Your Impossible Voice
May 8, 2023

Bess Recalls the Great Depression

By Kathryn Silver-Hajo

She paints WPA-inspired scenes of fishermen and farm hands, the frame shop on Flatbush a ruckus of wood and wire, tools and nails. Syd measures, hammers, curses. Bess regales with tales of bill collectors pounding the front door while they tiptoed out the back. Our Tom-and-Jerry routine, she sighs.

About the Author

Kathryn Silver-HajoKathryn Silver-Hajo is a 2023 Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Best American Food Writing nominee. Her stories appear or are forthcoming in Atticus Review, The Citron Review, CRAFT, Emerge Literary Journal, New Flash Fiction Review, Pithead Chapel, Ruby Literary, and others. Kathryn’s flash collection Wolfsong and novel Roots of The Banyan Tree are forthcoming in 2023. She reads for Fractured Lit. More at: kathrynsilverhajo.com; twitter.com/KSilverHajo; instagram.com/kathrynsilverhajo

Related Flash
bird on city street

Three Rings and a Window to Heaven

By Jacob Griffin Hall

“Three and a half months ago, we opened the door and sidestepped the bird. The poor thing had died right at the front step. It was terribly sad, I thought, to die. Even worse with a landlord who’d leave you to the insects.”

Read More
white metal railings near swimming pool

Libation

By Matthew Jakubowski

“I later learned people had a lot of opinions about the kind of people we were, and our so-called lifestyles, a word they thought was so vaguely clever. “

Read More
white ashes in close up shot

Ash Wednesday

By Sarp Sozdinler

“I lift my mother’s urn high to show her the places she’d never seen inside the house when she was alive.”

Read More

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This