After nearly five years of editing this journal, I am still be surprised by our depth of submissions. We read so many good pieces every period and our choices naturally push each other toward a breathtaking synergy. To me, this season of Flash Fiction explores our human ability to communicate in the face of otherworldly obstacles, our discovery of strength and courage in navigating everyday life.

In Michelle Hulan’s “Meara, Can You See the Light?” we find the living and the dead in conversation of sorts. Then in “Mother Tongue,” Kik Lodge takes us a on a train to nowhere/everywhere, which happens to be a place where people aren’t really communicating at all. The train gives way to a restaurant in Cristi Donoso’s “Quiet” where the communication breakdown is all the more touching. Joe Kapitan’s “Mare Autisma” might just posit that simple kindness can bring us back from the brink. It offers us moon, if we’re willing to be poets. Julia F. Green’s “Purse Tooth” promises that reassurances can come from an even smaller thing, as long as we hold it close once it falls out.

It’s stories like these that allow us to be open to angles unseen, to angels unheard. Perhaps our future isn’t bright, but something else. Rather than fear it, we might run toward it awkwardly, open to discovery, open to surprise even in the face of pain.

JR Walsh
Online Editor
The Citron Review