POO ON YOU — KIM MAGOWAN

My husband wants our four-year-old Hannah to know how to spell. Charley wants Hannah to explain to him, when he refused to read her the Five Little Monkeys book neither of us can stand and she said, “Well, poo on you!”, whether she meant “pooh” or “poo.” “Pooh” with an H, for Charley, would be sweet in a Victorian, Alice-in-Wonderland kind of way. “Poo,” though, would be crude and scatological; “poo” would require a time-out and consequences.
           I tell him he’s being ridiculous, but then the whole world is ridiculous. The other day Hannah told us very solemnly that at her pre-school, “‘Ha ha’ is a bad word.”
           Any man who could call a four-year-old “crass” and “disrespectful” is questionable. Any man who gets all red in the face over trifles is by definition trifling. “With an H or not? What do you figure?” he keeps asking me, as if it matters, as if the answer isn’t obvious.
           I want to tell him that in Spain, getting shat on by birds is considered a sign of good fortune, that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with poo on you, but Charley is beyond the reach of humor.
           I have many reasons to leave Charley, not the least of which is I am crazy about my boss, George, but if I leave (and I say “if” because of Hannah, and because I do love Charley, in a worn-out way), I’ll tell him that our parenting styles don’t mesh, and that will be at least partly true. I already know my exit line.

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Kim Magowan lives in San Francisco and teaches in the Department of Literatures and Languages at Mills College. Her short story collection Undoing (2018) won the 2017 Moon City Press Fiction Award. Her novel The Light Source (2019) was published by 7.13 Books. Her fiction has been published in Booth, Forge, The Gettysburg Review, Passages North, Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, and many other journals. Her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf's Top 50. She is the Editor-in-Chief and Fiction Editor of Pithead Chapel. www.kimmagowan.com

GIRLS IN SPACE BE WARY — MEGHAN PHILLIPS

There are 53 known humanoid species in the galaxy for you to fall in love with. Moody boys with scowls and deep forehead ridges, who don’t have words for “I love you” in their language. The closest thing sounds like a threat. Beautiful girls with powder blue skin and silver-white hair. Two perfect antennae that wave like corn stalks in the wind. You fall in love with a red-headed engineer from Indiana. 

Maybe you work hard to attain a position on the flagship of the Fleet—top honors from the Academy, a notable first encounter mission. You still have to wear a skin-tight jumpsuit, the brass pips of your rank glinting along your collarbone. Crewmen watch the curve of your ass as you bend down to check a thermocoupler. You have the highest accuracy in your squadron with a phaser pistol, yet they can’t remember to call you by your rank. The shine of your pips draws their eyes to the swell of your breasts. Like lights on a landing deck, your lover says when you’re finally alone. When she can run her tongue over those little bumps. When she calls you lieutenant commander as she peels the jumpsuit from your shoulders.   

There are so many ways to die in space. Ways to lose oxygen, to asphyxiate—small tears, a loose hose, a slow leak. You can freeze to death in a shadow. Cosmic rays could eat away at your soft insides. Away missions go wrong. First contacts turn hostile. Your lover goes to her bunk one night with a headache and just doesn’t wake up.

Maybe you leave the Fleet, turn in your jumpsuit, resign your commission. Take command of your own ship, a small freighter running supplies from Lunar 1 to Jupiter Station. You program the onboard computer with the voice of your lover. Her voice reciting nav coordinates, announcing incoming hails from other ships. Alone in your bunk you imagine your lover at the helm steering you through the stars. You stroke yourself wet to a digitized version of her voice. Grief’s lonely algorithm. 

There are so many ways to get lost in space. 

Maybe you leave space altogether. Leave your ship in a space dock and return to Earth. Move to Indiana. Program your virtual assistant to call you lieutenant commander. At night, you stand on your porch and look at the stars. Try to find familiar paths. You think about all the ways you could die on Earth. Wonder if you’ve only exchanged one set of dangers for another. You think about the 53 known humanoid species you could have fallen in love with, and mourn the one human you did.

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Meghan Phillips the author of the flash fiction chapbook, Abstinence Only (Barrelhouse). She is a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow. You can find her writing at meghan-phillips.com and her tweets at @mcarphil.

