Flash #43 Nov '26

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Flash Issue #43 Nov 2026

featuring
Coleman Bigelow, Louis Bourgeois, Chris Cottom, Sambhavi Dwivedi, T.E. Hahn, Airea Johnson, Lucinda Kempe, Michael Malan, Frankie McMillan, Julia Périco, Kathryn Reese, Elizabeth Rosen, Robert Scotellaro

Coleman Bigelow

You Can’t Play Fetch Without a Partner

            I preferred Roscoe in the flesh, but his phantom form is almost as good. He’s just as playful as he was in his puppy days, when Abby and I first adopted him. I still remember Abby asking, “How can you say no to that sweet face?” but it was Abby I couldn’t say no to.

            Now, when Roscoe drops a ball by my slippered feet, there’s no visible slime, but when I pick up the ball, Roscoe’s characteristic saliva-slick is there in my palm. I like to throw the ball toward the window seat where Roscoe used to nap, and watch his progress through the room as the pictures on the side table vibrate and the standing lamp wobbles. It’s easy then to imagine my adorable ghost of a mutt, his wiry terrier coat and his overlong Labrador tail brushing past the lamp as he races to retrieve the ball.

            Roscoe makes his presence known whenever I’m feeling low. His invisible whiskers dribble water around his water bowl—the same bowl Abby was always reminding me to fill. And his ghost nails clitter-clatter over the polished floor at the sound of “Treat!” One time, I offered Roscoe an actual stale green toothbrush treat, but the treat just got pushed around the carpet. I find the idea of freshening my ghost dog’s breath - of maintaining my canine’s canines - hilarious. Abby was adamant, however, that: “He won’t be as cute if they have to pull his teeth.”

            The nice thing about a ghost dog is that you don’t have to let it out to pee before bed. Or take it for walks, during which you’re liable to be subjected to sympathetic stares from well-meaning neighbors. I had enough of those awkward interactions during Abby’s treatment. Roscoe’s end wasn’t nearly as prolonged. When the vet informed me Roscoe’s body was “riddled,” I recall crumpling the pamphlet I’d been holding for flea and tick treatments. And how my breath caught at the irony of having two companions overcome with malignant cells.

            Another nice thing about a ghost dog is you don’t have to apologize for his over-enthusiastic front door greetings. When Abby’s friends, who’ve just “popped by”, smooth their skirts in the foyer like they’ve been jumped upon, I smile and stare back innocently. My ghost dog and I have gotten used to fending off these worried women who come to check in and drop off a casserole. Perhaps I’m too guarded - Abby often described me as a “tough nut” - but it’s hard to imagine letting anyone else through this shell.

            Yes, there are many conveniences to a ghost dog. And spectral or not, a dog truly is a faithful companion. I lost Roscoe almost a year before I finally lost Abby, but that loyal dog must have been waiting for my call. Or maybe Abby sent him back. That does sound like my wife. She was always thinking of others first.

Coleman Bigelow’s writing has been nominated for the Pushcart and Best Microfiction and longlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50. Recent work has appeared or is upcoming in Claudine, Ghost Parachute, MoonPark Review, Roi Faineant, and Your Impossible Voice. You can read his work at https://www.colemanbigelow.com/ or follow him on X, BlueSky, or IG (@cbigswrites).

Louis Bourgeois

JIM KARR

And the grass grew ‘round his brain.

Vietnam filled your head with strange images. A lonesome tiger moaned on a hill. Armless boys and girls played in the village forest. Constellations shone at noon. Showers of fish and crabs poured onto the marketplace at Dien Phu. Undaunted by the surreal, you swore to kill them all until the fog cleared and your arms turned to rubber. You did this; man, woman, child, and beast, no matter. This pleased you. It kept your head clear and your feet on the ground. Then late one evening on the outskirts of Tau Phu, you watched the horizon fall apart like busted stained glass, and you knew you were in trouble and would not live long.

They shipped you back to Slidell after you shivered night and day for six months. Mother and father hovered around like painted puppets. The old shotgun house where you were born and raised was a hall of mirrors and a deafening silence rang in your ears as the television blared and the coffee pot shrieked. Outside the window, all the flowers were yellow and you couldn’t get the taste of cardboard out of your mouth no matter how many fifths of Old Granddad you gulped down.

