Margaret Watson is the 1st place winner of Streetlight’s 2022 Flash Fiction Contest I try my best to ignore the telephone vibrating in my back pocket. I focus on what I am doing–massaging Stephen’s feet. Using lotion, my fingers like feathers, caressing the skin that is now so delicate. The vibration stops and starts again. Whoever this is, they aren’t going to use voice mail. “I’ll just get this,” I say to Stephen. I can’t be sure if he’s heard me. I step back, tap the answer icon, already knowing who it is. Barbara, … Continue reading Thank You For Calling by Margaret Watson→
I found my calling on a bleak Sunday afternoon in the fall of 1958, standing at the edge of a fetid swamp, questioning why bad things happened to little children. It was the day four-year-old Billy Flynn disappeared. I was nine at the time, living in Pawtucket, Rhode Island with my mother and grandmother, in the kind of friendly neighborhood that was pretty common back then. That afternoon had started innocently enough, in the Flynns’ backyard, right after Halloween. Decked out in Stetson hats and feathers, a bunch of us boys were playing Cowboys … Continue reading Missing by Ruth Spack→
Marie moved her mother Florence into an elder care facility only two months ago, but still got lost trying to find it. It was an incongruously red brick institutional building dropped into a suburban neighborhood of single family split levels and ranch houses, all on tree-named streets like Birch or Willow that formed no recognizable grid or pattern but were rather a random and meandering tangle that was impossible to navigate. She left her house late, and was now even later for being lost, which would add yet another level of tension to this … Continue reading Angry by Alan Brickman→
This year’s flash fiction contest brought many great stories . . . and hard choices. (Seriously, it’s no lay-up trying to determine a winner when you have two judges with different writing backgrounds and sensibilities looking for the top three entries!) But Mary Esselman and I dove into the stack, read and reread, then ranked those that spoke to us in order, finding overlap à la Venn Diagram. (Personal aside: I’m always intrigued by the fact that this formula may mean one’s favorite might not even make the cut at all.) That said, the … Continue reading 2022 Flash Fiction Contest Winners by Erika Raskin and Mary Esselman→
Erik awakens full of pain, lying in a hospital bed in a propped position, his throat sore from the tube that snaked down into his mouth and nose, his limbs heavy and bruised. His head feels like it belongs to someone else. The lights are low in his hospital room and he hears the soft whir of machines. No one is in the room with him that he can see. Panic floods his heart as he remembers the accident: the whirl of lights, the spinning crush of metal. And ten-year-old George, his son, in … Continue reading Erik and George by Ty Phelps→
I went on a museum field trip not too long ago and had a revelation. I’m sure I’m not the first person to have pondered the following—but isn’t it wild to think that all sorts of currently priceless artifacts may well have started off as gee gaws shoved in the junk drawers of days of yore? I mean the pottery fragment on display could have come from a set of unregistered-for-salad plates some caveman’s new bride couldn’t put in the give-away bag fast enough. Or you know, accidentally dropped. In other words, it’s entirely possible … Continue reading Beholder by Erika Raskin→
Today is Nora Richard’s seventy-fifth birthday. She sighs, blows her nose, rests her head back against the scratchy, cheap couch that came with Apartment 205 inside Serenity by the Sea, an assisted living community she and her late husband moved into six years ago. Another long day stretches ahead of her like a superhighway to the moon. Mornings are the worst without Harvey brewing eight cups of Chock full o’Nuts drip coffee instead of two cups because a full pot of brewed coffee really makes this place smell like home. Harvey’s baritone voice talking … Continue reading Serenity by the Sea by Virginia Watts→
You’re twenty. Fresh-faced. Everyone else in this writing cohort is watching you, rubbernecking, wide-eyed, pale. They can smell the blood in the water. They know you are going to say something, you must say something. Silence is not an option. The woman who submitted the piece is proud of it. Proud. Admittedly, her prose is clean, precise, purposeful. She has her MFA. She’s earned it. She uses it to write about people whose suffering she could never begin to comprehend. Her little scrap of prose chronicles the murder of a fictional anonymous boy in … Continue reading How To Survive The Buffet by Jessica Mendoza→
What the sky chart would indicate is that he and his dog, Bella, are looking at is the constellation Orion. But what he sees is the Frozen Butterfly, one of the constellations his sister taught him. Jack had contemplated bringing his daughter out to stargaze with him, maybe do a little storytelling to his grown and unsettled girl. But she was reluctant in the cold, so it’s just him and Bella—named for Bellatrix, the constellation’s third brightest star. He’s looking at it now, picking it out in the Butterfly’s wing. The first time he … Continue reading Betelguese by Stephanie Coyne DeGhett→
I recently accepted a beautiful piece of writing by an author who wrote back to thank me — and to graciously say he’s open to feedback—which was a lovely, appreciated response. Writers have been known to bristle at suggestions. I can’t remember the exact details but there’s a literary legend about an editor getting punched in the nose at a cocktail party over the unauthorized insertion of an Oxford comma. I, on the other hand, am a firm believer in the benefits of a second pair of eyes. On pretty much everything. Bathing suit selection, … Continue reading The Eyes of an Editor by Erika Raskin→
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