Congratulations to the 6 winners of Writer Advice’s Flash Memoir Contest. Some are returning winners; others are new. We’re proud of all these stories, along with many others that we aren’t able to share. If you weren’t selected here, we encourage you to try other sites.
NOTE: We hope you’ll enjoy their stories, and we’d love to hear your thoughts.
Please come back next week and read the next piece. We’d love to read your work, so please take a look at our Flash Fiction Contest. We’d love to have you enter your best flash fiction.
Winners:
“Serendipity in a Richard Cory Moment” by Carol W. Brown will be posted on 4/01
“Below Stairs” by Geralyn Pinto will be posted on 4/08
“Meeting Eisenhower at the Fourth of July Parade: Memoir 1952” by Kristen Bodie will be posted on 4/15
“Little Did I Know” by Laura Shell will be posted on 4/22
“Initial Knowings” by Pamela Wright Howell will be posed on 4/29
“Hot Flash” by Sherri Bale will be posted on 5/06
“Butterflies” by Damon Yaeger was also accepted, but his piece was picked up by another publication before I sent the notices. He deserves our congratulations too. We’ll share the reason why each one was picked when it is posted.
Hot Flash
By Sherri Bale
Mother Earth is suffering from what some call global warming and others call climate change. Freezing and broiling temperatures, droughts and floods are her way of showing her pain.
Long before anyone had heard the term “climate crisis”, my own mother experienced a similar phenomenon. She called it hot flashes. They started after a hysterectomy at age 34. That’s when the atmosphere in our house got hotter and hotter, even as the air conditioner was cranked lower. My mother suffered mightily during her daily episodes of personal summer, and she did not suffer in silence.
I had little sympathy for my mother. When a woman is hot, change into shorts, stick your head in the freezer, or eat ice cream. If heat waves wafting through your body cause headache, take an aspirin. Really, how bad could it be? My mother made so much fuss over something half our species experiences in their lifetime – as commonplace as the sun’s rise and setting and the ebb and flow of ocean waves. Suck it up!
My mother’s menopausal sufferings were not the only events that made life difficult for those around her. She had a litany of complaints: Her siblings didn’t appreciate all she had sacrificed for them, my father’s family criticized her, people talked behind her back. She severed contact with several neighbors and all but one brother. She tangled with the phone company, the school system, and the mayor’s office. She believed everyone was out to get her — including me, her only child.
I left for college at seventeen, relieved to leave my mother’s orbit. Our relationship the next several years was strained. I knew she boasted to others about my accomplishments, but to me she expressed only resentment. I had opportunities in life that she hadn’t, and she made it clear it was she who provided those opportunities. She quit school at sixteen to help support her younger siblings after her alcoholic and abusive father left. I knew she was ashamed of not having finished high school, and I heard her lie about it to friends. I felt no pity – she’d had plenty of opportunity to get her GED in the eleven years before I was born, or after I started school. I attributed her martyr complex to her inherent deficiencies. It was easier to blame others for her circumstances.
She died of lung cancer at age 58, after smoking for forty years. She never made a genuine effort to quit though she surely knew my childhood asthma was exacerbated by her second-hand smoke. She spent her last three years in chronic care, unable to communicate. We had no chance to mend our relationship.
Twenty years later, I was driving home from work when I suddenly felt flushed and sweaty, lightheaded and nauseated. I pulled my sweatshirt off and let below-freezing air in through opened windows. What fresh hell was this? Starting that moment, the episodes played on an endless loop, day and night. I tried to talk myself out of them. I tried to pretend they weren’t happening. I dressed in layers I could peel off. I stuck my head into the laboratory freezer.
After a month I cried “uncle” and consulted a doctor. He prescribed estrogen replacement. My symptoms were alleviated immediately. This miracle treatment hadn’t been available for my mother fifty years earlier. I wondered if it would have changed how she viewed her life.
With my physical relief also came insight. I realized I had been too quick to dismiss my mother’s complaints and assign her suffering to personal weakness. If her hot flashes were not exaggerated, was it possible her other complaints might also have been legitimate? She was certainly difficult, but I had been a harsh judge. I had been unfair.
