by Mizuki
Honorable Mention – Flash 405, August 2025: “Normal”
Fiction
Daughter, the trees used to scream in August. The Minmin Kami shaking the pines until the air fractured. Aburazemi spread their oil-sheen wings, while the Higurashi Priest sang the dusk sorrow-song, rising and falling like prayer. If you pressed your hand to the bark, you could feel the earth vibrating through the trunk, a pulse not your own.
At night the paddies answered with another chorus. Frog-gods drumming from every flooded field. Toad-spirits, too, their voices braided into one long rope of sound that tethered the rain clouds to our village. We lay awake listening, the air so heavy with noise it was alive.
Mornings came with Asagao, blue-mouthed daughters of sun on the vines, opening wide before noon heat closed them to silence. Kinmokusei scattered orange stars across the alleys, and Higanbana erupting after rain, red fire-bells tolling the end of summer, blossoms said to guide the souls of the dead.
Dragonfly-kings patrolled above the fields, while Hotaru-spirits fell from the heavens to rest in the paddies, lanterns small enough for children to cup in their hands. At the shoreline Sardine-hosts shimmered, Heron stalking through eelgrass, Crab scuttling sidewise. The sea, then, was limitless.
Yes, daughter, the cicadas were prophets measuring time with their voices, the frogs guardians drumming the world awake. The fireflies, stars who envied us and fell close enough to catch. You’ll ask if it’s true and I’ll say yes, or maybe, or only once upon a time.
And outside the window the rivers are thinning, their beds split open like old bowls, paddies bone-dry and empty, but you’ll say, more, in the darkness, your hand clutching at my sleeve, eyes closed, again, again. Outside, the heat rises in shivers where no frogs call, the sea hushed, waves collapsing inward with nothing silver beneath, only the whine of wires, the hum of machines, the engines restless, ceaseless, a world that has forgotten how to sing.
I’ll brush the hair from your forehead, feel the heat of your skin as if it holds the last of an endless summer. On the windowsill, a scatter of seashells gathers dust beside a jar of seeds, both waiting for a world that might still take them back. So I’ll tell it again, because soon it’ll be myth either way—a world of gods and songs and wings, a place where the earth once brimmed with voices you may never hear except in story.
Judge’s Comments: Of course, “Stories for a Daughter” is beautiful. But it is how the author uses beauty that made me fall for this piece. Normal is an evergreen word whose meaning has a short shelf life, and is constantly being replaced. “Stories for a Daughter” embodies this tension by making nature, normal’s most normal state, mythic. The tragedy is that nature, normal no longer, is.
Mizuki is a writer from Japan, currently living in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains with her half-moon and two very spoiled farm dogs. Mizuki’s writing has appeared in or is forthcoming at SmokeLong Quarterly, The Forge, Lost Balloon, Flash Frog, Your Impossible Voice, HAD, and elsewhere. She was the winner of The SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction 2025 and was shortlisted for the 31st Bath Flash Fiction Award. Mizuki is a 2025 Best of the Net nominee. Find her at mizukiwrites.carrd.co.
Photo by Jack Ray