Issue Twenty-Seven
Spring 2026
Ma, I Will Swim…
Sudha Balagopal's recent fiction appears in Fictive Dream, Adroit Journal and Does It Have Pockets among other journals. She has had two novellas-in-flash published by Ad Hoc Fiction: Nose Ornaments and Things I Can't Tell Amma. Her stories have been included in Best Microfiction and Best Small Fictions. She is Series Editor, Wigleaf Top 50.
not because I adored the way Parul, our maid, guided me and I basked as the gold sun warmed my cheeks, the silk of river water lapped my skin, my braided hair―tangled in soggy twigs and yellowing leaves―swish-swayed, or because I loved how my salvar-kameez ballooned, lifted by the rippling currents.
not because I shared smiles with the women chatter-giggling while they beat stubborn stains from clothes by the river bank and chased raucous birds perched on the jagged rocks or because I loved how bubbles of soapy water eddied and swirled as the women waded in, waist-high, to rinse out fabric.
not because Parul smelled of magic as she arrived each day after her swim in the Godavari, damp hair in a loose knot, a yellow rose snuggling against the side of her bun, bringing with her the scent of neem, ritha and coconut oil or because I begged and pleaded with her to take me to the enchanting river.
not because you want me to sing, not swim, didn’t acknowledge or sympathize when I said that the notes of classical music, sa, ri, ga, ma, escape me, that the crotchety teacher slaps me if I fidget during class, or because he forces me to kneel if I can’t reproduce the scale of a raga.
not because you’ve told me girls from upright, decent families like ours cannot and should not bathe in public, won’t accept when I say bathing and swimming are different, call me a disobedient brat when I describe tracing a path in the water like a fish, when I marvel at rivers which will blend with the sea, which will merge with the oceans and or because you label me crazy when I tell you everything, just everything, is connected.
I’ll swim adept and agile. I’ll swim like Mihir Sen, who crossed the English Channel. I’ll swim because you hated my affection for Paru, calling her shameless and ungrateful. I’ll swim because you told her she committed an unforgivable sin by taking me to the river. I’ll swim because you said we have bathrooms in our home, that only poor people are forced to use the river. I’ll swim because you tossed a wad of cash at her, instructed her to never return, pushed her out the door, slammed it shut and loud-snapped the lock into place.
The Worst Thing
Rachel M. Hollis lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, child, and a deeply unmotivated dog. Her work appears or is forthcoming in New Flash Fiction Review, Gone Lawn, Midway Journal, Lost Balloon, and elsewhere.
Bridgette transferred to our redwood mountain school in seventh grade, with black boots and matching hair. Her clothes were a little too small and stained in a way only she could make look intentional.
We’d been the same ten kids since preschool, stuck with reputations we couldn’t outgrow. I rushed to get to her first, before anyone else could decide who I was again.
“I’m Abby,” I said.
“Call me Bridge.”
She came over after school and I pulled out the good cookies—the ones we saved in the tin for special occasions. Bridge ate four in silence, crumbs falling on the couch as she scanned the room. Our family room suddenly looked ridiculous: “LIVE LAUGH LOVE!” pillows, the decorative chickens my mom loved.
“Want to ride bikes?” I asked.
“Don’t have one.”
“We could walk to the 7-11 parking lot.”
Silence. Then: “What’s the worst thing you ever did?”
The question hung there. I scrambled for something bad enough.
Before I could answer, Bridge said, “I stole a car.”
“What?” It slipped out too loud. She smiled.
Bridge came over every day. She told me once she and her sister slept in a laundromat after their mom forgot them at the mall. Then again after the county fair.
“My aunt’s famous,” she said. “She has a pool shaped like a guitar and I’m going to live with her when things calm down.”
Once we smoked cigarettes behind a tree in my yard, coughing and laughing. My mom found us under a cloud of smoke. The two weeks I was grounded were the longest I could remember.
The morning she didn’t show up, the air felt wrong. I ran to her street. Sirens. A police car driving away. Her face in the rear window—small suddenly, like she’d shrunk overnight. The screen door hung open. Cold air thick with mold and spoiled milk. Her lighter, discarded on the stoop.
I clicked it until it ran out of fluid, waiting for her to call. She didn’t.
Years later I saw her at a Shell station two towns over. When I said her name, she looked at me like I was begging for change. As her car pulled away, I thumbed her lighter in my pocket—the spark long gone. I hurled it at her taillight.
