Valerie Sargent

  • wish by Harry James The morning sun dappled the kitchen wall with an outline of wind-fumbled leaves loosely hanging on trees, cooking in the early morning heat. On […]

  • Trudy wrote a new post 1 year, 2 months ago

    My Wife Is In Love by E. H. Jacobs Five years ago, my wife fell in love. I’m not talking about me (we have been married thirty-nine years, so I hope the falling in love thing happened m […]

  • Duck Blind by Regina Guarino Across the narrow alley way between row houses, where trash cans totter and feral cats loiter, a window opens onto the neighbors’ kitchen. For o […]

  • Immersed by Caroline Kahlenberg     People will say it was suicide, but you mustn’t believe them. They’ll say I looked normal at first, a tall woman with long black hair […]

  • Trudy wrote a new post 1 year, 3 months ago

    I had heard when you get older you revert to a lot of your tastes and activities when young, but I disregarded it, until I started buying old Joni Mitchell and Buffalo Springfield albums, and listening to the […]

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    It’s not hard to sneak into the Manhattan Exclusion zone if you know what you’re doing. The Coast Guard mostly looks for the guys who don’t know what they’re doing—the ones who rush past Spuyten Du […]

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    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 […]

  • Trudy wrote a new post 1 year, 4 months ago

    ‘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 […]

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    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 […]

  • Trudy wrote a new post 1 year, 7 months ago

    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 […]

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    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 […]

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    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 […]

  • Trudy wrote a new post 1 year, 7 months ago

    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 […]

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