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

A short story performed by Jennifer Sims.

Read the story online: E […]

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, […]

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 […]

I was born in Montreal, Quebec. My parents were highly cultured people; they had a large collection of books on art, music and sculpture. I was a curious child and doubtless my parents’ interests rubbed […]

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 […]

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 […]

Given her first crayons at three, Nancy Congress Bass drew a picture of a pink poodle. She loved the slew of cats housed down the street and would grow up to be an artist with a penchant for painting […]

Things that get in the way, viz., from Online Etymology Dictionary:
1530s, from Latin obstructionem (nominative obstructio) “an obstruction, barrier, a building up,” noun of action from past participle stem of […]

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 […]

Private Wilson hesitated at the precipice. It felt like a long time since his Sargent had barked, “Wilson, GO! GO!” Technically, Wilson hadn’t heard it, the air rushing by the plane was moving by so quick […]

I began making photos, suddenly and unexpectedly, in 2005, when a dear friend was diagnosed with cancer. Making photos help me to fill temporal-spatial, psycho-social holes and, on rare good days, to […]

I had long been convinced that destiny had intended me to be born and bred in Italy. Instead, I grew up in suburban Chicago. In September 2008 I set out to rectify fate’s error. Together with my husband Bill and o […]

Risa Eccles, thirty-nine weeks pregnant, sat in her car, furious at Dr. LaSalle for being an asshole, at Paul for having the kind of job that made him seem like a degenerate, at herself for thinking that […]