RED CORDUROY COAT — AMBER RAY GARCIA

Outside, near a plum tree, small hands rub rust-orange chrysanthemum heads into palms. Little ravaged petals cling to the cuffs of her red, button-up corduroy coat, warm with quilt batting that pokes out at worn elbow places and tears on the back from tree climbing. The coat’s two pockets carry peeled sheets of mica, acorns, pink quartz, white pine needles, rumpled chrysanthemums.
           “Your mother won’t be able to let out my seams again this year,” the coat says.
           The girl shrugs, rubbing more flower heads together. Her coat exhales, making the bottom edge flare out around the girl’s waist. 
           The girl walks down the gravel lane to where her father dumps the ash from the fireplace. She paws through the ash with the toe of her tennis shoe, looking for charred wood pieces.
           “This will be our last winter together,” the coat says. 
           The girl pushes a narrow piece of charred wood into a pocket and runs over to an abandoned particle board leaning against her swing set.
           “Coat, how many more days until Christmas?” 
           “Six.”
           The girl draws six tally marks on the slanted board, making it bobble. She slides the charred wood back into a pocket and walks to the swing, the plastic seat wraps up around her hips as she sits down. She moves the swing with one foot on the ground.
           Oak flavored smoke from the chimney gathers in the front yard, creeps toward her. She puts the pads of her fingers on the wales of the corduroy, shifting it back and forth as she stares into droopy winter grass.
           “If I get a new coat for Christmas, I won’t wear it.”
           “If you get a new coat for Christmas, your mother will make you wear it.”
           The girl moves her tongue around her teeth, swallows. The coat sniffs. 
           “I could ask my mother to make you into a pillow.”
           “You could.”
           A tractor motor starts in the distance; the girl looks to the barn. 
           “What if my mother cuts you up into rags for my dad to use?”
           The coat clears her throat.
           “Well, in that case, you steal a few of my pieces and put them in a secret place.” 
           “I could put them in the rafters of the barn.”
           “But the rats.”
           “I could put them in my diary – It has a lock.”
           “You could.”
           The girl cups her fingers around her nose, inhaling chrysanthemum, wood smoke, the bits of ash and rock, then crosses her arms to grab opposite chains of the swing and pushes her cheek into the shoulder of the coat, hoping for an imprint.

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Amber Ray Garcia grew up in the Piedmont region of South Carolina and has resided in West Virginia for the past eleven years where she currently teaches Spanish. Her work, Hemlock Brook Inn, received an honorable mention in the West Virginia Writers 2018 Annual Writing Contest in the Middle Grade and Young Adult Book Length Prose category. Her story The Produce Stand was a finalist in the 2020 West Virginia Fiction Competition.

INFINITY ARROW — SAM MARTONE

At the tip of this arrow, another arrow, and at the tip of that arrow, another arrow, and at the tip of that arrow, another arrow, and at the tip of that arrow, another arrow, and at the tip of that arrow, another arrow, and so on and so forth, each point spiraling inward to the unseen center of this weaponized, airborne labyrinth. The Azure Archer always, eventually, runs out of arrows to let fly from his bow, but he takes comfort knowing this arrow never runs out of arrows. When he looses this arrow at supervillains, the first arrowhead pierces their skin, the second pierces their blood cells, the third pierces their molecules, the fourth their atoms, the fifth their thoughts. The sixth pierces their very dreams. It all happens in an instant, and yet it doesn’t end. The infinity arrow keeps going, undaunted by wind resistance or gravity. The two-hundred twelfth arrowhead pierces shadows. The five-hundred seventy-seventh arrowhead pierces earth’s atmosphere, soaring toward all the celestial bodies of the solar system, which it will also, inevitably, pierce. The ten-thousandth arrowhead pierces the fourth wall, and the Azure Archer looks out from his panel at you, reading his comic book, and asks you, What is it about all this violence, all this piercing? It’s really rather cruel and unusual and inhumane when you think about it, isn’t it? Petty theft punishable by even a single arrow is a little extreme, but an infinite arrow? He is beginning to regret this arrow’s design, the part he’s played in all this, but the arrow flies on: piercing voices, cleaving dialogue bubbles in two; piercing membranes between universes, so much thinner than we think; piercing absences, emptiness, all the spaces already created by prior piercings. You close the comic book you were reading on your lunch break and head up to the roof of the office building where you work every day from nine to five. Last night, you made a viewer out of a shoebox. The television said the solar eclipse would last for approximately three minutes. You stand on the roof, chatting with your coworkers, who hold the viewers they have made out of shoeboxes. When the sky goes dark, everyone goes quiet. You lift the viewer up and look through the pinhole to see the sun disappearing behind the moon, and your coworkers lift their viewers up and look through their pinholes to see the sun disappearing behind the moon. At the center of the moon, you see another pinhole, and a pinhole through the sun behind it, the great backdrop of space visible on the other side. You want to ask (but don’t) if your coworkers also see this. If you listen, you swear you can hear a distant whistling, as though something is sailing through the air, straight toward you.

