On "What Happens to a Girl Who Lives Alone" by W. J. Barris (364 words) ***

Here's a short with a sinister feel. There is a horror behind this story, a horror before, a horror coming. But in its brief spate of fewer of five hundred words, all we get is the feel of that horror, the dread, the sadness, the warning: don't do it. Don't stay single. Read the story here at the Vestal Review.

On "This Is the Beginning" by Lili Flanders (496 words) ***

A lot of flash is a flight, and this is one of those. It's a fancy. It's a wish. It's a run at the possible, a stab into the realm of the imagination. It's a list of beautiful details, a list indulged upon, details added to details, ideas added to concrete sights (which are themselves only ideas) added to a plot that becomes not so much one of the story but of the mind, which becomes one not so much one of the mind but of the story. Flanders--she of a foreign city's name--talks here of a simple lunch, of the sights around, of the desires those sights beg of her. And then we see the desires trashed--or come to be. Read it however you want here at Vestal Review.

On "Rapture" by Gayle Brandeis (500 words) ***

A lot of people are going to die forever if we believe many of any one of the world's religions. Brandeis takes this terrifying idea, puts it into the mind of a kid, and makes us laugh--or at least she made me laugh. And this isn't necessarily something that's humorous. My own childhood was full of angst about just such things--the end of the world, and somehow I'm in the wrong place. I remember, in fact, as a kid being told that the world would end in ten years--that put me at about nineteen. That was absolutely terrifying to me. Why? Because the timing was the absolute worst. The church in which I was raised taught that children were under the protection of the parents; adults by contrast were on their own. Age nineteen meant that I was just outside that "parental protection" window--but also so young that I likely wouldn't have gotten baptized yet (our church didn't baptize children either). Just my luck, for the world to end while I'm in limbo land. Now, I recognize how much that kind of thinking was nonsense--I still keep the faith, but I know that self-concern is the least important thing of all and also that God is merciful. But I don't feel like I heard a lot of that as a kid. Or thought about it. Ponder Brandeis's narrator's experience here at Vestal Review.

On "Dizzy" by Jurgen Fauth (394 words) ***

One's future in a deck of cards, one's luck, one's destiny. Fauth does a good job here of making the old idea fresh by making it literal. I won't say too much more, lest this blog entry grow longer than the story itself. Read the story here at Vestal Review.

On "An Ugly Man" by Ana Marcela Fuentes (427 words) ****

Dump one guy and take up with another. That's what Fuentes says she's going to do at the start of this little gem--and all in under five hundred words. I didn't know if she could pull it off and was dubious about the prospects, especially as I neared the story's end, but does it she does, and with aplomb. Read the story here at Vestal Review.

On "In Flight" by Michelle Richmond (494 words) *****

Back in 1999, when Michelle Richmond was a relatively new writer with only a few publications to her credit, a story of hers appeared in a journal called Cutbank, in which a story of mine was also featured. I too was a writer with only a few credits to my name. I'm still that writer, with only one story--and a pretty bad one at that--published since what has been to date my most successful publication and probably one of my most successfully written stories. Richmond, by contrast, has published widely, has gone on to some acclaim (I seem to recall an interview a few years later in Five Points), and has even had a few books published. There are probably some good reasons. Richmond has written some fine stuff. "Satellite," the story that appeared in that issue of Cutbank was probably the best story in that issue (not counting mine, of course--right?). And this short short featured back in 2006 in Vestal Review, one of the best journals for flash fiction, is another great example of good writing. Decent short shorts are fairly easy to come by; a really fine short short is another story. It's hard to take a person's breath away in five hundred words or less (the Vestal Review's limit). Here, Richmond conveys all the hope and angst there is when being a single person on a plane. At least, it conveys some of the desire I sometimes have--I doubt Richmond and I are the only ones that nurse such an imagination. Strangely, for all the times I've ridden alone on a plane, I've only managed to sit beside some really fine looking woman once--but we did strike up a conversation. She had a fiancé, of course. (And with my fairly obscure religious beliefs, I generally don't expect a random conversation with a complete stranger to ever turn into anything anyway--but it's nice to think about.) Read the story here.