Amy Barnes

Amy Barnes has two rescue dogs, two teenagers and one husband. They all both hinder and inspire her writing, but not this piece of flash fiction. She is an associate editor at Fractured Lit and reads for a variety of publications including CRAFT, The MacGuffin and Narratively. Her words live at around 100 sites but she can’t figure out a submission file system that works, so the true number is lost to the ether.

DIVORCED by Amy Barnes

July 21, 2021 · Fiction

A car the size of a house rams our house that’s the size of a house. Thunder from a 1986 Thunderbird shakes me out of my canopy bed to the window to the street. It’s the moment I know my mother is a liar, a big one. She lays there lazy for too long or maybe not long enough, in her satin-sheeted bed and satin-matching lingerie with a man who isn’t her husband or my father. Her lipstick is smeared and our house is too, a brick mouth opened up on one side. When the red lights encircle our house…

Crow Jonah Norlander

TUESDAY AT THE MONASTERY by Amy Barnes

October 27, 2019 · Fiction

We reverently chop up Brother Francisco. Deo Optimo Maximo. After morning prayers, that’s we do on Tuesday. Laid on the dining room table, our former dining partners resemble dinner chickens we used to eat together, reduced to skeletal bones. We carefully cut away flesh and organs and eyeballs and hair. Stripped of their robes, we leave only skulls covered in skin, brains removed as if we are Egyptian mummy makers, not religious brothers. I measure a place for my living hands on the arched crypt walls, bits of his skin clinging like gloves. Laid flat. Stretched out. A hand is…

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