Questions to Ask Adela (a short story)

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve gotten a short story published… To be honest, I was second-guessing whether I still remembered how to write a damn short story. 😭 I’m excited to tell you that my story QUESTIONS TO ASK ADELA is now online at Flash Fiction Magazine! 🎉 If you want to jump right to it, here’s the link. 📗 If you want more info about my writing process, read on. ✍️ And if you don’t care about any of this crap 💩, then why did you get this far into the post!?

So this is a story that’s been on my mind for many years as I tried to process the feeling when someone in my extended family died. Not just that, but I’ve been thinking about how we sometimes learn about death through the eyes of someone else who is closer to the grief of it. I tried to write this story fifteen years ago. But I wasn’t quite ready to write it. So I tried again this year. Instead of looking back at the old piece, I just rewrote it from scratch. I figured that looking back at the original draft would just keep me stuck in that old way of telling the story, or force me to use that old lens… or something like that. It wasn’t until I finished a draft that I looked back at the original. The earlier draft was a little bit too sentimental and it was trying too hard to be poignant. This new version (hopefully) is more about just telling the story and letting the reader feel how they want to feel about it. I grabbed one or two details from the old draft, but I didn’t really need to look back.

Also, this story won second place in their flash fiction contest. You know, I thought about whether I should still submit my stories to contests. Shouldn’t I leave the contests for the new writers? Maybe I should have done that, I don’t know. But also, since it has been many years since I’ve written flash fiction, I liked the idea of anonymously submitting my story to the slush pile, just to make sure that—if my story was chosen—it would be chosen on its own merit.

Anyway, here’s how the story starts:

I was only twenty-five and didn't understand grief. How it twisted its way into life.

My dad was visiting me in Portland for a week. Mom had called the week before and said, "Your father is being a nudnick. I'm sending him to you." They lived in Atlanta. I could hear in the background my father yelling, "I'm not a fucking package."

Now go check out the rest at Flash Fiction Magazine, which is a cool lit site that publishes a new piece of flash fiction every day (and provides a lot of other tools for writers).