About That Story

Contributor Stephanie Goldman on the inspiration for two flash fictions

We’re trying something new here at Fiction Attic: the About That Story series, in which contributors tell us how their stories came together. Recently, we published two flash fictions by Stephanie Goldman, Safe Passage and Category One. We asked Goldman to tell us about the inspiration for these stories…

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Category One was inspired by an ordinary afternoon when the little girl next door rang my doorbell and pointed out that our visitor's car was parked on the grass and endangering both the grass and its inhabitants. I was a bit annoyed as I had been having a somewhat stressful day, but it got me thinking about the spaces we share and the space we take up in the world.

Safe Passage came together as the result of a handful of writing prompts that I strung together with a real-life incident. I was coming home from a concert late one night on a NYC subway. A man screamed out a blood-curdling cry when someone stepped on his foot. It got me thinking about our bodies in spaces, public and private and how our sense of self can blur with the world around us. I was inspired by Elizabeth Bishop's poem, In the Waiting Room when writing the transformation that occurs at the end of "Safe Passage." 

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Fiction Attic Press publishes flash fiction, flash memoir, short stories, and serial novellas. Go here to submit your work.

Cover photo by Shashank Sahay on Unsplash