“Avitus B. Carle is one of the best flash fiction writers I know. This collection of sixty-one stories showcases the vast range of her talents. A writer of seemingly unlimited imagination, Carle is by turns disarmingly playful and dead serious. Formally inventive, magical, and often darkly funny, these stories present a kaleidoscopic world where anything can happen. But make no mistake, there’s wisdom and empathy at the center of even the most uncanny of these works. Carle makes us feel what her characters feel: a yearning to go beyond mere survival to a place of love and acceptance. These Worn Bodies is an astonishing, and deeply impressive read.”
— Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life: Collected Works from 2003-2018

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Praise for These Worn Bodies

  • "I have been waiting for this book. You have too, even if you didn't know it. This book of marvels and treasures. This book of magic and beauty. This book of Avitus Carle's singular, stunning storytelling. This book of we and they, and us and them. I have been waiting for this book. I have been waiting a long, long time."

    - Cathy Ulrich, author of Small Burning Things

  • "Carle’s debut collection mesmerizes with its inventiveness and depth. These tiny tales contain multitudes: love, grief, transition, abandonment, addiction, growth, longing, aging, illness, survival. By turns delightfully quirky and hauntingly surreal, Carle plunges us into relationships ranging from familial to platonic to romantic to downright bizarre, showing us all the ways people can love and destroy one another."

    - Tara Campbell, author of City of Dancing Gargoyles and Midnight at the Organporium

  • "Avitus B Carle's brilliant, startlingly original debut collection, These Worn Bodies, is a masterclass in the possibilities of the short-short story. At turns bizarre, uncanny, oneiric, hilarious, harrowing, these 62 pieces range in length from a single sentence to 4 or 5 pages and in form from a bulleted list, to the resume, the legal briefing, the dictionary entry, the epistolary, the instruction manual, the crossword puzzle -- there's even a story in the form of a Venn diagram. Carle's dreamlike prose bristles and thrills, searing image after image in lightning flashes that linger on the reader's inner eye. I never knew exactly where Carle was leading me, but I'm forever grateful for having taken the journey."

    - Pete Duval, author of The Deposition and Night Work

  • "Avitus B. Carle has created a feast of words in These Worn Bodies, easily consumable in small bites. With a stunning facility with language, unforgettable characters, and startling plot twists, once you start reading you'll be hard pressed to stop. I don't know who is more fortunate, Avitus for her remarkable storytelling gift, or us for having this collection available for us to devour."

    - Claudia Love Mair, author of Don't You Fall Now and Mourning Pages: Working Through Grief the Write Way (2025)

  • "With heart and insight, visionary Avitus B. Carle’s debut collection These Worn Bodies captures the ferocity of women told to hush for the sake of others, to be a good woman, a good daughter and a good wife when those terms are dictated by everyone else and wielded against them the second they step out of line. Crossing time and space, these stories show us with startling clarity how it feels and what it means to be a Black woman in America. See what you’ve always known, but maybe didn’t have the words for, spilled across pages with stunning language and imagery. Read this and feel yourself drawn to these flashes again and again. Get lost in these stories and find yourself. The world is ending and beginning again. Pull up a chair, Carle has something to say."

    - Chelsea Stickle, author of Everything’s Changing and Breaking Points

About Avitus B. Carle

Avitus B(uckhaulter) Carle lives and writes outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her debut flash fiction collection, These Worn Bodies, was the winner of the 2023 Moon City Press Short Fiction Award. Her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in The Commuter (Electric Lit.), The Rumpus, Waxwing, JMWW, and Shondaland, among others.

Also By Avitus B. Carle

  • "To All The Boys We Never Kissed"

    Published in SoFloPoJo

    August 1, 2024

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  • "The Woman Inside"

    Published in Necessary Fiction

    July 24, 2024

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  • "Trebuchet"

    Published in The Commuter (Electric Lit.)

    April 10, 2024

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  • "Close: A Father/Daughter Breakup Defined"

    Published by Moon City Review

    March 1, 2024

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  • "Seaworthy"

    Published in Moon City Review

    March 1, 2024

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