Whenever the fire engines wailed their warnings, Mom came alive, eyes flashing, and Dad glanced up with that far-away smile before drifting back into his head where he mostly lived. But we’d jump into the car with Mom to chase that campfire-gone-mad smell and throbbing red lights. From afar we watched the little men in yellow rubber coats and fireman hats climbing miniature ladders as in a videogame but with real smoke ballooning, brilliant blasts of amber soaring skyward, the inevitable collapse to embers. Perhaps this fire-lust foretold the day our family would snap like sparks swirling and drifting away.
Micro by Kathryn Silver-Hajo
Photo by Adam Strong
Kathryn Silver-Hajo is a 2023 Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Best American Food Writing nominee. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Atticus Review, The Citron Review, CRAFT, Emerge Literary Journal, New York Times-Tiny Love Stories, Pithead Chapel, Ruby Literary and others. Kathryn’s flash collection “Wolfsong” and her novel “Roots of The Banyan Tree” are both forthcoming in 2023. She is a reader for Fractured Lit. More at: kathrynsilverhajo.com; twitter.com/KSilverHajo; instagram.com/kathrynsilverhajo
Backwards Trajectory 