Fiction
The Marionette Collection
Being civically engaged, she began encouraging him to offer marionettes to charity events, fund raisers, parties. They began their marriage this way and the practice continued for years.
Section
Flash Fiction
Showing 25-48 of 115 pieces
Fiction
Robin’s Egg
Sarah’s mother kissed her on the forehead. “I hadn’t really thought about it.
Fiction
Canned Laughter
When Binoy the male nurse joined, Maami shifted with her grandkids and forgot Maama completely. Once, when she accidentally confronted her now forty-kilo husband in the corridor
Fiction
Mother
The only thing you could never bear about your mother was that she’d always been a terrible liar, an atrociously unconvincing one. She’d only half-look..
Fiction
Sunday Mornings
S is confusing my count of how many wrinkles I have found under my eyes when I smile. He sits at the edge of the bathtub, unbothered about lines, creases, or drooping at the corners of the mouth. I continue with the lined-up bottles of toners and essences and serums…
Fiction
My First Love was Long
At home, he refused to drink his milk. I tried different kinds: organic, fat-free, almond. I studied the pamphlet, which advised against force-feeding, so I made him a milk bath and soaked him for several days.
Fiction
Between the Woodchips and Me
My sister was supposed to come swing with me. She could push me so high that I would forget there was a world below awaiting my return. She coaxed me to jump every time.
Fiction
Column Five
Kill or be killed here in this foreign land, he fires at the first silhouette he spies through the sights of his Kalashnikov.
Fiction
Collateral Damage
He carried his leather briefcase as always. It was the one we bought for Father’s Day and the only one he would ever own.
Fiction
Dance of the Autumn Leaves
I raise my hand as if to slap his left cheek and the boy winces. A tinge of regret travels from my palm up to my headache. Both the boy’s smile and the cat simultaneously fall to the ground.
Fiction
White Guilt
I don’t know how this happened; I woke up and found myself like this. I have only just now begun to devote thought to why I am in this state really. My initial waking thoughts were prostrate and bowed to the immense pain of cracking open my oophorm eyes.
Fiction
Minha
She drew their faces in greater detail on the opposite page, as if she had severed and separated their heads.
Fiction
What it Feels like to Still Have Time
Do you chew Bazooka bubble gum still? Do you wear Converse high-tops and carry around erasers that smell like strawberry? Do popsicle sticks fall out of your pockets when you do cartwheels on the path behind the ravine?
Fiction
Where The Heart Is
Mom doesn’t throw things away, not since the time she got rid of a waterproof travel bag thinking she would never need one, until her knitting group made a trip to the river and everyone but she had a waterproof travel bag. Never again, she vowed.
Fiction
Nasima
The next morning, I found Zakaria and, by the afternoon, Nasima was in my flat swabbing the floors in a green sari. She was dark and thin with high cheekbones and deep-set eyes that sparked. She told me she was twenty-five, a year my senior. She had three children and a husband who peddled a cycle rickshaw.
Fiction
Sounds Heard in a Tent at Night
I am not sure if they made any sound. Returning to the tent, I poked my head into the flap and saw myself still asleep on the ground. With an emerging daze at the back of my head, I looked up from the bag to see that there was nobody at the tent’s entrance. It was zipped shut.
Fiction
The Closet
I was fond of that little place. There were costume-like clothes dangling above my head, willowy branches of a protective forest, and the walls formed an impenetrable edifice, bumpy and cold like Rapunzel’s tower. The clothes smelled of starch and my mother’s youth.
Fiction
Dogs Chasing Cars
Another car goes by; this time, the puppies move together toward the shiny wheel and break off in sync like a flock of geese. The leader sends out signals, and they move in unison. Finally, they stop and stare at me. I would take one back home with me if I could. They were that cute.
Fiction
Moondredge
Mother’s hands hide her face. Her mother, with her arm around her, repeats the same sentence over and over. The television blares, reporters reporting the rig was aflame, exploded, and sunk. They say they’re all gone. No survivors. They say it over and over.
Fiction
Insides and Outsides
The next day, I asked her what she meant. She stooped down, and I felt the warm air leave her lungs in a soft wind. “Sometimes when our insides don’t match our outsides, our bodies become prisons. When that happens, we become sad. My insides don’t match my outsides, love.”
Fiction
Sounding
What if they did hear me far away, in France, India, or China? What if they ran around yelling, “Who is making that noise? Where is it coming from? What is it?” Maybe they would think it was an animal and set traps, or the radio and look for a different station.
Fiction
Celestial Harvest
She crosses the front yard, pushes the gate open, reaches the graveled sidewalk, and sits down on the curb. The heat weighs heavily on the street; molten mirages shimmer on the pavement. Stilled air, tampered sounds.Christiane’s kitchen, with its human comforts and knowable scale, seems far now.
Fiction
Just a Shirt
The third time he put on the shirt he didn’t look in the mirror at all, and that almost made it okay, except that he knew that if he looked in the mirror, he would see his frizzy hair and his pasty skin turned blotchy…
Fiction
The Astronomer’s Garden
And so, the astronomer and the inquisitor pulled and tilled and spread and sowed until Emile’s backyard was one colossal labyrinth of garlic and radishes and roses and towering sunflowers that shaded the humble beds of lettuce and trumpeted the arrival of the spring winds.