Daniel Lowe is the 2nd place winner of Streetlight‘s 2026 Flash Fiction Contest
The river fog clears and rises, and for a few moments the tops of the city’s tallest buildings seem suspended in air. From your perch on the hillside, their windows are portals of white light, like eyes with cataracts reflecting a brilliant sun. Cloud cities exist only in fantasy, fairytale worlds of imagination now overtaken by video, and anyway, you gave up all fantasy other than the sexual kind the day you entered puberty.
Perhaps it was a day like this one, a cool September morning in its early vestige of autumn. Perhaps you were standing at a bus stop (as you are now, an ache in your lower back that of late has grown worryingly sharp). Perhaps the girl who lived down the street the entirety of your childhood—and whom you mostly ignored except for one rainy afternoon of third grade after-school puddle-jumping—was now walking toward you in freckles and a first-day skirt, and your heart went hummingbird. This morning, under the cloud city, that lit, archaic version of yourself flashes through your mind in twenty-four frames spliced with alternate images of a dimmed fifty-year-old man, both of you waiting for a bus.
It arrives.
On board, you sit alone and watch the imagined boy and girl riding on a seat next to each other. They don’t speak, their legs don’t touch, but the color rises in their cheeks. Last year, you took a vacation with your ex who you’d left a decade earlier. Each of you newly single again, you agreed to the trip on a lark. “Let’s go see Mount Rushmore!” she said. You stood together in front of the pale, disembodied heads, but you couldn’t stop discretely studying her face and the new, faintly filigreed lines that had formed over its bones like lace. That night, you slept in the same hotel room, the same bed, but resisted the need and nostalgia of the body. You woke before dawn from a dream, remembering how, years ago, when you’d told her you were leaving, she had held her hands to the side of her head and cried out, “I’m shattering! I’m shattering!” as if she were made of glass and had just struck the floor.
To dull the memory, you pressed up against her, and the heat of her skin was like solace, but she turned away. Later, from the hotel diner, over half-eaten eggs and toast, you watched her through the window as she smoked in the parking lot. You thought of the child you share who refuses to speak to you, how she would quake with fury at this false reunion, how you stole into the back of the church the day she was married, and a heavy June storm shook the church to the point that those who were invited exchanged looks of concern. Afterwards, the sky was scrubbed so clear that the broken world below looked reassembled in a way the parts of you would never fit.
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