Kallisto Gaia Press nominated 5 works from The Ocotillo Review Summer 2017 for the Pushcart prize. These represent the editorial epitome of our vision. The editors want to thank these literary artists, as well as all who submitted to our journal, for trusting us with their creations. We will feature one artist per week each Monday through January 1st. Today we feature Zoë Fay-Stindt And her Flash Fiction piece,

Kamikaze Discovered in Montpellier

The fake pregnant belly gave her away, but by then they were already tracking her, the funds she was funneling, her husband and kids, too. From age four to eleven we shared a classroom, shared birthday parties and walks home from kindergarten; fifteen years before she would be recruited, radicalized, siphoning the money from her massive heritage to the cause, hundreds of thousands of Euros already wired before the police caught on, the belly waiting to be filled with a collection of explosives.

At eight, she finger-painted her name on my bathroom wall with tiny white fingers, wrote herself into the narrative next to a fat rising sun, some futuristic moose, a red snake morphed into a rose—the tiny toilet room dyed technicolor by the hands of our village kids. Her thick letters loop over the toilet paper holder, their yellow outlined by a blue-black darkness, itching to bubble up.

 

Zoë Fay-Stindt  has been published in both online and print magazines, including Gauge, Concrete Literary Magazine, JASPER Academic Journal, and Winter Tangerine. She’s currently a freelance writer/editor and the founder/sole contributor to The Floating Zo poetry WordPress.