by Francine Witte AARN GIRI/Unsplash My girl Is vanilla bean, Lies on the floor like a scraggled mop. One day she makes me breakfast. More than a dozen eggs or so. It is all bubble and scramble, And I would tell her everything if I thought she could take it, but she can’t, she would curl up like steam, float out the window like an old butterfly. One time we waited together for the refrigerator man to come. It was hours, it was days, and then he showed up, turned the cold back

Walter Martin Just Outside the Tunnel of Love by Francine Witte, Blue Light Press, 2023 Reviewed by Scott Neuffer To say I know what makes good flash fiction would be a lie. I have no sheet of metrics, no firm rules. One of the Internet’s most popular literary forms, flash fiction appears to have the economy of poetry, the weight of each line, but also narrative leaps reminiscent of novels. Flash fiction does less than the longer short story in terms of space but, given the r

by Francine Witte Cristian Palmer Grab of waterfingers under your toes and horizon sailboats. This could be anywhere but it’s not. It’s not your ice cream ocean from when you were nine, and your mother held a towel around you as you wriggled into dryer clothes. Not the goodbye sand when Bobby Epstein kissed you one last twilight time, his face lit up by the bonfire collapsing, snapping, and Julie Mitchell’s face lit up sudden behind him. Now, the sea creeps deeper, up around