Tag: Milk Candy Review

  • Flash Fiction Review – “Two days after I died” by Justine Sweeney

    (The flash fiction story “Two days after I died” by Justine Sweeney was published on March 19th, 2026 at Milk Candy Review.)

    “Two days after I died” by Justine Sweeney is the type of flash piece that makes me love flash writers as they can be inventive and playful with this form, while at the same time making me ask, in a mischievous way, “What did I just read?”

    In “Two days after I dies” Justine Sweeny gives to us the character of a recently realized ghost. I love that this spirit is frantic and unhinged – tethered to this world, either unable or unwilling to leave it. Sweeny uses effectively simple techniques here; lack of capitalization, run-on sentences, and short words that make a choppy, staccato rhythm to the piece. What the writer creates is a spirit’s frenzied attempt to get all of these words out and tell us this self-perceived vitally important story. There is an anger to this ghost. A viciousness in her as she is annoyed that someone she doesn’t know well would dare post a personal reflection of her passing on social media. There is a hint at humor in the beginning, but as the fury builds, the tone begins to switch to an unhealthy bitterness which is out of proportion to the allegedly aggrieved crime. Take how the ghost lists all the offenses of this woman. Though the ghost sees the offenses as unforgivable transgressions, we start to feel a sense of jealousness in the comparison of their motherly actions. And when the twist arrives at the end, it lands with pity, and a disbelief that one, even in the afterlife, is so wrapped and warped in grievance, lacking the empathy to acknowledge that there is one person they cared about suffering in their mourning. But most haunting is how this ghost seems to lack even the slightest hint of remorse or regret that she is no longer with her children.

    Sweeney’s “Two days after I died” is a very short and compacted work, but it left me with wonderful questions to roll over in my head. Was the woman who posted on social media really affected to the degree that she claimed, or was it as the ghost suspected, a bit of online grief porn? Can one’s anger and bitterness make a person completely blind to their loved ones suffering? Can animosity and hostility follow us into the next world? Clearly, the theme was meant to apply to us in the here and now, but “Two days after I died” is a succinct rumination of the metaphysical possibility that a life lived unwell, will leave you emotionally untethered in spitefulness.

  • Flash Fiction Review – “What Kira Packed” by Heather Bell Adams

    (The flash fiction story “What Kira Packed” by Heather Bell Adams was first presented by Milk Candy Review on December 11th, 2025.)

    (Image from Milk Candy Review)

    You know what “writing advice” I hate getting more than anything? “Less is more.” And the hair’s breadth of a runner up to that infuriating maxim is, “Show don’t tell.” These two bits of advice are the Tweedledee and Tweedledum of the writing world, who get marched out by lazy editors and inept writing instructors when they need to say something enigmatic yet mildly profound, which can be interpretation in any way, other than with a coherent explanation. Those two phrases have been used so often, that the words have been rendered meaningless.

    But then Heather Bell Adams writes “What Kira Packed,” and finally, there is an articulate, rational, and svelte work of flash that says in a clear voice – this is how you write less without telling.

    This piece is under three hundred words, using a structure devise of what Kira packed going to and then back from “camp.” It is heartbreaking in its simplicity, knowing the “change” Kira endured at “camp” and how what she’ll be coming home with what may include trauma, repression, self-loathing, and depression. This is a gut-punch of a piece, a brutalist’s honesty here, but Heather Bell Adams also leaves just enough vague, forcing us to use our imaginations to fill in what is left undefined. This creates a unique and individual horror for each of us as to what “really” happened at this camp.

    This is how you do it, and do it impactfully, with intent to get to the marrow of a story.

    Bravo.

  • Short Story Review: “Something Out of a Horror Movie” by Mario Aliberto III

    (The short story “Something Out of a Horror Movie,” by Mario Aliberto III appeared on February 27th, 2025 in Milk Candy Review.)

    (Image from Milk Candy Review)

    When I was a teenager, and well into my twenties and beyond, I spent hours debating with my friends about the mechanics, tropes, and clichés of horror movies. How most horror movies, more than any other genre of film, are made up of an uncountable number of rip offs and copies of more successful horror movies. For myself, as a person who loves awful movies, bad horror films are an entertaining gift that just keeps on giving.

