April 2025 - Expectations Of The Day
And here we are in issue #6 of Dog Throat Journal, home of oddly favorable flash fiction and prose poetry. A lovely ride it's been. Thank you, everyone!
Seems like with what's going on in the world we have dark work for dark times, which is fitting. We've also mixed in some levity and beauty to keep things balanced.
This time around we're welcoming several new folks. Please enjoy their contributions, and drop a comment on their work. Many thanks again, and all the best. Victor David
Issue title by Deepansh Khurana
No, Perfect Is Better Than Done
by Deepansh Khurana
Every morning, or sometimes in the day, if the morning has been chock-full of demands of attention and time from the world, I set out to fix the sheets on the bed. It is a rather painstaking process that needs my utmost attention. Like an engineer overseeing a construction site—what with all the debris and other wastefulness left behind from the day before—I assess the case and make a decision. I choose if I ought to replace the sheets just yet or if they could carry on for another day. This is, like all decisions, informed by tonnes of factors, including but not limited to the measure of my laziness, the absurd expectations of the day, the general state of my health, and...
SOS, Someone Said
by Pamelyn Casto
Someone started the discussion by saying somebody should explain what SOS stands for. Somebody said the Germans made up the signal and called it Notzeichen. Someone else claimed that wouldn’t work because people wouldn’t understand what Save Our Notzeichen means. Somebody added that Save Our Souls is simpler to understand, unless someone’s German. But someone pointed out that anyone could say that and that still wouldn’t make it true.
Someone shouted, "No, it actually means Save Our Ship!" Somebody insisted...
You Can't Have the Cream Without the Meat
by Trilety Wade
“You can’t have the cream without the meat.” The woman-on-her-way-home knew this wasn’t true, but it was the expression verbally repeated by the brainwashed. Not quite so vague as to be idiomatic, yet not quite so clear as to be a maxim. This motto was even visually repeated in a conspicuous inscription on every piece of fabric and every inch of flesh. Factories existed with the sole purpose of embroidering the eight-word slogan on every piece of corporate clothing. But the tattoo artists had died out from the stimulation-starvation of boredom that accompanied the fatal repetition of unimaginative ink as they mechanically abraded the exact same sentence in the exact same block font in the exact same large size and in the exact same blend of red. You couldn’t just display it; you had to display it the same.
“You can’t have the cream without the meat,” the man without a head said. He did have a head, and a functional but lazy brain. But in these parts, and in these times, she saw everyone as a moral decapitee. His beard was as thin as...
Rooms of Memory
by Sofia Ziegler
Memory arranges itself like an anatomy textbook: here is the heart (a willow tree, planted for a dead girl), here are the bones (a playground race, a naming ritual), here is the skin (shame, always shame). I wake with the taste of metal in my mouth, pressing Google Earth's bright eye against my childhood playground at 3 AM, bourbon making the screen liquid, searching for proof: yes, the willow still stands. Yes, this happened. Yes, I was there.
Kiko died of brain cancer that year, the tumor blooming inside her skull like some horrible flower. I hadn't invited her to my birthday party, but she came anyway, silver stars on wrapping paper, her mother fluttering at the doorway, awaiting rejection, pleading...
A Wisp of Happiness
by Louella Lester
He had no one. One day he saw a thin beige thread trailing a beige scarf caught about the neck of a tall thin woman seated in front of him on the bus. He reached up, then dropped his hand worried that, if he pulled at it, the whole scarf would unravel in front of him. So he waited to catch it when she reached to ring the bell. She stood. Turned. Moved toward the backdoor. But nothing unraveled. A thread, only about twenty centimetres long remained, caught...
