My sisters and I pushed a tape into the tape drive and music came on and the car started driving, we were in it. The park appeared though darkness was predominant. There were terrible things, but not here. There were people who knew, but not here. There were people who’d love us, not here, and those that would couldn’t. The trunk was filled with summer’s fireworks. We kept the battery on, the music shook the pavement. My sister danced like her soul had come back. My sister threw pops until color lit her feet. My sister, my sister, my sister.
—Kathleen Levitt is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has previously appeared in Fiction Southeast, Entropy, and 34th Parallel.
Kathleen Levitt on writing flash
I like to think of flash fiction as a reduction. Not as devolution or dissipation, but as the conversion of one thing into another more condensed, more vivid, and more potent thing. What is left after the image has been over the flame for some time is its sticky essence.