Crumpled Map by Meg Pokrass
When Meg Pokrass served as the guest judge for the CRAFT 2024 Flash Prose Contest, she had just published The First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories, which spans fourteen years of her career. The editor of the Best Microfiction series and acclaimed author of nine flash fiction collections, she has only recently turned her attention to flash nonfiction.
Pokrass’s micro CNF “Crumpled Map” tells a story of a childhood road trip with her mother and sister with remarkable economy. As she says in her author’s note, “brevity helps sharpen the intensity of lived moments.” This intensity is magnified by the employment of sensory imagery throughout the flash essay. What’s notable are the number of images that Pokrass packs in and their sharpness, detailing a terrifying road trip that she, as a young child, didn’t have the capacity to understand.
Even though the narrator was quite young, she was able to make sense of the world through what she sees, smells, hears, and even dreams of feeling. Her town is a “discount-outlet-shopping-mall town” that “smelled of fried onions, matzo balls, fathers and grandparents,” her home one where a “television…blinked blue all night.” In the “blur” of states that they travel through, they pass homes with “lace curtains”—both a sight and tactile image. She contrasts the lives of other families (“children waking up to a school day, grandparents coming over for dinner”) to her own, where her mother, “Marlboro in hand,” is turning up the radio so loudly that it “drown[s] out trucks.” She reflects both on the absence of sound (“a father who hadn’t laughed in years”) with a sound that’s unwanted (“whose sarcasm mocked us”).
In her craft essay, “Creative Nonfiction: Sensory Self-Revelation,” Mary Ann McSweeny writes, “A creative nonfiction piece may be jump-started by the who, what, where, when, why, and how of an event, but the purpose of the written work that subsequently emerges is to go beyond the facts to find the human essence within the experience.” Here, Meg Pokrass plunges us into the world of her family by letting the reader see, hear, smell, and touch an experience that terrified her as a child. —CRAFT
There was always a map in our mother’s lap as we drove over states we’d never imagined before; leaving our Pennsylvania discount-outlet-shopping-mall town that smelled of fried onions, matzo balls, fathers and grandparents—leaving a television that blinked blue all night when our parents were fighting, abandoning a father who hadn’t laughed in years and whose sarcasm mocked us the older we grew. Speeding through a blur of Maryland, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, Utah, stopping occasionally at a Motel 6, rumbling past family homes with lace curtains, passing streets with names like Mapleleaf Road or Rosemary Terrace, reminding us that there were normal families who lived on them, children waking up to a school day, grandparents coming over for dinner.
Marlboro in hand, our rebellious mother would turn on the car radio to drown out trucks, and ask my sister for directions, but the few maps in the glove compartment were crumpled, and each state felt mysterious, like part of something that we couldn’t yet see. We were bats out of hell, was how she described it over a bottle of wine to a girlfriend years later, skidding over ice, fishtailing it in motel parking lots, driving through a blizzard that lasted all day not stopping to pee, not stopping to eat or sleep because we were running out of money. Then, Ma would shake her head. Sometimes she’d even laugh. But what I remembered most was the terror of being lost. I’d ask her if she knew where we were going, and she’d sigh and say, Of course I do, but my sister would whisper, Not on your life.
MEG POKRASS is the author of The First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories (Dzanc Books, 2024) and eight previous collections of flash fiction and two novellas in flash. Her work has been published in three Norton anthologies, including Flash Fiction America, New Micro, and Flash Fiction International; Best Small Fictions 2018, 2019, 2022, 2023 and 2025; the Wigleaf Top 50; and hundreds of literary magazines including Electric Literature, New England Review, McSweeney’s, Five Points, Split Lip, Washington Square Review, and Passages North. Meg is the founding editor of New Flash Fiction Review, co-founder of Flash Fiction Festival UK, and founding/managing editor of the Best Microfiction anthology series. She lives in Scotland, where she serves as chief judge for the Edinburgh Flash Fiction Award. Find her on Bluesky @megpokrass.bsky.social.
Featured image by Garrett Butler, courtesy of Unsplash.
