Where I Found Him by Meg Pokrass

Way up in Alaska I found the man who loved me. He could no longer move his feet. I found him half-dead, staring up at the sky, looking for a helicopter. He turned his head and said to me “I am sad”. When he spit my name, it froze, but I understood it. He juggled the letters with his frostbitten stare. I was just visiting, a tourist in Alaska, I said, I was not local and could not be depended on. But the truth was this; I wanted to be loved by this man, even if the ice were rigid and the climate would ruin whatever we became. I liked the feel of his frozen words, the way they caught each other mid-air.

Meg Pokrass is the author of seven full flash fiction collections, including (from earliest to latest) “Damn Sure Right” (Press 53, 2011), “Cellulose Pajamas” (Blue Light Book Award, 2015), “The Dog Looks Happy Upside Down” (Etruscan Press, 2016), “Alligators At Night” (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2018), “The Dog Seated Next to Me”, (Pelekinesis, 2019), Alice in Wonderland Syndrome (Chapbook from V. Press, 2020), and “Spinning to Mars” (Blue Light Book Award, 2020), “, a flash chapbook, “An Object At Rest”  (Ravenna Press, 2020), and two novellas-in-flash: “Here, Where We Live” (Rose Metal Press, 2014) and “The Loss Detector”  (Bamboo Dart Press, 2020), “Spinning to Mars” (Winner of the Blue Light Book Award, 2021) and “The House of Grana Padano (co-authored with Jeff Friedman). Meg’s flash fiction, prose poetry and hybrid writing has been widely internationally anthologized, most notably in 3 Norton anthologies of the flash fiction form: Flash Fiction America (W.W. Norton & Co., 2023), New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (W.W. Norton & Co., 2018) and Flash Fiction International (W.W. Norton & Co., 2015), The Best Small Fictions (2018 & 2019), the Wigleaf Top 50 (4 x) and the BIFFY Awards in 2019 and 2020, as well as many other anthologies including Brevity Magazine’s Flash Non-Fiction Funny and 100-Word Story’s Nothing Short of 100. Meg is a great teacher of flash fiction. Her classes lead writers to generating lots of material in directions they may not have gone on their own!

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