HONORABLE MENTION, Summer 2026
The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition

BY MARI HARRISON

TThe parking meter in front of Mrs. Garrett’s bookstore ate coins on Sundays.

Amir watched it happen every weekend from his father’s laundromat across the street, perched on a folding chair, towels moving through his hands out of habit. Other days, a quarter bought the green flag and added time, plain and ordinary. But on Sundays, the coins disappeared into the slot and the flag stayed red. People cursed and hit the meter, then walked away shaking their heads.

His father said it was broken. Amir was only nine, but he knew the meter wasn’t broken. It was hungry.

He’d always seen things other people missed: the gray that pooled in the laundromat’s corners when his father went quiet too long; Mrs. Levitt’s worry, thin and restless, hovering around her hands when she dropped off tablecloths; the meter’s hunger. It was a hole in the coin slot, darker and deeper than anything around it. The month before, thin threads of it had started crawling down the pole, following old scratches in the paint like veins. Last week the hole had been the size of a dime. Today, a quarter.

Amir watched Mr. Winston from the deli feed it three quarters and kick the pole when the flag stayed red. One of the black threads slid out and brushed his shoe.

Mr. Winston went pale. He clutched his chest and staggered back against his truck.

“Sorry about the meter,” Mrs. Garrett called from her doorway. “You all right?”

“Dizzy spell.” His voice had to travel farther than usual to leave his throat. He steadied himself and limped into the deli. The threads receded and the hole settled back, slightly fuller. It had taken something from him, small enough that nobody else would notice.

Amir dropped his towel and ran across the street.

“How’s your father?” Mrs. Garrett asked, her reading glasses tapping against her chest.

“The meter’s getting worse.”

“I know, sweetheart. The city’s been out twice. It works fine every time they come out.”

Amir knelt and put his hand on the pole, careful to stay clear of where the threads curled. “It only does this on Sundays.”

“You know, I think you’re right.” She looked at the meter properly, tracing the pole with her eyes. For a moment Amir thought she saw it too. Then she shook her head. “I’ll put a bag over it. A sign.”

He felt the hunger press against his palm, sharp and wanting. Coins barely fed it. What it needed was an object with years of careful keeping in it.

“I can fix it,” Amir said.

She smiled the way adults smiled when they didn’t believe you but didn’t want to say so. “Be right back,” he said as Mrs. Garrett went back inside.

                                                                             * * *

Amir’s father stood at the change machine rolling quarters into paper sleeves, hands moving steady and automatic. His work apron hung on its hook by the back room door, and the lucky quarter was in the front pocket, worn smooth on one face from his thumb. He’d carried it the day he married Amir’s mother and the day Amir was born.

Amir had asked for it once, years ago, when an ice cream truck passed by. His father’s no had been quiet and final enough that he’d never asked again.

He didn’t ask this time. He slipped it from the apron pocket while his father’s back was to him, and ran.

The coin was warm in his hand. He could feel his mother in it, or his father’s memory of her, which was nearly the same thing. It held the weight of choosing to carry something through every ordinary moment rather than set it down.

The hole pulsed when it sensed him coming. The threads pulled tight.

Amir fed the quarter in before they could reach him.

The meter clicked. Whirred. The hole opened and pulled. It took the metal and everything behind it: twenty years of grief, the love that lived underneath that grief, and the daily act of keeping something close because letting go would mean it was really over.

For one second Amir thought it might keep pulling, straight through the coin and into his own chest.
Then it stopped. The flag popped up. Two hours. The threads slid back up the pole and disappeared. It was just cold metal and a satisfied meter.

“Amir?” His father walked toward him with the empty apron in his hands.

“I took it, papa. The meter needed it.”

“Why? You don’t even drive, Amir.”

“It was hungry. I could see it.”

His father was quiet. Then: “Show me.”

Amir pressed his hand to the pole. Nothing pushed back. No hole, no threads. Just metal, warm from the afternoon sun.

“It’s gone now,” he said. “It ate what it needed.”

His father touched the pole too, and felt nothing but metal.

“Your mother could see things like that,” he said finally. “Colors around people. Weights in objects. She’d tell me about them and I couldn’t see any of it. But I believed her.” He pulled his hand back.

“Are you mad, Papa? I’m sorry. Mr. Winston was about to get hurt.”

“You knew what it meant to me, and you took it anyway.”

His father looked at the green flag a long moment. Then he took a regular quarter from his pocket and fed it into the slot, watching the time climb to four hours. “Glitchy meter,” he said. “Come on, Amir. The towels.”

They crossed the street together. His father hung the apron back on its hook and returned to his quarters, his back to Amir, hands moving steadily through the stacks.

Amir picked up a towel and folded it. He watched Mrs. Garrett come out an hour later, feed the meter, then go back inside, satisfied.

The sadness in the corners of the laundromat darkened and spread, heavier than before. Neither one of them looked at the apron for the rest of the afternoon.

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