Now I try to check myself when my mother’s complaining voice comes out of my mouth, which it does more often than I’d like. I attempt to be empathic to those around me. It scares me that I have more in common with my mother than I realized. I am grateful for modern science, and I belatedly feel pity for my mother who did not benefit.
Sadly, the cure for Mother Earth’s climate pain is not to be found in a pill bottle. We need to acknowledge that her pain is real. We need to change how we treat her. We need to mend our relationship with Mother Earth before she spins off into the great unknown as mine did.
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Sherri Bale is a published writer of flash fiction, short stories, and creative non-fiction and an aspiring historical fiction novelist. A retired medical geneticist and part-time personal trainer, she competes in powerlifting events locally and nationally. She is the mother of two humans and a diabetic Jack Russell rescue pup.
Editor’s Note: Although flash fiction doesn’t normally have this much in it, Sherri Bale has done a deep dive on a subject that both men and women know more about. Her words are insightful, we feel her regret, and this is a strong slice of life and reflection here. Good work!
Initial Knowings
By Pamela Wright Howell
I knew to write only the initials of the song in my diary, or my mom would think the worst when she read it. My dark blue and teal flowered journal, slightly bigger than a deck of cards, had a purely-for-looks lock on the clasp. In my mom’s house, growing up in Charleston, my inner self was an open book.
January 8, 1980
Eric asked me to go with him. I said yes! TTLWH
Eric and I walked the mile home from middle school together most days. On a frontage road flanked by mossy woods and Savannah Highway, he carried his books, mine, and his trumpet case. We lived five identical brick houses apart – his was the first in the neighborhood. On the day I said yes, we parted with a half-hug and full smiles, and I skipped home to turn on the radio ASAP.
As my 15-year-old sister and her friends had taught me, that’s how couples discovered their song. The first song you hear after agreeing to “go together” becomes your anthem – forever.
I unlocked the front door, flew to my room, and tuned in WTMA 1260 on my clock radio. And there it was:
Cause you’re the joke of the neighborhood
Why should you care if you’re feelin’ good?
Well, take the long way home
Take the long way home…
How funny – and kind of perfect – for us, since we became a couple on the way home! My big sister and her friends knew their shit.
I opted for the initials TTLWH in my diary because I knew my mom would assume “taking the long way home” meant I’d let Eric “take me behind a tree”—her shady phrase for all the bad and nasty things a girl could do or have done to her by a boy if she wasn’t careful, or worse, if she was trashy.
I wasn’t sure exactly what “going behind a tree” entailed, but I knew it was horrible. And I knew something about me made my mom think I was the kind of girl who’d GBAT, while my sister was not.
Supertramp at 11 years old.
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Pamela Wright Howell is a media professional in Asheville, NC, specializing in nonprofit, education, and youth advocacy. With 25 years in television news – on-air and in production – she now amplifies organizations transforming lives and strengthening communities. A lifelong writer, she’s finally sharing her personal work. Quietly wondering who might start sweating when they hear “memoir.”
Editor’s Note: This piece has an authentic voice and a fabulous ending line. Engaging and well done. We’re proud to share this.
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Little Did I Know
By Laura Shell
I saw my dog scoot across the leaves in the yard the other day, and as I laughed hysterically/ Little did I know that he would be dead soon.
Little did I know that his death would cause me to break five years of sobriety and have four shots of bourbon.
Little did I know that his death would have me begging my psychiatrist for Xanax or Ativan or Klonopin to stop the shaking in my body.
Little did I know that as my husband and I buried our best friend, our child, our only companion, I would wail loud enough for the entire neighborhood to hear me, that my husband would have to pick me up off the ground because my legs would give out.
Little did I know that I’d have a perpetual ache of despair in the pit of my stomach.
Little did I know how quiet the house would become without his huffing, his snorting, his barking.
Little did I know how empty the bed would feel without him pressing against my back at night.
He’s not here to greet us when we come home.
He’s not here to beg for bacon or cheese or eggs.
He’s not here to carry toys twice his size into the living room and toss them around like they’re made of air.
He’s not here.
He’s not here.
He’s not here!
Little did I know that his death would be my fault.