One night you left a note on the cold kitchen table. You walked the two miles to Lake Ponchartrain barefoot and shirtless. You wore a turquoise jaded cross around your neck, and your hair was long and brown to the middle of your back. How the stars did fall that night on the beach as the shrimping boats pulled their midnight trawls. The smell of creosote pilings was thick in the air. Looking into the sky for the first and last time, all you could think about were horseshoe crabs and how, when you were little, you played with armadillo bones beside a dry ditch for hours. Your father pulled up in his ’56 Lincoln just in time to hear the shot crackle through the salty June wind.
1970

Louis Bourgeois is the Executive Director of the Mississippi non-profit arts coalition, VOX PRESS, and is the Director of the Mississippi Prison Writes Institute, a literacy agency that serves incarcerated writers and artists. He is primarily a poet, but he has published translations, fiction, memoirs, poetry, and interviews in over 300 magazines and journals and is the author of the National Book Award nominated , The Gar Diaries, and the award-winning collection of poems, OLGA. He graduated from Louisiana State University with a BA in English and was the first graduate of The University of Mississippi’s MFA program in Creative Writing.

Chris Cottom

Jam Today

This is how it starts. Mum leaves home for good before breakfast, doesn’t even do Chantelle’s lunchbox. Being sisters, we’re as close as a sliced loaf so I make her two rounds of strawberry jam on white, don’t listen when she moans about usually getting aged halloumi goujons on Tuesdays. She comes back beaming, with orders from four schoolfriends, two of them boys. Within a week I’m making jam sarnies for half the class. When the headteacher asks me to do them for the whole school from September, I defer my place at Cambridge and do a summer intensive at the Conservatoire de Conserves, right here in Kirby Lonsdale.

This is how it explodes. After my loganberry on sourdough has staid aldermen weeping with delight at the Mayor’s Breakfast, the council gets me to supply blackcurrant butties for the town’s rough sleepers. Chantelle nominates me for Northern Entrepreneur of the Year, which I win. Within six months I’m buying 40% of the world’s whortleberries and open a processing plant in a former monastery in Bratislava which we call Blueberry Hill. My YouTube jam sessions go viral; celebs beg for autographed jars of my ginger and thimbleberry; and hipsters drive insane distances to queue for my tasting restaurant, called Jam Today. When I spot a customer who might be Mum, but isn’t, I’m not sure if I’m disappointed or relieved.

This is how it ends. In July I’m in our London HQ, with Rothschilds urging me to float on the Stock Exchange, when I take a call from a tearful Chantelle, working late at our main site in Kirby Lonsdale. She says she loves being Senior VP of Floral Flavours, but misses the lunchbox sandwiches I used to make: morning-fresh bread, a smear of unsalted butter, and at least one unsquished strawberry in every round. I email Cambridge, tell them I’ll be taking up my place if I can get my sister up to speed with sandwich basics by September. On my way out, I stop in the staff restaurant with its fifty different loaves and shelves of everything from Cloudberry Conserve to Jumbleberry Jam. I make four rounds on sliced white, strawberry of course, with a bonus butty for my driver if she gets me home to Kirby Lonsdale for in time for breakfast.

Chris Cottom is a recovering insurance copywriter with recent work in Banshee, Barrelhouse, Fictive Dream, matchbook, New Flash Fiction Review, New World Writing Quarterly, Orange Blossom Review, The Broadkill Review, The Good Life Review, Tiny Molecules, and elsewhere. Catch him pedalling around Cheshire, UK, and at chriscottom.wixsite.com/chriscottom

