2nd Place in the Cambridge Flash Fiction Prize 2025
*
I sat at eye level with the scar on his knee. In the summer, it was more prominent. Surrounded by tanned skin, its borders harshened. When we were teenagers, he told me once he thought it looked like a snake. We’d been sitting on the same pavement, licking dripping popsicles. I’d pressed my finger into the keloid and asked if he could feel it.
“No.”
I moved my finger further up. “What about now?”
“Still no.”
I gave up. He straightened his leg to create a canvas, took the blue-stained end of his popsicle stick, and traced the mark.
“You see it, right?” he said. “It’s a copperhead, I think.” He paused. “Or maybe a viper.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “To me, it looks like a river.”
He stood before me now, dancing. The river on his knee flowed freely as he glided across the court. I had not seen him in 13 years. He was a man now. He was a ring leader.
“Welcome,” he said. Coke and cheap gin splashed from the cup in his hand. “Welcome to the greatest show on Earth.”
It was late June. I’d come home to lead a photography workshop at the high school where we’d met. He was in town to sell his father’s house.
“Do you remember when he made you sit in the attic to admire his insulation?” he’d asked when we’d spotted each other in the grocery store that afternoon. “I left you alone for two minutes and came back to your feet dangling from the ceiling.”
We decided to get a drink.
In the bar, a neon sign cast a hot pink beam across his face, and for a second, he looked like a teenager again. His face swelled with hope.
An hour passed. Then another. We avoided the big questions. The do-you-remembers kept us full.
Do you remember when we skipped sixth period to get Chinese food, and you burned your tongue so bad that you had to go to the nurse when we got back?
Do you remember when we painted my room forest green and accidentally stained the carpet?
Do you remember when the tent we’d stitched out of stolen pool towels collapsed on us in the rain?
Do you remember when we built that bottle rocket?
Do you remember why we never shot it off?
Do you still have it?
Can we go get it now?
When we found it in his dad’s garage, we realized its base had decomposed. We ran next door to a convenience store and bought a liter of Coke. He remembered how to fit the pieces together better than I did.
We lugged his father’s rusting bicycle pump to a deserted basketball court at the end of the street.
He told me to sit down and enjoy the show.
“Behold,” he said, lowering his voice. “Magic beyond your wildest dreams.”
As he danced, a spotlight fastened to the hoop reflected off his wedding band.
He became a ring of fire to me.
He filled the rocket with air.
He pushed down, down, down on the pump.
All along, I wanted to say, “Do you remember when we stopped loving each other?”
Then, I watched it go.
Up, up, up.
I watched it spiral.
I watched it fight our gravity.
I wondered, when it came back down, where it would land.
***
Megan Griffo is a journalist and fiction writer based in New York City. She was the winner of Writing Battle’s 2025 Heart Short Fiction contest and is currently working on her first novel.