The Pop Star’s Mother Dreams About Bugs
Tina S. Zhu is an Assistant Fiction Editor at Split Lip Magazine who also co-edits WYRMHOLE, the terminally online speculative fiction newsletter. Places her work has appeared include Lightspeed, The Cincinnati Review, Best Small Fictions, and The Crawling Moon: Queer Tales of Inescapable Dread (Neon Hemlock Press, 2024), a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award. Her work has received support from Lambda Literary and the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, and you can find her at tinaszhu.com.
The pop star’s mother wishes she could fit her daughter back into the palm of her hand again, cupping her hands around the pop star’s beating wings to protect her frail exoskeleton, so easily crumpled and crushed by the world. She invites the pop star back home to suburban San Diego, tells her to leave her problems behind for a weekend.
The pop star did not come home last December like she had promised thanks to a Christmas concert at a children’s hospital far away. Since she moved to Los Angeles at sixteen by herself, she has repeatedly blown off spending time with her mother who still lives in a small world, a world barely large enough for the bugs in her backyard every spring.
The pop star arrives two hours thirteen minutes late, pulling up to the driveway in her sports car as red as a fly’s eyeball. The pop star’s mother is tired of how flaky the pop star has become, so she will be just as flaky in return. Instead of getting lunch and introducing the pop star to the members of her book club like she had planned, the pop star’s mother has changed her mind. She wants to make her daughter wait, so she continues reading on her folding chair in the garden, watching the butterflies flit by her garden.
The pop star sits down in the dirt. The pop star wants to be back in Los Angeles, preparing for her trip into the desert next week to film her latest music video. She regrets having made the drive but has no regrets showing up late.
The mother glances up from her book and begins to sing. “My daughter, my daughter.
The ladybugs in the flowers, the butterflies in the trees, glow brighter than cameras, brighter than stars. Your mother misses you. Your mother misses you.”
And when the mother finishes, the pop star is a butterfly. The mother remembers who the pop star was before she was the pop star, when she spent her summers at the pool, a girl whose big dreams were only dreams. The mother wants the pop star to revert back to the girl she already has shed like a molten cicada skin, and it is the mother’s vain hope that the pop star will forget that she is the pop star forever and be her daughter again. This dream, however, is the pop star’s nightmare. The pop star flaps her wings to get closer to the sun and its warmth, realizing that she and her mother will forever want different things.
The mother is already late for the neighborhood book club with her other retired friends who don’t listen to pop music released later than when they were twenty-five. The greatest music in the world was always made before you turned twenty-five, which is why her own daughter’s music never appealed to her. When her butterfly-daughter lands on her book, she laughs. The butterfly drifts away from her, joining the other butterflies until the mother loses track of where her daughter has gone. As it vanishes from view, she remembers that her daughter had forgotten to send her anything last Mother’s Day. How wonderful and strange, she thinks when she gets a text from the pop star the next day, declaring that she had made it safely back home.
Will you send someone for your car? the mother asks, hoping that the pop star herself would return.
You can keep it, the pop star replies. I was planning on buying a new car anyway.
The mother resigns herself to another Christmas with only the other members of her book club. They still do not believe the pop star is her daughter, having never met her before or seen her outside of photos as a child, which they dismissed, saying don’t all little girls look the same, like green caterpillars who have not yet developed unique patterns on their wings after emerging from their chrysalises? The mother makes a decision. She will confess at the next meeting that her daughter turned into the red car left behind.
Family Time
Judy Darley lives by England’s North Somerset coast. She’s the author of The Stairs Are a Snowcapped Mountain (Reflex Press), ‘Sky Light Rain’ (Valley Press) and Remember Me to the Bees (Tangent Books). Her fiction has been heard on BBC radio, aboard boats and coastal paths, as well as in caves and a deconsecrated church. Find Judy at https://bsky.app/profile/judydarley.bsky.social; https://judydarley.wordpress.com
My sister, Aether, portions the clock’s ticks. I get the ones from four to nine. She gets from ten to three.
The vibrations begin that warn me our clock is about to chime seven. I scoot onto the bridge before it swings around. It’s not quite a bridge, Aether insists, because it doesn’t connect to anything.
I disagree. It connects then and now; them and us.
Aether has dressed me in Ma’s gold crinkly gown. It trails below the bridge and shines like sunlight. Ma’s opera gloves bunch at my shoulders like stunted wings.