Sambhavi Dwivedi

THE MATHEMATICIAN

After my father dies, I read an article in which scientists reveal the mathematical formula that can prove God’s existence. I fly around the world to find someone who can show me how it works. Scientist One in Berlin tells me to follow the light that God has given me, Scientist Two in Stockholm says all of the other scientists are frauds. Scientist Three in Moscow sings about how the universe is God’s orchestra, how the planets are harmonizing through time, and Scientist Four in Cambridge tells me how to find The Mathematician. He lives in a small gray house by a lake in Yellowknife, the name itself a dull blade on my tongue, and I ask if he really is The Mathematician. He says yes, but that God is the only one who truly knows. Then bring God here now, I say, and The Mathematician shows me pages of graph paper, scrawled with imaginary numbers and abstract variables, logarithmic curves and ancient lunar arithmetic. The Mathematician tells me we have to examine the cosmic constants. I ask if doing this will prove that God is real and he says that this is all just a theory. But I need to talk to God, I say, as The Mathematician keeps sketching more figures, scribbling more symbols. I rip the notes from his hands and tear them and tear them before bringing the ink-soaked paper to my damp mouth to chew, the waxy residue forming a thin layer of film in my throat when I swallow. WHY WON’T YOU TELL ME ANYTHING THAT IS TRUE? I scream at him. I cannot do that, he says, because God is The Truest Mathematician. I leave the house, lay in the plush of snow. Above the lake of frosted glass, an aurora borealis erupts across the night sky in its neon, electric waves of light, an unworldly omen. When The Mathematician comes out, lays down next to me, he asks why I need to speak to God, and I tell him that what I really need is to speak to my father. The Mathematician exhales, the warm fog of his breath a question mark, and says, God is your father. But He is not. My father will live forever.

Sambhavi Dwivedi received her MFA in fiction from NYU, where she was a Goldwater Fellow. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Nominee, her poetry is featured in The Westchester Review, The Ocean State Review, Midway Journal, and Yalobusha Review, among others, and her criticism appears in Words Without Borders. She was a recipient of an honorable mention for the Academy for American Poets' Enid Dame Memorial Poetry Prize. Her work can be found at bio.site/sambhavi.

T.E. Hahn

After the Blast
            Sora’s breath is warm from wine. Adam chews a wintergreen mint. It sparks in the dark of his mouth. The bay is staked with sails. A June breeze threads their car. The flush of fresh fruit rushes through their open window. Tomorrow, Adam will sell the crib. Today, he stops at a farmer’s market, hungry for something naturally sweet.
            Sora refuses to leave her seat. She slurs, blames him, curses her body, pinches her shrapnel-scarred stomach. He hoists her over his shoulder, her nails shredding his back. Locals stare. She settles. So does he.
            They buy a pint of the cool reds and sit in the sand by the bay. They let the muted sweetness drip from their mouths. Sora brings a berry to her lips, but her thin finger sinks into wet rot. She winces like the day of detonation, when he dragged her through dust and debris, shards of glass in his tongue, her arm rigid around her belly. Now there's the bare rectangle of wood flooring in his office where he'd made room for the crib. The dusty glider where he'd expected to rock her to sleep. The still shrink-wrapped socks, sheets, and swaddles he'd used as a suppressor to scream her name, a name they now refuse to speak.
            They reach for the final berries in the carton. They're furred with rot. Sora launches the rest into the bay. She watches them burst against the water. Adam imagines her wanting to follow. He braces for the blast they won't endure together.

T.E. Hahn’s writing is published or forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, Identity Theory, The Ex-Puritan, Flash Fiction Magazine, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Spry, and other venues. His fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, The Best Small Fictions, and a Norman Mailer Award. He is the author of the Kirkus Star–awarded novel Open My Eyes. He holds an MFA in fiction from Fairfield University and a PhD in English literature from St. John’s University. He serves as a fiction reader for TriQuarterly and teaches literature at Great Neck North High School in New York. He has been awarded fellowships and scholarships from the Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing and the Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference. Find him at his website at TEHahn.com or on social media @TEHahnFiction.

Airea Johnson

WHITE RAIN

It must’ve been picture day when my dad shot my brother because my hair smelled like cigarettes and White Rain. The coffee pot was taken off its heated seat, the grounds floating like tobacco juice. Dad walked through the kitchen, his boot strings dragging the floor. Afterwards, on TV, an expert weighed an astronaut’s pocket watch. Dad sat on the couch, rifle resting against the arm, pointed toward the ceiling. He pulled a cigarette from his Altoids tin. The smoke hung in the room. He stared out the kitchen window, his face a haunted telescope. He cleared his throat and the pause moved through the room like dust.

Airea Johnson is the co-author of the chapbook Fire Carousel, published by Main Street Rag in 2023. Her chapbook Alabama Rapture was a finalist and runner-up in the Tusculum Review chapbook contest. Her chapbook Lucky Strike was a semi-finalist for the 2025 Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest. Her work appears in Saw Palm, Lucky Jefferson, Third Wednesday, & others. She is an Alabama writer who lives in Florida, pursuing a writing degree.

