Sean McKlusky's Editor's Pick:
Total package here. Short, sweet, tight writing with few excess words; this works. It’s got a great hook and provides the reader with just enough detail to set the imagination in motion. By the time it doubles back on itself the picture is complete and is left to cling to the imagination like stale cigarette smoke. Good flash.
This is how the story ends: a drunken brawl over a dinged fender, broken cheekbone floating in flesh, arriving for dinner as if it were normal to eat beside blood-soaked tissues with one eye swollen shut. She serves you only the soft food, mashed potatoes and gravy, cutting up your meatloaf tenderly, ignoring her own children. You wonder how much of this they understand, and, to soothe your own conscience, decide none of it. Oh, how you will ease between her legs and melt into her skin tonight. In the morning they will sneak into the bedroom to watch cartoons and get hit with the stale odor of alcohol, blood and sex seeping through your pores. You found her at the bar, so alone, so needy: this is how the story begins.
Tara Lazar holds a BA in English/Creative Writing from Rutgers College. Her short fiction is forthcoming in Six Sentences and Boston Literary Magazine. She recently completed a children's book manuscript and is working on a young adult novel.