CRAFT

There were forty-nine white roses in the arrangement nearest to me. I counted them twice. Someone at the florist wasn’t paying attention. 

The front-row chairs were upholstered in dark red velvet, which was thinning at the edges. I rolled the threads between my thumb and middle finger because it was better than fidgeting. Grandmother hated fidgeting. Ruby sat ...

i. denial

I can’t admit I’ve fucked up. Not to myself, and certainly not to anyone else.

It simply doesn’t track. I’m the responsible one in the family. The reliable one. The sober one. Rock steady, perpetually calm amid chaos and crisis since childhood. I’ve managed and mitigated drunken fistfights among my dad and my...

i.

Many things about the new wife I had married worried me. Presently, I feared that marriage had turned her timid. She sat at the edge of the bed with her hands folded in her lap. Her glasses were falling off her face from her chin knocking against her chest.

All this had to be because of her unusual behaviour in my roo...

Where is your father? 

He’s dead, Mommy. She sobs over the piece of frosted layer cake the memory care center has given her as a welcome celebration. She forks bites of chocolate and thick white buttercream into her mouth. When she asks how she will live without her partner in crime, I tell her that she’ll be okay, she’s with me now.

A few years ago, when I was developing a graduate course on flash writing, I knew that I wanted to include Beth Ann Fennelly’s Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs (2017) because it showed how brevity helps language to draw images and moments precisely ...