A big congratulations to our finalists, winners, and everyone who entered the Art of Tarot contest in poetry or flash fiction. It has been amazing to see how the themes and symbols in the game of Tarot have evolved and continue to speak today. A giant thank you to our judges, Riham Adly, for flash fiction, and Roula-Maria Dib, for poetry. Both judges read the submissions blindly and chose their top ten, top three, and the winning work. First place winner in poetry and in flash fiction will receive a $100 prize. Well done everyone! Lorette, The Ekphrastic Review (Click here for poetry finalists and winners!) Top Three in Flash Fiction Shadow Children, by Lisa Molina (flash fiction winner) Circus, by Bayveen O'Connell The Heartland: A Three-Card Spread, by Nancy Stohlman Ten Finalists This Week’s Tarot Card: Death (Reversed)*, by Valerie Fox Playing Solitaire, by Hedy Habra What Do You Think I Do When I Pretend I'm Fishing, by Hedy Habra That Last Year, by Mary McCarthy Shadow Children, by Lisa Molina Circus, by Bayveen O'Connell Tempted, by Bayveen O'Connell Amira, My Princess, by MWPiercy The Heartland: a Three Card Spread, by Nancy Stohlman Endgame, by Mary Thompson Winning Story: Shadow Children As an adult, I recently learned that I was once a Shadow Child next to Lady Fortune’s Wheel. It’s no one’s fault. Lady Fortune is blind-folded. I’m sure she assumes it is our brothers and sisters with life-threatening illnesses who fall off the wheel and sit in the dark after the wheel goes down, down, down. And yes, as time goes on and the wheel goes round, through rounds and rounds of chemo, they are in the depths of the shadows a lot of the time. But with the help of our parents, grandparents, friends, and extended family, they are able to hang on, stay on, until the wheel rises again. It is our job, as the healthy siblings of our sick siblings, to keep off of that wheel. So we remain in the shadows, watching and waiting, not wanting anyone to worry about us. As for me, I go to school. I do my chores without being told. I never complain. I certainly never cry. And then one day, my dad takes me, just me, to a carnival. It is a bright sunny day, and the rides are all on a pier that juts out into the ocean. Since the pier is narrow and straight, most of the rides just go around and around in small circles. I am instantly drawn to the Ferris wheel at the very end of the pier. It is called “Lady Fortune’s Wheel.” I look up to see the top of it, and the sun rays reach out to me as arms through the spokes. We get into our seats and feel a small jerk as the wheel starts to turn and we begin to rise. I see the whole island shrink smaller and smaller the higher we go, and the ocean gets larger and larger, sun dapples glinting off its surface. I smell the sea air and feel the ocean breeze flowing through my hair. After going around a few times, the ride suddenly stops when we are at the very top. I look all around me, sun still shining on my face and realize that, at this very moment, I’m no longer ‘pretending’ to be happy. And then, without warning, a guttural moan begins to howl deep down within my gut. It is growing, coming up, up, up, just like the Ferris wheel. I can’t stop it, no matter how hard I try to keep it inside. My mouth opens wide, and I wail uncontrollably into the sea air. Wails of pain. Wails of guilt. Wails of fear. My father quickly puts his arms around me, and holds me tight, telling me, over and over, “It’s ok, let it out, let it all out, it’s ok... You don’t have to be so quiet and strong all the time.” He puts his face down onto the top of my head and I hear that he, too, is now crying. The seagulls cry with us, as my dad and I sit suspended on top of the world. Soon, we feel a jerk and the wheel begins its journey back down to the wooden pier. The following spring, all four of us are at the carnival on the pier. My brother has been given a break from his treatments, and his hair is growing back, lighter and curlier than before. “Let’s go on the Ferris wheel,” I say as we show our wristbands to the lady at the entrance. “Nah,” my brother replies, “I don’t like things that go round and round and up and down. They make me dizzy and nauseous. I’d rather go and throw baseballs at bottles for prizes.” And he flexes his atrophied biceps in triumph. Instinctively, I begin to go along with what he would like to do; but