Photo by Ann Savchenko on Unsplash
by Meg Pokrass
Floating all the way up to the ceiling of her bedroom, Felicity sometimes imagined a more fetching kind of life in which she was a whole, fleshed-out person. As it stood, she was but a flare in her mother’s life, all lighthouse eyes and flashing smile, a swallow-tailed child who was quick as a flick that could never really land long in one place.
Floundering, when not floating around in her bedroom. Or trying to think of what might help her mother out or staring at the blue road outside her window.
When her mother held her in her arms, Felicity raised a smile like a surrender flag. Fast as a fish, she often felt as if her life were silver plated— as if she could gather herself into a flashing ball, present herself to the world like a piece of fallen sun.
Meg Pokrass is the author of Breath and Shadow: Six Sentence Stories (with Robert Scotellaro), First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories(Dzanc Books, 2024) and eight previous collections of flash fiction and two novellas in flash. Her work has been published in three Norton anthologies, including Flash Fiction America, New Micro, and Flash Fiction International; Best Small Fictions, Wigleaf Top 50; and hundreds of literary magazines. Meg is the founding editor of Best Microfiction.
