Bite by Avitus B. Carle
Editor-in-chief Jennifer A. Howard on today’s bonus short: What moves me most about this flash from Avitus B. Carle is the unity, the solidarity that arises from the “we,” the plural narrator, but also from the generational gifts from the mothers and grandmothers. The circle Carle builds here is mighty.
Bite
We open our mouths. Drop our bullets on our tongues. Taste the metal and three of us cough up powder. One of us nods. All of us nod. And we bite. We bite our bullets with our back teeth, listen to the sounds of our sprouting bones cracking within our gums. We bite to strengthen our jaws. We bite to quiet our laughter. We bite to practice how to warp our words, how to tuck them within our bullets. We are girls in lace cradling bullets in our palms. Bullets stolen from our fathers’ guns, from their safes; souvenir bullets our grandfathers kept from the wars they relive in their sleep. We remember the stories of our grandmothers and mothers and wonder where their bullets are now. Two of us turn away from the circle, take aim at their targets in the distance. Four of us turn. Seven. Ten, taking aim with puckered lips. We aim at those who tell us to hush. At those who tell us to be good little girls. Pretty little girls. Silent and still little girls. All at once, we fire. We fire like our grandmothers and mothers. We fire our bullets encased in our words and wait for the sounds of impact.
Avitus B. Carle lives and writes outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is the Associate Editor at Fractured Lit. and Editor at FlashBack Fiction. Her stories have appeared in Apiary Magazine, Jellyfish Review, The Offing, Mineral Lit. Mag, CRAFT Literary, CHEAP POP, and have been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and the Pushcart Prize. She can be found online at https://avitusbcarle.com or on Twitter @avitusbcarle.