Lucinda Kempe

Seal*

              When I was born, I skidded sweetly from my mother’s womb into the warm salty water, and I began to swim quickly learning to nuzzle her as she swam by.
              When I was a few weeks old, I swam through a tangle of funny seaweed that slipped around my neck. I didn’t like it, but my mother could do nothing.
              When I was a month old the seaweed tightened and I struggled to breathe and it entangled around my flipper making it hard to swim.
              When I was two months old, I began to get thin as I couldn’t eat and had trouble keeping up with the pack onshore.
              When I was near three months, everything began to blur. I couldn’t breathe or eat. I could barely drag myself across the sand. That’s when these crazy running and jumping animals doing Pilates on the beach caught me in a net. Savages, they wrenched my tail when I heard a silky voice say, “It’s okay, buddy. Jean, hold the camera.”
              I felt tugging on the net, the sound of unzippering and the sticky tight seaweed choking me being touched. I thought I would die when a small sharp object went under the noose and cut it then something held me to pull it off my flipper. The net set me free. I heard the same voice, “Good boy, go back to Mama. The salt should heal the wound. Man, it was a woman’s beach hat. Imbeciles.”
              I could bark again. I barked for my mother and ambled towards the waves and soon the water soothed the burns from the bad seaweed.
              I could breathe.

              *Dedicated to the seal rescuers of Ocean Conservation Namibia.

Lucinda Kempe’s work is forthcoming in Gargoyle, Salvage, the McNeese Review, Unbroken Journal, Bull, Gooseberry Pie, New Flash Fiction Review, and Hotflash, among other places. Her work chapbook Pretty Girl is being published by Silverbacked Punk Press in October. You can find her: https://lucindakempe.substack.com

Michael Malan

Easy Does It

After watching Bonnie and Clyde, Dennis and Peter walk out of the Hollywood Theater and everything looks different. The sun has gone down and shadows are looming in the alleys on both sides of the street. Store windows are black and streetlights dim. Dennis is looking into the future, his marriage to Daria, her adventures at Zabriskie Point, an exploding house, the dark side of the American dream. Peter is thinking about getting high and making a movie, something contemporary and exciting, two young men in search of America, a drug deal gone bad, the end of an era. Dennis is imagining an exhilarating road trip, he and Peter riding their Harleys across the Golden Gate Bridge while the Lovin’ Spoonful are singing “Do You Believe in Magic.” Each scene in Peter’s movie will be accompanied by psychedelic music, popular songs, engines that reverberate at the edge of consciousness. Dennis imagines that people everywhere are learning to live at the intersection of time past and time future, where moments and eons converge—and time present is disappearing in time eternal.

Michael Malan is editor of Cloudbank (cloudbankbooks.com), a literary journal in Corvallis, Oregon. He is the winner of Meridian’s 2024 Editors’ Prize for Fiction. He is also the author of four books from Blue Light Press, including Midnight at the Chevron Station (2025, poetry and flash fiction). His work has appeared recently in Puerto del Sol, Lake Effect, Cincinnati Review, Washington Square Review, New American Writing, and Grist.

Frankie McMillan

The hair dresser’s monologue

This man comes into the salon, this man I've never seen before … nicely dressed in a plaid jacket and I’ve got ten minutes to spare so I say, yes I can fit you in, what would you like so then I’m behind him with my scissors looking in the mirror, and he says well I don’t want to be beheaded and I say, pardon me and he points to the mannequin head that Shelley has been practicing her perms on using the no 10 rollers … and oh, I quip, that’s a pity… so it’s just a trim you’re after and he says, is it real hair on those heads and I drape the cloth around his shoulders and wonder what Shelly is up to in the back room, she should be out on the floor by now and when he faces the mirror again I suggest a few cms for a trim and a light layer to take off the weight and he nods and says every day the news gets worse and I say sit still and I'm just about to cut when he gets back to the beheadings and how it was considered an honourable death in medieval Europe, often reserved for nobles and high-ranking offenders, blah, blah ... and then he's on about mechanical devices like the French guillotine and the Scottish Maiden, blah, blah and I say excuse me, and I call out to Shelly that the floor is unattended but she doesn’t hear me, she’s got the dryer on and he says oh, I haven’t made you feel uneasy have I and I whisk his bare neck with the brush and tell him he owes me thirty and as he leaves I think he owes me a lot more, a helluva lot more for bending my ear about beheadings.

