silver sliver

crossing blue realms
of day brought to day

mugicha tea stirred
when from timelessness
the Emperor speaks

O-Matsu San imitated a distant sound, making a wind-across-pine-boughs hiss through her crooked teeth. This frightened all of us orphans, so that when we went for water our bare and shaking knees drummed splashes from our pails, all the way back. And when she was suddenly gone, dripping from cliff’s edge the day we heard the war had ended, the wind knew. The pines and the water knew. We stood together but apart, beneath stars and slow moving clouds, reluctant to touch her few possessions. All left for us there, under the evergreens.

Daryl Scroggins

has taught creative writing and literature at The University of Texas at Dallas, The University of North Texas, and the Writer’s Garret, in Dallas. He now lives in Marfa, Texas. He is the author of This Is Not the Way We Came In, a collection of flash fiction and a flash novel (Ravenna Press), Winter Investments: Stories (Trilobite Press), and Prairie Shapes: A Flash Novel (winner of the 2004 Robert J. DeMott Prose Contest). His poems, short stories, and creative nonfictions have appeared in magazines and anthologies across the country, including Blink Ink, Cutbank, Eastern Iowa Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Star 82 Review, and Third Wednesday, among others.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Writer Boy, microfiction by Daryl Scroggins in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 4, July 2020); nominated by MacQ for Best Microfiction 2021

⚡ Face of the Deep, ekphrastic prose poem in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 3, May 2020)

⚡ Field Trips, flash fiction in KYSO Flash (Issue 12, Summer 2019)

⚡ New to School, microfiction in Eclectica (Jan/Feb 2018)

⚡ Two Fictions: “Almost Baptized” and “Against the Current” in New Flash Fiction Review (Issue 10, January 2018)

⚡ Eight Stories: A Mini-Chapbook at Web del Sol