They Kept Running (University of North Texas Press, 2022) by Michelle Ross is the 2021 Winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. As I read this gem of a book by one of my favorite writers, I was not surprised this collection of flash fictions...
Fiction
Bacon Gouda Sandwich
I lift an empty Starbucks cup from the trash and that’s how I get a fifty-cent cup of coffee. I take it to the patio and feel like god damned royalty. I’m tripping pretty hard, and the sun is a soft, ripe plum suspended in the early morning sky.I’m a girl so I never...
Virtue Signals
I don't remember at which rally I met Brad. He always went to them alone, wearing the brightest pink pussyhat and a tight "Future is Female" t-shirt. He was fit but awkward and a women's rights superfan. Sometimes, I caught him talking to himself.He eventually found...
Oh, Predator, and Me
Alice slew me. I fell like the universe from the back of a pickup truck. Big, loud thud. Picked myself up, dusted off, tried to figure out how to make myself worthy of her appetite. She stood alone at the concert, hair pulled back, a fluffy scarf hiding the skin of...
The Bed
The bed was a normal bed until you laid down on it. The first time I did I thought I was having dreams, but I wasn’t. They glowed around me, these soldered shapes in the dark. At breakfast the next morning I asked my good friend, who was the owner of the bed, why the...
Goodbye Mouths
I'm at a party in a large house with empty white walls and thick carpet the color of clotted blood. A tall stranger with hungry eyes and a slasher smile tries to pull me in for a kiss, but I push him away and he returns to his chair at an impossibly long table...
Baggage
The woman I met that night at the bar later became my wife. Then a little over a year ago my ex- wife. That night we were drinking on the patio and she asked to bum a cigarette. She stayed after I lit it. You couldn’t smoke indoors. This was July. Heat sticking around...
Filling My Mother’s Hole
I hate my inattentive mother for having an affair while I'm navigating myself through raging hormones and a dumpster fire called middle school. And I am still dripping with fury after she picked me and my only friend, Sophie, up last week from school smelling of her...
With Regrets to the Roots
When the woman was still a woman, she kept a special place in her mind where she locked away all of the things which were too unkind to say. Every medical refutation to the woman at work who kept trying to sell her essential oils for her diabetes and her septicemia...
Scream
Kelsey heard it first. She shared this huge ancient wood frame house with her grandmother, her baby brother, and her cousin Joey. Many of her friends came up with excuses when asked to come over, she understood but would still be disappointed.But she heard it, the...