Romance
by Avital Gad-Cykman
I dream of a secret romance with a language. Clandestine outings, loops of words wrapped around my body when we spend long nights in a loft looking over a city and send words like a whip across the sky. I bend over the banister and bare my soul. The words taste cool and moist like dew as they slide off my tongue.
After the sexy times, we get serious. My language births words for the brain so it can wrap itself around contemporary monsters. My fear hides in the gaps and holes between words, where unnamed wars are about to break out. Named, even monsters lose their shadowy presence and let us caress their sinewy backs.
As we open up, my language gifts me with broken words and limping sentences that got lost over the generations, and seek a new mouth to pronounce them. These words are loaded, heavy with history. Ours. They melt on my tongue, then I solidify them into bearable shapes. It is possible to make toys out of ruins.
I take my language for a date at a restaurant. We are three: I, my language and a man. The language comes between us, as if I need a protector, but the man’s lips project rhymes: dandy, candy, candy cane. I get him, his words. Ours. We are alone with the language, even lonely, but we’re safe with language between us. No one can reach our core.
Avital Gad-Cykman is the author of Light Reflection Over Blues (Ravenna Press) and Life In, Life Out (Matter Press). She is the winner of Margaret Atwood Studies Magazine Prize and The Hawthorne Citation Short Story Contest, twice a finalist for the Iowa Fiction Award and a six-time nominee for the Pushcart. Her stories appear in The Dr. Eckleburg Review, Iron Horse, Prairie Schooner, Ambit, McSweeney’s Quarterly and Michigan Quarterly, twice in Best Short Fictions, W.W. Norton’s Flash Fiction International anthology and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in English Literature, focused on minorities, gender and trauma, and lives in Brazil.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Romance”? Languages are untamed beasts. I love their words, for their beauty and many meanings. They help me communicate and absorb, but their limitation is clear. The proof of the limit is that each language gives a slightly different shape to what rises from the same person. Perhaps we’d better know all words and languages, to improve the precision and subtlety, or maybe, this will not be enough either. If I sound like a frustrated lover, then I managed to convey the origin of this flash. by Avital Gad-Cykman We buzz in the room like dragonflies, cell phone flashlights shining, much as our parents held aloft lit candles when Leonard Cohen sang their favorite songs. A different poet sings to us, but even while we applaud, his name loses letters like a broken neon sign. The next singer-poet already rises to fame. Time lasted longer in the 20th Century. These days, our present kicks the future’s ankles. The 21st Century leaps forward like a frog, the desperate and given to wrongs Frog in Hot Water. A child, our child, plays the God of small animals with frogs. He speaks softly while placing one carefully somewhere far from the pond, and then pays no attention to its despair. He may go to politics as a grownup. Our last attempt to show our son that such supremacy is transient consists of words and music. A triplet of singing poets (because a holder of a world, a poet like Leonard, is rare) may still turn his attention to whales longing for each other, crying dolphins or burned out land. Lenny was ready to die, so he wrote and sang. We aren’t. We don’t live in grace while falling away from the planet. But our son on his flight from fire might avoid the undercurrents and conquer oceans with a kayak. Avital Gad-Cykman, the author of Life In, Life Out (Matter Press), and the upcoming Light Reflection Over Blues (Ravenna Press) has published stories in Iron Horse, Prairie Schooner, Ambit, Calyx Journal and McSweeney’s Quarterly among others. Her work has been anthologized in W.W. Norton’s International Flash Fiction, Best Small Fictions 2020 and elsewhere. She grew up in Israel and lives in Brazil. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Grace”? Leonard Cohen has been a lot on my mind, since I followed his steps in the pre-covid Montreal, and watched (right there) the documentary about him and Maryanne. When I felt suffocated by the pandemic and worried about current politics, I imagined candles, lights, dragonflies and Cohen’s words. I started typing, and felt how the idea of his spirit helped the flow of words of worry and hope from beginning to end. by Avital Gad-Cykman Imagine taking the key for the family apartment in Vienna, the one located in a building already destroyed and rebuilt. Imagine inserting the key into the locked door of the family apartment in Bialystok, to step in and find generations of indifferent neighbors in residence. Imagine someone turning the key at the keyhole of your door in Jerusalem and opening the door before you block it shut. Her face is yellowed like old newspaper. Nobody says anything in any apartment. I don’t disturb the woman sitting on an unfamiliar couch in Vienna, watching a World War II film. I