Gustavo always believed he had one more novel inside him. Krystiana was a poet through and through, her poems scattered in journals now found in secondhand stores, an unsigned book deal afloat in a drawer somewhere in that yellow cottage under magnolias on a hill. Rarely did they venture outside. Food came to the porch where news spilled across the front steps. Stupas of books arose in each room and piles of poems in various drafts formed archipelagos on every available surface. Four burners on the ancient Magic Chef range were buried under sketchpads of doodles and titles and moleskins of first lines never taken. Krysti in black, Gus in denim, drifted through the cottage on smiles, ageless through the decades. Gus’s big hit had once been written in 17 languages across the sky, and oh what a ride, his movie on marquees still seen through memory’s eye out the window through the trees. It was the frayed plug of the electric kettle that betrayed them. Forgotten in the ON position after brewing harmless tea—without water, without whistle, with deep red coil turning to white hot—a short, a spark, an arc, from two-prong outlet to yellowed paper mountain ignited the ravines of memory, the gullies of words, and brought flames to a lifetime of craft that lit the night sky and turned the cottage that contained the words and fire of poet and writer to piles of ash on the fertile ground where once their beauty grew.

Guy Biederman

is the author of five books, among them Nova Nights (Nomadic Press, 2021), Edible Grace (KYSO Flash Press, 2019), and Soundings & Fathoms (Finishing Line Press). His next collection, Translated From the Original: one-inch punch fiction, will be published by Nomadic Press in December 2022.

His stories have appeared in many journals such as Bull, Carve, Flash Frontier, Flashback Fiction, great weather for Media, KYSO Flash, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Riddled with Arrows, The Ekphrastic Review, and Exposition Review, where he was twice a Flash 405 winner. His work has recently received a Publisher’s Choice Award and an Editor’s Choice Award, and has been nominated for Best of The Net.

Guy’s writing apprenticeship began in a goat herder’s shack during a civil war in Guatemala. He now lives on a houseboat with his wife and salty cat, and walks the planks daily.

Author’s website: https://www.guybiederman.com/

Author’s blog: This Day Afloat: Reflections of Life on the Water

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Quite, a prose poem by Biederman which was the winner of the “Triple-Q” Writing Challenge in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 11, January 2022); to hear him read this piece, see Recordings at his website.

⚡ Edible Grace: An e-Collection of 12 Micro-Prose in KYSO Flash (Issue 12, Summer 2019); click on Next Page at bottom left of each piece to access the next one.

Edible Grace is also available in print and offers bonus content, including six additional micro-prose and five more photographs by the author, plus a pen-and-ink drawing by Tula Biederman.