Short Fiction for Poetic Souls Don’t blink – flash fiction can be over quicker than you’re ready for it to be. I have such a fondness for short stories. The term conjures memories of favorite literature courses where I marveled at classics like Kate Chopin’s “The Storm” and shivered after concluding Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s horrifying “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The beauty of short stories (surprise!) lies in their brevity. They can be read in one sitting. Their concise nature means that every word carries more weight. The short plots pack a punch. Many tend to incorporate a twist of some kind, often at the end. The short story and its subgenre, flash fiction, lend themselves well to our hurried, distracted culture. For a few moments, the reader is immersed in a mind-altering work of art. And just before there’s an impulse to reach for the smartphone, the reader’s eyes are skating over the last sentence. What is flash fiction? We’re all familiar with the short story since it’s been a popular writing form for a few centuries. But flash fiction seems to have exploded onto the literary scene more recently. As it turns out, the term was coined only about 30