Posts Tagged: Karen Berry writer
Okay, all you other Karen Berrys
Karen Berry in Georgia
You signed me up for Match.com. I don’t want to belong to Match.com. That account is canceled, please sign up under your own email address instead of mine, “Mary.” I also get your job alerts, by the way. Maybe you found a job and now you’re looking for love, but listen, I get more Georgia stuff than I get from any other state. I’m not sure why you can’t type your own email address instead of mine and I don’t care. Just, please, make it stop.
Karen Berry in Europe Somewhere
Do you realize that you ordered your expensive something-in-Spain tour tickets to my email address? My email address here in Oregon? I am not currently in Spain (and never have been) but if I were in Spain I’d have definitely gone to see whatever that was you spent all those Euros on! I wonder if you arrived at your tourist location without tickets, or if you caught your mistake beforehand. I also want you to know that I didn’t cancel your taxi reservations to the airport this time, but I have before. Yes, it was me, so please use your own email address in the future.
Karen Berry in Central Oregon
You signed me up for CuddleMe.com or something like that. It’s like that site you signed me up for last year, LetsFlirt.com or some such garbage. These are sites for married people who want to cheat, and I am married but I do NOT want to cheat, so please stop. Last time you did this, I signed in and looked at your photo and profile before I cancelled (you’re very pretty). This time I just blocked all that mess. I’m not going to the trouble of changing the password and cancelling the account. But if you are wondering why you get no extramarital flirtation action, this is why. Are you the person who signed me up for Ashley Madison? Please please please. I tell my husband when this happens, just on the off chance that there is another data breach and it looks like I’m in the market for philandering. Use your own email account, please.
UK Karen Berry who is a Compulsive Gambler
Look. We share a name, not a proclivity for online gambling. But judging by the email I keep getting, and the number of dark web password theft alert notifications generated by your use of my email on gambling sites, I think you really have a problem. UK Karen Berry, I don’t know if you’re the Welsh Karen Berry or the Dublin Karen Berry or maybe the New Zealand Karen Berry, but you need help! Get help!
And that is enough grumpy ranting for the day.
Yanking the chain – Byron and Blake
A Non-trad student, that was me.
When I went back to school as a non-trad student (meaning old), I had a professor who was losing control of his classes. By that, I mean, he couldn’t keep the thread of his lectures. He wandered from topic to topic, reacting defensively when another student asked him what his ramblings had to do with Blake and Byron, who were the subjects of the only class I ever took from him.
The Byron and Blake class was one of the many classes in the English department taught to both high-level English majors (like me), and grad students (not like me). The grad students had to turn in an additional paper and an annotated bibliography. My friend Denise and I exchanged scribbled notes that mocked one grad student who kept drawing parallels between the Romantics and the Beats. Everything inspired him to draw long verbal comparisons, especially Beats-with-Blake, which is silly because Blake was his own visionary self, not really part of the Romantics (was he supposed to be their Kerouac? I can’t remember. Maybe he was their Ginsberg). Nothing could stop the discourses of this young man.
Okay, but at least he talked a bit about Blake, which was more than the professor did. He just kept going on about Byron. Our teacher loved Byron, but aside from the professor’s insistence on saying “Don Joo-ahn” (apparently that is the correct way to pronounce the title of Byron’s masterwork) I wasn’t learning much. In fact, that was nearly the sum total of what I absorbed about this poem.
I was not the only person feeling baffled by how little I was actually learning. I was 39 when I took this course as an undergraduate, but not the oldest person in attendance. There were several 65+ auditors in the class. One of them actually said out loud what most of us were thinking, words to the effect that she’d taken this class because she’d heard that our professor was an expert on Blake and Byron, but she was still waiting for evidence of that. “I took this class for your brilliant insights, and I’m getting nothing.” It was brutal. It was also true. I want to audit classes next year, and I wonder if I will ever be so pointed.
