Tag Archives: Flash Nonfiction

This Is Your Hand

by Cait West

This is your hand—dried, cracked, bleeding on a January day under a muted sun. At rest on your book, it twitches in sleep, and your glasses have fallen down your nose as you lie stretched out on the floor, too busy to sit on the sofa. You’re too impatient to rest, but your body has taken over anyway in this forced sleep while reading. It’s just like when I was a child, and you would fall asleep while quizzing me on my phonics. You would make up stories in your sleep, and I would crouch down next to your open mouth and wait for the words to whisper out. Continue reading

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Talisman

by Anneli Matheson

The day after my mother’s memorial service I sort through her jewelry box. Like her, it’s colorful and disorganized.  Gold plumerias and pearls rest beside costume brooches perched atop tangled silver chains and errant earring backs.  After her cancer diagnosis my mother rarely wore jewelry, fearing the metals were polluting her body.  As I hold one of her favorite pairs of earrings, the gold filigree drops with the red stones I pretend are rubies, I’m tempted to bifurcate her life into Before and After the Diagnosis. Continue reading

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The Green Coat

by Samantha Steiner

It was a weekday, sunny but winter, and I was in my hooded green coat. I approached the subway platform just as a man was leaving, but he wasn’t leaving, he was walking toward me. He had a hand on my arm, stroking the fabric of my coat, and his head leaned too close: a thin face, a deep umber, salt and pepper scruff, eyes that emanated permanent confusion. Continue reading

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The Ida Poplowski Chronicles

by Maddie Woda

My father says his fifth grade teacher was Guy Fieri’s grandmother. She had red hair and freckles, according to my father, and taught social studies in the trailer duct taped to the actual elementary school. He, my father, and apparently she, Guy Fieri’s grandmother, are both from Powhatan Point, Ohio, a crusty junction of Ohio and West Virginia in the Ohio River Valley. Food is love in Powhatan Point, just like food is love in most places, and my grandmother (not Guy Fieri’s) owned two restaurants while my father was growing up. One was called the Wigwam (I do not debate the politics of this moniker with my father. What’s done is done). The other was called Dorelli’s, manned by Doris and Ellie, my grandmother and great-aunt respectively, before they were my grandmother and great-aunt. Continue reading

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Another Immigrant Story

by Holly Karapetkova

In the 1980s you were a movie star in a small Eastern European country. You played a prince, an attendant lord, and other roles of note. We watch them on YouTube. “That’s me,” you say, though it really isn’t—not anymore. You have to point yourself out because none of us can recognize you, the muted color of 30 years passing. On screen you watch the war escalate. Continue reading

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