"The Twist" is up at Spire Light and "Teacups in a Cupboard" has been published in Spectrum vol. 65.

 

 Hello from the Brazilian crazy spring time!

 

 The story "The Twist" is up at Spire Light, a magazine out of Andrew College. 

https://www.andrewcollege.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Spire-Light-Journal-2022.pdf

The flash "Teacups in a Cupboard" has been published in Spectrum vol. 65.

Since it is not online yet, here is the flash:

 

Teacups in a Cupboard

I’m taking with me the minimum necessary. The hyena who’s had me bite by bite, can finally feast on organs fed by hopes and expectations. I won’t need hope where the future is a glow of sunset. I’m stripping down to my bones, where memories are mapped.

A desert town, where dunes surrender to my bare feet, and a mum and a dad, mine only, raise a white house with a red tiled roof and plant struggling fruit trees. Wildflowers and eighteen-year-old boys are cherished here, and in danger of extinction.

Sea sand weighs down my bathing suit every Saturday morning, and the remained sand that isn’t swept by the sea waves pours down into the wet floor of the shower. Children grow free in nature. But in ceremonies, we stand, ordered by size, like teacups in a cupboard.

In the desert town, Samson gave his life to save others, but the bible telling it enters home only by the school request. The book of Genesis is wrapped with a blue cotton, and sewn letters sparkle like gems. Saturday’s candles are never lighted, only memorial ones.

At seventeen, the hyena goes for my heart. The heart, swollen from a tsunami of death, steels its walls, blocks its valves and throws itself at the hyena’s paws. The hyena’s fingernail makes a fine scratch, but the teeth meet an uncrackable cold surface.

Now, the hyena can feast on a heart that's mellowed from loving and lovers, tired kidneys, heaving lungs and a slightly embittered pancreas. The desert town is carved in sand and bone, and I need no binoculars to see the horizon, my home.