flash fiction

Flash Friday Review: “DreamHouse” by Christine Naprava, published in Flash Frog

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Flash Fridays are back! We’re kicking it off with “DreamHouse,” a new piece by Christine Naprava published at Flash Frog. Christine has been publishing some great pieces this year and her latest is no exception. Also a talented poet, a distinction which really shines in the language of this piece. 

There are a few reasons I chose this flash to highlight this week, the most obvious being that it’s told in second-person. Big fan. I know it can be polarizing, but I love it, especially when done well, as it is in this story. I love the immediacy of second-person, and Christine has pulled it off wonderfully here. She begins the story by bringing the reader into a perfect slice of Americana—a roller skating rink—and introducing us to a man that could be “your father.” 

The piece weaves through the speaker’s date at the roller-skating rink, and some of the circumstances that moved them from North Carolina to California. Naprava’s poetic skills shine in the nuanced descriptions of the piece, like the man’s toothpick (“Back in North Carolina, the toothpick left scratches on your cheek”), or her date’s vehicle (“Your date drives a Mustang, and you’re a living tragedy”). 

The use of second-person really drives home the universality of the piece. Thematically, the narrator is running from her past: from North Carolina to California, from her father to her date with the Mustang. Yet even when she makes it out, her past still haunts her. The man behind the counter, the other blondes at the rink—how do we make it out of our pasts unscathed and forge ahead to our futures? Can we ever truly make it out? A difficult question to answer, but a question that arises in great fiction. To do it masterfully is impressive, even more so in the confines of flash fiction. 

Maybe we are just outrunning our ghosts to what Naprava describes as “some far-off decade” where “you suffer alone though the world is telling you that you no longer have to.” 

I sure hope so. 

Read the piece here.

Christine Naprava is a writer from South Jersey. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Contrary Magazine, trampset, Kissing Dynamite, Spry Literary Journal, Overheard Lit, The Friday Poem, and Thin Air Online, among others. You can find her on Twitter @CNaprava and Instagram @cnaprava.

Christian Gilman Whitney is a writer from Western Massachusetts, and earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College. Find him on Twitter @c_g_whitney.

“Chicago” by Kathy Fish, published in Wigleaf

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Chicago is a flash piece narrated from the perspective of a sixteen-year-old whose observations circle around the creepy acknowledgment in the first line: “He kissed his daughter like a lover in the dark hallway at her bedroom door.”

And then the situation: the narrator is visiting her boyfriend’s house. The couple is lying on the couch, covered by an afghan, while the narrator’s boyfriend’s fingers “were inside [her] jeans.” The mother, father, and sister are in the living room next to the couple, and they’re all watching Happy Days, though the irony of that television title is lost on them, or at least the narrator, whose family is falling apart.

But you haven’t forgotten the first line, have you? I haven’t either, and the narrator hasn’t because she returns to this detail again and again. The sheer tragedy of it; of the narrator’s boyfriend’s sister (who is fifteen) instructed to go to bed at 8:15, halfway through Happy Days, and the father kissing her in the hallway. How many fifteen-year-olds are instructed to go to bed at 8:15? Of course that’s the least of the sister’s worries. Our worries.

Still, there are other things happening: discussions about travel, backstory which features a funeral and a fist through a window. And objects (spoons) that represent an important role in this brief, powerful story.

On a personal note, I’ve never read a story that refers to the Amana Colonies, but I’ve been there, and I’ve eaten that family style dining to which the narrator refers, where they bring you massive plates of potatoes and meat, and whatever else northern Europeans chow on. But in my family, there were always too many people at the table, and even the large platters never felt like enough to satisfy our cravings.

Fortunately that’s not the case with Fish’s story. There’s plenty here, and she does us the courtesy of trusting us with just the right information. We’re in the hands of a master storyteller, and she doles out just enough detail. Not too much. Just enough.

Check it out here. And more about Kathy Fish here.

Review of “Good Teeth” by Leslie Walker Trahan, published in New Delta Revew

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“Good Teeth” was the 2020 winner of the Ryan R. Gibbs Award for Flash Fiction. After reading the piece, you’ll understand why. My brief review here:

This story is tied together by braided storylines with a compelling sense of time and excellent use of white space. The braids include: A creepy dentist/landlord. The narrator’s obsession with a stranger – a man – who may or may not exist. And the narrator’s deceased father. The two men — the stranger and the father — look alike and share a love of the violin. We see wonderful images and details that lend credibility to this: callouses on fingers, the “sleek neck of the violin case.” Meanwhile, the dentist gives a “months free rent” to the narrator if she goes out on a date with him. He also gives her free exams—sticks his fingers in her mouth and talks while the narrator “…[doesn’t] say a word.”