Today I am Riches. Aether wears Dad’s tattered shirt, trousers and cap as Rags. Tomorrow we’ll swap to keep things interesting.
The swing outwards is dizzying. For a moment I feel I’ll fall.
I smell coffee and a singe of toast and remember Ma swinging back with beakers of marmalade.
The clock’s slow chimes reverberate through my bones. The grey-haired woman our maker called Janet sits at the table alone.
I miss the bickering and laughter of earlier times. Now all is quiet.
The woman glances up to see my arrival.
I know the rules. Don’t blink. Don’t squeak.
I’m motionless, breath held.
The woman’s eyes move rapidly, seeing but not quite registering.
I remember Ma feeding me crumbs of marmalade-drenched toast when the bridge swung me home; Dad squeezing me tight and saying I did well.
I want to ask the woman: where did they go?
Janet hadn’t wanted to take apart the clock Leonard built, so she’d got the stool ready and waited until the clock struck midnight. That gave her plenty of time to climb up and snap the woman-doll free.
Before her son headed abroad, she wanted to give him something his dad had made.
The woman-doll was wearing the rough blue dress Janet thought of as her peasant outfit.
Janet never understood how Leonard got the mechanism to change the figurines’ clothes. She preferred the gold finery one of the smaller ones now wore.
She’d never seen them wear that dress before she took the parent-dolls. When she broke off the man-doll for her daughter, the clock’s innards must have unbalanced somehow.
The dolls would provide a hint of home for their grown children while they were far away.
It was what Leonard would have wanted.
Now, though, she wonders. She discomforted by the way the littlest figure gawps as she drinks her coffee.
Janet jumps as a movement catches her eye.
Her youngest grandchild, Lily, stands in the kitchen doorway. The whole family is visiting for the first time from overseas.
Last night she’d seen Lily sleeping with the woman-doll clutched in her hands.
“Morning, Lily. Want some toast?”
The girl nods and waves her doll.
From the corner of her eye, Janet half-sees the small gold-clad doll tremble.
She blinks. “Your auntie will be home today. She’s promised to bring the clock’s man-doll. You can reunite them.”
Lily bares a gap-toothed smile. She holds the woman-doll up towards the clock as the mechanism swings the smallest doll inside.
Stranger Dimensions Than You Can Imagine
Andrew Graham Martin's writing has appeared in Electric Literature, HAD, Post Road, SmokeLong Quarterly, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere. His work has been nominated for Best Microfiction and Best Small Fictions, and he was a participant in the 2026 Kenyon Review Winter Online Workshop. He lives in Indianapolis with his wife and baby daughter. You can find him at andrewgrahammartin.com.
My boss used to have a robot dog. It would march around the floors of the real estate conferences he attended with a flag protruding from its back that read “FOLLOW ME TO DEALS.” Then one day the dog stopped a little too abruptly and the kid that was following it nearly got his eye gouged out by the flagpole.
At first my boss thought we could just replace the flag with perhaps a sort of vinyl poncho the dog could wear instead that would still urge people to follow him. But after dozens of calls I had to admit to my boss no one makes vinyl ponchos for robot dogs. He sighed and said “really?” like I’d told him Chipotle no longer carries barbacoa. He looked so defeated that I suggested perhaps an embroidered sweater would do instead? That cheered him up for a few days until I had to confess that no one makes sweaters for robot dogs either. Their dimensions are stranger than you can imagine.
So the dog’s been decommissioned. It’s folded up like a complicated camp chair in its black canvas carrying case, stored in the back room of our coworking space amid the custom neon “DEAL” signs, Dealy the Barking Deal Seal, the emphatically-not-street-legal “Dealmobile” golf cart. I feel guilty how relieved I am – the thing weighed close to 50 pounds and I was the one who had to drag it to and from FedEx every time a conference rolled around.
But my boss is clearly depressed since we had to put his dog away.
I almost said “put down,” but of course you don’t put a robot dog down. One day you just give up on the romantic notion that you’ll ever turn them on again.
Dissasembly
Mugdhaa Ranade is a dreamer+realist in The City of Dreams (and Harsh Reality), Mumbai, India. She writes because she knows nothing else, and nothing else knows her.
When we woke up, the chairs were gone. The chair in our room holding our washed-not-folded laundry, the chair we used as a footrest and fought over, and the two remaining chairs around the dining table. All vanished. As if they had never been there.
Except, they had been.
