Photo by Paul Arky on Unsplash
A piano tilts on the dirt beside a freeway entrance like an unbalanced stilt walker: chipped keys, case body cracked, chunks of wood missing, and still the boy plays, his fingers knitting a melody not heard above the traffic, the notes steeped in ache.
The swollen traffic comes and goes. The heart roosts where it can.
Soon the tune demands, launching notes with such heft that a block away a woman pauses from sorting clothes beside her makeshift tent, blue tarps fluttering in the wind, and something loosens inside her, something bright, defined, like the shiny penny her father gave her as they stood before the fountain. Toss it, he told her. Make a wish.
Claudia Monpere won the 2024 New Flash Fiction Prize from New Flash Fiction Review, the Genre Flash Fiction Prize from Uncharted Magazine, and the 2023 SmokeLong Workshop prize. Stories in Best Small Fictions 2024 and 2025 and Best Microfiction 2025.
