enneđź“š reviewed Small Wonders Issue 5
Small Wonders Issue 5
4 stars
As is maybe obvious, I've been quite enjoying all of the Small Wonders issues. I don't get a chance to read a lot of short fiction, let alone flash fiction. It certainly looks like a tough job as a writer to squeeze an interesting story into such a small space. In the notes from the editors this time around, they say "flash fiction lives in the transition zone between poetry and story", which explains a lot about why they would create a magazine that covers both (and also why I sometimes misremember a story as being poetry as prose).
Here's a couple of my favorites again from this one:
- Imagine Yourself Happy by Premee Mohamad
Whoever gets to autopsy me, congratulations, this really will be a first in the literature if you're allowed to publish.
I really enjoyed this story about a scientist narrating their unexpected last moments. As …
As is maybe obvious, I've been quite enjoying all of the Small Wonders issues. I don't get a chance to read a lot of short fiction, let alone flash fiction. It certainly looks like a tough job as a writer to squeeze an interesting story into such a small space. In the notes from the editors this time around, they say "flash fiction lives in the transition zone between poetry and story", which explains a lot about why they would create a magazine that covers both (and also why I sometimes misremember a story as being poetry as prose).
Here's a couple of my favorites again from this one:
- Imagine Yourself Happy by Premee Mohamad
Whoever gets to autopsy me, congratulations, this really will be a first in the literature if you're allowed to publish.
I really enjoyed this story about a scientist narrating their unexpected last moments. As the title implies, it's one about taking pleasure in the small moments you have.
- Kodakromen by Elizabeth R. McClellan
Every selfie will eventually be a picture / of a corpse
A poem about the burden of seeing the future through photos.
- Chocolate Pudding by David Hammond
"When you wake up,” she says, “we’ll have 'gravity.'"
A fun story about a kid on a spaceship returning to earth; I like the adults in this story who are trying to share their nostalgic joy about gravity or birds or earth itself to a kid who really would just prefer to float forever and is trying to translate alien adult joy into something more relatable.