365 Short Stories: Week 6 (and a few days), Love

A few week ago, I fell in love again. For me, it only takes a small opening. I felt the zing in my chest, found 8 pm energy even as the sky fell grey with rain and sleet, and wanted to talk about my new beloved to everyone. I tend to fall in love easily and usually it isn’t with a person. This time, it was with an art installation project in our hometown, one that invited the community to come together in an abandoned store and write love letters, 1000 in two weeks, which we did. These kind of projects inspire me. You can read about 1000 Love Letters here.

Feeling the same giddy love for art of letter writing made me think about how love can feel a million trillion different ways and the objects of our desire may take a variety of form. So with my story project, which to date had been random in choice, became about love. From February 5-14, I looked for love in all of the short story places.

Here’s where I found it…

Unrequited in “Araby” by James Joyce at Fiction

Haunted in “Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot” by Robert Olen Butler at Web Del Sol

Made up as you go along in “Morton Bonsey” by Randall Brown at 3:AM Magazine

Any size in “Crushed Ice” by Gary Fincke at SmokeLong Quarterly

Between siblings in “Nobody” by Tom Kealey at Sunday Rumpus Fiction

Longed for in “Flotsam” by Diane Cook at Redivider

Sweet in “Zorba’s” by Mathieu Cailler at Scissors and Spackle

With an unexpected twist in “Scapegoat” by Michelle Coppola from Short Story America on Quiddity

Rendered fragile with time in “Immortalizing John Parker” by Robin Elizabeth Black at Freight Stories

Grown fonder with absence in “Lemons” by Frances Lefkowitz at 100 Word Story

Click any one of these shorts and feel your heart begin to stretch towards something you hadn’t yet found to fall in love with.

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