Butterfly Wing
The mad scientist sewed a butterfly wing onto my left shoulder, nerves spliced together like rope. I fluttered it once. My muscles ached with the effort. “There are consequences to all things,” said the mad scientist. I already knew this because of the baby inside of me. Everyone was underwater within hours.
At the Movies
In this movie, Jesus and my mother are at a bar drinking mojitos. The music swells as Jesus unzips his skin, revealing a metallic endoskeleton. The audience claps politely. Jesus’s eyeball pops out, but my mother just pushes it back in with a familiar sigh. I finally rise from my movie theater seat to embrace her. The lights flash red. How did my mother become younger than me? While the curtains close, Jesus fiddles with the drained batteries in his chrome torso. I don’t tell him I have some extra AAs in my jeans pocket. We start to walk out of the theater, but Jesus can’t make it past the exit door.
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Elena Zhang is a Chinese American writer and mother living in Chicago. Her work can be found in HAD, The Citron Review, and Flash Frog, among other publications. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, and was selected for Best Microfiction 2024 and 2025.