Waterworks

by Adele Gallogly

The vehicle careens before Cate’s class enters a chlorine-soured waterpark pretending February doesn't exist. It skids before Cate takes too long in a stall mushing her wonderbread breasts into mustard yellow nylon. It slides before she overhears a trip leader say her English teacher’s name with “killed in a wreck this morning,” dragging out Ms. Elzinga so it sounds like an exhale. It spins before she holds in this ice block of gossip while plunging and wading and floating. It crashes before she waits, alone, in the longest line for the steepest slide with a two-person tube on her shoulder. It stops before she plummets down a blue tunnel, sobbing and sobbing and sobbing, and goes red-eyed and gasping to the bottom, where some kids think she's giggling and others tease her for freaking out like a little girl.

6S

Adele Gallogly is a Canadian writer new to the magic of flash & microfiction and now hooked on tiny stories. Her work has appeared in FlashFlood, Writers' Hour, Paragraph Planet, and been shortlisted for the New Writers 100-Word Writing Competition 2025.