Throughout this very peculiar piece, the observations coupled with the braided storylines are enough to signal the alarm, but then we find out more of the narrator’s frame of mind through conversations between the narrator and her sister who asks: “Have you been taking your meds?” We hear that question a couple times, once near the beginning, and once at the end, and by the second time, we too wonder how much help this narrator might need. We readers aren’t exactly sure. But we do know one thing: we won’t call the dentist to come help.

Read and listen to the perfectly crafted and detailed story here.

Leslie Walker Trahan’s stories have been featured in The Forge and SmokeLong Quarterly, among other publications. She lives in Austin, Texas. You can find her on Twitter @lesliewtrahan.

Flash Friday Review: “The Little Details” by Jody Keene, published in JMWW

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A familiar story: a wife endures the daily grind—kids who don’t clean up, a husband too forgetful (and maybe unmotivated) to change the kitty litter, and a host of other things that add up. But “he’s a good man, your husband;” the narrator says, attempting, perhaps, to convince herself. There’s a sadness in this piece made more so by the two coyotes shot and killed by the husband (opening line: “Your husband is in the garage with two dead coyotes.”). One of them, pregnant, with “stones in her belly now rather than pups.” This—a revenge killing for the two coyotes allegedly killing Juno, the family’s dog (“…pieces of her all along the creek bank. The steam from her innards drifted over the water, away from you.”). All of this intermixed with memories tied to motherhood, as the narrator recalls breastfeeding, her children at her chest—how fleeting, abrupt, a life can be. Narrated in the second person, the story takes us through a circumstance not unfamiliar to most who endure the daily grind where the saving thought or hope, on a particular day, is how the stylist might cut one’s hair; when the one strong emotion emerges from being “determined not to let the stylist talk you into bangs this time.”

Check out the story here.

Jody Keene is a writer and social media coordinator living in Little Rock with her family and as many dogs as possible at any given time. Her work has previously appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine.

Flash Friday Review: “And This Is How It Ended” by Yasmina Din Madden, published in Fractured Lit

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If Shannon Ravenel is correct and a good story’s ending will kiss the story’s beginning, then the end of this flash piece, by Yasmina Din Madden, told in reverse, would most certainly be a chilly goodbye peck on the cheek.

But kissing and story structure aside, there’s so much to admire in what Madden can do in so few words. We don’t need the blow-by-blow details, but one line will do it: “I surprised David with small gifts while I cheated on him with a fellow teacher…” That’s the one and only time we hear of it, but why go any further? There’s no need when economy (of words) is a prized possession.

Weed killer is apparently another prized possession. I’ve always thought weeds are simply misunderstood flowers or uncommercialized edibles, i.e. the gorgeous dandelion, but there are weeds of the noxious variety that do “choke out other plants.” These are the weeds that need attention pronto otherwise they might rot an entirely good garden plot full of lush, nutrient soil that could grow the tastiest of tomatoes. I, like Madden, live in Iowa, and there’s nothing quite like an Iowa grown tomato—something about the rich soil coupled with the intense July heat and humidity. I couldn’t choose a more favored and flavorful fruit to occupy any garden space, however big or small, in the Hawkeye State. Hell, we need at least one thing to brag about (we’ll see about the basketball team this weekend – let’s hope they don’t pull an Iowa State last time they played a #15 seed).

As we move forward (or is it backward?) in the story, we see the couple in question (David and the narrator) initially meet in a garden. This happens over a year prior to the first paragraph of the story. The couple shares time and space and eventually their relationship blossoms. But we quickly learn that what’s true of the tomato—that regardless of how “misshapen,” they’ll maintain flavor and “juiciness” and a resistance to “pests and disease”—unfortunately cannot be said for the most noxious of weeds; that a dandelion might live and flower and die back within a week, but the most invasive, as David well knows, needs to be cast out at the first hint of existence. Otherwise, inevitable ruin. David says it to the narrator in simple terms: “…a weed is a weed.”

Check out Yasmina’s story here.

Yasmina Din Madden is a Vietnamese American writer who lives in Iowa. She has published fiction and nonfiction in The Idaho Review, PANK, Necessary Fiction, Cleaver, Hobart, Carve, and other journals. Her stories have been finalists for The Iowa Review Award in Fiction and The Masters Review Anthology: 10 Best Stories by Emerging Authors. Her flash fiction has been shortlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions and Pulp Lit’s Hummingbird Flash Prize.