FLASH CREATIVE NONFICTION
Women’s Hospital by Anne P. Beatty
They are tearing down Women’s Hospital, where I gave birth to my youngest two, a girl against the flame-bright maples of November, a boy in June’s fat sweat. For years, the hospital stands silent, as we drive to the…
Pageant Queen by Ryan Kristopher Jory
This used to be my go-to anecdote when warming up to strangers in bars: the one about my pageant for the repairman. It had been my parents’ first color television, a Zenith workhorse in a wooden case, complete with…
The Word Disorder by Allison Field Bell
I insist I need a corset for under my dress. A wedding. My cousin’s. A purple strapless with a layer of chiffon. My mother is outside the dressing room. She asks if anything fits. I stare down the mirror.…
Here and There at the Lake by Janice Vis
Content Warning—sexual assault Along the western shores of Lake Ontario, the water splits the land and pools into a marshy inlet webbed with bike trails and bridges. I walk these paths every day, just wandering about, here and…
The Catalog of Human Memories by Celia Cummiskey
When I was in college, a lover came to visit me in London. He’d been traveling through the Balkans and staying in hostels where he’d needed to furnish his own towel and toiletries. When he arrived at my cubelike…
Pretend We’re Dead by Melissa Ragsly
My first job was at a farmstand with a twenty-five-foot papier-mâché witch named Winnie towering over the parking lot. Eyes like a lizard’s with vaginal slit pupils and a boulder of a nose. She enchanted people. Drivers would pull…
Walking the Iowa River with My Grandmother after the Floods by Grace Morse
I told you it wouldn’t take long to get to the river. No, I don’t come here alone at night. Yes, I do come here when night is impatiently waiting to arrive, streaking the sky with pink and cobalt…
Canines by Jona Whipple
She says go like this and bares her teeth at me, lips pulled back. All the other girls lean in to see inside my mouth, too close. I smell the leather of their shoes, but I don’t flinch. Jagged,…
Forty-Eight Hours in Miami by Christina Simon
My first time in Miami is tiny cups of sweet Cuban cortadito; and going to the Miami Open with my husband to join the crowds cheering for Carlos “Carlitos” Alcaraz, the Spanish teenage sensation and World #1; and rainy…
Snap, Stacked, & Night Sky with Generations by Rebe Huntman
Snap Not when your mother makes you go to the dance. You tell her you’re sick. Really sick this time. See? You’ve broken out in hives. Not when she slathers you in calamine lotion & stuffs you into tights…