I was walking our dog this evening, around six o’clock, when I heard the low rumble of an approaching train. I live in Silver Spring, Md., a few blocks from where the tracks cross over Georgia Ave.

When […]

Sylvia wished she saw anything but houses when she looked out her bedroom window. A field, a lake, or the foggy moors of Wuthering Heights. Or if there must be houses, let them be stately. Like Pemberley or […]

My evolution from wanting to write, to loving writing, to having to write did not proceed quietly. The more I lost myself in the craft, the more I anguished over what it meant to be “good enough” and, once goo […]

To: Team Members

From: Jill Valentine, MENTOR

Re: Time-Off Requests

Dear Team,

First off, how lucky we are to still be thriving in this economy! Because not everyone’s so lucky. Some people are o […]

I’ve written before about the upside of long-term ditziness (mostly having to do with the silver-lining aspect of it not being a new, and therefore alarming, decline.) And I’m glad that I’ve documented it.

The […]

I was on the patio in my lounge chair journaling. The year was 2017 and I had been living in Los Angeles for the past twenty-three years, having moved from Chicago. I loved my husband Dave, family and friends but […]

My mother had a chair that when she sat in it, she was invisible. At first she put it in a corner where she would be unseen and could not be found and where she would hide from our rambunctiousness and our […]

Anne Whitehouse’s moving new poetry collection, Outside from the Inside (Dos Madres Press, 2020), takes us on four journeys, each with its pains and losses, its accretions of insight and moments of joy. In the f […]

The truck stop parking lot reverberated with idling big diesel engines. The air smelled like sour urine. Randal Whitley stood by the open door of his cab smoking a cigarette and drinking his morning coffee. A […]

Anne Holzman is the 3rd place winner of Streetlight’s 2020 Flash Fiction Contest
 

I hear you before I see you. I start working on arranging my face.

There’s the ding-ding of the elevator, the door op […]

You tiptoe back towards religion, in my experience, cautiously and nervously and more than a little suspicious, quietly hoping that it wasn’t all smoke and nonsense, that there is some deep wriggle of genius and p […]

The Captain had not been himself ever since we extracted the frozen bird carcass from the ice. He had become withdrawn, seeking solitude, showing disinterest in his duties even as four of his men resided in the […]

My father was an atheist; my mother, an agnostic. My parents preached conscience and character to their two daughters instead of dogma.

I grew up in Greensboro, N.C., a city with seven colleges. Outside of […]

Sheila Longton is the 2nd place winner of Streetlight’s 2020 Flash Fiction Contest
 

What I remember of my mother is this: She is down on her hands and knees, crawling backwards along the hallway, s […]

Nancy Ludmerer is the 1st place winner of Streetlight’s 2020 Flash Fiction Contest
 

The Lubavitch Hasidim are sending two teen volunteers to spend time with our daughter. I resist at first, but […]

It is no easy task to provide a peek into a textured world, with backstory, present and possibility —in only five hundred words. The writers who submitted to our Flash Fiction Contest took on the challenge a […]

Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.
Simone Weil
Love is not merely an emotion. It is a meltdown that reestablishes a more unified space of brilliance, goodness, and sadness. This is the real function of love […]

Once a week a Sergeant and a Driver were detailed to take the garbage from the Camp mess hall and dump it at the impromptu garbage dump out on the far end of the runway.

In a country where much of the rural […]