I left my body, my home, and my life at 5:14 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon in May, just as the peonies outside turned their faces upward and smiled their brightest smile. One minute I was cutting up […]

I have a touch of prosopagnosia (that’s Latin for: oh shit), which is an inability to recognize faces. For me it’s always been a transient condition, hitting without warning. Certain situations are predictably […]

Kay Rae Chomic is the 3rd place winner of Streetlight’s 2022 Flash Fiction Contest

Stephanie climbed her porch stairs, nodded at the two pumpkins with carved misshapen noses, mouths, and teeth. One […]

The first time I saw Bad Dog Ollie, he gave me the stink eye. He was in a large pen with a flock of adorable puppies, who ran and tumbled and played in a group. He stood to the side, staring up at me with his […]

More than half a century ago

(wtaf)

when I was five, my parents bought a DC row house that came furnished

(an estate sale? someone walking away from their whole life?)

with lots of heavy dark furniture […]

John Adinolfi is the 2nd place winner of Streetlight’s 2022 Flash Fiction Contest
 

All the times of their lives happened at the shore. She was a lifeguard. He was beach patrol. He tripped over h […]

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 St […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 a […]

Serenity by the Sea by Virginia Watts   Today is Nora Richard’s seventy-fifth birthday. She sighs, blows her nose, rests her head back against the scratchy, cheap couch that came wi […]

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 mu […]

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 […]

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 b […]

Hey, son. It’s your Mama. Hope y’all are doing good up there. I’m callin’ cause I’ve got a little problem here.

So, did you hear about that storm we had a couple days ago, that derecho? Well, none […]

It’s just a stupid old oak tree, I keep telling myself, while I sit at the kitchen table and watch the white winter sunlight bathing its branches. It’s dying, I say, as I wipe away tears and busy myse […]

In the small Appalachian town where I was born lived a squat, bowlegged, hairless doctor. Some called him a quack and a dope fiend, but in 1954 he delivered me on his dining room table, spanked me ‘til I c […]

Twenty years ago, a reporter called me with bizarre news, so bizarre that I instantly wrote him off as a prank caller. He claimed he was from a town out West, maybe in Colorado? I am fuzzy on the details. I […]