On the one-year anniversary of the Covid lockdown, my husband and I decided to visit the recently-reopened Museum of Modern Art (while double-masked and socially-distanced) in midtown Manhattan, and have dinner […]

The summer I worked as a tour guide at the CN Tower, it was the tallest free-standing structure in the world. One thousand, eight hundred and fifteen feet tall.

On my first day there, I shadowed a colleague […]

“Please forgive me. My illness won today. Please look after each other, the animals, and the global poor for me.”

Some people are born with a different level of grace and goodness than the rest of us. My […]

They knew exactly when it would happen. Not just the day and the hour, but the minute. The very second. Even before they knew it, it was still destined to happen at that precise moment because it had […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 He had become withdrawn, seeking solitude, showing disinterest in his duties even as four of his men resided in the […]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 […]

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 […]

The ascent of the Black Lives Matter movement and the overthrow of apartheid symbols in the Capital of the Confederacy made me think of some of the things I heard when we lived there:
–The South will rise […]

“I told you we should have made reservations,” Maya said.

“But this trip was supposed to be about spontaneity.”

Maya and Zephyr were driving across the country in their new used RV. They were celebra […]