something inside me clicks, like when the Ferris wheel stopped unexpectedly while my dad and I were at the top. I smile at him and say, “You go ahead. I’m going to ride the Ferris wheel. It’s such a beautiful day, and I love the view from the top. After the ride, I’ll meet you over there. See ya’” I wave at him, and walk over to Lady Fortune’s Wheel. I want to feel the sun on my face, see from the top of the world, and maybe even cry a little with the seagulls. Lisa Molina Lisa Molina is a 2022 “Best of the Net” nominee for poetry. Her digital chapbook Don’t Fall in Love with Sisyphus launched in February 2022, by Fahmidan Publishing, and her first print chapbook, Womb Worlds is currently available for pre-sale at Finishing Line Press. Molina’s poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction can be found or is forthcoming in The Ekphrastic Review, Sky Island Journal, Beyond Words Magazine, Bright Flash Literary Review, POETiCA REViEW, and Miniskirt Magazine. Top Three Flash Fiction Finalist Circus My house is a circus. Our dog, Trixie, wears a tiny top hat and red jacket. I’ve taught her how to bark: Roll up! Roll up! In the basement, you’ll find my zitty sister putting on clown makeup to hide her face. In the spare room you’ll see the ‘Incredible Sleeping Man’ modelled on Rip Van Winkle in his deepest REM cycle: that’s grandpa. He could just be dead though – best to check with a mirror. Upstairs my brother Joe is a stomping elephant trying to break its shackles, he calls it moshing. In the living room baby Ruby tumbles off the couch, carousels over the coffee table. She’s our little acrobat. In the kitchen Dad is a lion roaring because his dinner isn’t ready, and Mom tippy-toes around him, tightrope walking between the fridge and the cooker. And me? Well I’m just the ‘Invisible Girl.’ Bayveen O'Connell Bayveen O'Connell is a teacher and writing facilitator based in Ireland. Her words have appeared in Splonk, the Ekphrastic Review, Janus Lit, Fractured Lit, The Forge, Scrawl Place, Grimsy, Ellipsis Zine, and others. Her flash fiction has received nominations for 2023 Best Microfiction, and the Pushcart prize. She's inspired by art, history, travel, myth and folklore. Top Three Flash Fiction Finalist The Heartland: A Three-Card Spread The Dollar General One of the major arcana cards, the run-down Dollar General is the quintessential symbol of The Heartland. The Dollar General is the gathering place, the hearth, the sun around which the neighbors can congregate and bargain hunt together, in community. Notice the halo of light around the yellow Dollar General lettering, the field of monocrops, how the borders of the card are decorated with cows in feedlots. The baby cows in the corners are mirrors of one another, a symbolic reminder that this scene will go on and on, into eternity. If you have drawn the Dollar General card it means you are the kind of person who can disappear out here, who can live an entire life without making a mark anywhere. You are the sort of person who will die quietly. There will be little said at your funeral. You are just one of many cogs, many thrusts of blood pulsing through the heart of The Heartland, and like the cows, your life is not meant to be individual or unique. If this card is reversed, you may be trying to leave but Dollar General continues to tempt you back with its low low prices. The King of Big Gulps The King of Big Gulps, seen here in his living room, has been your best friend for over 30 years. In this card he’s in a lot of pain. Notice the pack of cigarettes on the table, a symbol of defeat, the brimming Big Gulp at his feet. He is dressed in the traditional garb of the town but his jeans are torn, t-shirt stretched, hair going white, a nod to his maturity and wisdom. Though the King is clearly suffering, clearly at war with his own body, he is surrounded by the same halo of light seen in the Dollar General card. If you draw the King of Big Gulps, he may have called you six weeks ago to say he was dying. To ask you, as his oldest friend, to throw him a goodbye party. You might have wept together on the phone, separated by miles and decades. You will always remember the King as he was, controlling the lightning and the winds. Receiving the King of Big Gulps is a message about the enigma of healing—how we heal and how we don’t. Notice the ankle and wrist cuffs, the key