I was depressed. I was asking myself what’s it all worth.
One of my sister’s best friends died this morning. Once upon a time, college-ish, I had a crush on her. We went to the beach to surf once. We didn’t make it into the water. We sat on a cement wall above a set of stairs leading to the beach with my surfboard behind us on the sidewalk and watched the water and talked about life. And now she is dead. And every story I read today is soured by her death. And I can’t see the point in putting together a list of stories I only kinda liked this week. And yes, I used the word kinda, why not? I’ll be dead one day so who cares about word usage and punctuation.
Or, maybe, because I will be dead someday, I should be more concerned with commas. Maybe commas and spelling and periods are the only important thing we leave behind. I have no idea.
But I couldn’t get into anything I was reading until I read Andrew Bertaina’s I Dreamed a Father which I absolutely love and can’t imagine how he came up with it, except that I think there might be a Black Hole in the Hydrangea outside my window right now.
Anyway, thanks to Andrew I will make it through another week of this weird experiment called Burn After Submitting.
One other problem I ran into this week was that I was reading John Gregory Dunne’s Vegas, Joy William’s ninty-nine stories of GOD (a collection of flash fiction) thus read very little online flash fiction.
Then this girl I took surfing once died…
Ash Carter
The Rise, Fall, and return of Gary Fisketjon
Anthony Neil Smith
Midterm Exam on The Great Gatsby
https://citywidelunch.wordpress.com/midterm-exam-on-the-great-gatsby-by-anthony-neil-smith/
2 by Joshua Hebburn
The Outage
https://www.havehashad.com/hadposts/the-outage
The Situation
https://www.scaffoldlit.com/microwritings/the-situation-by-joshua-hebburn
Andrew Bertaina
I Dreamed a Father
https://ghostparachute.com/issue/august-2025-issue/i-dreamed-a-father/