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Laura Shell has been published in NUNUM, Maudlin House, Typishly, The Citron Review, and many others. Her first anthology of paranormal stories, The Canine Collection, was released in 2024. She’s a prolific writer and submitter of flash fiction and the Editor of the Flash Phantoms horror fiction site–www.flashphantoms.net. You can find more about her at https://laurashellhorror.wordpress.com.
Editor’s Note: The build in this story work exceptionally well. So does the pace. Well done and intense.
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Meeting Eisenhower at the Fourth of July Parade: Memoir 1952
By Kristen Bodie
From my Daddy’s shoulders, I could see the parade in both directions: the marching bands, the floats, the flags, the old flivvers and the fancy cars. My sister’s Girl Scout troop marched by. She carried the flag because she was tallest. It was hot. I wished I had a baseball cap. Mama said girls never wear baseball caps. Even if they like baseball.
Suddenly, Daddy swung my leg over his head and slid me to the ground. He pushed me forward. “Go right up front, honey,” he whispered and pushed. It was hard to squeeze by big people’s legs. I wriggled until I popped out of the crowd. Everyone was cheering an extra fancy car coming. A man sat on the convertible part of the back seat.
Then the car stopped. The man got out, straightened his jacket and put on his hat. He walked over to me. He crouched down and looked into my face. “Hello,” he said. “What’s your name, Miss.”
“My name is Kris. With a K.” He was listening so I told him. “It’s important you use the “K” so you don’t mix me up with the other Chrisses in my class.”
He put his hand out and shook mine. “I am honored to meet you, Kris,” he said. “My name is Ike.” He smiled. He looked old but kind. “I’m running for President of the United States. Will you vote for me?”
“I don’t know. Did you do something important?”
“Well, let’s see. I led the troops on D-Day in the invasion of France.”
“My daddy was at Chair Burg,” I said.
“Do you know where Cherbourg is?”
“No, but it was scary.”
“Yes, it was. Is your daddy here?” I nodded and pointed behind me.
“Are you this young lady’s father?” Ike stood, facing my Daddy.
“Yes, sir.” Daddy raised his hand up to his head in a funny way.
“What unit were you in?”
“Merchant Marine, sir.”
Ike extended his hand to Daddy. “You boys did a fine job. We could never have succeeded without you protecting our backs.” Daddy shook his hand. “I know a lot of those ships were sunk.” Daddy nodded. “I’m glad you were able to come home to this fine family.” He looked down at me.
“Would it be all right if I picked you up, young lady? These gentlemen want to get a photo. I don’t think they can get us both in the frame unless you’re up here.” I nodded. He swooped me up. He smelled like wet wool and sweat and cinnamon. He turned and waved to the crowd. Flashbulbs popped. My eyes blurred into blue flares. He lowered me to the street. “I hope you vote Republican, young lady!” he said. He walked back to the car and climbed in. As the car moved away, he winked at me.
Daddy grabbed me and hugged me. “You shook hands with the next President of the United States,” he said. Back on the sidewalk, Mama fussed with my hair. “Of course, he stopped for her, George. Blonde pigtails, little kid in overalls.” She made that funny tsk-tsk noise she used when she wanted you to know she is not fooled, not one bit.
“Ethyle, that was history right then! And our little girl was part of it!”
“History was when you came home,” Mama said.
Later, when it was almost time to go to the fireworks, Daddy asked me, “What did you think of Ike, honey?”
“I want to be just like him,” I said. I went into the bathroom. I found the scissors. I couldn’t undo my braids. Mama had wound them tight. She said I have fly-away hair. I climbed up on the sink and looked in the mirror. I grabbed my bangs with one hand and cut them straight across. Then I looked more like Ike.
“Are you ready, Kris?” Mama called. “We’re ready to walk over to the stadium.” She turned. “Oh my God! What have you done?”
“I look more like Ike!” I said. Daddy roared.
Mama grabbed her handbag. She stomped out. Daddy took my hand and grinned. “You look wonderful to me, honey,” he whispered. We hurried to catch up with Mama. She called over her shoulder, “I’m still not voting for him!” But she talked about that day forever.
