THE GARDEN
The wildflowers wilt over their own feet as I stagger through the dusty, jaded soil. One of my legs is broken. My mouth is parched. And my stripes burn.
I wonder if the workers before me dealt with this kind of heat. I wonder if the workers after me will suffer even more. I wonder if there will even be workers after me.
The honey isn’t so sweet here anymore. The dream has melted away. This planet is no longer my garden.
As I use my last shred of will to drive my stinger into the ground, I pray that my final moments will be graced with a cool breeze.
ZACH MURPHY is a Hawaii-born writer with a background in cinema. His stories appear in Reed Magazine, Ginosko Literary Journal, The Coachella Review, Mystery Tribune, Ruminate, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, and more. His debut chapbook Tiny Universes (Selcouth Station Press, 2021) is available in paperback and e-book. He lives with his wonderful wife Kelly in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Read More by Zach Murphy:
Buy Zach’s flash fiction chapbook: Tiny Universes
Poetry by A. N. DeJesús, Radka Thea Otípková, Sara Moore Wagner, Patricia Zylius, Pavla Melková, Angela Topping, Jessica Q. Stark, Karel Šebek, Eric Nelson, and M. Nasorri Pavone. Fiction by Sarah Rose Haughn, Genta Nishku, Lucy Tunstall, Petra Hůlová, Paweł Sołtys, Vratislav Kadlec, and Zach Murphy. An interview with Atomic Culture. Reviews of Eileen Cleary’s 2 a.m. with Keats and other books.
I asked a man I was in love with once /
if he was in love with me. No, he said.
His astonishing, indeed quite singular ability to touch the tip of his nose with his teeth was something he discovered almost inadvertently
Get used to it, kid, everybody wants something from you. /
And they’ll swear they’re giving you a gift.
Prague is falling behind the windows /
like an autumn curtain falls on summer /
like a fish falls after a whale
I’d listen to her work her way through its drama: the //
little girl’s errors hitched to curiosity, her wandering hands, the /
way the wolf and the girl had much more in common than not
What are you reading? Here at B O D Y we’ve always got a tome or two open, and we're happy to recommend these recent books.
Me, I’m the opposite, of course – my soul is in full view, as if it weren’t just my shirt that was ripped but my flesh too, and it’s right here, my clownish soul, winking at you with a tear in its eye, because like a steam engine it’s powerful and full of emotion at the same time.
say it /
briefly //
like /
a finch’s whistle
My sisters, deep in our cells, are still feeding me. /
But I know I will be their last queen.