She was frustrated, and she was only auditing. Those of us who had paid money to take the course as part of our degree requirements were probably more frustrated, because we were expected to produce papers on these Romantic legends. How? I’d turned in exactly one paper in this class, a close reading paper on Byron’s poem, “Darkness.” There is so much meat in this poem that I certainly didn’t need an instructor to explain it to me. It’s long, but I’m putting it here because it reminds me of our present day situation of toppling institutions, billionaire oligarchs, and climate disaster.
Read if you’d like, or not–if not, you’ll need to scroll.
Darkness, Lord Byron
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires—and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings—the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consum’d,
And men were gather’d round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other’s face;
Happy were those who dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:
A fearful hope was all the world contain’d;
Forests were set on fire—but hour by hour
They fell and faded—and the crackling trunks
Extinguish’d with a crash—and all was black.
The brows of men by the despairing light
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
The flashes fell upon them; some lay down
And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest
Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smil’d;
And others hurried to and fro, and fed
Their funeral piles with fuel, and look’d up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world; and then again
With curses cast them down upon the dust,
And gnash’d their teeth and howl’d: the wild birds shriek’d
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl’d
And twin’d themselves among the multitude,
Hissing, but stingless—they were slain for food.
And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again: a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
All earth was but one thought—and that was death
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails—men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devour’d,
Even dogs assail’d their masters, all save one,
And he was faithful to a corse, and kept
The birds and beasts and famish’d men at bay,
Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead
Lur’d their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answer’d not with a caress—he died.
The crowd was famish’d by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies: they met beside
The dying embers of an altar-place
Where had been heap’d a mass of holy things
For an unholy usage; they rak’d up,
And shivering scrap’d with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
Each other’s aspects—saw, and shriek’d, and died—
Even of their mutual hideousness they died,
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow
Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—
A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirr’d within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp’d
They slept on the abyss without a surge—
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon, their mistress, had expir’d before;
The winds were wither’d in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them—She was the Universe.
And this is one of Byron’s shorter poems. Doesn’t it seem prescient? Or am I just recovering from watching “Eddington” last night? Maybe one day I’ll dig out the cardboard box that holds my college papers and read what I had to say about this dark litany, but there is another paper in that box more germane to this story, so back to the story we go.
Well, then. Anyway…
As the deadline for our final project approached, I became angry. Aside from his short works, Byron was doing nothing for me. The instructor would rhapsodize about how people would line up on the docks to get the latest installment of Don Juan, but that didn’t inspire me to read any more than the assigned passages. I found nothing in those to inspire a thesis. A topic was needed, so I decided to educate myself on Blake, because the professor had spent so much time on Byron, Blake had barely been mentioned.
Off I went to the PSU library. I researched, made notes, turned over motifs I’d noticed, wondered what to make of them that could be supported by criticism without recapitulating someone else’s ideas wholesale. I produced a final paper on Blake’s chain imagery. I was especially proud of this paper because I had gotten nothing out of the class. Whatever I’d written, I’d found on my own.
But wait. There’s more.
As relieved as I was to be done with this embarrassment of a class, it wasn’t over yet. We would receive our final grades in person, at a one-on-one meeting with the professor. My mood was slightly truculent as I went to his office and sat down.
I intended to tell him how hard it had been to learn anything in his class, but I didn’t have a chance. He began to talk about what a difficult quarter it had been for him. He’d been in denial about how deeply his lack of hearing had affected his teaching. He’d misheard or missed much of what his students had to say, and knew it had affected his teaching. He planned to get hearing aids, but after he read the class evaluations, he was so discouraged that he’d considered retirement.
He lay a hand on my paper. “But when I read a paper like yours, I know I’m still doing a fine job. I have to be, if my students are producing work of this caliber.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him. I nodded, and left with my A.
Image by Briam Cute from Pixabay
Christmas Eve, Norwegian style.
How it was when I was a little girl
Somehow, I have abandoned my Norwegian childhood Christmas traditions; cast them aside like used wrapping paper. Because he was the child of immigrants, my grandfather Virgil (Papa) had a very specific (and Norwegian) way of observing Christmas Eve, and my grandmother Lucille (Nana) had devoted her life to doing things his way.
