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 He had become withdrawn, seeking solitude, showing disinterest in his duties even as four of his men resided in the […]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

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 […]

It all started when a friend in California sent me three used paperbacks that someone donated to her sidewalk library. My friend and I hoped that my nephew who is stranded here during the pandemic without school […]

The day slipped into dusk as the ambient light ebbed imperceptibly like the liminal moment before the tide changes direction. Robin removed her Ray-Bans and stared up at the wide-open heavens above the El […]

From beneath the dining room table he spots wisps of dust on chipped gray floorboards across the room. He hears his grandmother clop around the kitchen in her low-heeled shoes, into the pantry and out again. […]

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
 L.P. Hartley
That quote knocks me out so much I wanted to use it to launch into a safari through my own history. Perform a little dispassionate […]

Summer

Elmer Toon was always a little beyond the edge.

Elmer shot across the bridge from Dorsey Street and onto the big parking lot, head thrust out over the front wheel as he peddled full tilt on a […]

I run a writers’ retreat in a nineteenth-century farmhouse on the James River in Norwood, Virgina.  My quarters are at  the rear of the three-story house and consist of a large country kitchen with a woodstove, a […]

Right now, sitting in my armchair, I’m imagining myself at the Camilla House bed and breakfast in Penzance, listening to Fiona, the charming proprietor, as she tells me about her favorite local restaurants and p […]

Hannah Fisher keeps the curtains closed in every room of the farmhouse night and day. Windowsills are stuffed with juice glasses brimming with seasonal wildflowers: delicate, snow-white Queen Anne’s Lace, purple c […]

It was raining hard and Eunice’s husband, Oliver, insisted on getting the car from the lot and bringing it around to the front of Brucie’s, where they were regulars. You could get supper for two, dessert inc […]