1997 James James steadied the table as Augie reached into the hazy air to disarm the smoke detector. The hem of Augie’s new sweatshirt lifted away from his stomach, and James glimpsed his hip bones, the bumps of his…
CH1 Grandpa Choi once sat me down and said, you’ve got a face that begs to study. “Jang Mi-in, you’ve got a face that needs education.” Needs. There wasn’t wiggle room in his vernacular. I knew what he meant;…
By Khushi Daryani • “Only in America do you have the luxury of being depressed,” claims Ruifang from Ling Ma’s Severance (Ma, 226). A recently resurfaced novel due to its uncanny similarity to the global pandemic, it contains several…
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…
I was ten when I discovered I had a womb. It bloomed red. The same year I learned about space. Booster rockets to escape gravity, separated and lost forever. My mother bagged items in a grocery store, Mary, an…
By Heidi Czerwiec • I come late to creative nonfiction, after decades of writing and training and teaching and researching as a poet. While I feel I’m still playing catch-up with the standards of nonfiction craft, what I bring…
Week of April 4, 2020 I swallowed most of a fly today at Spring Creek Park. It swept past my lips, then lodged itself into the back of my throat, launching a series of gagging coughs. A family of…
Everything about Shiraz’s mom is dark and shiny, especially her black vinyl coat. Her lipstick is the same deep purple as the polish on her long nails and her high-heeled strappy sandals. I once asked Mom to try on…
By Candace Walsh • Raven Leilani’s Luster is a craft and theme kaleidoscope, every turned page yielding a new configuration of angles and juxtapositions. What happens in this novel—twenty-three year old Edie, a Black woman artist manquée working slackly…
Dr E. Foster General Practitioner 4/16/2017 Patient: Mrs Zoe Smith 5/162 South Street Civic Prescription: LEVONORGESTREL 150mcg / ETHINYLOESTRADIOL 30mcg (generic for Nordette-28) tablet Take one (1) tablet by mouth at the same time each day. Oral contraceptive. QTY:…
I have always been intrigued by the experimental form in flash fiction. There have been some stunning stories told in truly unusual ways—who can forget K.B. Carle’s magnificent “Vagabond Mannequin”? I’m fascinated by the idea that anywhere there’s text, a story can emerge; however, many of my previous efforts fell short. I struggled to find the right balance between trusting the reader and overtelling. Many times, my peer readers either missed the underlying story altogether, or felt they weren’t given enough credit as readers. I came up with a new idea in an experimental flash workshop and with the support of the wonderful Marisa Crane I went on to develop it further.
Our lives are littered with tiny scraps of us; I often wonder what others might surmise when they take these puzzle pieces and try to assemble them. This struck me especially about medical information, and particularly prescriptions. Every time I hand a piece of paper to my pharmacist, they have a tiny window into my life. They know what medications I take and can guess at the likely causes. What narrative do they construct, I mused, about the people they see on a regular basis, especially those they’ve assisted over a number of years? Do they judge? Is there an unspoken bond, when they’ve silently known people to be at a low point?
The challenge with this, again, was striking the balance between trusting the reader and giving them too much information. Initially, when the story was just prescriptions, the meaning was lost unless the reader themselves knew what these medications were and what they were for. (At this point, I mused on how this story would speak differently to people who used medication to help manage their depression, used medical contraception, or who’d had a medical termination.) My second draft swung too far the other way. In the end I found what felt like a happy medium and submitted it to CRAFT. I was fortunate; they loved the concept and wanted to work with me on the piece to strengthen it.
This piece is all about contrast. There’s the clinical language of the prescriptions themselves, juxtaposed against the pharmacist’s emotional take and her own life experiences. There’s an underlying relationship between Zoe and the nameless pharmacist, but it’s externally invisible. I don’t often write in such close third-person, but for this piece it felt perfect.
The collaborative editing process between me and the CRAFT team was an absolute delight. The guidance I received pushed me as both a writer and an editor. In the end, this piece ended up a significant departure from my usual work, but has given me the confidence to continue pursuing experimental flash.
AMANDA MCLEOD is an Australian author and artist, and the managing editor of Animal Heart Press. Her words and pictures can be found in many places both in print and online, and she’s the author of flash fiction collection Animal Behaviour (Chaffinch Press, 2020). A 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee, she’s always got more ideas than she has time for and is slowly learning to say yes to less. See more of her work at amandamcleodwrites.com and peek into her magical everyday on Twitter and Instagram @AmandaMWrites.
