Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash
By Meg Pokrass
That was the year we all had the same dream about Mom on the very same night, so we knew it had to be real. “How beautiful my pets are,” Mom said, staring down at us from the stars. She wore a teal-colored cloud dress, handed us a cup of hot chocolate. Freezing in Dad’s dressing room, we’d only eaten a shared tuna-fish sandwich for dinner. “Your father is an honest clown, but for most performers, it’s an act,” she whispered. She looked at us sadly, as if we could never fake it enough to make her alive again—and when she smiled, her teeth lined up like accordion keys.
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.
