-old son and I go out to plant hyacinth bulbs. My burled joints creak as I plunge a trowel through the soil, revealing naked worms reeling in crisp air, burrowing back through dank holes. “Look at the worms,” I say to my son. He cranes his face into the hole, then pops up, nose covered in soil, a worm writhing between thumb and finger. “Gentle,” I murmur. The worm thrashes on his now-open palm. He hunches over it, crooning, “Hello, sweet worm,” before brushing worm-skin with boy-lips and letting it drop. 

In the spring, we’ll pick the hyacinths and bring them to the grave of a sister he will never meet. I’ll teach him where to find the metal vase for our flowers. Together, we’ll pour water from the jug to fill the vase and splash the stone. With cloths, we’ll rub the dust that settles on the name beneath our open palms. Then he’ll crane his face down to murmur, with gentleness that makes my heart writhe and thrash, “Hello, sweet sister.” I’ll hunch over him like a burled willow weeping brittle leaves. 

*

Orah Dawn Levin-Minder lives in Massachusetts with her partner, their five children, and their giant rescue puppy Elsa. She published a Tiny Love Story in The New York Times, and “Planting Hyacinth Bulbs” originally appeared in River Teeth’s Beautiful Thing series. Instagram: @orah.minder

Shooter Flash: “Loveless” by Travis Turner

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When Charlie Loveless died, they cleaned out his office on the second floor of Wallace Hall and left a box of his old books in the hallway free for the taking. I grabbed all of the Hemingway and Faulkner I could carry and took them back to my dorm room. I placed them on the shelf and read the annotations when I felt lonely. Dr. Loveless was the first English professor I met when I moved to campus that summer. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to major in, but after a few weeks in his class I knew English was a possibility. His Introduction to Literature class was my second class of the day after getting done with Intermediate Algebra. Ol’ Charlie talked a lot about mortality in his lectures. When he was a kid growing up in the hills of Tennessee, he played a game with the other kids. The fainting game. Someone would wrap their arms around him from behind and squeeze until his breath was almost gone and the light grew dim. He told us about teaching at FSU when the Bundy murders happened. Between lectures on Twain and Bierce, he would talk about his golf game and drinking bourbon at the country club. When half the class skipped out on Friday mornings, he would give us “Elvis quizzes” and ask us questions about the King. It was ok if we didn’t know the answers; he’d fill in the blanks for us and we would write them down for full credit. 

Now I find myself teaching in the land of perpetual youth. The sun never sets here. Everyone stays eighteen to twenty-two years old and the party never stops. Desoto must’ve been onto something when he went searching for the fountain of youth near Tuscaloosa. Maybe he should’ve been nicer to the Black Warrior and he would have learned the secrets of the land. No one ever fails here. Straight As by the tens of thousands, even if no one makes it to class. Forget to turn that paper in? Forget to turn anything in? That’s ok, because youth is wasted on the young. Time is money and there’s plenty of both to go around. Our football team wins every game 100-0 and we still rabidly cheer. No one ever really wins – it is a game of constantly chasing your own tail. No one ever remembers. Memories are washed clean with each cycle so there is never so much as a stain on our whites. 

No one ever forgets. The ones that lose their way are forced to leave and remember the age of immortality with a sigh. No one matters. We are all interchangeable parts on a never-ending cog. No one is insignificant. We all have meaning and purpose, hopes and dreams. Unlimited protagonists chasing our own adventures in the great storybook. No one is ignorant. We all know the stakes. Leaving is never an option once your cup runs over. I may apply for a job at the school for the blind, Lord knows I have enough experience. When the lights grow dim for me, I hope someone will do me the honor of picking up my books from the hall and placing them on shelves of their own. 

*

Travis Turner is a native of Alabama’s Black Belt. He teaches literature and writing at the University of Alabama. He spends his spare time with his cats and in his garden. He can be found on most social media at @travisturnerii. 

Shooter Flash: “Sole Survivor” by Alexandra O’Sullivan

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I parked the car after the school run and took the core of the apple I’d been eating to the guinea pigs on my way past. There, at end of the cage, lay a potato-shaped lump.  

“Oh no,” I said as I knelt to confirm what I already knew, that Nutmeg, the matriarch of our pig family, had died. 

“What?” grunted my fourteen-year-old son as he slumped past on his way to the house.

“Nutmeg has died.”

“Oh,” he said, his voice rising to betray his teenage apathy. 