    So, when I started reading Mario Aliberto III’s “Something Out of a Horror Movie,” I was intrigued as to what he was wanting to accomplish is this flash fiction story. It reads like it was written but someone who loves the awful character clichés of the genre. What I appreciated in this piece was that as I started reading it, I couldn’t put my finger on if this is a story about characters in a horror movie, or if they are characters in “real life” that find themselves in a horror movie situation, or if these are characters that have seen too many horror movies and went to that places because of the situation they were in. By doing that, structuring the story that way, left me feeling off balance which played very well to the theme of the piece, and ultimately the climax of the story.

    But what I enjoyed most was that this story took a stock clichéd character that I have seen in millions of horror movies, and made me think of her differently, and also made me view her actions in a fully well-rounded way for that character. Aliberto does this rather effortlessly, and compactly. The last paragraph is just great.

    I will never look at the Bad Girl trope character the same way again.

  • Short Story Review – “Good Girls” by Martha Keller

    (The flash fiction story “Good Girls” by Martha Keller was first published in Milk Candy Review on September 19th, 2024.)

    One of the many things that I love about flash fiction, as a form of storytelling, is that it lends itself quite well to writers willing to play with the structure and the form that a narrative can take. Martha Keller accomplishes this deconstruction of a traditional narrative, rather well in her piece “Good Girls,” which appeared in Milk Candy Review back in September of 2024.

    After an opening paragraph, which describes the immortal clashes between girls on swings and boys who wish to remove them, the story takes on a narrative structure of examining consequential moments of life, every five years. What Keller uniquely creates is not a linear progression, but more like a retrograde motion, starting at the age of 30, and descending to a newborn. This format enables the reader to compare the desires and aspirations of each age, but highlighting specifically how what is important at a certain age, wasn’t even on the horizon just five years before. In considering this structure, it plays with a level of menace that seems just below the surface in each of these ages. How in each age, something is sought and even acquired, but the feeling of it being taken away is also present, which goes back to the opening paragraph of the girls on the swings and the boys wanting to take that from them.

    “Good Girls” is very efficient and succinct as a flash piece; only 400+ words. Keller doesn’t waste any time in this story. This directness coupled with the unique structure of its narrative creates an insightful work of flash fiction.

  • Short Story Review: “Why I didn’t Immediately Load the Car When My Husband Texted that the Fire Was Getting Closer” by Claudia Monpere

    (The flash piece “Why I didn’t Immediately Load the Car When My Husband Texted that the Fire Was Getting Closer” by Claudia Monpere, appeared in Milk Candy Review.)

    I like flash fiction; it is my preferred form of storytelling now. It’s a very malleable form as well. It can be a straight forward very short short story, it can boarder right up to poetry, a snapshot of stream of consciousness – whatever it needs to be to tell a story, or complete a thought, or action – flash fiction can do it.

    In Claudia Monpere’s “Why I didn’t Immediately Load the Car When My Husband Texted that the Fire Was Getting Closer,” we are presented with an impressively short flash piece (193 words) that consists of 10 sentences. The title also functions as an essential setup, as the body of the piece is answering that question. A device is employed with 9 of the sentences beginning with the word “Because,” except for the last one. Though this is not the most original device, Monpere uses it effectively to create a rhythm and a pace that builds to the concluding final sentence. Also, the third, sixth, and eighth sentences are about the impending fire, creating a dramatic effect, like a ticking clock, adding to the tension of this moment. “Why didn’t I…” is a good example of why the flash fiction form is so intriguing when it comes to telling stories and expressing feelings and thoughts.

    As a person who also had to load a car quickly as a wildfire approached my home, I deeply identified with this piece. When a natural disaster is an abstract, and just a mental exercise, you think you know how you’ll react, and prioritize what is important when that moment arrives. But when you open your front door and can smell the fire, see the sky changing color, and hear the fire trucks, you don’t know what to do at first, and I grasped for the things I thought were important, before I realized what was important. And maybe I am biased due to my personal experience, but Claudia Monpere captured an emotional truth in the middle of a disaster perfectly.