Bringing Bright Ideas to Life:  My Flash

“Let us be lovers, we’ll marry our fortunes together—” you said it half-laughing, like nothing could break it. I packed up my doubts in a worn canvas bag, and we boarded a bus headed somewhere that mattered. We smoked at the back where the windows were dirty, watching the country blur into questions. You read me the news from your phone in your lap— every headline a fracture, a warning. And the moon rose over the turnpike tonight, soft as it used to be, strangely unchanged. I

By the time the last grocery store closed, Harrow Bend had already begun forgetting itself. The town lay in a shallow valley where wheat once grew tall enough to brush the sides of passing trucks. In the evenings the fields had moved like water when the wind came through, long golden waves folding and unfolding beneath the sky. Now the fields were the color of old bone. Dust drifted across the empty roads in pale spirals, and the wind moved through the valley with a dry whisp

He had been called many things before he ever knew his own name well enough to answer to it. Case number. Placement. Temporary. The foster homes blurred together like watercolors left out in the rain. Yellowed kitchens. Green carpets worn flat by strangers’ feet. Wallpaper with tiny blue flowers that seemed to watch him while he slept. The colors smeared together in his memory now, but the feelings never faded. Cold linoleum under bare feet at dawn. The sour smell of cigarett