He wavered a moment, glancing toward the cage, then turned and continued his slouch toward the house, blue school bag slung over his shoulder.

I buried her under the tea tree beside the graves of her two children, Storm and Gumnut. Her body was still warm as I cradled it into her final resting place. I had buried her children quickly, wanting to get the gruesome task over and done with, but with Nutmeg I lingered, crouching by the hole to stroke her silky, brown coat and say my silent goodbye.  

It wasn’t just that she was my favourite, though she was, unashamedly, my favourite. It was that her death signified more than the end of her life, it was the end our life as a family with guinea pigs. I knew that her husband, Flash, the sole survivor, would have to be rehomed, unless I could borrow a companion pig to help him to see out his days.

Guinea pigs are social creatures. They have been known to die from solitary confinement. In some places it is illegal to have only one. I’d long worried about what to do with the last remaining, but I never expected it to be Flash, the frail old patriarch with a slow stride and a cataract, who’d outlive his wife and children. 

My son was eight when we got Nutmeg and Flash. Nick was a good age to take on the responsibility of pet ownership. A good age to use pets to learn about the birds and the bees. I grappled with the questionable ethics of backyard breeding, before deciding to allow them to have at least a litter, and to use it as a learning experience.

Before the litter was even born, we’d developed a habit of sitting for long periods by the cage. It was meditative, watching them bustle about, up and down the ramp, through the plastic tunnel, in and out of the blue igloo. Via google we learnt that the hilarious growling whole-body vibrate Flash did when near Nutmeg is called rumble-strutting, and it indicates affection. We learnt that the eccentric sudden leap accompanied by a mid-air twist was called popcorning, and it indicates happiness. I felt a vicarious surge of joy every time they popcorned. 

When the first litter was born, Nutmeg came into her own as a mother, guiding her four babies down the ramp and chatting to them, constantly, with encouraging squeaks, while they bopped along behind her with a chorus of chirpy peeps. 

“Mummy, Mummy, Mummy, Mummy…” I joked to Nick as we watched them. 

It was easy to make up words for them. They were constantly chirruping, peeping and making a hysterical high-pitched scream, called ‘wheeking,’ whenever we walked into the backyard, that Nick and I translated as, “Feed us!! Feed us!!” 

Flash was also frequently rumble-strutting at Nutmeg, even after two litters and the ‘snip, snip’ operation. 

“Hey there, pretty lady,” I imagined him saying with a low drawl as he sidled up alongside her, vibrating.  

They were a dream couple. They raised two litters of healthy babies and got to keep one from each.  During the pandemic, they got an extension on their home. Nick, aged ten, spent hours building them mazes and miniature playground equipment from scrap wood, though Flash always preferred his blue igloo, humping it along on his back like a turtle in a way that made us laugh. 

Years later, as I was feeding them their hand-picked grass, a job that had long been my sole responsibility, Flash humped his igloo along to reach the stalks, and I pointed it out to Nick, aged fourteen, as he headed towards the car.

“Flash is being a turtle.”

“Huh,” he grunted, barely achieving a syllable. 

“Nothing.”

When the second daughter died, I told Nick we’d lost another pig as I made dinner. He’d just returned from his girlfriend’s house, and I expected a monosyllabic reply, but he made actual eye contact with me as he gasped, “Not Nutmeg?” 

“No,” I said, resisting the urge to hug him. “Not Nutmeg.”

When Nutmeg did die, I arranged for Flash to move in with my friend’s pig, who was coincidently also recently bereaved, having lost her sister to a dog attack. It seemed like fate. I sent Nick, who was at his girlfriend’s house, a video captioned Flash meeting Luna.  

I imagined him watching the clip of Flash rumble-strutting up to his new woman. My phone beeped. I read his reply. 

Nice. 

*

Alexandra O’Sullivan lives in Regional Victoria, Australia. She writes fiction, creative non-fiction, articles and reviews. Her work has appeared in publications such as Westerly, Meanjin and The Big Issue Fiction Edition. She works as a high school English teacher and was recently included in the anthology Teacher, teacher published by Affirm Press. Her current work-in-progress is an anthology of interconnected school stories. Instagram: @alexandraosullivan84

Shooter Flash: “Sabbath” by Rebecca Klassen

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Mum called it Suicide Sunday and had done so since she was a girl.      

‘A day so boring you wanted to kill yourself,’ she told me. I wondered if other parents said similar things to their teenagers. 

