by Meg Pokrass | Jeff Friedman
It was clear an angel had broken into Miss Petrie’s house. When I got there, powder clung to the living room air. Miss Petri said, “Something is missing.” She stared at my t-shirt, which said, Angels Can Break Our Hearts. I took out my high-powered invisibility detector lens, and now I could see all the things and places that the angel had touched. I didn’t want to scare Miss Petri, who looked beautiful in her nightgown and slippers, so I tried to keep my face neutral. I followed the angel’s wingprints back toward the bedroom. There were powdery dust clusters around old photos of Miss Petri as a smiling little girl. I could see the shadow of wings rising behind her shoulders in the photos. Miss Petrie seemed tired, as if a heavy angel was pushing against her wherever she went. “Show me what’s missing,” I said when we entered her bedroom. “How can I show you what’s missing when I don’t even know what it is,” she said. “Then tell me,” I said, “what you’ve lost.”
Meg Pokrass is the author of nine collections of flash fiction and two novellas in flash. Her work has been published in three Norton anthologies of flash including Flash Fiction America, New Micro, and Flash Fiction International; Best Small Fictions 2018, 2019, 2022, and 2023; Wigleaf Top 50; and hundreds of literary journals including Electric Literature, McSweeney’s, Washington Square Review, Split Lip, storySouth, and Passages North. Her new collection, The First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories by Meg Pokrass, is forthcoming from Dzanc Books in late 2024. Find her on Twitter @megpokrass.
Jeff Friedman’s tenth collection, Ashes in Paradise, was recently published by Madhat Press. Friedman’s poems, mini tales and translations have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, New England Review, Poetry International, Cast-Iron Aeroplanes That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 American Poets on their Prose Poetry, Flash Fiction Funny, Flash Nonfiction Funny, Fiction International, Plume, 100-Word Story, Cleaver, Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom and The New Republic, and Best Microfiction 2021, 2022 and 2023. He has received an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship and numerous other awards and prizes. https://poetjefffriedman.com
Emerge Literary Journal 