Frankie McMillan has had work published in Best Small Fictions and Best Micro Fictions. Her latest collection of small forms, Eddie Sparkle's Bridal Taxi, was published by Canterbury University Press, 2025.

Julia Périco

to paul

love begins, in the split second of a snort that precedes a laugh; in a slight exaggeration in the movement of legs, tilted a bit to the left, in a way of being that tells me: this is all i've got, do you like it? love begins like a sudden fright, while i try to cross the street, when i sink my shoes into a puddle, i don't know, it's hard to pinpoint, but it begins somewhere around there: when i stop to switch tracks before facing the streets, when i leave the house in a rush, without combing my hair; by the way, it rarely obeys hairstyles, or the poems i memorized, or the most important news of the week that i studied to try and find it, only to fail.

love begins at plastic table, slightly wobbly, in the middle of a bar conversation where one confesses by saying: i really tried, but it didn't work out. it begins in cheerful failure, sometimes out of spite, without doing the proper math; i think: not now, but it doesn't listen to me, i tell it: i don’t think you going to satisfy your whims, how excessive, but it runs over all my precautions, it doesn't take me seriously.

sometimes, it begins with the wrong people; i see: they make a joke, they have a way with words, and then i think: there's no way i'm falling for this again, but it begins and i always fall; i want to know when i'll stop tripping over it; and just when i think i've learned to keep my feet firmly on the ground, it begins. there was this one time it began right after it had already begun with someone else, i thought: this won't work, what are we going to do? it turns its back on me, i never know where it's going.

love begins. i can't point to the exact hour, though i really wish i could say it began right there on Padre Carvalho Street while we walked toward the subway and a fine drizzle fell, turning the city into a hiding place for me. it was right there, at 4:35 p.m. on that Saturday when the drizzle returned to São Paulo and he said to me something like: let's?

then love begins. and i can already hear the scream of the tunnels; the ghosts line up and wait for the rebellion of the winds, sooner or later the winds come to take revenge for everything and we exchange a conspiring look knowing that love will end, even though we don't know when, even though it has only just begun. love begins, outside of us, in a third body we create together, when we no longer know where one ends and the other begins; i tell him: in this moment, i would die too, yes. we teach love its very own words, and then we tear out, one by one, all the phonemes; we become voiceless. do you remember the last time? well, it's no use: love ends, sinking the roots of the end while we still believe we can protect it, of course, the end seems more certain; beginnings, no, beginnings seem reckless to me. it ends, and with it, an entire vocabulary will gradually go extinct, until we no longer understand each other. i imagine we will be so awful, we fear losing our minds, we will go back to therapy and say it isn't just about a broken heart.

love ends, and rarely by mutual agreement; one will decide first and the other will have to accept it, even while not accepting it; i already shudder just thinking about doing all this again, it makes no sense, don't you see?, i argue; love is a very poorly designed bridge; what nonsense is this, starting over, i insist: after all, why? but love shrugs and goes skipping down Sinkhole Street without paying me the slightest mind.

Julia Périco studies English Literature and Linguistics at the University of São Paulo.

Kathryn Reese

I’m not the only one who remembers

My sister confronts me regarding a cold cup of tea, left on the bench since yesterday. Teabag still in, the string wound around the handle. The paper tag, my flavour. Evidence.

My mother is doing battle against an old choko vine that winds over and under and through the fence. “She chops things down,” my sister tells me.

My mother only keeps things that thrive. No time for settling in or a slow season, even after so much rain. “Leave the frangipani alone!” my sister scowls.

I keep buying new plants for other people’s gardens. Mango, lychee, dragonfruit. I cry when my parents remove the cluster of banana trees by their bedroom window. The fruitbats don’t visit anymore.

I read a story about a banana flower and I knew how that tasted. There are so many ghosts and I include the papaya, here. The way my grandmother scooped those black seeds from the flesh, buried them in newspaper with the bean tips and pumpkin peel.

My grandmother lamented the loss of good Ceylon tea. Not in a bag, the sort you brew in a pot while you’re eating your lunch. In this way I learned to mourn what I never had. My mother says I live so far in the past I lose what’s here, now.

My sister confronts me with a cold cup of tea.

