Jennifer Fliss (she/her) is a Seattle-based writer whose writing has appeared in F(r)iction, The Rumpus, The Washington Post, and elsewhere, including the 2019 Best Short Fiction anthology. She can be found on Twitter at @writesforlife or via her website, www.jenniferflisscreative.com. She can be found on Twitter at @writesforlife or via her website, www.jenniferflisscreative.com.
I’m staring at a grid of tiny faces. I click and I click and I click and highlight the boy speaking, Arlis. Arlis tells the class his mother is asleep on the couch. Then he picks up his pad and moves it around the room and sure enough, there’s a lump of mother on the couch. I recognize the frantic… Read more →
I collected shiny stickers, fuzzy stickers, stickers that smelled like cherries. Sheets of unicorns and teddy bears. Circles of hearts and rainbows. I revered Lisa Frank and her psychedelic penguins and tigers frolicking together. Always frolicking. Dad hurled a lamp at the wall, cockroaches skittered, and my mother cowered under her own melancholy-bent antennae. I flipped from one page to… Read more →
I find the photo among his family’s old things: brass animal figurines (gazelle, birds, a deer), a tearing-at-the-stitching limp frog hand puppet, wedding china never used. In the photo, there is a boy, no more than eight or nine. He is holding something up. I can’t tell what it is. All angles. A piece of glass maybe? The photo is… Read more →