The Churn
by Brenden Layte
The ocean’s stained-glass surface explodes against pink-flecked granite. The ocean’s rain falls, chalky remnants slowly drying on jagged rock. The ocean’s retreat swallows the rockweed glowing golden in the morning sun. The ocean’s advance scatters kelp as it rushes through an inlet. The ocean’s thunder chips away at the world. What if the ocean flowed over the Irish moss swaying in the tide pools for a final time? What if the ocean rose and came over the cliffs it could never reach? What if the ocean cascaded through the forests and churned us all into pieces of debris among the splintered remains of hemlock, spruce, and white pine, everything broken and thrown through the hills, flowing through the moss and lichens and trees, and then over the peaks that were once beyond its reach but now surround what’s left of us until...
Office of Complaints Against Change
by Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal
It was five am on a Friday. I was dressed and ready for work. It was 2035. It was the last day I would be at work. 36 years in the same place. A 36 year old, caucasian male, would be my replacement. Someone who worked for the president, now in his tenth year at the helm had read an old poem of mine criticizing facism, reported me to the Office of Complaints Against Change. I had to turn in my badge and parking placard. I would be led away, my citizenship revoked, and pension...
Do the Best You Can With What You've Got
by Brad Rose
As career day approaches, I’m wondering, Is a tattoo really the best long-term investment for me? I mean, from a skeleton crew’s perspective. I guess there’s no real reason to fear the alphabet, but I’m a glass-half-empty kind of dude, waiting for the other flip flop to fall. No use lollygagging around until the crows come home. Hey, hand me those kittens,...
Last Day in Pompeii
by Spencer Keene
By the time we felt the mountain’s breath it was too late; the great
molten wave was bearing down on the town with the viciousness
of a Roman deity, snapping its Ionic columns like toothpicks and
spraying...
Born a Whale
by Jackie Roberti
I was born a whale.
I remember this clearly: floating in a cloud of amniotic fluid, light filtering through from the surface. I was not an easy birth. My mother labored for hours as I fought to remain like a ballast in her belly. But I was born, and even with eyes closed I sensed the light above, and the overwhelming instinct to go towards it.
I think the trouble began with that first breath. Air rushed in through my blowhole, oxygenating the blood from my snout to my flukes. Some signal must have been fired, some latent genes sprung into action. I blame the air. Air, which I needed, which would remake me.
The process was slow....
My Last Trip
by Esteban Colon
Somewhere there is a voicemail that reveals what it would sound like if I was battery powered and those batteries were running out.
Somewhere there is a panicked text understanding the experience of losing control of me.
trying to focus past the folds of origami reality, high definition
cat fur filling my saucer sized pupils, thick worm fingers dancing
like they’re mating and trying to split in halves.
Somewhen I watched chronology break....
Protection
by Ken Poyner
We worry that our children, out doodling the void-filling chapters of their lives, might by accident - or worse, by design – stumble upon a cache of abandoned clownware. A carelessly forgotten, or strategically placed, set of size twenty-five shoes, a harvest of water emitting daisies, ten fingers’ worth of exploding cigars. The children would be too curious to avoid the artifacts, immediately populate them with imaginings grown from idle clown contacts, the pancake make-up smeared on fathers weaving home from drunken adventures, rumors fed them by older sisters, and perhaps a clandestinely viewed performance. Would they experiment? Would they be turned? Would they smuggle pieces of clownware home to dawdle with under their sheets in bed at night? We raise our children to be clown-aware, to draw a strict, if arbitrary, line. But children...
Track 10 of Lucy Dacus’ Home Video
by Jacob Hatfield
reminds of the time in your car when you claimed Lucy Dacus was more than an indie musician, she’s an academic and hot as hell. You’d give her the moon even if you knew she’d throw it right back at you. This is how most days go: we stare at the dried flowers tied with twine hung on your rearview mirror, listening only to the most deprecating indie music of all time for an hour, always skipping 8 am statistics. Today, though, you turn down the dial and say your diagnosis has ruined you. This is something I’ve prepared for...
Ngaben: at Pangkung Tiba Beach, Bali
by James Penha
The crematorium gate is open to the sea tumbling against the sand, rumbling eternally, waiting. As always. Mourners surround the pyre devouring the golden adornments first then the father mother son daughter uncle aunt I do not know whom I am here only for the spectacle. The salty air mitigates...