around his neck. The King asks us to question our illusions: How do we keep ourselves in our own chains? How can we see the key around our own necks? If you draw this card you may find yourself driving 10 hours across Kansas and Missouri, a place you haven’t seen in 12 years, to find out before it’s too late. The Three of Corn Three ears of strong corn grow from a stalk in the centre of a field of equally strong stalks. In the foreground you can see the abandoned town, the forgotten dreams. But the field of corn remains. Long after we’re all gone, the corn remains. Nancy Stohlman Nancy Stohlman is the author of six books including After the Rapture, (March 2023), Madam Velvet’s Cabaret of Oddities, The Vixen Scream and Other Bible Stories, and Going Short: An Invitation to Flash Fiction, winner of the 2021 Reader Views Gold Award. Her work has been included in the Norton anthology New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction and The Best Small Fictions 2019, as well as adapted for both stage and screen. Other finalists, in alphabetical order: This Week’s Tarot Card: Death (Reversed)* Valerie Fox Valerie Fox has published in numerous journals, including Juked, Ellipsis Zine, The Phare, Flash, Reflex, and The Café Irreal. Stories she has written have been included in the Best Small Fictions and Best Microfiction annuals. She published, The Real Sky, a hand-made collaborative artist’s book with visual artist Jacklynn Niemiec, in an edition of 26. Books include Insomniatic, The Rorschach Factory, and Bundles of Letters Including A, V and Epsilon (compilation with Arlene Ang). Playing Solitaire See, this is who I want to be: the Queen of Heart. Impassible, yet wearing a heart-shaped ruby pin swelling with anticipation as night after night I shuffle the deck and wait for his phone call. On the mahogany, a bottle of Wild Raspberry Eau-de-vie stands next to two glass flutes. Who would have thought I'd follow my grandmother's footsteps and align card after card in concentration? When it was my mother's turn to play Solitaire, she'd enter a meditative state while she allotted a special wish for each round. See, I love the way cards cover the table in rows, setting up an arcane tableau. Cigarette butts fill the ashtray as I'm back to chain smoking the way I did after my first heartbreak. Each spent cigarette giving hope and light to the next. Maybe a way to change the outcome, or myself? I move cards face-up one by one and mumble muffled sounds the way my grandmother and mother used to do. What did they wish for time after time? Hedy Habra Hedy Habra is a poet, artist and essayist. She is the author of three poetry collections from Press 53, most recently, The Taste of the Earth (2019), Winner of the Silver Nautilus Book Award and Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award; Tea in Heliopolis Winner of the Best Book Award and Under Brushstrokes, a Finalist for the International Book Award. A twenty one-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the net, her multilingual work appears in numerous journals and anthologies. https://www.hedyhabra.com/ What Do You Think I Do When I Pretend I'm Fishing You may not know it, by under my brush, a new chain of communication is always created as I add layer after layer of colour and linseed oil. You might picture me in my atelier surrounded by all sorts of odd and prized objects and think I revel in the smell of ethereal solvents. But truly, I feel most at ease outdoors. My intimacies with nature run deep, in the murmur of leaves and roots, in riverbeds, ponds and waterfalls. At times, I watch ripples form over the surface of the water and pretend I'm fishing. Yes, I'm fishing for inspiration. But what I hold in my hands is not a fishing pole, it is a brush because my canvas is always nearby. I marvel at the dragonflies' flight as they hover in pairs over the water and kiss its surface to capture their prey. With a twist of my brush, the dragonfly grows in size and kisses a fish that has leapt out the water attracting a calico stray cat but remember, my brush is my wand and the fish whispers an arcane message to the cat whose whiskers tremble and reach onto the heart of a flower rising out of a fiery lotus-shaped lantern. And these connections keep echoing themselves ad libitum forever captured on the square space that has become a mandala. You have now