Kathryn Reese is a queer writer living on Peramangk land in Adelaide, South Australia. She works in medical science and enjoys road trips, hiking and chasing frogs to record their calls for science. Her poems are in The Engine Idling, Temple in a City, and Red Room Poetry. Flash in Pithead Chapel, Wigleaf, & Literary Namjooning. Collaborative writing in Gone Lawn, Midway Journal, & Many Wor(l)ds.

Elizabeth Rosen

The Essentialness of Benny
or
A Teenage Daughter Responds to Her Parents Telling Her to Dump Her Boyfriend, the Wannabe Romantic Poet

You say get rid of Benny. You say there are other fish in the sea. You say that Benny isn’t essential to my happiness. Maybe. Or maybe you just don’t understand the essentialness of Benny.

            Benny isn’t essential the way air is. He’s more essential the way skin is to keep your organs from falling out. Or the way hair is, to keep the sun from searing your scalp.
            Benny isn’t essential the way water is. Benny is essential the way the ocean is to seeing the sky reflected against it.
            Benny isn’t essential the way calories are for powering your machine-body. He is essential the way synovial fluid is in making it run smoothly.

            It’s possibly true when you say Benny isn’t essential to having a fulfilling life, but he is essential to having a life worth thinking about.
Benny isn’t essential to having a good time. He’s more essential to categorizing the time you have. He’s more essential for time to have something to rub against, to leave scent marks behind that allow us to know that it has passed.

            So when you ask me don’t I think I should get rid of Benny – because he is late picking me up from the library because he was in a debate about Ruskin’s theories on art, or because he forgot to buy the concert tickets for my birthday because he was trying to get a stanza right – you may as well be asking me to get rid of my skin, or the Earth to get rid of the ocean, or Time to stop moving. I could no more do that than tell my cells to stop dividing, or tell my mitochondria to stop instructing them to die.

Elizabeth Rosen is a native New Orleanian and a transplant to small-town Pennsylvania. She misses gulf oysters and Southern ghost stories, but has become appreciative of snow and colorful scarves. Her stories have appeared in places such as North American Review, Baltimore Review, Pithead Chapel, and Gargoyle, and have been nominated for the Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. She still wants her MTV.

Robert Scotellaro

Wonders of the Ancient World

I think it was after we built the Great Pyramids of Giza and were exhausted and a bit dehydrated, so we and our camels guzzled from the Nile. No, wait—that can’t be right—for I think it might have been after we constructed The Library of Alexandria, because back then we read by candlelight for endless hours as shadows climbed the walls. Humm, it’s still a bit hazy, and it could have been after we built The Temple of Artemis, The Fortress of Van, or The Konark Sun Temple, Oh, hell—one thing I know for sure: it was after that suitcase of yours, open on the bed, gobbled up everything you needed, then got lockjaw. And that it was after those perfect sentences you carved from a glacier, and flung out your car window as you drove off. And, oh, bloody hell, now it’s come to me. It was after we built that fragile house of tangled mist that only the mother of fog could love.

Tulip

It was 2:15 in the afternoon, as Peterson was about to make it into the end zone, that I received the text that my android was breaking up with me. She was perfection and I felt I’d gotten all the settings right, but this was a lightning strike I never saw coming. She said: “Your haiku has “way” too many syllables (which is criminal) and you have the intellectual durability of a saltine cracker.” I was crushed! I promised her I would read more and not bug her when a crossword puzzle stumped me. But she was done she said, and that was that. And damn it all to pieces if I wasn’t just jilted by a machine, and thought: was my refrigerator next? My wife was happy with her android. The one she named Bentley, that played Bartok on our old piano, his hair flopping about as he pounded the keys. Amazing what they can do now. My Tulip could scan a thousand books in seconds, balance on one toe, play a zither, or blow into an elk’s horn from a hilltop on a summer’s day. A monosyllabic haiku perfect summer’s day. And now, astonishingly, she’s somehow even mastered how to break a heart.

Robert Scotellaro is the author of 11 flash and microfiction collections, and 5 books of poetry. He has, with James Thomas, co-edited New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (W.W. Norton). His work has appeared widely and is included in Norton’s Flash Fiction International and Flash Fiction America. His work has been published in 7 Best Small Fictions and 3 Best Microfiction award anthologies. He is the winner of Zone 3’s Rainmaker Prize in Poetry and the Blue Light Book Award. Visit him at: www.robertscotellaro.com