The scratches the laundry chair and the footrest chair had made on the wood were proof of their existence. So were the dust-framed round patches of clean wood (four circles forming a square, two such squares) left behind around the dining table.
I went searching around the house, looking for signs of a break-in. Even though it made no sense to my sister. Why would anyone come to a ramshackle house in the middle of nowhere just to steal some old chairs? They weren’t even antiques or anything. I agreed on the not- antiques part. Because had the chairs been worth something, I would have sold them ages ago. But they weren’t. So in our house they remained. Until now. Until they got beamed up into space.
My sister said this with her I’m-serious-don’t-argue-with-me face. I knew better than to do that. She still believed this is how our parents disappeared: they were beamed up into space. That they were still aboard some spaceship, either being driven mad through relentless experimentation, or assimilating with the alien race, maybe even helping them plan an invasion.
Because I didn’t argue with her, the discussion ended. We went about the rest of the day, then the rest of the week, then the rest of the month, chairless. The clean laundry shifted to the edge of the bed before I begrudgingly moved it into the cupboard. We fought over whose legs would be the other’s footrest. I let my sister win. And the dust-framed circles remained, a glaring reminder fading, fading, faded.
Then our bed disappeared.
Where we had fallen asleep on our lumpy mattress—muffin-topping over the edges of the termite-damaged bedframe, my sister kicking me in the back through the night, probably living life as a cat in her dream, or a horse—we woke up on the floor.
Scattered around us were Ma’s ribbons, Da’s shoelaces, my sister’s one hoop earring she’d worn on her last birthday with the four of us, and the polaroid I’d taken of that moment, that I had crumpled before their vanishing. All the things we’d lost to the void under the bed.
Things we wanted to lose.
The discovery ripped us apart. My sister spat forgotten anger. I washed my mouth with misplaced guilt. Then we collapsed into a moody I’m-not-talking-to-you-go-away silence.
We stewed in it on opposite sides of the room until it bubbled and oozed over. While the leftover hurt burned to a crisp, we inched closer to each other. Embraced. Talked. Laughed till our stomachs hurt. Cooked together like we used to, the four of us. Cooked together like my sister and I hadn’t since the disappearance. The argument had cleansed our palate.
When night fell, we lay on the floor, the crumpled polaroid in my sister’s hand and her one hoop earring in mine, Ma’s ribbons and Da’s shoelaces enclosing us like a summoning circle.
And we waited for the aliens to beam us up. Because there could be no other reason for this bed-sized lacuna.
My sister was convinced our parents were rebuilding their life aboard the spaceship. That all these years, their memories had been erased. But now, now that the chairs had disappeared and so had the bed, they had remembered themselves. Remembered how they had built their past life: chairs first, bed second, house next. Remembered us.
So we waited. And waited. And waited.
Close to dawn, my sister lost the fight to stay awake and curled into my side, tears trickling down her cheek, wetting the shoulder of my thin cotton t-shirt. I could do nothing to comfort her—nothing that would bring her any comfort. So I let her cling to me and turned sleep away. I kept my eyes wide open, letting them dry out, holding my own rivers of salt at bay.
Before the first rays of the sun could pierce the shadows safeguarding our agony from one another, there was a washing-machine rumbling. My sister awoke just as the house started rising, separating from the wooden floor we lay upon like soggy paper coming apart. Brick and mortar and walls and roof came alive like a mythical cat awakening from a deep slumber.
We held our breaths, clutching each other, once again waiting.
The house began to walk.
Away it went, sauntering, cat-like, and then galloping, horse-like. We cowered on the wooden floor, stripped bare of shelter and hope, the ones left behind. And my sister broke into pieces. I tried to hold her together. I tried to put her back together with the glue of my assurances. I tried—
But it didn’t work.
She tore herself out of my arms. And she ran. After our house. Away from me. Without looking back. Uncaring of how she had shredded me to bone and sinew and blood. Not a heart in sight. Because it was stuck on her.
I did not chase after her.
Because like everything, I had already lost her.
I knew it. I knew the truth. I had always known the truth.
Those that walk out on their own legs never return.
Knots
Robert John Miller's work has appeared in places like HAD, X-R-A-Y, Bruiser, Maudlin House and Scaffold, online at robertjohnmiller.com.
