I’ve held season tickets on the fifty-yard line of health care for a long time, watching in alternating awe and horror at how medical interventions are provided. In the gratitude/wonder department, […]

Rose sat on the front porch, her custom at that dwindling time of day, watching. She tucked a strand of gray-white hair behind an ear. Her rocker squeaked against the floorboards. Light had fallen near […]

‘The silence gathered and struck me. It bashed me broadside from nowhere, as if I’d been hit by a plank. It dropped from the heavens above me like yard goods; ten acres of fallen, invisible sky choked the fie […]

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 […]

The first photo I took, when I was twelve years old, was of treetops. I’ve always loved nature. My subjects over time have not changed—I still take pictures of nature even when I’ve traveled overs […]

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 began photographing at sixteen when I got my first paycheck from the local movie theater to purchase a 35 mm film camera, a Canon EOS Rebel G. The camera then never left my side the rest of high […]

When I was thirteen, my mother left us. It was on a Sunday and she knew that Daddy, my brothers and I were away, visiting a family out on the old Nashville road. A moving van pulled up to the duplex and my […]

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 […]

There are two loves in my life, two passions on which I spend countless hours. On one side the world of science, biology, physiology, cells and smells, counters with a microscope, computers with software […]

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 […]

I once held my cousin in a Dixie cup. At least a part of him. The improvised committal on the banks of Nottoway Swamp was a fitting send-off for a man who wanted no ceremony. Prone to eccentricity and melancholia […]

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 […]

I wholeheartedly believe in the power and value of art—whatever the avenue. The act of trying is the underlying variable of my art education, from solely writing poetry to putting energy towards visual po […]

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 […]