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FREEDOM NIGHT: FLASH FICTION BY MEG POKRASS

April 11, 2019
#thesideshow, April 2019, Fiction, Flash Fiction
National Poetry Month April 2019
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Freedom Night
Tonight, we refuse to live our lives like indoor cats just because there’s a hole the size of Europe in the ozone. What we do first is we order-out Chinese peanut noodles. After consuming them, we’ll walk out the front door together and do something outside of the house. It’s been a year of waiting for something to help us out of here.
So, when delivery guy arrives bearing noodles, my husband looks at him tenderly, as if he’s here to save our lives.
“A bit dangerous out there, isn’t it?” My husband asks.
Delivery guy shakes his head, offers a sad little rat grin, and hands him the boxes of noodles. “Good stuff,” he says. My husband tips well. My husband smiles, and I imagine how the bag of food feels warm in his arms.
“Happy Freedom Night,” he says to me.
I try to laugh, it’s the way he says things, the expressions on his face. He used to be so funny.
What we do is we sit down at the table across from each other. We sit there and we wait for our noodles to cool. Soon, we’ll devour the long, curly threads, which gives us something to focus on. It’s been a year since our boy’s disappearance. His hair was long and curly just like that, and it gave me a lot to do—to care for.
Sometimes my husband becomes like an announcer. Even then, it’s hard to laugh. But he’s going all-out tonight.
“Tune in, folks! See what happens when they leave the safety of their nest,” he says, as if tonight, there will be applause. As if there is an outside world without our boy inside it.

MEG POKRASS has published stories and poetry in Electric Lit, Tin House, Rattle, PANK, 3AM, Wigleaf, Matchbook, NANO Fiction, 100-Word-Story, Smokelong, and many other literary magazines both online and in print. Her flash has been included in Best Small Fictions, 2018, and 2 Norton anthologies: Flash Fiction International (W. W. Norton & Co., 2015) and New Micro (W.W. Norton & Co., 2018). She received the Blue Light Book Award for her collection of prose poetry, Cellulose Pajamas (Blue Light Press, 2016). Her newest flash fiction collection is Alligators At Night (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2018). Previous collections include Damn Sure Right, My Very End of the Universe, Bird Envy and The Dog Looks Happy Upside Down. Meg’s flash has been included in the Wigleaf Top-50 list (short and longlist) numerous years. She currently serves as flash fiction curator for Flash Fiction Festival, U.K. and is the Managing Editor of New Flash Fiction Review.

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