A simple square knot would probably do just fine, I thought, but then memories of the Square Knot Incident flooded my brain hole, how the entire refrigerator had fallen down on the apartment below, landing atop another refrigerator, and I had to remodel the entirety of both apartments and adjust the listings to accommodate two apartments now sharing a single two-stack refrigerator. A barrel hitch might work better, or maybe a rolling hitch. The overhand knot was right out, as was the anchor bend. Of course, I hadn’t yet considered staples and other metal fasteners. With enough brass fasteners and maybe some sheet metal screws I could probably get the job done and have time to enjoy the rest of my summer, but then also the Brass Fastener and Sheet Metal Screw Incident came to mind, and I was certainly not going through that again. My insurance nearly tripled. The obvious alternative — delicately using a chainsaw to move things piece by piece, and then gluing them all back together — felt way too basic. Who am I, after all, if not someone who prefers knots and metal fasteners? Adhesives are for people who project their insecurities onto their work, desperate to create situations for immediate bonding. No, I prefer versatility. I prefer the joys of a temporary, flexible hold, combined with the option of high-strength, corrosion-resistant connections that are truly earned. Yes, sometimes the brass fasteners and the sheet metal screws fail, and I get complaints from tenants that they have to walk up three floors to use the microwave on top of their two-stack refrigerators — they try to form committees, post notices in the lobby with Scotch tape, no less — but all the more reason for them to leave, if they don’t like it. I am who I am.
La Playa del Silencio
Asia Cakala is an emerging writer based in the UK. This is her first publication.
We are in paradise. Our backs to the crescent-shaped cliffs, eyes on the velvet horizon, sun spilling across spaces and flesh. A hum of wilderness, and a sense that we shouldn’t be here.
You have that work thing. It’s my mum’s birthday. But you’ve always wanted to see Asturias, and I found cheap flights. It’s called La Playa del Silencio, you say on the bus, so we don’t speak when we get here.
We don’t speak about the trip I’m planning. We don’t mention the women you’re seeing.
There’s no rush here — just the scream of waves against the shock of rocks, the familiar curl of your lip, like when you said I love you and This isn’t working.
Old us would have fucked here in the refuge of a cave, then laughed at pebble-patterned skin and algae hair stuck to my ribcage. Now it’s only silence, lodging itself into the creases of the cliffs, reverberating, spreading.
We are in paradise.
At sunset, you don’t spot the mountain goat trotting under the golden-split sky. You don’t notice how its bleat curls around my organs, how it rattles in my chest.
When your phone pings, I watch your breath ease at the sight, once moon-tender just for me. I don’t want to know the names but I do. Chloe and Ashley, a conflagration on my tongue. Ashley and Chloe.
I can’t take this anymore.
I leave you buried in your phone and walk to the shore. The sea brings back our honeymoon — salt-bleached skin, brine in our mouths, how we couldn’t get enough of each other. I imagine wading further, the depths enveloping me, claiming me, wanting me.
I imagine I don’t resurface when my scream reaches you. I’ve forgotten what it feels like to be held.
Prophet
Nate Miller is a writer and musician living in Michigan.
Zinah said only self-obsessed people had visions, and it was because we liked her that we started ignoring Jack. Or because we hated him, the way you could tell by the distance in his dirty blue eyes that he was going to spout something equal parts ethereal and generic when he loped into the cafe, how he’d tie his apron in perfect loops behind him instead of bringing the strings around the front, or the way everything he made was barely wrong: a half-pump of syrup, dark roast instead of medium, oatmilk. Once he talked for an hour straight about how God spoke to him in the Walmart deli, the golden light when God touched down, how the hams turned to suns and the sausages to levitating crescent moons, rambling about God’s directives about soap, and cardboard, and coal-burning furnaces, and all the time his haughty apron strings were dangling perfect, and he messed up the espresso in every drink and we didn’t tell him, and also we were ignoring him. So you can imagine our surprise when Zinah trotted in with that same distance, or height, in her deep eyes, how she tied her apron symmetric in the back, how she rambled about kombucha, and how God spoke to her at the movie theater, came through the screen and grabbed her wrist, and how we were to obey her, and the loving spirit of the Lord.
And we did. And eventually God shipped Jack off to India.
Enough
Pamela Painter is the award-winning author of five story collections, and co-author of the textbook What If? Her stories have appeared in over a hundred journals and in numerous anthologies including Best Microfictions2025, Best SmallFictions2025, and the Wigleaf Top 50, 2025. She has received an NEA and four Pushcart Prizes, and her stories havebeen staged by WordTheatre in New York, and LA.
