The Cake, The Smoke, The Moon By Francine Witte

Francine Witte

 

The Cake, The Smoke, The Moon

By Francine Witte

ELJ Ediriona, Ltd.

New York, NY

Copyright © 22021 by Francine Witte

ISBN-13: 978-1-942004-36-3

Softbound, 22 pages, $10

 

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

 

     Francine Witte’s flash fiction has appeared widely in magazines and anthologies as well as Best Micro fiction and Best Small Fiction in 2020. She won the Thomas Wilhelmus Award in 2010 for her flash fiction.

     A new chapbook of flash fiction by Francine Witte is one to celebrate and it does live up to expectations. Her twenty stories are not happy, in fact, some are downright depressing, yet each one offers interesting stories and creative writing.

     In the first story, “On the Way to Our Summer Place,” we meet a family heading to their retreat not knowing if it is still there. The children are told there are no gas stations or trees and no other cars.

     Another tells us that a woman’s DNA test reveals she has a sister she never knew existed, and in another story everything a girl’s father measures, furniture, tables are soon gone. There is a surprise ending too.

     Other stories center around lemons, a man with an extra arm, a ghost, an unfaithful husband, a cab ride and a dying mother, a woman who meets her ex for dinner and the proverbial tunnel of love story that is not what one usually thinks. In fact, none of Ms. Witte’s stories are what you think they are. They are dark with humor that is often subtle, not uproariously funny.

    Witte’s writing uses her ideas and her creative ways so the reader marvels both the stories and the way they are presented. 

  

  Here is one story, In the Park:

 

     On an afternoon when the sun goes stone and thuds itself under the horizon, and the trees shake their veiny leaves like hands about to hit, and the bench nearby is a gather of slats holding up the elderly couple we were going to be, him spooning ice cream into her quivery mouth and not even minding the dribble. And then, over there, the children on swings, sailing the air as if practicing for a life of come and go. And right in the smacky center of that, is you sitting there, your eyes two blackened holes, your mouth telling me about the sometimes death of love.

 

     The Cake, The Smoke, The Moon is an enjoyable read. The stories and their endings always leave the reader with something more to ponder and with the knowledge they have read an author worth reading. 

 

 

 

_______________________________________________________________________Zvi A. Sesling, Brookline, MA Poet Laureate (2017-2020)

Author, War Zones and The Lynching of Leo Frank

Author of forthcoming flash/micro fiction The Secret Behind The Gate from Cervena Barva Press

Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review