After the obligatory coffee date at Starbucks, we go to Joe’s Shanghai for the soup dumplings. I fall into your eyes as we bite into gossamer pillows filled with scorching soup, the pork and crab variety, too good to forego, this delicacy, this passion. Six months later, as a birthday surprise, I take you to a local place the Yelpers say has the best soup dumplings at half the price. You say, “Soup dumplings are overrated.” Turns out things I thought you loved you don’t love at all. The next day the lady next door reads my tea leaves. That clinches it.

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)

“...Tenancingo” 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.