The day started in Claremont, South Dakota, with waking up too early and lying in bed with a stomachache, knowing that you had, oh, maybe sixteen hours to go before you could get your hands on a present. Food was out of the question, as was anything fun, because all you could do was exist in the gloomy half-life of painful anticipation. They didn’t have DVDs back then, or even VCRs, and the networks (there were three) didn’t feel the need to assuage children’s suffering by ordering up anything for us to watch. So we just suffered.
Eventually, after what felt like hours and hours of waiting, walking around aimlessly, pining and stressing and checking the clock every minute or so, my mother (Mom) would announce that it was time to go to our grandparents’ home. So we’d drive the forty-five minutes from Aberdeen to Claremont (population 53), and the additional few miles to the farm. Then it was time to start waiting it out over there.
Out on the farm
In general, I found my grandparents’ farm to be a magical place. Part of it was my grandmother’s devotion to the domestic arts. She’d long ago raised her own children, and though she watched us often, her home reflected her personal values. It was arranged and spotless. We amused ourselves with the limited toy options she allowed in the home, but nothing could distract us from the agony of anticipation we felt on Christmas Eve.
First, Nana would set the big oak dining table with the good dishes and the sterling silver flatware. We were not allowed to help, as we might drop a piece of the good china (Adams & Son, Sharon) or smudge the carefully polished silver (Wallace, Grand Baroque). There would be cooking going on in the kitchen. When those mysterious preparations were complete, we would all be called to table.
The adults sat down to oyster stew. As a child, I couldn’t account for the oyster stew. I can give you the recipe, which was, no lie, cans of evaporated milk mixed with cans of oysters topped with pats of butter. That was it. They’d float some oyster crackers on there and call it Christmas dinner. This was a delicacy. My distaste for it was so strong that I thought the reason it was served was probably that it was so revolting that no one could stand to eat it more than once a year.
Luckily, my sister and I were served Campbell’s cream of potato soup in lieu of the stew. This was possibly a matter of economics (canned oysters were expensive) or possibly done in consideration of the fact that oyster stew made us gag. We were also allowed some oyster crackers to float above the chunks of potato, impervious to the sogginess I loved in Saltines. Everyone also had dinner rolls.
After we ate the soup, we would have bowls of vanilla ice cream. My sister and I would beg a little Hershey’s syrup to liven it up a bit. Our grandmother was abstemious with it for reasons known only to her.
Do you sense a theme, here?
Is it a Norwegian tradition to serve an all-white dinner? I’m not sure. I only know I could hardly stand to choke this down, because it was so featureless. As an adult, I understand at least one reason for this menu. It required little to no labor in comparison to a turkey with all the sides. My grandmother had just done all that for Thanksgiving. We could have had a roast beef, but my grandfather ran a feedlot, so roasts and steaks were on the table at almost every single dinner. The rare appearance of something from the sea must have been a low-labor treat for both grandparents.
So after this bland extravaganza was consumed, the table needed to be cleared, but not by us kids. Those were the good dishes and flatware. We might have damaged something on the way to the sink. We didn’t even have that small task to use up any time. We waited in the living room for Mom and Nana to do the dishes. By hand, of course, because even if there had been such a thing as an automatic dishwasher back then (I don’t know if there was or not), Nana would never have put her fine china and sterling silver in a dishwasher. It all had to be hand-dried and carefully put away.
My brother and sister and I lingered by the tree, throats closing, stomachs churning with anticipation. My grandparents had an artificial pine trimmed with ropes of gold glass beads, gold satin balls, red velvet bows, and spun cotton birds with real feathers. I found it unspeakably elegant, but at that point, I was long past being enchanted. I was dying inside. We were all three dying. We’d been dying all day, and dying all through dinner, what was a little more dying? Why not keep the agony up for as long as humanly possible?
