FLASH CREATIVE NONFICTION
Roadways 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…
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The 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…
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Cities 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.…
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Murmurations 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…
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User’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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Normal Girl by Kelly Lindell
Bedtime in first grade is finger jelly and sock lint. Vaseline rubbed on my bloody, split, vellum-dry knuckles; hands cocooned in white Nike gym socks, wrapped on my wrist with scrunchies. I am told to sleep. Wake up for…
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Called Shot: A Prose Sestina by Emma Kaiser
I ignore him as he takes the chair across from mine, though I knew of course that he’d be here—back porch of the local backwoods dive bar, the night cool, the back of my neck burning. It is November…
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The Coat by Kathleen McKitty Harris
Christmas, 1978. I recognized my father’s rushed, angular handwriting in Santa’s note beside the empty scotch glass and plate of sugared crumbs on our coffee table—but I was eight, and I wanted to believe. That year, my father bought…
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Abbreviated / Not Manager Material by Paul Crenshaw
Abbreviated Since entering middle age, I sometimes fear my time is running short. I could use the word “manopause” to explain the changes men face at my age, but I need to save time so I just say…
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Refrigerator Elegy by Lindsey Harding
Do all things expire? you ask on trash night, and I shake my head, shake two-week-old pasta into the sink, shepherd it down the drain. No, surely no. And later—the refrigerator cleaned out, its shelves crumbless at last, so…
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