Worthing Flash

She plunges her paintbrush into the jar of turpentine and shakes the sleeping dog’s leash at her. Lamia wakes and scrambles to her feet. Want to go for a walk? Susan says. It is 2 a.m. and this is their routine since Susan’s brother left and never came back. Try not to let her miss me too much, he’d said as he handed the dog over. But she did. One night Susan was going through her old voice mails and the dog heard her master’s voice. She jumped up whimpering and knocked the machine out of Susan’s hands in an effort to free her master from it, in the process erasing his message. Susan moved into his house mostly for the dog’s sake, Too much change was no better for dogs than children, and Lamia bonded hard with Susan. Followed her everywhere. After a night of painting, Susan was relaxed enough to take the dog out. It was almost an apology for inverting Lamia’s schedule and synching it with her own, but Susan was a night owl. She needed the simmering down of the day’s noise to access...

Gift It was nice of you, I told the pup, to bring the cat some kits. Not your fault they died so soon. They can’t come back but the cat is still here with you, with me, in our room, in the house. She’s sad now but will soon want some food, want to play. She’ll get out of the house, go to the yard. And if she does not come back, then it’ll be just you and me once more. Don’t look so cross. We have loved the cat and prayed for the kits and that too is a gift. Cheryl Snell 100 single-syllable words

-Something funny happened today at work. -Oh? -I taught my class with sunglasses on and didn’t even know it. I just thought it was a cloudy day. -Has that ever happened before? -Once, before my first important talk. I must have told you that. He picks up the sunglasses from the table, peers at her.  -How could you have forgotten? he adds. -It was before my time. How could you have forgotten that?      She gets up to feed their yellow canary. She had wanted a parrot, but he didn’t want something that spoke English.  It would only learn a few phrases at most, she’d cajoled him. You could teach it the ones that amuse you─ you’re a teacher for god’s sake. And it’s not like the bird would argue with you.      He put his foot down and kept it there. Now she has to admit she loves the canary’s sweet song; and he doesn’t mind it. Most of the time he doesn’t really hear it, she thinks.  While she fills its dish, the bird skitters out of the c...

We were sprawled on the hospital bed, counting all the dead people we had kissed. “My teenage boyfriend, the one who killed himself.” “The tennis-player in college. Those shorts!” “How about the boy across the street? His sister was so appalled I had touched her precious brother. She’s dead now, too. At least I never kissed her.” “Well I did. Summer of Love Redux, baby!”  She loved to say stuff for shock value and as usual my startle reflex made her laugh. “Well, aren’t you the judgey one,” she said. The doctor came in, his stethoscope dangling.  “I bet he’s going to Halloween as a doc-tah,” she stage-whispered behind her bruised hand. He smiled and pulled the curtain around her and once again I was on the outside. “This will take a while, she called through the fabric. “Bring me back something Halloween-y. We’ll trick-or-treat the ward!” To spend her bit of remaining time being monitored like that─ what good did it do? She was going as fast as she could. I...

I didn’t want the apricot toy poodle, but Dad insisted. I thought she would spend her days on a satin pillow, muzzle in the air, grooming her well-manicured curls. But she was a real puppy, and lost no time tugging the ribbon loose from her ear and clawing the baby blanket we’d brought her home in. Still, it wasn’t until she almost fell into her water dish because her head was too heavy that I saw why Dad picked her: She’d teach me how not to fall in, no matter how deep the water, or how long he’d been gone.  Cheryl Snell

In those days I had two secret sisters, invisible to the world. I kept them in my jewellery box until we were alone. Then I’d pull them out, stretching them until they were bigger than me, big enough to shield me from spitballs or get me out of the locker I’d been shoved into. I named one Billie and the other Jo. I also had an older brother, ever-present but welcome nowhere. He tracked me like an animal at school, and at home when our parents went out, telling him, “You’re in charge of your sister,” he’d groan, then twist out a lopsided smile for me. By the time I heard the car back out of the driveway, I was already in Mother’s closet amid the swish of satin and the scream of zippers, listening to the plop and plod of my brother’s leather boots. I imagined myself grown up and gone from the house; disappointed that wishing did not make it so. “I don’t know why you think you can hide from me,” he said when he found me. Now would be a good time for my invisible sisters to burst...

At the kiosk, you stand in front of the vendor’s hive of sweets. From a certain angle, the vendor himself looks like a cone of spun sugar on a spindle of legs. Edible. In the honeycombs of his display, there are pounds and inches wherever there is greed and gluttony, so don’t be surprised when a twirl of pink floss escapes its funnel, floating like a kite into the clouds, and the vendor wonders what it will cost to break your resolve. You stick out your tongue to catch a skyfall of sugar you won’t have to pay him for.  bio Cheryl Snell ’s books include several poetry collections and the novels of her Bombay Trilogy. Her m ost recent writing has appeared in Does It Have Pockets? Switch,Your Impossible Voice, and others. Her work has also appeared in several anthologies including a Best of the Net. She has been nominated for Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, and BOTN awards. A classical pianist, she lives in Maryland.