Her profile read: “Loves Shakespeare, avocados, salty things.”

He replied: “Me, too!”

After weeks of emails, she accompanied him (tall, bearded, tie wearing) to Lear. He shouted “Bravo!” She clapped till her hands hurt.

Over guacamole, he said: “Marlowe wrote it, same as the Henrys. That’s clear.” She squeezed her lime so hard a pip jumped between them. At 42, she still believed love was possible; that her father’s death was peaceful; that her miscarriage at 27 meant motherhood wasn’t to be. That Shakespeare understood her heart’s pain.

She licked the salt, said nothing. And fled with her tongue burning.

Nancy Ludmerer’s

stories and flash fictions appear in Kenyon Review, The Best Small Fictions 2016 (“First Night,” a prizewinner in River Styx), Electric Literature, Mid-American Review, Vestal Review, Fish Anthology 2015, A3 Review, KYSO Flash, Cimarron Review, and others. Her story “A Simple Case” was the fiction winner in Carve Magazine’s 2019 Prose & Poetry Contest. She lives in New York City.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Hide-and-Seek, flash fiction by Nancy Ludmerer in KYSO Flash (Issue 8, August 2017)

⚡ Learning the Trade in Tenancingo, micro-fiction in KYSO Flash (Issue 6, Fall 2016)

This micro is among 100 personal favorites on Clare’s List, selected from among a thousand works published in KYSO Flash over the course of six years.