But eventually the dishes were washed and dried and put away in the big hutch. The silver was washed and dried and returned to fuzzy pouches with slippery ties and stashed in a special drawer, not to be touched until the next big holiday. Mom and Nana would settle on the couch, and Papa would settle into his recliner. Oh, wait, he was already in that recliner. In fact, he inhabited that recliner for all parts of the evening that didn’t involve the table. We’d find our places and someone would put on some Christmas music and fuss a bit and then call for Santa’s Helper.
The job no one wanted
Santa’s Helper was usually my older sister. My brother, while older than her, was deemed too clumsy for such a job, and I couldn’t read the gift tags. But I could help pass out the presents. Each gift had to be taken from under the tree, the tag read aloud, and then delivered to the recipient. This took a bit of time, even though my sister and I worked in harmony to get those presents stacked at the feet of our family members as swiftly as possible. And then, finally, when all gifts were distributed, the Ceremonial Opening of the Gifts could commence.
We practiced a ritualized taking-turns system. Youngest to oldest, one at a time, everyone staring at you, watching you, measuring your response to the present. My sister and I generally got good stuff, but our brother was just old enough to be trapped in that post-toy span of years, with board games and clothing in many of his boxes. He’d open socks or a sweater and have to pretend to be excited because everyone was staring at him.
Around and around we would go, one at a time. The adults ran out first, of course. As a child, I was surprised by how little attention they paid to their own gifts. Their bottles of drugstore scent, copious pairs of socks, and crocheted potholders seemed completely beside the point, though Nana really liked a recipe card holder I made for her one year from a wooden spool and a clothespin. The adults just watched with smiles on their faces, beaming with joy. And for the most part, it was a joyful event. The present opening was prolonged and yes, somewhat excruciating. But it was handled with decorum and patience.
How it was when I became a mother to my own little girls
As strange and torturous as this could be for a child, it was what I knew. It’s what I expected, and what I missed when I married and had kids of my own. My ex-husband was a Christmas morning person. In his house, you just woke up and tore in. No watching, no turn-taking, no full day of tortured anticipation. I found it barbaric, that early morning wrapping paper carnage, that free-for-all. The opened presents were placed back under the tree, and it was not crowded. No one thought about gifts after the initial opening of them. But that left the rest of Christmas day. What would they do for the rest of the day?
My mother-in-law had been up since the very early morning, cooking herself into exhaustion, filling the table with her favorite dishes. There would be a turkey, a ham, and a roast beef. Imagine my horror that we ate on paper plates. All day long, people came by and fixed plates for themselves, ate and visited, then filled another plate and topped it with foil to take home. There were stories to tell, laughter to share, and cocktails to drink. It was wildly different than the Christmases of my youth.
I quietly mourned my Christmas Eve torture, the genteel all-white dinner, the routinized, scrutinized way we opened presents. When we decided to stay home on Christmas so the kids could have it by their own tree, we had to make decisions about how we’d be observing the holiday. I lobbied for opening presents on Christmas Eve. Like Nana did with Papa, I deferred to my husband and set aside however I’d done things. His traditions won.
After we divorced, our traditions were scrambled. He had the kids over for dinner on Christmas Eve, and I had the kids on Christmas morning. I felt aimless and alone on Christmas Eve. What had been the most anticipated holiday of the year was spent wrapping last-minute presents and preparing for dinner the next day. No more Christmas Eve, Norwegian style.
How it is today
Change is the only constant. My kids have grown up, married, and had children of their own. They have in-laws to visit, and their own trees full of gifts on Christmas mornings. Every single year is an improvisation, a Tetris-style game of who-will-be-where. Celebrations can take place over the course of several days to fit us all in. We have had Christmas dinner days later to include my younger brother and his family as they return from his mother-in-law’s Christmas. Some years, it’s New year’s Day when the big holiday happens.
There is no such thing as a tradition in this new incarnation of the holiday. I understand that we are in the time of life that calls for constant flexibility. I go with it. Now, instead of the torture of waiting to open my own presents, I watch the window for my grandchildren’s arrival so I can watch them open theirs.
It’s agony to wait, but so worth it.
MERRY CHRISTMAS TO YOU ALL!
Pushcart nomination!