Kristen Bodie was born and raised in Evanston, Illinois, famous for its Fourth of July celebrations. Her family never missed the Central Street Parade. Her father joined up at age 28 despite an exemption. D-Day was the only battle he ever talked about, perhaps because it was on his birthday. She’s been writing for as long as I can remember.
Editor’s Note: Kristen Bodie has written a story that only she can tell. She does a beautiful job of showing all characters–especially the mother in the last paragraph. The family dynamic is effectively shown through a child’s eyes. This is a memorable story.
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Below Stairs
By Geralyn Pinto
A man wearing orange gloves collecting garbage in a black bag. Selective focus.
I grew up in a family which was boxed in by economic status, middle class morality and antiseptic surroundings. It followed that, as children, we weren’t permitted to be on familiar terms with those who lived ‘below stairs’.
Ma said, “They are all God’s children, but you cannot get too close to certain classes of people.”
Aunt Marge agreed, “Besides, you never know what you might pick up from servants. They are hard to train in matters of health and hygiene. None of you children is to entertain them in the kitchen or let them drink from our glasses. There’s the garden tap. They’ll survive un-boiled water. They’re not like us.”
But Walter, Emmy, and I did worse. We slipped into their quarters in the outhouse and ate their food. We liked it. It tasted wonderfully of woodsmoke. The water we drank from a mud pot smelt like the earth after the rains. We pigged into their red-chili curries which left us with streaming noses and happy hearts. We had never mixed with any but clean and ‘upright’ people. We always returned, three cheerful sinners, still niffing of the rice and curry which we had eaten with bare hands. We made friends with Kuttappa, the sweeper boy, whose eyes were black as cloves. He taught Walter how to make catapults with discarded tubing and shinnied up trees to get Emmy and me mangoes in the season, and star berries all the year round.
Calendar pages flipped over many years. I grew up, and became ‘civilized’ which grandma feared I’d never be. I grew fastidious.
And I grew ill. It wasn’t the microbes that did it. It was an autoimmune condition, for want of a better explanation.
Four feet is the breadth of the average surgical cot. Now it was the breadth of my world in the Intensive Care Unit where I barely fended off a near-fatal encounter with ulcerative colitis which was chronic, extensive, florid and active. I was trapped between two temperature zones – the tundra of the ICU and the torrid heat of the inflammatory condition that boiled and bubbled in my large intestine. I was leashed to life with lengths of tube which channelled colourless, lifegiving liquids into my veins. I curled into a child-sized question mark lying on white sheets and covered with a red blanket. The air smelt of cold, clean oxygen and sweetly sickening ether. There were x-rays, and scans of parts of my body that I barely knew existed. Then, there were blood tests.
I dreaded the arrival of the phlebotomist, Mr Joshi, and privately thought of him as Dracula, prowling the ICU for the warm, red stuff.
He arrived one afternoon, gloved, masked and unusually apologetic for a ‘vampire’. He examined my forearms with veins which were thrombosed and cobalt blue.
“I’m sorry, ma’am. Forgive me, but this time I’ll have to draw blood from the femoral vein in your thigh.” He hung his head down in misery and compassion. My atrophied body tightened. This spelt pain. He signalled to the attendant who carried a box of sterile specimen containers and picked out one.
Then the hypodermic and the statutory warning, “This is going to hurt, just a little.”
Drawing blood from a femoral vein in a thigh which has been reduced to skin stretched over bone, is like a piranha attack. Red, biting, hungry pain crawled over my skin and bone. A hot gush of tears. I was eight years old again. As my mind shrank to protect me, someone else reached out to do the same. It was the attendant, squatting on the floor and taking my hand in his, through the railings of the surgical cot.
I focussed on him instead of the savage contraction of skin and saw a pair of clove black eyes with a shimmer of tears in them.
“Kuttappa”, he whispered, “remember me?”
“Kuttappa? Here?”
“I got a job as a janitor in this hospital. Then, a promotion. I was made Mr Joshi’s attendant. I read the list of Joshi sir’s patients for blood drawing. And I knew it was you.”
