She is a large woman. In another place or circumstance, she would have been the woman in the flowery housedress with fluffy mules on her feet. She would have been the lady you always seem to get stuck next to on the bus when it is hot and crowded and everyone has to hold onto the strap. She would have been the one with the smelly armpits. But she fits no clichés. She has money from sources unknown. She has a style so cosmopolitan it makes your teeth hurt. She’s always waving. Hello. Bye-bye. … Continue reading Adrienne by Lisa Ben-Shoshan→
What happens to the homes where we once lived? Homes we left behind, in childhood when it wasn’t a choice, as an adult when it was necessary for work or, as elders, for health reasons or to be closer to family. We can track them down via Google maps, but I suggest they no longer exist. Those places where we once lived, and especially those we once loved, exist only in memory, and, if we’re lucky, in the imagination. I hold onto places I’ve loved by writing fiction set there. Writing helps me process loss. … Continue reading Holding Onto The Past Through Fiction by Virginia Pye→
Spring. Finally. After several snowstorms, ice, and being stuck in the house for days on end, Louise couldn’t wait to get in her yard. The daffodils had bloomed, the forsythia had appeared on stage and the February camellias were still struggling with their winter memories. There was plenty of work to do: mulching, feeding, cleaning up windblown trash, picking up sticks, planting grass seed, trimming bushes, pulling her pots out; she was so glad she had her yardman Buddy to help, insofar as her husband Robert wasn’t much help. The garden, other than family and … Continue reading So Be It by Tyler Scott→
The sixty-year-old woman is sleeping at the moment, so I sit on a worn brown couch in the family waiting room down the hall from Shirley. It’s not too far from the intensive care ward where she lays on the white, white sheets, connected in too many ways to the machines that keep her alive or that measure whether she is, or is not. This windowless refuge gives no hints about day or night, winter or summer. Two half-done jigsaw puzzles await completion on small tables. There is a television, but it isn’t on. Shelves … Continue reading By Shirley’s Side by Peter Wallace→
Mark didn’t want to go to Jackie and Jonathan’s—he had too much studying to do before the end of the semester—but Marci insisted. “You can’t study all the time,” she said, but he was the only one of the four of them in graduate school, and was under pressures they weren’t. “Can we at least leave right after we eat?” he asked. “No walks in the woods this time?” Marci gave him a sideways glance. Getting back to Boston from the North Shore on a Sunday was never an easy drive, and the later you … Continue reading Cheesecake by Con Chapman→
X/@/20X÷ Today the puppeteer cut my strings. Then he left without a word. It feels strange to move my arms on my own. I opened every plastic pickle jar in the dollhouse, just to try them out. The pickles inside were frozen in clear acrylic. I always imagined it being liquid. My body is mine for the first time, but it doesn’t feel like it yet. Tomorrow, I’ll get scissors and a dotted line painted all down my arms. That way if anyone else ever wants to string me up again, they know I’ll … Continue reading Puppet and Master by Karris Rae→
Lissy is already dressed, her dolls arranged next to the bed in the space that is sometimes a boat, sometimes a park, and often a doctor’s office. The toys are all hues, different nationalities, from newborn to school-age, with sizes that don’t really make sense when placed next to each other. The two Barbies, who were inexpertly gifted to my daughter, live in the closet. Their boo-zooms, career ensembles, and matching footwear are of no interest to the kindergartner. “Hello, little girl!” I say. “Hello, little mother,” she smiles. “Whoa, why does Susan have all … Continue reading Complicity—A True Fiction Of Now by Erika Raskin→
“There’s something you should know,” was how he would put it. He would say this while she was doing something else—years later, in a Solana Beach cottage two blocks from the Pacific, Annie could still remember exactly where she’d been, what she’d been doing, the way one does looking back at a national tragedy. These were not national tragedies but at once less and more, news that struck to the bone, altering her immediate world more than a presidential assassination. What Andrew remembered was how she stopped what she was doing and turned her … Continue reading Grater by Debby Mayer→
Tim Collyer is the 2nd place winner of Streetlight‘s 2025 Flash Fiction Contest Career Day smells of bleach and gravy. Wrong and familiar at once, like medicine in birthday cake. Margaret sits on a child’s blue chair, jaw still tender from yesterday’s biopsy. The scarf over her scalp isn’t a statement, just warm. Emma twists her book bag strap round and round, marking time with what they don’t discuss. A builder talks about bricks. A paramedic shows a stethoscope and every child leans forward. Margaret once wrote columns about the sound of crisp pastry giving way, about wine that tasted of … Continue reading The Taste of Copper Pennies by Tim Collyer Flash Fiction→
So, pretty much every old saw about old age is 100% true. There’s crepitus (the medical onomatopoeia-ous description of creaky joints), and the inevitable geriatric bitch sessions where individualized assaults on the body are compared in groups of two or more, (except, of course for the unmentionable issues which are unmentionable for a reason); and the whole-scale disappearance of words from mental dictionaries (though, thankfully adjacent synonyms seem to hang on longer.) There also seems to be a universal consideration of undertaking the massive Swedish Death Cleaning to free heirs from the unpleasant chore down-road. … Continue reading Night, Night Sleepy Heathen by Erika Raskin→
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