“Wet Rain” made the cut!
I am delighted to announce that Thin Skin has nominated my short story, “Wet Rain,” for a Pushcart Prize.
You can read it here: Wet Rain
Short story up at Persimmon Tree
Persimmon Tree Winter 2025 issue
My short story, “Mysteries of June and August,” is up at Persimmon Tree. This fine publication is hardto crack, and has people like Gloria Steinem and Maxine Hong Kingston sitting on the board, so I am chuffed.
Read it here: Mysteries of June and August
Hey, I made a long (and now short) list!
Fractured Lit Elsewhere Prize
Edited to add: I also made the short list. This is very exciting. That being said, I will not win.
Another edit: I did NOT win!
My strange little story, “In the Temple of the Ugly Women,” made the long list for the Fractured Lit Elsewhere Prize, judged by Jemimah Wei. I have no idea if the story will be shortlisted (edit: it was). Still, I’m delighted to have it get this far (edit: in all honesty I never expected to win but gosh it would have been GREAT).
I sent in two stories, and until this list was published, I had no idea which of the two they chose. I guess “Gibby’s Tall Tale” didn’t make the cut, which is no surprise because it’s one of the strangest things I’ve ever written.
“Ugly Women” is also one of the strangest things I’ve ever written. I guess strangeness can pay off.
See the longlist here: Elsewhere Prize
See the shortlist here: Elsewhere Prize
I told you I was setting up my home office and here it is. (image courtesy Unsplash)
The Midwestern Table at Herstry
Why I’ll Eat Anything
As part of a call for “Feast” essays, Herstory has published my piece, “The Midwestern Table.” As you read it, I hope you laugh, cringe, and finally understand why I could never be a picky eater.
All the “Feast” theme essays can be found here (I am in good company):
Herstry: The Feast
October is Over, and Coins
Dividing the Jewelry
My sister wanted to divide my mother’s jewelry on the day Mom died. I mean, the actual evening of the very day, October 30, 2004. I was furious with her for even suggesting it, but she’d first started asking about it on the way up to see Mom. As far as we knew, we were just going up to see our mother in the hospital. We were unaware that this would be the last day of Mom’s life.
On the drive, my sister let me know that she wanted a diamond and emerald ring Mom won in a contest. I wanted to lash out, to shame and excoriate her for even talking about something like that. But I stayed calm.
This was an opportunity, I decided. I could freak out, or I could actually take a moment to calm down and consider what I wanted of my mother’s. After a beat, I said that was fine, if I could have Mom’s wedding set. And that evening, I took it, along with Mom’s watch and a couple of bracelets. I didn’t want them. I wanted Mom, but I knew if I didn’t take what I wanted, my sister would take it all and sell it.
I was right. I had my mother’s diamond put into a new setting, and I wear it every day. The contest ring is gone.
More Division
My dad was anxious to clear Mom’s stuff, but he didn’t want to do it. The rest of this painful dividing up fell to us, and happened after the funeral. We all went back to the house and go to work on the clothing. Once we finished with that, my sister started sniffing around the kitchen, looking for a specific plate that had either flies or bees around the edge, something Mom won at a farm auction in South Dakota in the 1960s.
Dad told us that our younger brother had taken it. “He took that and her rolling pin and the coin collection.”
My sister’s eyes flashed. “I don’t know,” she said in a prim, warning voice. “There were some valuable coins in that collection.”
I shrugged. “Good. I’m happy that he has something of value.” My sister pressed her lips together and said nothing more. This was probably a good thing because I’d have let her have it. I was furious. But that was nothing new. I was furious with my sister around Mom’s death, and it’s true that she could be impossible, but it is also true that I needed to be furious with someone and my sister was an easy target. My brothers and I were so stunned with grief that we could barely function. My sister was not. She was strangely gleeful, and I couldn’t stand it.
Hence, furious.
Other Divisions
But back to the coin collection. Mom had saved coins her entire life, but I sincerely doubt that there was anything valuable in there. If Mom had coins of actual value–those old silver coins with Lady Liberty on them–she’d pawned them. But she still saved coins of perceived value, even if the only perception was her own.
