Jennifer Fliss is a Seattle-based fiction and essay writer. Her work has appeared in PANK, Hobart, The Rumpus, Necessary Fiction, and elsewhere. She can be found on Twitter at @writesforlife or via her website, www.jenniferflisscreative.com.
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 →