"Boots," by Pamela Gay

In the vein of Robert Olen Butler’s Had A Good Time: Stories from American Postcards, this story too evokes a life between the lines; in this case, the tension between what the postcard writer thought and what she wrote. The visual element of the displayed postcard, the actual handwriting and the postmark, lend an aura of reality to the fiction. The dreamy quality of the prose and the suppressed emotion echo the blurry watercolor of the postcard illustration. The 1945 postmark and an unnamed voice, which refers to Japan’s surrender, places the story in history. Most appealing is the device of using a relic to evoke enough particulars of a life that capture the reader’s imagination. I love the line, “Some nights she’d turn in her sleep and curl into him to find he had his boots on.” There are numerous curious elements in this flash fiction. Enjoy it here at Grey Sparrow Press.