FLASH STORIES: SABRINA CANFIELD: ‘LIFE FLIGHT & ALL OVER THE CITY. DISCUSSING EPIPHANY and CATHARSIS.’

“These pieces are from a larger collection of memories about my father’s lifelong arrivals and departures.”

Preface

These pieces are from a larger collection of memories about my father’s lifelong arrivals and departures.

In childhood, my time was split between my father’s house in Utah near the Virgin River, which eventually flows into the Pacific Ocean, and my mother’s house in Montana near the Missouri River, which meets the Gulf of Mexico via the Mississippi. As a longtime resident of New Orleans, a city flanked by waters on the brink of plunging into the sea, I have often visualized the remnants of my maternal and paternal homes being rushed on their own respective rivers toward separate oceans.

Throughout his career, my dad flew airplanes. The first piece is based on a memory from a flight my brother and I took with him. In the second piece, I imagine my dad as a mythical character along the lines of Poseidon, a figure whose presence as well as absences draws my attention using the same pull with which it commands the waves.

The second piece quotes passages from the story titled “Love Suicides” from Palm-of-the-Hand Stories by Yasunari Kawabata, translated from the Japanese by Lane Dunlop and J. Martin Holman.

Read Full Story by Sabrina Canfield in the WINTER issue.

Street Date December 9th 2025

Sabrina Canfield

Sabrina Canfield is a writer and journalist in New Orleans. Her short stories and poetry have appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine and the Glass Cow.