On "Where You Lay Your Dreams" by Sterling McKennedy (508 words) ***

McKennedy's flash piece is full of wonderful details that show us the essence of the narrator and the person he's talking to. His comparative "experience" shows in how he feels himself "gracious" to this new divorcee. But what really shines in this piece is how these two divorced people are both at once drawn to their ex-spouses as they are pushed away from them. It's as if the fighting must go on. There is a tension here that one doesn't usually see in stories about divorce, a tension between one's dislike for this person and one's desire to continue with him or her, even if it's just to have someone to punch. Read the story here at Night Train.

On "Hit-and-Run" by Douglas Light (5156 words) *****

As I noted in my write-up of Light's first collection, some of his most powerful stories build on small details, using them for multiple effect. In this story, for example, accidents become a motif that forge both the main event of the story and the aura in which the story resides. A man is hit by a car on a walk home after museum show opening. But such is not the first scar he will bear. His face is scarred by something else entirely, something that draws a woman toward him, but the story behind the scar is multivaried, the truth something we will never know. Just as we can't know the real essence of a person involved in an accident whose name shows up in a newspaper, no matter how many people are interviewed, we can't know what really resides behind the features of a person's face. The stories go on forever. You can read the story here at Night Train.

On "The Kiss" by Priscilla A. Kipp (531 words) ***

I've had plenty of opportunities to feel neglected. Someone new comes into a friend's life, and suddenly you don't hear from him or her for a while (it's particularly unnerving when it's a person you had some romantic interest in who didn't feel the same way--"I sure liked being friends with her but now I can't even be that"). Not being a parent, I've never had the opportunity to feel neglected by my own offspring. I imagine in a way that it's even worse. I mean, after all those sacrifices and a whole chunk of one's life spent together, and now the kid is an adult with people of his or her own that he or she loves. But there's also something joyous in it also, seeing your son or daughter become his or her own person. This is the ground that this bittersweet (mostly sort of sad) story covers. A woman, at the airport, meeting her son, along with the girlfriend, who her son seems more excited to see. Read the story here at Night Train.

On " Another Story About Me and Some Guy" by Kathy Fish (276 words) *****

There aren't too many writers who do flash fiction well as well as Kathy Fish when she's on her game. This story has a kind of desperation to it that's put forth in a haphazard, go-with-the-flow kind of way. And that's what makes it work so well. A woman takes off with a total stranger, but only after he runs some errands. Where are they going? Um, well, read the story here, at Night Train.

On "Tuning Pegs" by Sterling McKennedy (2708 words) ****

This is a quiet one, one of those slices of life--and here, it is slices, because we're getting more than a single incident. What makes this particular story special, however, is in the details. There are two moments in this story where I had to stop and think, awed by an observation at once very true and very unthought (at least by me) before. One involves an incident at the DMV (or rather a series of thoughts there), the other simply a description of some police drama. I wonder if I'll ever be able to watch police dramas again without thinking about what McKennedy has to say about them. Oh, and the story--about a newly divorced woman with two kids trying to find her way, settling now for a job she thinks will need nowhere (and which probably will)--that's a fine piece of work as well. Read it here at Night Train.

On "Pussies" by Paula Bomer (4126 words) *****

One of the things I enjoyed most about teaching freshman composition, for the few years that I did it, as a graduate student, was that I got work with eighteen-year-olds, folks just beginning life as an adult, life on their own. There was so much hope, so much vibrancy there, so much expectation. Even by twenty-four I had become a bit jaded, and other students, the upper-division students in literature classes, were also. They've been at this a few years, know what it is to live away from mom and dad.

I remember my own days, that summer after graduating from high school, the way that I thought maybe, given all the great work I'd done in school, the world would open up for me. Just give it a little time--a month or two--and people would see how much I could do for them. Good jobs were likely to walk right into me. Now, I know that I don't much matter to people who don't know me, that I'm one of seven billion people--and seven billion people is a lot of people. At eighteen, seven billion--that doesn't seem to register. I don't know why. Somehow, we think we're different. Not one of the billions who go through life anonymously, vanishing with only a handful of people caring.

Bomer captures those kind of young moments in this piece, that awkwardness of youth, that worshipping of cooler friends, that thinking, conversely, that somehow people will eventually come to know us and will love us, given time--you know, a month or two. Read the story here at Night Train.

On "In the Air a Shining Heart" by Lydia Copeland (1204 words) ****

Sometimes writers get on a rant. They string together sentences and images in pursuit of an object, a word, an emotion, a thing. I think of the first half of Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground. Admittedly, I'm not a big Dostoevsky fan; I tend not to go for maximalism, not to go for those huge books that throw everything into them including the author's grandmother's underwear and the shiny snowglobe the cat knocked off the dresser at age three. But for those fifty or one hundred pages in that first half of Underground, Dostoevsky proves entirely interesting. He's a man with an attitude, and as a reader, you're certain to know it.

The few short pieces I've read of Copeland's each draw me toward them in their own way. Copeland's a writer of great skill and style, able to evoke a moment or scene with just a few chosen words and to do it so well that you think, for a moment, wait, you stole that from my memory (and then wait, that isn't one of my memories!). But here, Copeland's tops even herself. This is a piece that makes me want to go out and write something, that makes me want to scream its words out in public, on a stage, in a concert. Like a really good song, it makes me want to live. Read the story here at Night Train.