Beth Gilstrap: THREE MICROS • Cleaver Magazine

Flash by Beth Gilstrap
THREE MICROS from There Is News Along The Ohio River

XII.

There is news along the Ohio River: a boy, toddler drunk, walks ahead of his parents whose body language suggests distance, a slow dying of affection, skin hunger. See how she reaches for his hand and he doesn’t register—they call that a bid, a turn toward, but to those who know better, a lament. See how they fail to notice the child following a faint blood trail looping its way up the bridge, trying to find its source but failing to connect it to the smallest of feathers, some hovering in their footfalls.

XVI.

There is news along the Ohio River: an owl pellet inch rolls past dandelion blooming in cracks in the sidewalk. A heart juxtaposed. Human versus tyto alba. Barn Owl. You dissect without fear for this time what’s died is for a reason, and likely unborn for the beaks are so small they remind you of the interior doves of sand dollars you sometimes broke open while yet they lived—pinkish green, supple with hair that tried to grab onto your palm, to sink back down beneath the sand. You cannot help but cry at the enormity of it all, the slight you feel as you count two, four, six, and ribs by the dozen, held in thumbnail and happenstance.

XVIII.

There is news along the Ohio River: it is the end of what people on the news will eventually call the George Floyd Summer and someone has spray painted Where is the love? on the Indiana side of the Big Four in black and red. The ‘w’ curls wide and tight and there’s an arrow connecting the words. She feels it in the pocket between rib and collarbone where so much trauma lives. Radiant heat. How he helped by hanging better, light-filtering shades in the front room, but the sparrows keep getting in through gaps, through breaks, through rot, and she can’t seem to find an answer even with meds, even sober, even in quiet funerals for birds.

Beth Gilstrap (she/her) is a writer from Charlotte, North Carolina who likes to play with genre lines. Her debut hybrid/flash CNF collection is forthcoming from River River Books in February 2026. She is also the author of two story collections, including Deadheading & Other Stories (2021), winner of the Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Prize, I Am Barbarella: Stories from Twelve Winters Press (2015), and the chapbook No Man’s Wild Laura (2016) from Hyacinth Girl Press. She and her house full of critters now call the lowcountry of South Carolina home.