About the Author
Sherrie Flick’s short fiction has appeared in numerous literary
journals, including North American Review, Quick Fiction, Quarter
After Eight, and Quarterly West. Her work is anthologized in Sudden
Fiction: The Mammoth Anthology of Minuscule Fiction. She has been
awarded artist residencies from the Ucross Foundation and Atlantic
Center for the Arts and was a Tennessee Williams scholar at Sewanee
Writers’ Conference. Co-founder and Director of the Gist
Street Reading Series, she lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with
her husband, the playwright Rick Schweikert.
About the Chapbook
These are sinewy, deeply engaging stories,
at once elliptical and satisfying. I Call This Flirting is a
marvel: each story is concise
as a poem, yet the collection is as seamless and expansive as a
novel. Whether describing small-town couples in the Midwest or
adventurers in Central Europe,
Flick’s stories radiate with lyric intelligence; the stories here
are a clear-eyed benediction to love and longing.
– Paul Eggers, author
of Saviors and The Way Water
Moves
I Call This Flirting is a collection of fever-dreams,
haunted by desire, grief, sex, and memory. These are late-night
stories, told after midnight, a femme fatale whispering sad and
unraveled and lusty
tales into your ear. That femme fatale is Sherrie Flick, and
she’s
a wickedly good writer.
– John McNally, author of The Book of Ralph
From the Chapbook
Sleep 1969
Perhaps the baby owl was a sign as it came down outside your
boyhood window—new feathers tousled, shocked and mourning
the loss of easy flight. The short hoots over and over, lost
as it was on your rooftop in Omaha, Nebraska, 1969.
Or perhaps it was the boy dreams all around you, the five brothers grunting and
gurgling earthy dream noises of the hunt, the kill, the escape. Or perhaps it
was the moon, the snow, the baby owl, the night. And you—there—magically
awake to see this disaster of attempt.
The big man and your mother creaking in their rocky boat of a bed right next
to the wall with chinks in the plaster you tried to stop-up with cottonballs
lifted from your sisters’ dresser the night before. Perhaps it was the
creaking springs, or the moment they stopped and the house took an inhale, deep,
long, oblivious to the tiny owl—out there on the roof, a jumble of feathers.
Streamlined a few moments before, gliding in the crisp, flat air of the Great
Plains, now tousled and hooting, waiting for change.
Touching the frozen panes of glass with your thin fingers—perhaps it was
the cold making it real forever—the owl, hooting. You, there, in a rustle
of hand-me-down pajamas, sheets, blankets, thoughts—not knowing this moment
would never really end.
And when the mother owl in her magnificence swooped down—after hours, after
what seemed like days but were hours, the mother coming to rest beside the baby—perhaps
that meant hope.
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