FLASH CREATIVE NONFICTION
This Century, the Last by Kristine Langley Mahler
Everyone is coughing behind a mask. The papers warn that the only way to avoid the sweeping sickness is to limit contact, but kids are still playing together in the streets because October in Cloquet, Minnesota is rarely this…
Read MoreGun Case by Charlie Geer
Later, after my uncle’s suicide, the gun cabinet would be moved into the attic, but in the early eighties it still stood in the upstairs hall, just outside my bedroom door. An unassuming wooden display case with twin glass-paned…
Read MoreAntediluvian Animals by Keely O’Connell
The plane lands in the one hour of tilted midday light that January sees daily. I step down onto the icy runway, and my new principal throws my bag into the bed of a red pickup. I climb in…
Read MoreLast Cut / No, No One Wins by DM O’Connor
Last Cut All firsts. You let me drive. You let me choose the radio station. You rested your huge head against the headrest, closed your eyes. Never a willing passenger. Seventy-five quiet kilometres to the London Regional Palliative…
Read MoreDash by Sarah Fawn Montgomery
At dusk the light goes diffuse, like slow motion, like simple. The backyard trees are velvet; cirrus swift brushstrokes make the sky seem safe. The railroad rattling through the front yard slows too, whistle filtered through the gloaming until…
Read MoreRoadways by Virginia Watts
Along Route 322, an often-traveled roadway of my childhood, past the turnoffs for Annville, Cleona, and Quentin, a thing of exquisite and recurring beauty—an automobile salvage yard that everyone simply called “the junkyard.” Cars dumped and clumped, leaning affectionately…
Read MoreThe Untimely Collaborators by Sara Davis
There are mornings we just manage it. We rise in the weak gray light and take our coffee with our notebooks open. A sliver of meditative silence. Are you writing about me? you ask. No, I lie. Are you…
Read MoreCities and Desire by Hart L’Ecuyer
Inspired by Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino—a story of my life Perhaps the farmland becomes industrial yards with barbed wire fences, and then the barbed wire fences become concrete retaining walls covered in graffiti, and you are there.…
Read MoreMurmurations by Susan Eve Haar
She had become clumsy. She’d dropped the mug she loved, the green one the color of an aspen leaf, with its fluted skirt at the bottom. Either she’d knocked it to the floor, or worse, forgotten it was in…
Read MoreUser’s Guide to Point Guards & Girlfriends by Marisa Crane
When you’re the point guard, you’ve got to be an extension of the coach on the court, & when you’re the girlfriend, you’ve got to be an extension of your abuser in public. Be careful not to embarrass either…
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