Summer Nights: The Great Noveling Adventure, #1

By Jenny Adams Perinovic, Gabriella Crivilare, Cristina R. Guarino and 10 more

SUMMER NIGHTS is the first flash fiction anthology compiled by The Great Noveling Adventure. The collected stories run the gamut from first love to heartbreak, revenge to forgiveness, redemption to murder. They, like the thirteen authors who contributed them, are widely varied, but they each demonstrate the same truth:

A lot can happen in a single night.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Great Noveling Adventure
• Release date: Jun 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781513020105

Book preview

FOREWORD

The Great Noveling Adventure is and has always been about sharing the road to publication with other writers, helping and supporting one another along the way. What better way to share that road than to undertake a publishing journey together?

This anthology is a collection of works by current and former TGNA contributors, as well as members of TGNA’s audience. The stories are as varied as the writers who contributed them, featuring everything from Space Pirates to proposals, birthdays to murderous nightmares.

What do they all have in common?

Each takes place in the course of one summer night.

A lot can happen in a single night. Love can be lost (or found), hearts can be broken (or mended), and nightmares (or dreams) can come true.

All of the above. None of the above.

Which will you read first?

The Big Two-One

Kate Sheeran Swed

Izzie’s grocery basket looks like the mitten in a picture book her mother used to read, a folktale where one forest animal after another squeezes into a glove until, moose upon beaver upon bear and coyote, the whole thing bursts.

Not with a bang, she thinks, but with a field mouse. Or in the case of her grocery basket, an avocado. She totes it with both arms looped through the handle as she weaves through the odd Manhattan store, down escalators and through torturously narrow aisles.

Izzie thought she was used to the disappointments of having a July birthday after years of parties that fizzled as everyone left for lake houses and Disney World. Today, for her twenty-first, she should be showing off her ID and ordering something pink with sugar on the rim.

But somehow, inexplicably, Izzie has been doing college wrong.

You’ve got acquaintances, her best friend from home always tells her. You need friends.

But Izzie doesn’t have them, so she’s planning to grill on the mini Weber that the roommate she met via Craig’s List keeps illegally on the fire escape. Pathetic, but better than nothing.

Izzie’s last stop is produce. She’s deciding between grapes and strawberries when a guy unloading blueberries says, I think you’re meant to leave some food on the shelves.

She looks up, surprised that someone in New York is deigning to make conversation. He’s vaguely familiar, brown waves of hair tucked behind his ears.

I could mess with you and say you recognize me from Trapeze 101, he says, but it’s econ.

Front row, red notebook, always does the reading. He’s cute. She didn’t think she liked long hair on guys.

 Right, she says.

He tosses a package of blueberries onto the shelf as if it’s a Frisbee. The readings are brutal.

They are, yeah.

We should meet up sometime, he says. Study partners? Over drinks?

Does he—is he asking her out? Sure, she says.

Let’s set something up, next class.

Izzie boards the escalator and situates the cart on the step beside her so she can text Michelle. Econ Guy situations require immediate consultation.

She manages one letter before her overloaded cart tips.

Izzie grabs for the handle. She misses.

It’s too late to stop the avalanche. Chicken wings and cake mix chase each other down the stairs, with condiments close behind. A glass jar of mustard arches toward the bottom step, landing with a crash that can only mean that there’s going to be yellow goop in the teeth of the escalator for the foreseeable future.

For a second, Izzie can only watch in horror. The people on the down escalator stare, but there’s nothing they can do. And god, this is New York, so they probably wouldn’t help even if they could.

She’s afraid to glance at the produce section, where Econ Guy must be frantically planning how to retract that study partner offer.

Izzie trips onto the landing and drops to her knees to shovel the waves of groceries to safety. The steps carry them to her like flotsam on a beach, bean dip and frosting, and did she have to pick up the Goldfish crackers? They look babyish now, washing up beside the six-pack of Bud Light.

 Izzie reaches for the crackers, and her hand lands on a boot instead.