guessed that my wildest dreams guide my brush at the rhythm of my renewed desires. Hedy Habra Hedy Habra is a poet, artist and essayist. She is the author of three poetry collections from Press 53, most recently, The Taste of the Earth (2019), Winner of the Silver Nautilus Book Award and Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award; Tea in Heliopolis Winner of the Best Book Award and Under Brushstrokes, a Finalist for the International Book Award. A twenty one-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the net, her multilingual work appears in numerous journals and anthologies. https://www.hedyhabra.com/ That Last Year We were falling from the broken tower, the one we worked so hard to climb, old dreams and old promises coming down all around us like rocks in an avalanche, assumptions breaking up like ice in a too warm sea, leaving us with no foundation, no rest, no safe place to start again. Our restless questions kept us moving, chasing the music down neon streets that never took us home. I kept my Tarot close, carried it everywhere, through the loud streets, the smoke and whiskey in the bars we washed up on, carried like foam and seaweed on the rolling tide, took it to every party and the rooms we finally collapsed in, on someone’s floor or couch when sleep tripped us and took us down like a lasso cast around our feet, the floor tilting and breaking up beneath us, marriages sliding off their rails, plans colliding, dreams losing all their flavor, ambitions gone sour as disappointment on our tongues. I threw the cards again and again, and they fell true, reflecting our wild careening , hungry for rescue, for some new magician's trick to take us in, shelter us from the ruins of our broken hopes, but we were such fools, dancing on the edge of a cliff we couldn’t see– Nothing coming but another hard fall, and not one ounce of comfort. Mary McCarthy Mary McCarthy is a retired Registered Nurse who has always been a writer and artist. Her work has appeared in many anthologies and journals, including The Ekphrastic World, edited by Lorette C. Luzajic, The Plague Papers, edited by Robbi Nester, and recent issues of Gyroscope, Verse Virtual, Blue Heron Review and Third Wednesday. Tempted Granny was burning sticks of cinnamon. Done with baking, on to conjuring. The air thick with the cloying sweetness, it breathed Hansel and Gretel, Goldilocks, The Gingerbread Man. She sipped canella syrup coffee laced with Tia Maria, cutting up apples into wedges and nibbling them with her dentures: imagining she tasted of Christmas. Beside her, the hearth flame flickered and a shaggy shadow appeared on the threshold. Chuckling, Granny touched at her curls as the panting, sniffing figure padded closer. Drawing the last of her tipple, she tore off her cardigan, brown buttons taking flight across the room, to reveal her embroidery beneath. Eat me, it said. And with a hungry howl, he did. Bayveen O'Connell Bayveen O'Connell is a teacher and writing facilitator based in Ireland. Her words have appeared in Splonk, The Ekphrastic Review, Janus Lit, Fractured Lit, The Forge, Scrawl Place, Grimsy, Ellipsis Zine, and others. Her flash fiction has received nominations for 2023 Best Microfiction, and the Pushcart prize. She's inspired by art, history, travel, myth and folklore. Amira, My Princess Out there- I am myself, standing on a sphere working in diligence to be noticed. -a basic miracle. In the space between what happens above and below there is a winded crookedness of Fall that partakes of an illustrious scene, catching my skirt; I am twisted slightly. Balanced between hallowed hands, a star fixed ball holds fast. I watch. You may rest assured, I am with you always. Never far- Crinkled leaves that hang on to the tenderness, the strength of those young stems so small, just started, not wanting to let go. Having fought to stay orange now bruised and browned-the stubborn ones-tremble. Barren lands- soon all will be stripped away. Standing on the lawn a purple hue shone. The sky is engulfed by a pale indifference, it is not for minutes remaining until this tranquil mix of light and color stays - fixed. Apart, but together -The pitch is perfect; it is now time to begin. Everything steadied before the arrival - Excited before the rise of the Beaver Moon. Out there - a feeling of bristles peaked in one single flash of brightness - Noticed; I