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Sam Martone lives and writes in New York City.

INHERITANCE — K-MING CHANG

All my life, my grandmother was cuffed by light. Around her wrist was a jade bangle the color of smoke. She smoked three cigarettes a day, a substitute for every meal, and told me it sapped the hurt from her head. When she lifted her hands to speak, the jade turned varicose-veined, bulging with blood-rope, and under direct sunlight, the stone went soft as steak fat. When I touched the bangle with my pinky, it was the same temperature as my grandmother’s forehead, perpetually feverish: this was because, according to my mother, there was infected shrapnel enshrined in the fat of her left calf. My grandmother never showed me her legs, even when I begged. She told me she had radish calves, the kind that are newly uprooted from the soil and boiled bitterless. If you saw my legs, she said, you'd eat them from me. I didn't learn what shrapnel was until years later when I was watching a movie at school about World War II. In the movie, a soldier's head explodes, and I later learned that the director blew up watermelons for reference. A watermelon has about the same density and water content as the average human head, the director said. When I told this to my grandmother, she laughed and said it was true, that when I was asleep she'd cleave my head into wedges of sweet, seedless dreams. When she laughed, her teeth rattled in her mouth like dice. She spat them into my palm, and they always landed on light. She always told me that when she died, we couldn't let anyone steal the bangle off her wrist. She said it was Grade A jade, flawless and certificated, and that she had to be buried with it. There were some people, she claimed, who would sever her hand to get it. When she died, the bracelet had to be removed for cremation. They gave us the shattered pieces in a plastic baggie, and my mother said the bangle could no longer be sold, except as pebbles and salt, because all beautiful things lose their worth when they break. In front of the cremation tray, my mother and I stand three feet apart, the way we always do for photos—my grandmother used to stand between us, spinning her wrist so that the bangle would catch the flash and redirect it, our faces overexposed into bone. With long chopsticks, we pluck the leftover pieces of bone off the tray. Among the ash are nickeled bits, dull-skinned beneath fluorescent lighting. The shrapnel, my mother says. The things her skin never said to me. My mother says it’s ironic, that what survives is what she wanted to hide. I hold the throbbing silver between my chopsticks and lift it to my mouth, swallow. Inside my belly, the shrapnel nestles like a seed, grows me into a tree of clean meat.

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K-Ming Chang / 张欣明 is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. Her debut novel Bestiary (One World/Random House, 2020) was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. More of her work can be found at kmingchang.com.

2021 SEASON 1 LINEUP

New year, new stories! ✨

We’re SO excited to announce our 2021 lineup (below). You can also find (eventual) links to our 2021 stories here.

New stories run Tuesdays and Thursdays starting January 12. See you then!

2020 BEST SMALL FICTIONS NOMINATIONS

We’re so excited to announce our 2021 Best Small Fiction nominees!

• “Chiefs” by Joshua Bohnsack

• “Animal Behavior” by Melissa Bowers

• “Bad Fish, Black Sheep” by Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar

• “Holy Jesus, There’s a Nun in IKEA” by Sara Hills

• “The Stone Girl” by Lucy Zhang

Find links to all of these stories here, and best of luck to our nominees!

SUBS OPEN NOVEMBER 2020

Hi friends! SUBMISSIONS will be open for the month of NOVEMBER 2020. We will be actively reading for Season 1 of 2021—selected pieces from this upcoming submissions cycle will run January into March 2021.

(As always, for more information on what we're looking for, or how to submit—when we're open!—please check out our submissions page.)

Please note: We will not respond (accept/reject) pieces until after a submissions period is closed. You are free to query us, but our method is to read every piece we get, even ones submitted at 11:59 PM on the last day. It's important to us that every piece gets the same care and attention. This also means we generally need a small buffer of time after submissions close to read and gauge pieces.

We’re excited to read your work! For additional info, click here! To check out our 2020 stories, click here!