fractured lit

Flash Fiction Friday: a review of “Sometimes Grief is a Moonrise” by Allison Field Bell, published in Fractured Lit

/ Keith Pilapil Lesmeister / Leave a comment

There’s an introspective and meditative quality to “Sometimes Grief is a Moonrise” by Allison Field Bell, published in Fractured Lit. The atmosphere/mood of the piece is set, in part, by the distant narrative voice—a third-person POV—which simply reports the setting and actions of two friends standing on a porch. Through this recall of setting and actions and dialogue, Bell creates a feeling of unease, vulnerability. And yet, the thing around which the two friends talk and smoke is left unstated. Unstated, yes, but clearly understood (I won’t give it away. You’ll have to read for yourself.).

Also, a wonderful refrain of words and images throughout: the porch, cigarettes, a road, the moon and sky, an apple orchard, an owl. The reoccurring images create a looping feature that is at once hypnotic and connects us to the natural world: sky, owl, orchard.

This is a piece that explores a complicated kind of loss: “[The] kind of loss that is an extraordinary relief. Gratitude. Freedom.”

The entire piece is the processing of this loss and gratitude and freedom—how to make sense of it (read the title once more). One woman wants to be alone/silent, the other doesn’t want to leave her friend, for fear of being a bad friend. There isn’t much talking, but the smoking—neither person smokes regularly—becomes the activity around which the two keep company.

Bell shows her vast writerly ability in what is probably 500-600ish words. She shows us the complications (and freedom) of such loss, and, most importantly, conveys the emotional weight of such decisions through a masterful use of POV, tone, setting, and details.

Read the piece here.

Allison Field Bell is a multigenre writer from California. She is the author of two forthcoming collections: Bodies of Other Women (fiction, Red Hen Press) and All That Blue (poetry, Finishing Line Press). She is also the author of three chapbooks, Stitch (forthcoming from Chestnut Review Books), Without Woman or Body (Finishing Line Press), and Edge of the Sea (CutBank Books). Find her at allisonfieldbell.com.

Keith Pilapil Lesmeister is the author of the story collection We Could’ve Been Happy Here and the forthcoming Ask Me About the Money. More info at: keithlesmeister.com

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

/ Keith Pilapil Lesmeister / Leave a comment

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.