Throughout her childhood, she’d adhered to the Sabbath traditions of duty and no play, though this was more under her parents’ guidance than God’s. Post church, she would sit on the stairs in her best clothes and listen to the heathen neighbour children through the wall, blowing recorders and laughing. She’d been round there once for tea. The mother had given them sugar sandwiches and let them gouge holes in the lawn with sticks. 

‘Mind my bloody azaleas,’ the mother had told them. Mum had repeated ‘bloody’ to her mother and had never been allowed back.

When my grandfather died, Mum was a freshly divorced, single parent. With grandfather gone, Nana expected Mum to attend Suicide Sundays again with me in tow. The new criteria no longer required Mum at church, though we were told it would be nice if we came along once in a while. Only knitting, reading, and watching Songs of Praise were permitted in Nana’s chintzy sanctum. Watching other programmes risked a brazen ‘hell’ or ‘bugger’ slipping into the atmosphere to sully the day.   

One late autumn Suicide Sunday, I pivoted round and round on my backside in front of Nana’s gas fire, hoping that, like a rotisserie chicken, I would eventually cook on all sides. Nana worked her knitting needles. Mum stretched so that her feet almost touched the fire’s orange bars, the heat making her tights give off a plastic smell. I watched Mum nodding off, imagining having to grow up here every day. A new family lived next door with the sounds of computer game music, squabbling, and giggling coming through the walls.   

As the gas fire reddened my cheeks, I suddenly stopped pivoting as I remembered the crumpled piece of paper in my schoolbag. 

‘Mum?’

‘Hmm?’ 

‘I’ve got cookery class at school tomorrow. I’ve got to take ingredients in.’

Mum’s eyes flicked open. Nana’s needles stopped.

‘What have you got to make?’ 

‘Apple crumble. Sorry, I forgot.’

Both women were on their feet.

‘What’ve you got at home?’ Nana asked Mum.

‘No apples, that’s for sure.’ 

Nana went to the kitchen, Mum close behind. Cupboards banged over notes of infuriation.

They returned, Mum carrying a bag. 

‘Nana’s only got Braeburn apples. We’ll have to see if we’ve got the other ingredients at home.’

‘Can we go to the shop for the rest?’ I asked.

Nana shook her head.

‘You should’ve told me yesterday,’ Mum said to me. I’d always wanted to leave Nana’s before Songs of Praise, but not like this. Mum apologised to Nana.

Nana shrugged. ‘Sometimes life throws us trials.’

The drive home was quiet. Intermittently, I apologised. Mum said she knew I was sorry, yet there was no talk of forgiveness. 

‘It’s always up to me to sort these things, never your father,’ she said. After that, I stopped apologising. 

I couldn’t picture where my father was or who he might be with, and I didn’t know when I would see him again. Even though her father was dead, Mum had the same dilemmas, but the similarities didn’t unite us. 

When we got home, Mum put the butter, wrapped in its golden foil, on the kitchen table.   

‘We need oats too,’ I said tentatively, ‘because it’s a healthy crumble.’ 

‘Bring me the recipe.’

I brought her the forgotten list, which she read while I brought Nana’s bag of Braeburns to the table. Mum weighed and decanted ingredients into plastic tubs. Little white clouds billowed; granules were spilt. She banged the cinnamon jar on the counter. The clumps wouldn’t burst, so she threw it in the bin. I put the tubs into the bag with the apples. The butter remained unweighed on the table. Mum put away the scales and muttered as something tumbled from the cupboard. 

‘Where shall I put the butter?’ I asked. Mum rounded on me as more clutter fell from the cupboard. 

‘Up my arse!’ she yelled. 

‘Okay, but you’ll have to come to school tomorrow.’

My words floated precariously into the air. They’d been a gamble, particularly on a day we didn’t laugh. Mum said nothing as she put her face in her hands. The silence built over the hum of the fridge. I wanted to cram the words back into my mouth and fill my cheeks with the trouble they’d caused. Then her shoulders shook as her legs folded. Her hands dropped. She was laughing, shaking all over.

*

Rebecca Klassen is co-editor of The Phare. Her work has featured in more than forty publications including Mslexia Best Short Fiction, Popshot, Ellipsis Zine, Burningword, Barren, and The Wild Word. She has won the London Independent Story Prize, and was shortlisted for the Oxford Flash Prize and the Laurie Lee Prize. She regularly performs her work at Cheltenham Literature Festival and Stroud Book Festival.