Sunflower hunched on the chair, gazing out the window at the twenty-foot dried stalks left over in the garden, trying to forget the straw-like woman with the sunken face sunken into the sour-smelling featherbed. To forget how the woman—forgiving as prairie grass—had welcomed Sunflower the year before with a firm kiss on each cheek. When would Beno be home from the mannequin factory where, as quality control, he tinkered with the mechanics of the big dolls? Just the thought of Beno’s springy hair spilling out of his cap, working with his fiberglass-roughened hands on her body, made Sunflower contemplate abandoning her watch and fleeing into the next room. She would fling off her apron and dress, slide naked under their sweet-chestnut-scented quilts. A raspy rattle startled Sunflower from her daydream. She knew without even searching for the old woman’s pulse. Sunflower kissed the dry forehead as if it were a baby’s. When Beno got home, she shushed him with a finger to her lips at his mother’s closed door and nudged him into their own bedroom. Amid the one-two, one-two, Beno raised his eyes and looked out the window. Sunflower propped herself on her elbows. They witnessed the stalks greening, a virgin plum on the overhanging tree enlarging, a faded nightgown lying empty underneath.

Luanne Castle’s

writing has appeared in Bending Genres, Bull, Cleaver, Copper Nickel, Does It Have Pockets, The Disappointed Housewife, The Dribble Drabble Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Flash Boulevard, Gooseberry Pie, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Pleiades, River Teeth, Roi Fainéant, Saranac Review, South 85 Journal, TAB Journal, Verse Daily, and Your Impossible Voice, among many other journals and anthologies.

Her hybrid memoir-in-flash will be published by ELJ Editions in December 2026. She is also the author of two award-winning full-length poetry collections: Rooted and Winged (Finishing Line Press 2022), a Book Excellence Award Winner; and Doll God (Kelsay Books 2015), which won the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for Poetry. Her chapbooks include Our Wolves (Alien Buddha Press 2023) and Kin Types (Finishing Line Press 2017), a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. Her stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fictions.

Author’s website: https://www.luannecastle.com/