I tightened my hold on work-calloused fingers and slipped away on a piece of mind:
to a childhood of raw mangoes, star berries, and water that smelt of the earth;
to the green years of growing where silly, unkind rules were meant to be broken.
Adulthood fell away like a dead palm frond. I was breaking the rules all over again.
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Geralyn Pinto is a short story writer from Mangalore, India. A cheerful, boisterous childhood and a sober adulthood, challenged by serious illness, shaped her into the writer that she is today. For this piece of flash memoir, she drew upon friendships forged when she was a child and a near-fatal encounter with ulcerative colitis, in her early thirties.
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Editor’s Note: We hesitated because this is two scenes with some time between them, but both are absolutely necessary to tell this story. It’s evocative and shows the culture in which the narrator grew up. At this moment it’s important to share every culture.
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Serendipity in a Richard Cory Moment
By Carol W. Brown
I did not know about the gun when I read her essay for my class at DVC.
She was quiet and lovely, a blonde beauty, twenty-three, working in a job she loved while pursuing a college degree. As weeks went by, some young women in the class noticed her sparkling engagement ring, while a few young men asked about the fancy sports car she parked in the student lot.
But her essay was unlike anything I had encountered in my twenty years of reading student essays.
We had just moved from Connecticut, and it was my first semester at the college. I was meeting my student’s class in an hour and needed to talk to her about my concerns…but how?
I took my concerns to an experienced professor, and her quick dismissal, “I have better things to do with my time than concern myself with students’ problems” led me to the yellow pages (this was 1990) hoping to find a psychiatrist who might give me perspective within the next forty-five minutes.
Improbably, my first call was picked up after a few rings by a psychiatrist in Walnut Creek who was expecting a return call.
With apologies I asked if he would give me a few minutes to listen to my concerns about a college student in my class, that the tone of the essay was disturbing. He indulged me but soon stopped me short: “I think I know your student; he identified her, saying that she had been his patient several years before: “ Tell her that I must see her this afternoon.” I told him I would do my best.
When she arrived before class, I asked her if we could have coffee after class and discuss her paper. She was surprised but agreed. After class we walked to the cafeteria, and after we had settled I began by telling her that I might have read too much into her paper, but that I was deeply concerned, and how my acting on this concern led me to the yellow pages—a random call to a psychiatrist who just happened to answer his phone—and that this psychiatrist stopped me not long after I began, told me that he needed to see this student that afternoon, and gave me her name.
She was stunned—but touched—that her doctor from years before had stopped me after just a few minutes, identified her, and would clear his schedule to see her.
Then she told me about the gun sitting on the floor of her car and her plan to use it that day.
It was my turn to be stunned.
Rather than being angry at my actions, she was amazed that this highly respected, busy man insisted on meeting with her that day. Her reaction helped allay my fears about what might come next.
We went to my office where she first called the doctor, then a friend to take her to see him in half an hour, and then her fiancé to pick up her car.
While we waited for her friend, she poured out something of what she had been carrying: two weeks before, she had been in a terrible car accident—not her fault; she was physically unscathed, but others were not as lucky; then a week ago her closest friend, a friend she had supported through a long serious illness, had died. Throughout these weeks her fiancé had been caring and supportive, but her family had been dismissive. Weighing on her was her concern about the fiancé she deeply loved: she felt that she was unworthy of what looked to be their ideal future, that he would be better off with someone more deserving.
We met her friend in the lot near my office, and we never spoke of that day again.
The semester ended, and I received a note: several weeks before the end of the semester, she had experienced another life-challenging event, but this time she was able to see it through, and her future looked bright indeed.t
All these years later, I think of this young woman. She reminds me that there are many burdens that our students carry that we cannot begin to know.
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Carol W. Brown has been a lucky daughter, granddaughter, niece, sister, friend, student, volunteer, teacher, wife, daughter-in-law, mother, grandmother, with many years of exploring, swimming, boating, sailing, and tennis.
She’s loved everywhere she’s lived, including New Jersey, Houston, New Orleans, Austin, Miami, New York, New Canaan (CT), and now Orinda.
Editor’s Note: We picked this one for the compelling opening paragraph, the moment-by-moment message, and the authentic voice, as well as the writing.
