Best Microfiction 2020 by Meg Pokrass & Gary Fincke & Michael Martone

Author:Meg Pokrass & Gary Fincke & Michael Martone
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-949790-10-8
Publisher: Pelekinesis
Published: 2020-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

Hema is an Indian-American writer living in Singapore with her husband and kids. Her most recent work has appeared in MORIA Online, Spelk Fiction, The Brown Orient, National Flash Fiction Day, and in a couple of print anthologies including Chicken Soup for the Soul. She tweets as @m_ixedbag.

Bloom

Kari Nguyen

Flash Frontier

Girl takes the yellow chalk from the cardboard box lying on its side in the shadow of the brick wall of the school. Beyond the large square of pavement she can see the backs of the officers visible through the chain fencing. They are spaced evenly, every few yards, facing forwards unless she is to yell, or make any other sound loud enough for them to hear her. Girl loves to draw, twirl, and also to yell at the officers, things in her native tongue which mean nothing much to them, just small person noise. They check on her by turning their heads, and then they turn back around. To them she is Girl and nothing more, no other name needed, or at least this is what she assumes because they don’t ask her name, or give her theirs. When her turn is over in a few minutes’ time the next one will also be Girl, and then Boy, Boy, and so on, until everyone has had their air.

With the chalk, Girl writes her name, Maitea, in a free space on the blacktop. They are allowed to write as long as the words aren’t bad, and Maitea knows her name means love, or at least that’s what her father told her when she’d climbed up into his lap so that he could detangle her hair with a comb that first morning after breakfast, after her mother had been called away.

She wonders how the others carry love, when it is not in their name. This bothers her, but she doesn’t have the words in any language (yet) to begin exploring or making sense of these ideas.

A breeze kicks up and the few trees out along the road begin to stir. The chalk in her hand moves across the ground, bumpy and imperfect in its path. Maitea is drawing what looks to be a large teardrop outlined in yellow, which she then quickly shades, as there isn’t much time left for her out here. She draws another, then another—out, arc, and back again, with a quick shade—many of them, scattered randomly across the tar where she can find room. They look like enormous drops of rain that have fallen sideways, tears of a giant or perhaps a God.

The wind nips at the shapes in chalk, and begins carefully lifting their edges, rippling them a little and then still more before loosening the entire shapes and spinning them into the air. Up, up they go. Maitea glances back at the teacher, who has opened the glass door and has a hand to her mouth. The teardrops begin to shuffle, and instead of falling back down they begin to join, to make way for each

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