There was something special about going through my change, looking for something Mom would want. I saved half dollars, old nickels and wheat pennies in a special place and took them to her on my frequent visits. Mom accepted with a gleam in her eye, then squirrelled away the coins. I found this delightful.
Mom also saved coins from wherever she went in Europe. Most of those coins weren’t worth much more than face value, but they meant something to Mom. Value and worth are two different things, aren’t they? She liked the acquisition, and I liked the giving. And that was definitely worth something.
October Coins
Mom died 21 years ago. Things were so much different with my sister for more than half of those years. I gave up being furious with her, and she gave up resenting me for being born. There was a new generosity in her heart once her meds were balanced and she was sober. I loved it.
We gave to each other. I gave her money quite often, and gift cards, and rides. I took her thrifting and to lunch and I even took her to Bonnie Raitt a few months before she died. She gave me small things almost every time I saw her. And she gave me the greatest gift she ever could, which was her sobriety. It was what I wanted most from her.
After forty-five years of drinking, my sister would have celebrated fifteen years of sobriety on October 1st of this year. I told her that I’d like to go to a meeting with her to see her get her fifteen-year coin. Now, that would have been a coin of real value. She was so excited to share this with me.
Sweet sister, sweet mother. Two of the most difficult women who ever lived, and also two of the most delightful. I am thinking of them both, and missing them terribly.
Procrastination and the Doom of the Undone
Forestallers, Unite!
If there were an award for procrastination, I would win it. I am a champion procrastinator. And the thing is, I have a very specific way to procrastinate which allows me to masquerade as someone who is always accomplishing things. My method is this: when I don’t want to do something, I tell myself I’ll do it just as soon as I get this other thing done. And I am always able to find other things to do so that I don’t have to do the one thing. The important thing. The real thing.
I have had a stubborn knot of necessary business to take care of that I haven’t. Instead, I have made the guest room lovely and hosted friends for three days and then flipped the room for my next guest this weekend. I have hosted an 8th birthday party for Grandson the First that was a smashing success due to us buying all the food instead of trying to make it (he wanted pizza, I don’t make pizza). I have arranged and hung things in my office. I have also done my laundry and the dishes and scrubbed various surfaces and I have even dusted. But I haven’t done the actual things.
These are the things.
One, schedule a meeting with my insurance agent to discuss what to do because Providence has cancelled their Medicare bridge plans. Two , fill out a Social Security form that I’ve been avoiding, but then my friend Kathleen explained what it was and how it might even increase my benefit. Three, schedule a mammogram.
I did all those things this morning, and also paid a bill, and looked at the balance on my OTC benefit card which I must use before Providence cancels my plan, and wrote with my husband about what the heck we are going to buy with all that OTC benefit.
And now I’m sitting here glowing with the serene virtue of a woman who has stopped avoiding and started doing. It’s a familiar feeling. I was always accomplishing tasks at work. I kept long lists of what I needed to do, and checked them off accordingly. I love to check stuff off a list. I’m one of those people who will write down a few things I’ve already completed on a new to-do list, just for joy of crossing them off. But I always did a few things before I did the big thing, the difficult thing. Even when I was busy, oh so busy, I was secretly procrastinating.
It isn’t just procrastination.
In truth, part of my avoidance of life’s daily tasks had much to do with the overwhelming anxiety I have been feeling over the threatened (and completely unneeded) mobilization of the National Guard in my city. I’m not sure that threat has been ended, more like forestalled. But I feel like I can breathe today. So I’m doing. Except, I have other things to do and I am writing a frivolous blog post, which is another form of procrastination.
I told you, I am really good at this.
Paint Chips at Flash Fiction Magazine
The Smallest Story
I have a wee flash piece up this morning, one of a few pieces that are circling out there waiting for publication. I sent this quite a while ago and couldn’t even remember if I liked it. Well, guess what, I do. It’s a tiny story about a large moment and I am as surprised by the kind comments as anything else.
