Such riches in so small a space…Quick Fiction 18

QUICK FICTION 18

Cover art by Andrea Zuill

Edited by Jennifer and Adam Pieroni, Quick Fiction has been a long-time favorite literary journal of mine. I saw that Pia Ehrhardt was in Issue 4 and being a fan of Pia Ehrhardt, I subscribed and have been a subscriber and sometime contributor since then. I’ve held on to every issue and go back and reread them often. I brought all my issues to my flash fiction class at American University (the Discover the World of Communication summer program for high school students). The kids ate them up and learned so much by reading what I think has always been the best of what flash fiction has to offer.

The design and look of Quick Fiction has remained simple, with stunning artwork on the covers. Quick Fiction has only ever been about flash fiction and prose poetry, most of the work covering only one, small page. The work inside consistently great.

But Issue 18 may very well be the final one for this great little journal and that breaks my heart. There is amazing work to be found here and you can buy a copy here: Quick Fiction. Issue 18 includes 27 stories and prose poems, all truly excellent.

Some of my favorites from the issue were “The Train” by Curtis Smith, “Temporary” by Myfanwy Collins, “Seagulls” by Eric Bosse, “Parenting, From Chicago to Abu Dhabi” by Mark Yakich, “The Polar Bear” by J.A. Tyler, “Infinite Things All at Once” by Rachel Yoder, “Voodoo Child” by Roxane Gay, “More Love”by Greg Gerke, “Forgive Us, We Feel Less Confident Than We Appear” by Andrew Michael Roberts, and “Vs.the Mailman” by Charles Lennox.

These works and really everything in the issue work so well on the level of language and emotional evocativeness. I love this perfect line by Nathan Clay Barbarick in “Who Are You Kidding?”: “Nothing ultimately develops between us but the calm horizontal line of our reciprocal knowing”. The diction in “Temporary” by Myfanwy Collins, words like “unblinkered” and “cabbagey” and how the whole, small thing is layered over with images of dismantling. The simple truth of “I didn’t know her but I knew her” in Roxane Gay’s “Voodoo Child.” How there are no missteps, tonally, to the short, sharp story “Seagulls” by Eric Bosse. The “smart surprise” (to use a term of Jennifer Pieroni’s) at the end of the James Grinwis story “Village 51 Glimpse.” Two stories with two different takes on a lifetime in a paragraph are “Washington ‘The First Shall Be First’ Franey and “Mindy ‘Baybee’ Byrne by Stephen Cicirelli and they are both impressive in their scope and number of emotional punches.

I love Rachel Yoder’s writing and here, this paragraph, in “Infinite Things All at Once”:

“I copied six types of cool loneliness from a book onto unlined paper and then considered how I was so cool and lonely I might shard apart into ice flakes so delicate and infinitesimally complex they ruin your heart the precise moment you are able to comprehend them.”

Well, yes.

The last page of this issue of Quick Fiction contains one simple sentence, so in keeping with a journal that has always been classy, elegant and great: “Thank you for reading.”