‘Thing We Believed When We Were Small’
— Joyce Chong
She looked out at the couples pouring hand-in-mittened-hand from the diner across the street, laughing, all inside jokes and Corgi puppies.
This flash fiction story by Kendra Fortmeyer seems to encompass all the doubts, disappointment, and disillusion of being stuck in the awkward space between adulthood and youth. There’s something about the juxtaposition of two extremes, the mundanity of day to day life intertwined with something just so slightly fantastical like being on fire, that makes this story unforgettable. That, and the ability that it has to make something peculiar feel so familiar. You’re on fire, and you have been for several years now but that doesn’t mean your mother doesn’t still nag you to find a boyfriend, or to go back to school. You’re on fire, but that doesn’t make your life any less unremarkable than it was before, at least not to you, and not to the people who matter. It’s not about the fire. Or, maybe it is about the fire and its convenient role as a placeholder for so many possible analogies. Maybe it’s about distance, wanting to feel connected or understood and not studied and criticized. Maybe it’s about all the melted phones she must have run through, all the conversations lost to static. There’s something unshakeably real about being in flames, and you're not sure what, just that you might have been there before.