It’s a rainy Monday morning and I have the radio (yes, a real radio!) on the local Classic Rock station, something I rarely do anymore. It’s all about streaming on Spotify, Pandora, Amazon, Soundcloud, and probably zillions of other services I don’t even know about. But, for a girl who grew up listening to FM radio, there’s something comforting about real DJ’s, local commercials, and real Rock music. Sometimes I need that fix. It’s a good day for reading, too. I have a good book going, We Cast a Shadow, by Maurice Carlos Ruffin (highly recommended!) and I’m perusing online journals, a favorite pastime. Maybe y’all would like a few quick reading recommendations? I’ve included three Flash Fiction pieces and three Creative Nonfiction pieces that I especially enjoyed recently. All of them can be read in just a few minutes but the stories will stay with you for much longer. Enjoy!

FLASH FICTION

Rosh Hashanah, 1967 by Lori Sambol Brody in Trampset: “We haunt the hidden corners of the building, the dark broom closets, the windowless offices, the bathrooms. We dance with broomsticks; we paint our lips Pink-a-Fling pink with my mother’s Max Factor lipstick. Other kids from our school try to avoid us.”

In the Winter by Puloma Ghosh in Craft Literary: “Was I the creature, or was he? Because the walls changed, I know they did. The doors disappeared. Outside became black not with night but because we took the room and tipped it into another world where it was never supposed to be, left a double of it behind so nobody would know.”

The Following by Lyndsie Manusos in Milk Candy Review: “Religious sects and cults contacted my family. Alien enthusiasts emailed me. When something so inexplicable happens, it sets a fire in the chest and head like a cold, and people need to find out why, they have to know. I had nothing to give them. There was nothing to give.”

CREATIVE NONFICTION

air in the brain by JJ PEÑA in Water Stone Review: “after she rammed her car into her boyfriend’s mercedes & burned bags of his drugs, she found us in a ditch, playing with electric wires in the dirt. she promised she’d never leave us that close to danger again.”

If He Loved You He Wouldn’t Travel So Much by Beth Gilstrap in Anti-Heroin Chic: “In my family, we are told when one of us is close to death, we only tolerate cornbread crumbled and mixed with whole milk. This story goes back to my great-grandma, who birthed seven children and died at ninety-six.”

Ghost or Haunted by Jen Rouse in Schuylkill Valley Journal: “There is no age at which we are unable to feel grief. No time limit on how long it might last. We are always looking for ways to belong, to feel safe. To be held and wanted. We make up arbitrary rules about how we should navigate the universe of need. But there are no rules.”