turn and head in. Is this me when I reach for you ? There is a Way of the Song spoken within the musician: Was it the wind, this moment. An octave - the light - crossed between a cloud- those mammoth creatures slipping past. Imprint these day’s verses - this lightning. The lifting of dreary colors that still drop like numbers scattered in a predictable environment. Helpless - not so. Still finding the courage to move within this frame-work. The one created for you. Even if it were a slip-of the tongue- God spoke your name. To have pronounced it correctly was a gift. The inflection, a lifting smile. It would seem for both. With the use of The Tarot’ To say I used this tool without knowing what I was literally dealing with. It is (too) naive a stance...Once you enter into that world-how-ever innocent. Compensate, sounds like -a quick word for adapt. How prepared the resources one must have possible to create out of: Nothing Cards: acting as the Ground. I had not looked past the superficial. As always one can only know a little. No matter how much is offered, (to be able) reading between- between lines quite clear and foundational lines, lines still- stirred. The quest for the sight-just outside of Range. Yet engaged with the picture. The tradition to look past the mood of the heart and listen. Eyes and a sure voice; until I have been shaken. More than once these things have occurred. This partition, literally dealing with a problem of this Divinity. Asked to participate on a small level, a plane. How do you efficiently reduce the environment? In a moment so contained as this. Moment, A Moment, a moment, this moment, I entrust New Story, may it be well with you, go in peace. New Story, may it be well with you, go in peace... Could this be the good-one - the thing to be remembered. Become Nature, When did the cards- ever-disappear. This shame I am not, able to understand. Disruption of character These broken bells Rhetoric suspect MWPiercy MWPiercy is a writer and artist.
Endgame You’re in the cinema this one night with a man you’ve just met. He chose the film. You read the blurb beforehand – it’s not your normal thing – Spanish with dark, shady characters bearing gloomy expressions. There’s violence too, during which you will close your eyes. It’s a massive cinema but few seats are taken. You’re in the middle halfway down – M15 M16. You wonder why he selected those seats. You tend to avoid the centre, preferring instead to hide away at the edge, somewhere near the exit so you can escape quickly at the end. The adverts are weird too. Ones you’ve never seen before for local restaurants you’ve never been to, selling unpronounceable food you’ve never tried. With the ads comes strange, unsettling music, but the man you’re seeing stares straight ahead, his muscular arm moving mechanically in and out of the popcorn while he slurps his coke loudly through a straw. How did he know about this film? Why did he want to see it? The trailers are for films of an indescribable genre and you know that when this movie finally starts it will be of the same ilk. You wonder what intelligent comment you’ll be able to make at the end and you worry intensely about this. But the man keeps on munching, his fat hand moving in and out of the popcorn, eyes glued to the screen in front. There’s a murmur of conversation from the few occupied seats, but from M15 and M16 only silence. You’ve had sex once with this man; wild, painful sex that you kind of enjoyed but didn’t. Now you smell his aftershave, feel his closeness, but he seems far away. The film begins. The language is unintelligible, the imagery unfathomable, yet he’s completely absorbed. You wish you could scuttle out of the door marked ‘EXIT,’ back to the safety of your cosy little life, but you know this is something that needs to play out. The story has not quite begun. What will be the endgame, you wonder? Mary Thompson Mary Thompson is an English teacher from Brighton (UK). Her short fiction has appeared in many journals and placed in competitions. In 2019 and 2020 she won a BIFFY 50 award and one of her stories was featured in Best Microfiction 2020. She is currently working on a novella-in-flash. Mary tweets at @MaryRuth69.
1 Comment
LINDA MCQUARRIE-BOWERMAN
12/20/2022 06:26:51 pm
Lots of fabulous reading here for the next day or so!!
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