Grandma’s House

Micro fiction is a form of flash fiction that features extremely short stories. A common  description defines micro fiction as ‘any story of less than 300 words’, but they are often much shorter.

Once a year, Flash Frontier runs their Micro issue, in which the word limit is a mere 100 . This year I was lucky to have my story Grandma’s House accepted for publication.

In this story I drew on childhood memories. Places visited when very young can inspire vivid images that linger as we grow older. My grandmother’s wooden villa in Wellington Road becomes jumbled up with the dark carpeted hallway in Uncle Fred’s Palmerston North house. The remembered smell of dusty carpet still tickles my nose, and the fall of sunlight in a particular way still evokes the recollection of golden light on shadowed corners. I recall the monochromatic photo of the smiling girl and the warm smell of freshly-baked shortbread.

These are places I can no longer physically reach. My micro story becomes the distillation of many memories into a single experience.