Waiting by the Phone

At 15, Kenny called me out of the blue and asked me to be his girlfriend. The fact that we spoke from our respective homes nightly and hadn’t yet met seemed like a mere technicality.

After recently hosting a Narratively Academy video chat between literary legends Lee Gutkind and Dinty W. Moore about what a flash essay is, we ran a brief flash essay contest. The winning essay, from Jen Shepherd, was so fun to work on and got such a warm response that we thought we’d share another. This one, from Cathy Alter, reminds us why we love flash pieces: The best ones can do so much in such a tiny space.