Flash

A HOLE TO DIE IN by Sarah Butler

August 7, 2024

The Yucca Valley had plenty of pool cleaners, but none as good as him. Jeb started cleaning pools because he didn’t want to sell meth like his cousins Rob, Kyle, Tyler, and Clay. He liked the roteness of skimming the surface of the water with his net, the reading of pH strips, and the satisfaction of a job well done. He’d cleaned some of the most beautiful pools in the desert – he even did the one at Sinatra’s house once. But what he really wanted to do was own a vintage cowboy boot store. He was born and raised

FRUIT AND FRACTIONS by Taleen V.

August 5, 2024

On the table apricots blush, sliced to their stony seeds. A faded bowl of walnut brains sits untouched and long wet spears of cucumber sweat beside them. Goods grown right here in Fresno, just like you. The professor picks you up by the waist and sets you next to the spread. His beard is silver spangled and his brows touch. He resembles your uncle Varouj who plays the piano at Christmastime, except this man doesn’t smile as much. Until his grab, it had not crossed your mind to be afraid. “You can always trust Armenians, they’re family,” your mom once

BUD SMITH by Z.H. Gill

August 2, 2024

My brother Max told me about Bud Smith. The writer, not the baseball player, the one who’d pitched a no-hitter in his rookie year for the St. Louis Cards. For a brief time, I thought he was the baseball player, who’d pitched a no-hitter in his rookie year—on 9/3/01, eight days before fair Seth MacFarlane missed his plane at solemn Boston Logan—for the St. Louis Cards. But he was not him. Who else was he not? Bud Smith was not Indiana Jones*. He was not Jerry Springer, Bud Smith. He was not Josh Hartnett, nor Josh Hartnett’s character, Captain Danny

NINE by Matthew Feasley

August 1, 2024

A week before mom’s clinic burned to the ground, my older brother Sam brought home an octopus from the Greek grocery where he worked. After his shift, he had set the octopus on one of the shiny tables in the back and studied it beneath a wash of fluorescent lights. He looked at its hollow head, its body, and its missing eyes. Everything seemed ‘normal’ until he noticed its arms. Sam counted them again and again to be sure. Then he threaded the animal carefully into his backpack and hobbled out of the store to catch his bus. At home

LOOK FOR A WHILE by Lamb

July 31, 2024

LILING, 66 It is not wise to swim so soon after a meal, I know, but I have never experienced anything quite like the sensation of floating in a swimming pool with a full belly, which is—and I didn’t realize this until I lay here pushing my pale legs down into the water, watching them spring back up like ice—in essence, just another pool containing smaller bits of floating flesh. And all this occurring on the deck of a cruise ship floating in the Pacific, Earth’s largest body of water? Well. I may go again tomorrow after lunch. DAN, 37

ON THE OFF CHANCE THERE ARE BONES IN THE SOUP by Emilee Prado

July 29, 2024

Last month, Robert Ladlo was accidentally promoted at work. He’d been standing in the empty head office, glancing around covetously when one of the new employees asked if he’d be taking over for the boss who was away exploring concerns about early onset dementia. Ladlo said yes. When everyone began treating Ladlo as if he were the new boss, it became true. Ladlo took this stroke of luck as divine right, a fated ascent. Over the next few weeks, he began to stir the pot just to see if anyone would stop him. Once, he spat his gum into the

PURGATORY by Amy DeBellis

July 11, 2024

Julia starts noticing David when he kills the fish in their bio classroom. The class finds it on the floor when they come in, stranded in a too-shallow puddle of water, tiny mouth open in a last desperate gasp. Like everyone else, David wears an expression of puzzled sorrow, his pale eyes wide with sympathy, but nobody besides Julia notices the spots of water on his sleeves. The thin trapdoor of his smile, flickering in and out of existence. So Julia starts noticing other things, too. She registers the curve of his lips, the cupid’s bow as pronounced as those

CATFISHING by Bridge Lower

July 4, 2024

Catfishing happens at night and the bait smells like blood and cheese. We fished for what felt like hours in a cloud of mosquitoes, and we only caught one fish. We pulled it to the floor of the boat, and I couldn’t believe it actually looked like a cat. It fought hard, flailing wildly. The man called it a beastly motherfucker, his foul language thrilling my sister Ellen and me. “You know catfish got tastebuds all over their bodies?” he said. “They’re just swimmin’ tongues. You lick one and he’s lickin’ you right back.” “Gross!” we screamed. “Why would you

SUCKLE, SWALLOW by em x. liu

July 3, 2024

In my mouth, your name is silt and sweet freshwater, like the stream that bounded you and yours into that space the rest of the village didn’t dare cross. Yong’en—Yong—En—Yongen. 永 for forever and 恩 for a kindness. It must have meant my kindness; you have never been kind to me, my Yongen. When we were girls you would organize the other kids so that as soon as my attention flagged, they would peel away from me–your long hair and shrill laughter flickering on the wind at the front of the pack. It was a shock every time, a reminder

THE COPY by Lana Frankle

July 1, 2024

Delusion of control has long been a fascinating yet unnerving symptom of schizophrenia and other psychoses, as well as derealization and depersonalization disorders. While some antipsychotics do show promise in treating this symptom, treatment resistance is common and can be stymying, and no therapy specific to it exists. The inventive paradigm described here will be a game–changer for people with this condition. The inspiration for our intervention comes from the famous, decades–old experiments by Benjamin Libet, who observed using electrophysiological techniques that the neural impulse that generates motor actions occurs several hundred milliseconds prior to the action, and more importantly,