Hello! It took me longer than hoped (the world has been, uh, complicated) but I’m back with more themed story recommendations!
Quick housekeeping note: I’ve added the ability to subscribe to my blog as a newsletter, if you’d like to do so. As history shows, I’m not a terribly frequent poster; you’ll get occasional recs, like this post, as well as the occasional big update or a behind-the-story post from me, but nothing that should clutter your inbox. You can sign up at the bottom of this post, and I think there will be a pop-up, too, the first time you scroll through the post. (You don’t have to subscribe to read.) I’ve got four new stories out soon (!) and more themed recommendation posts in the works, so this blog-newsletter-thing is a great way to stay in touch, if that interests you!
Today, I have five pieces of flash fiction for you. As with my last recommendation post, these are all from 2024, which means they make for perfect awards season reading! Please consider nominating these stories for any and all awards for which they’re eligible.
I have been on such a flash fiction kick recently… writing it, reading it, studying it, and mostly just trying to figure out how something so short can be so effective. I’m a chronic overwriter. I like to ramble and then ramble some more for good measure. Much like poetry, flash is a form I love, but it isn’t one that comes naturally to me. And flash works for me much like poetry does, too: the flash stories I love most are those that hit me hard emotionally not despite but because of their length.
My current obsession with flash started in early 2024 when I first read Rachael K. Jones’s “Five Views of the Planet Tartarus” in Lightspeed (a bonus rec for you, in case you somehow missed this story). I’d never read much flash before; at that point, I was totally new to the world of online short fiction. Imagine my surprise, then, when I read a 549-word story that absolutely kicked me in the teeth. I read it again. And again. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Since then, I’ve totally fallen in love with the form. I love when a story takes four minutes to read and somehow wrecks my entire day. I love thinking I’ll read a story quickly, then losing half an hour when I can’t stop rereading it. I love being surprised by a story—not just a little, but enough to knock me over.
These five stories represent everything I adore about flash fiction. If you’re anything like me, once you’ve read these stories for pleasure, you’ll want to go back and reread all five over and over again as you try to puzzle through how exactly they manage to work so well on a technical level. The thing is, though, there’s no separating the technical level from the emotional level with these five stories. The original title for this post was “flash fiction that made me cry,” and that’s secretly still the theme of these recommendations: these stories, as short as they are, will make you feel some Really Big Feelings.
Some are heartbreaking. Some are heartmending. Some are both. I can’t say enough good things about these stories. I hope they make you cry (sorry). So, without further ado…
THEN CAME THE GHOST OF MY DEAD MOTHER, ANTIKLEIA by Nadia Radovich
Apex (January 2024)
When you were young, Mama sent you away from the land of the dead and told you not to look back.
I’m scared to say too much about this story and give it away. But I can safely tell you that this story perfectly demonstrates all the reasons why Nadia Radovich is one of my favorite writers of short fiction right now. A stunning use of myth to explore the relationship between the pain of the past and the grief of the present. It’s a story about language and loss and family and love. And it’s a story where every last word is perfectly chosen, a story that understands the relationship between language and meaning, beauty and horror, history and the future.
My fellow Nadia Radovich short fiction stans know: we’ve had a great year. (Anyone who’s spoken to me in 2024 knows just how much I adored “Another Old Country” in Apparition, for example.) I came late to “Then Came the Ghost…,” having already read Radovich’s other 2024 publications. But this story would be a perfect starting point if you haven’t yet gotten around to Radovich’s other work. What a year of stories!
SENDING SIGNALS by V. M. Ayala
Translunar Travelers Lounge (February 2024)
No one will sleep in my beds or walk through my carefully tended gardens again, but I maintain them anyway.
A Dyson sphere and a Ringworld walk into a bar, and… become best friends and make me cry? An absolutely lovely piece told from the point of view of an unlikely protagonist: Complex Rings Habitat XRW24-2201-MA, long ago left empty and alone, who follows a distress signal and discovers an abandoned energy sphere.
Though there are no people in this story, which spans several hundred thousand years despite being only a thousand words long, it is as achingly human as anything else you’ll read today. The voice is brilliantly done: not a human voice, clearly the voice of a machine, but one that feels entirely real. This is a story about the power of stories, and a story about the power of connection, too—two messages that hit me even harder rereading now than it did when I first read it. Hopeful, tender, lovely, loving.
FIVE ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS YOU PROBABLY HAVE by John Wiswell
Uncanny Magazine (May 2024)
I am proud of you. We never met and I am so proud of you the ground caves in whenever I think about your tiny face.
A story written in the form of a note, complete with crossed-out lines that will make you laugh and make you cry. But this isn’t an ordinary note: this is a note inside of a geode inside of your wall, hidden there by the father you’ve never met. (There are quite a few stories about parents in this post—an accidental theme within a theme.) It’s a story about cool magic, yes. Mostly, though, it’s a story about love. About the things we inherit, both good and bad. About the messy, heartbreaking, hopeful complexities of family.
Along with “Five Views…,” this was one of the first pieces of flash fiction I remember reading, and it simply blew my mind. (I am a sucker for lists of five things, apparently! Plus, I was still a brand-new writer and relatively new to stories that experimented formally like this one.) This story is only 904 words long, but it contains a whole universe; every character mentioned, even if only briefly, feels vividly real. I get choked up every time I read this one. A perfect example of what flash can do.
YOUR RETURN TO THE FIVE RUINS OF THE BOG by Parker M. O’Neill
Apex (November 2024)
This castle is rich with your lives. Lives that you can only comprehend now, backwards, alone.
“Your Return to the Five Ruins of the Bog” is unsettling, strange, aching, and challenging in the very best of ways. Both love story and horror story, “Your Return…” unfolds in two directions: journal entries (well, NeuroLog entries) are presented in reverse order, interwoven with a journey through the ruined architecture of the bog in the present as the narrator follows their lover’s path through the ruins. The story comes together slowly and then all at once, all the richer—and all the more heartbreaking—upon a second read.
I loved this story the first time I read it. O’Neill brilliantly balances lush and languid prose (perfect for this haunting, haunted ruined castle) with one emotional knife-twist after another. But I loved this story even more when he pointed out a structural/stylistic choice I hadn’t noticed the first time I read it (shame on me). I won’t spoil anything, but this is a story worth reading closely.
THE STOLEN SABBATH by Jennifer Hudak
The Cosmic Background (December 2024)
Each Friday my mother unfolded the sabbath from where it had been hiding all week, snapped it out like a fresh sheet, and draped it over the weekend.
A gorgeous, tender story, at once a beautiful metaphor and a reminder not to get caught up searching for the ‘right’ metaphor. “Let it happen,” the narrator’s mother reminds us. Let this story happen to you, too: this is one where I don’t want to say too much before you read it. If you, like me, love slipstream stories about family and grief and faith, you’ll love this story.
When I read this story in December, I immediately knew that my next themed recommendation post would have to be “flash that made me cry,” in no small part because I knew I would want to keep talking about this story. I know December stories sometimes fade into the background. If you missed this one, I implore you to spend a little time with it today.
Leave a Reply