Kathryn Silver-Hajo
★ ★ ★ ★
FLASH FICTION
Image by Augustine Wong
‘Summertime’
Everywhere something is melting—ice cream before it reaches your quivering tongue, banana-scented bubblegum in a mozzarella stretch off the sole of your shoe. Clocks dripping and draping over tree branches and park benches, as if time itself has warped, refusing to be confined—in a case, in a capsule, in a zone. Polar bear floats by on an ice floe and you wave and gush how cute and fluffy. And the neighborhood kids swim after, breaking off chunks of ice for their lemonade stand. Give us lemons and we’ll make you lemonade! they cry, having learned the lesson well—always keep your glass half full! And in the forest of darkened dreams some enterprising soul bundles bushels of charred wood, bags it, brings it for barter. Best charcoal for the BBQ! Bring your burgers and beer! After all, it’s summertime and from somewhere-time Ella warbles warm. Hush little baby don’t you cry. It’s summertime and it’s hot as hell, but don’t you cry. We long to believe the livin’ can still be easy, that there’s a-nothing can harm you. Nothing can harm you. Nothing can harm you.
Kathryn Silver-Hajo’s fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry appears, or is forthcoming, in Litro Magazine, Citron Review, Pithead Chapel, Atticus Review, Ruby Literary, SoFloPoJo, Fictive Dream, New York Times-Tiny Love Stories, New World Writing, Flash Boulevard, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Bending Genres, Cleaver Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, Rusted Radishes: Beirut Literary and Art Journal, and others. Kathryn lives in Providence, Rhode Island with her husband and sassy, curly-tailed pup, Kaya. Discover more at www.kathrynsilverhajo.com and follow her on Twitter: https://twitter.com/KSilverHajo and Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kathrynsilverhajo/.
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Beautiful. I know different styles appeal to different people, but the importance of this rang out loudly and clearly. Many thanks!