The familiar constriction arose in her chest. She followed the dark echoes of her husband’s steps; his gait sober as cold coffee. Heel, toe. March. She giggled at the image of her husband as a soldier. Hi […]

I was typing my alternate ID number into the keypad at my (formerly) favorite grocery store when the perky cashier asked if I qualified for Senior Discount Thursday. My finger froze midair.

“Excuse m […]



Podcast: When a woman faces the loss of a beloved, aging pet, she finds herself confronting her own experience with age and death.

Read the story online: Ernestine Goes to Heaven by Susan Heeger

When whales and porpoises beach themselves en masse, people react and mobilize in response to the tragedy. The sight of cetaceans dying from dehydration or drowning, and the inevitability of their slow, suffering […]

Tara Lindis is the 3rd place winner of Streetlight Magazine’s 2018 Flash Fiction Contest.

The children do not have life jackets. We give them ours. Their slender arms slide through the adult sized holes, […]

It’s hard being human, especially when the world feels hard. Nowadays, we live in a fishbowl of constant exposure to the unnatural noise of unnatural tweets and digital pings, chimes, and chirps. I miss bird song […]

Katherine Smith is the 2nd place winner of Streetlight Magazine’s 2018 Flash Fiction Contest.

The coffee was bitter and good in La Palette, Carol’s favored café off the Boulevard Saint Germain. Ten ye […]

Christine West is the 1st place winner of Streetlight Magazine’s 2018 Flash Fiction Contest.

My social anxiety as a high schooler was grossly misdiagnosed as maturity by adults. I wasn’t seen as shy, b […]

“Simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being. Man has no other reason for his existence.”

—Nan She […]

Who am I?
Why am I here?
What do I want?
What do I offer?

Last week, when I attended an event about purposeful living, a group of 10 people meditated briefly and answered these same questions. We had agreed […]

He emerged from the bushes clutching a bottle of wine, his face whipped red by the wind. They were huddled together in the clearing. Dry tufts of winter grass poked through the ratty blanket on which they sat. […]

“Be an ant,” he says.

“Don’t look at the whole project at once and try to do it,” says my stone-steady, clear-eyed, logical-thinking husband. “Be an ant. Do what’s in front of you. Do this one thing, take t […]

You Held My Hand And Walked Me Out Of The Water
 

Sometimes I look at the photos of my parents before they were sick to try and find clues of the diseases to come. There’s one of them courtside at a P […]

I was sitting at the bar in the My-Oh-My drinking what was left of my disability check after buying oxy from the retarded janitor at the hospital. The idea of killing someone hadn’t come up yet. I kept staring a […]

I hate the scent of imitation lemon in dish soap. It’s too concentrated to be authentic. But the scent will lose potency once I dilute it in water. That’s always the trick. Dilute what’s unpleasant. Dilute […]

One summer evening, long after dusk, I was relaxing on a porch in a comfy chair next to a novelist I’d just met when she softly announced, “The stars in the sky look like an ocean. But I’m high, so maybe that’s […]

Remain calm.

You have purchased the crème de la crème of packages; don’t squander the experience with a panic attack. So bridges make you sweat. So you chew three Xanax every time you board a plane. So […]