stand still, taking in history, until her adolescent grandson pushes me back out to the hallway and onto the staircase, then closes the door. In a different turn of events, I live inside and they don’t. My key drops on the floor like a tiny bell. I also refrain from interrupting the old couple, with their sons and daughters sitting around a modern table in an ancient living room in Bialystok. They stare at me, then return to their card game. A boy and a girl run in circles around me until I’m caught between their arms and they hurl me back to the cold night. The children can’t speak to me, nor can I hear them. We don’t share a common language. The yellowed old woman enters the kitchen in Jerusalem and sniffs the air. I keep cooking dinner. The smell of her life is long gone from here and her body scent must have changed, but the dog doesn’t bark. Dogs have respect for the people of the house. The woman stands firmly, as if she won’t leave ever again. My children ask who she is. I don’t know what to say. Should she be here? Must we make room? I don’t know, kids. Nobody speaks the same language. Avital Gad-Cykman, the author of Life In, Life Out (Matter Press), and the upcoming Light Reflection Over Blues (Ravenna Press) has published stories in Iron Horse, Prairie Schooner, Ambit, CALYX Journal, Glimmer Train and McSweeney’s Quarterly among others. Her work has been anthologized in W.W. Norton’s International Flash Fiction, Best Small Fiction (Sonder Press) and elsewhere. She lives in Brazil. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Keys”? The origin of “Keys” is in my visit in Vienna, where my mother was born, and my somewhat shaky sense of belonging. My experience as a refugee’s descendant made me think about refugees from other peoples and the people who expelled them or are simply living in the abandoned homes. We belong with our parents’ abandoned homes, as well as with our new homes and, because wars go on, we may find ourselves on the other side. by Avital Gad-Cykman I count on you. Count on you. Still. Count. “A goose,” you said. “An iris.” See, a lightning crossed the sky outside my window over and over today, and a fluorescent lamp lit other fluorescent lamps across the ceiling. The lightning reflected the fluorescent light and the fluorescent light reflected the lightning, and my fingers trembled against my thighs. When everything is named and is in its place, I can tell the west from the east. I can go places. I head out, carrying a small backpack and walking down toward the port. Way south, between towns and behind a school, a cow still steals my sandwich, and you laugh. I am in peace, too, overlooking human epic. But when I return, years later, on the roadside sprouts a pale flower I cannot name. I tell about you to this woman, whose skin is rigid yet fragile like the skin of the Earth. I didn’t know that every year was a bonus, when I felt blisters and lines spotting and crossing your palms. You walked like an explorer, and I walked like a landowner among landmarks named by you. “Go on,” says the woman. I try, although I hardly speak these days. Each word suspended in the air stretches the sky, and earlier words I said have the edge of a razor. Still. The woman stays for an hour. I count. Out she goes. Come in. I enter the torn spaces crossed by geese and stained by irises. Avital Gad-Cykman, the author of Life In, Life Out (Matter Press), has work published in Iron Horse, Prairie Schooner, Ambit, CALYX Journal, Glimmer Train, McSweeney’s Quarterly and Prism International among others. Her work has been anthologized in W.W. Norton’s International Flash Fiction, The Best of Gigantic and elsewhere, and won the Margaret Atwood Society Prize, The Hawthorne Citation Award and other prizes. She lives in Brazil. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “You Named Things”? The origins: it starts with my childhood memories of my cousin, ten years older than me, taking me to fields I crossed running, and telling me the names of trees, birds and flowers. I felt then and I still feel gratefulness for the clarity of words that open way through the chaotic world of feelings and dreams. Unsurprisingly, he became a scientist. The sun is absent, we inform the secretary at the principal’s office. She looks up from below a unified brown curl of her whole hair, and says that it is winter, a season in which bears hibernate, as we have studied, and butterflies develop in cocoons, she thinks, so of course the sun remains absent. Last month, our favorite flight company (TRRRR: usually cheap, rarely retires airplanes) started employing rag dolls as air hostesses. My husband and I were reluctant to fly with them, since we dislike alterations and surprises, masqueraded gates to disappointments. But we had to visit his aging parents, and changing companies would have defied steadiness as well. So habit triumphed. (more…)Grace
Keys
You Named Things
Growing Pains
by Avital Gad-Cykman
(more…)The String Theory
by Avital Gad-Cykman
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.
Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again September 15, 2025. Submit here.
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