We are in our favorite bar, served by our favorite waiter, the Manhattans with their crimson Luxardo cherries perfect, cold hold the ice. As if it is no big deal, you ask, “Can’t you give in just enough to make me happy.”
I sip appreciatively before I address your request. “‘Just’ is an odd word,” I say. “And its companion ‘enough’ is even more curious. Never mind that you want the ‘you’ that is me to give in just enough to make the ‘me’ that is you happy.”
You slump back in your chair already unhappy, because making you happy also requires me to stop parsing what you say. Instead, I lean forward to describe the deep sadness of the word “enough.” I say, “To you it is the level to which I must rise to make you happy. To me it is the level to which I must bend to keep us together.”
You ask that tired old question, “What do you want?” I say, “Another Manhattan for starters.
Maybe two. Enough bourbon to bring us to an end.”
Molly
J.D. Strunk's fiction has appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, The Louisville Review, Pithead Chapel, Necessary Fiction, The Coachella Review, Summerset Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Denver, Colorado. IG: @jdstrunkwriter
Nine-year-old Molly squints her eyes tight against the blazing August sky, her small tan forearm raised at an angle, approximating the Sun’s late summer parabola. Surprisingly, Molly can no longer smell the pool’s chlorine, even though it burned her eyes when she first got in.
“You get used to a thing,” her mother had said, the day Daddy left the house for good.
Apparently, Molly had gotten used to the chlorine, too.
Earlier that summer, Molly’s brother, Jake—two years older and oh so much wiser—had told Molly that chlorine was a poison. So too he said that sodium burned when it touched water.
And yet, combined, they made table salt, just the same as what Daddy couldn’t eat, because of his bad heart. Molly had thought about her Daddy’s heart often this summer. Just as she’d thought of it during the argument, back in May—the one right before he moved out.
With effort, Molly slides a finger beneath the strap of her pink Frozen bathing suit, pulls the tight elastic band away from her sunburned shoulder, exposing a white line of skin. The swimsuit is far too small, but her mother has yet to notice.
After massaging her shoulder, Molly dunks her head beneath the water. When she remerges, her eyes find the row of white plastic chairs lining the pool. Her mother is there, sitting in one of the chairs, staring blankly into a book. The chair beside her is empty. Gazing at the empty chair, Molly feels the same emptiness. Molly hopes the emptiness fades. She hopes her mother is right: You get used to a thing.
Baggage
The author of fiction in Yankee, Writers Forum, Ellipsis, Flash Fiction, Bright Flash Literary Review and New Stories from New England, Marcia Yudkin advocates for introverts through her newsletter, Introvert UpThink (https://www.introvertupthink.com/). Her essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Ms., Next Avenue and NPR. She lives in Goshen, Massachusetts (population 960).
One suitcase per person, they’d been told. Though it was summer, many brought sweaters or shawls, uncertain of their destination or the length of their stay. Some brought books, thinking they’d have the leisure to catch up on Goethe or Tolstoy. Others brought a gown or a tuxedo, envisioning the spa having dress-up dinners. “It’s just a short walk to the station,” prune-faced guides announced.
Strangely, at the turnoff for the railway hub, the guides – in uniforms now – insisted that the families keep going. “How far?” some asked. No answer came, just stern gestures to keep moving forward.
After an hour, books began to be discarded. After two, extra pairs of shoes. After three, parents left valises on the roadside so they could carry their crying children. After four, everyone noted that their guides – guards, rather – had bayonets now. After five, wallets came out of pockets, but no amount of Reichsmarks could buy water from those who still had some.
And me? I’d like to think I would have unclasped my violin, tuned it, sat upon a tall, abandoned suitcase and played the most beautiful, uplifting solo airs I could recall. Schubert’s “Trout.” “Greensleeves,” perhaps. César Franck’s “Allegretto,” the one that inspired Proust’s enchanting “little phrase.” Or just the Pachelbel “Canon,” round and round, rising and resting, soothing frantic souls on their – our – death march.
Anyone
Miriam Mandel Levi’s work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Chautauqua, Tablet, JMWW Journal, MoonPark, Flash Frog, Forge, River Teeth, Under the Gum Tree, Bending Genres, Flash the Court, Hippocampus, and is forthcoming in Flash Fiction Magazine and Jewish Fiction. Her stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and Best Microfiction. An editor at Under the Sun, she lives in Israel. More at: miriammandellevi.com.