Female Education

By Rita Ciresi

Ciresi's 14 thought-provoking flash fictions deal with love, loss, and the hard choices women make. Her characters experience great joy and passion; they endure failed marriages, displacement, rejection, and grief. Their narratives are influenced by contemporary ideals of female empowerment, as well as former "female education" practices that attempted to control women. In spare prose, these stories are hilarious, poignant, and sad, and sometimes all at once.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wordrunner eChapbooks
• Release date: Aug 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463345870

Rita Ciresi

Rita Ciresi is author of the novels Bring Back My Body to Me, Pink Slip, Blue Italian, and Remind Me Again Why I Married You, and three award-winning story collections, Second Wife, Sometimes I Dream in Italian, and Mother Rocket. She is professor of English at the University of South Florida, a faculty mentor for the Bay Path University MFA in creative nonfiction, and fiction editor of 2 Bridges Review.

Book preview

Female Education

Flash Fiction

by Rita Ciresi

Published by Wordrunner eChapbooks

(an imprint of Wordrunner Press)

Smashwords Edition

ISBN:

Copyright 2019 Rita Ciresi

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Contents

Four Way of Looking at a Wife

Some Things You Can Ask Me

Burned

Lowlands

Disposal

Bargains

Office Party

Old Flames

On His Way to American History

Through the White & Drifted Snow

Imaginative Writing

Notes for a Very Long Love Story

Female Education

Maybe the Mermaids

About Rita Ciresi

About Wordrunner eChapbooks

Four Ways of Looking at a Wife

I. Home Ec

In high school industrial arts, the boy who will become the Husband makes a wooden birdhouse. Across the hall in home ec, the girl who will become the Wife bakes biscuits and bran muffins and zucchini bread.

After graduation the boy and the girl marry. The Wife stays in the kitchen and the Husband sets up shop in the garage. But after the kids are born they’re hard pressed to pay the mortgage, so the Wife goes to work.

After typing and copying and filing for eight hours, she swings by the grocery store. There she buys a yellow box for the daughter who lives on crackers, a blue and orange box for the son who eats only mac-n-cheese, and a red and green box that holds a frozen pizza, hard and flat as a Frisbee—the sole thing she has the energy to serve the Husband for dinner.

The stove preheats. The Wife stares out the window at the wooden birdhouse the Husband made years ago, now hanging from a crooked branch on the backyard birch tree. She