On Thursday, there are three chickens in the backyard pecking at each other, plucked feathers scattered on the ground like a gruesome crime scene. You could make a fourth chicken out of this, I think and rescue the yellow one with a bleeding wing. She scrambles in my arms, talons clawing at exposed flesh. I drop her. She returns to pecking, happier in the violence which is more comfortable to her than in my arms: safe but unknown. I do not know how to save them if they do not want to be saved, only … Continue reading In the Nature of Chickens, There is Little Room for Gentleness by Emma Fenton→
Recently I was able to convince my husband to let go of a small part of his hoard/collectibles (vocab depending on who you ask). This was accomplished with the promise of selling the things, which was both a great triumph and a self-imposed curse. As the more computer literate of the two of us, it fell on my shoulders to post on eBay. In theory eBay is great. Someone a few miles away or across the world could want what you’ve got. Unfortunately if I haven’t done it in a while, I forget that the … Continue reading The Thrill of the Sale by Emily Littlewood→
it surely is the same wrinkled sky from years ago when i lived in dense forest towns when cold winds chafed Iroko bark like prayers chafe fingers. i smoothed my first grinding stone with rocks rocks picked from streets maddened from stoning thieves. i peered down wells and called to the nameless to find out for myself: guards of the wide road where mothers have gone mad where faint rhymes tuck into palms, love poems in vapors, breastmilk curdles with ghosts, and from mounds poured for the forgotten, i walked, anyhow, anyhow myself Liz Femi … Continue reading grown girl: she thinks of the dead by Liz Femi→
Sheri Reynolds is the 2nd place winner of Streetlight‘s Flash Fiction Contest The garbage disposal made a horrible racket, a gritty, grinding, clonking commotion. Avocado pit, she thought, and reached for the off-switch just as a knife flew up from the sink’s black hole. It was a paring knife, the one with the slender purple handle, silver blade so thin and sharp that the gleam still shined in her eye as it hit her throat, bull’s eye, like her throat had been its one true target. She’d been making guacamole to take to book club … Continue reading Unzipped by Sheri Reynolds→
Here’s what the Left—of which I am a dyed in the wool member—needs to understand: many adherents of ‘conspiracy’ theories aren’t crazy. I mean a lot are. But a lot aren’t. Not yet, anyway. Democrats have got to start acknowledging that a great deal of the distrust that is expressed about government and big-business is well-founded. There have been/are bad actors and institutionalized policies resulting in injuries, bankruptcies and deaths. Think Purdue Pharma and opioid addiction, for example. Or losing your house because of a hospital bill. Categorically blowing off somebody’s pain and reality is … Continue reading The Big Tent Of Dangerous by Erika Raskin→
And if you were that old collection of smudged walls and dusty glass, you would be embarrassed to be caught by the morning – stretched out fence to fence, your top half in scaffolds, cross in repair from the super storm, gravestones covered September leaves in March, unprepared for the sun, bleary-eyed, pulled from that dream of the underground railroad – belly full of tunnels, tunnels full of bloody songs. And if you were a stone, you would miss the touch of … Continue reading Belleville Reformed Church by Josh Humphrey→
Red-wing blackbirds flew overhead, their red shoulders gleaming in the afternoon sun. The air was thick with the chirping and buzzing of wild fauna. Most of them—apart from some of the insects—fled before our canoes as we penetrated the swamp, following channels invisible to the outsider’s eye. Tall shrubs and grasses lined our channel, providing a modicum of shade against the direct rays of the sun, this vegetation caressing our crafts—and occasionally us—as we paddled in deeper and deeper. Lily pads with flowers growing from their hearts floated aside, making way for us. Frogs seated … Continue reading The Drowned Place by Miles Fowler→
Phyllis Brotherton has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2023 Essay/Memoir Contest I carry my brother’s heart all the way to Salina, Kans. When we’re still an interminable hour away, his wife texts, “Hurry.” My wife speeds the rented Traverse up I-35 North, the smoothest, blackest, flattest expanse of four-lane we’ve ever seen. The well-kept interstate, fresh asphalt, closely mown center medians, stretch before us in the 2 a.m. darkness. I imagine the SUV’s front wheels lifting off, separating from tarmac, rising up, flying over these final miles in minutes. Alas, we’re bound to … Continue reading My Brother’s Heart by Phyllis Brotherton→
Who doesn’t love mysteries and secrets? I can recall sitting under a shade tree as a child with stacks of Nancy Drew, Alice in Wonderland, Tom’s Midnight Garden and the Boxcar Children series. Before that, there was Aesop and Grimm, rife with gore and violence, all the jealousies, abandonments, and disguises that life can throw at you. And how instructive to observe the way choices made by heroic children can lead to downfall or triumph! Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim in The Uses of Enchantment argues for the utility of the classic European fairy tale, supernatural and … Continue reading Writing the Family Secret by Sharon Ackerman→
P. W. Bridgman is the 1st place winner of Streetlight‘s Flash Fiction Contest She told the story about him, but only once. About how she found him on a chair, pushed up to the kitchen window leaning out over Baskov Lane from their second-floor apartment in Leningrad. He was holding between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand the bloom of a Siberian Fawn Lily, plucked from her window box. His little hand was steady, his gaze was too, as he waited. She dried her hands on her apron, bread rising on the … Continue reading Little Vova* by P. W. Bridgman→
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