Day 4 Winner of Quarto’s 2024 Thunderdome Flash Fiction Contest. View the prompt here. Muscle Memory is also our overall Thunderdome winner of 2025!

Illustration by Jacqueline Subkhanberdina

Sadly I have forgotten what your mother does for a living, but recently I found out through the grapevine (Facebook) that she has taken up playing the bass, strumming the strings. The woman of God feeling the rhythm in her chest, buzzing as surely as He intended. You, on the other hand, are off somewhere writing no music and smoking so many cigarettes, fucking up your one perfect voice. But one aspect of being young is banking on stagnancy to mean stability–if inhaling adds anything, it’s some rasp, rizz, reticence at its worst. Every now and then there’s a fallout in my chest like a baby bird slipping from its nest. Reckoning with the recalcitrant thing it always intended to do but long before it ever had the agency. Like taking the driver’s seat with the keys in someone else’s drunk hand. With my boot, I kick a rock from one spot to another. Woolf said the stone will outlast Shakespeare. Last night I showed up so early to the party, the host looked me square in the face and expected, fairly, a reason. So I rummaged through my empty pockets and believed, fully, there could be a miracle of apparition, a sudden something from nothing. Let me help with chairs. Good guest. You looked sorta stressed, but the cool kind of frantic. Your face card is so cracked I could cry. Oh! and this you is a different you from the one before. The you before is long gone. Let me pop the cork. I hate that part, doesn’t everybody? Some sorry widow out there is feeding old letters and voicemails to AI. She convinces herself it’s the same you she used to write to, hear from. Her dead robot husband. I keep kicking the rock.