When The Heat Went Out on New Year’s Day, We

By Erica Plouffe Lazure

booked flights to Florida, walked the dog, drank leftover party nips, spent three hours online shopping at the café sipping Mexican hot chocolates, wore knitted hats in the bathtub, turned our oven on to broil, wore mittens to bed, emptied the fridge making stew, went to the mall and bought nothing, called the super again, learned the workmen weren’t getting overtime, put another cape on the dog and gave him a blanket, ran the hairdryer over our hands his paws, ate ice cream to warm up, made love under eight layers of covers, invented new words: fridigious, ice-is, colden daze.

     
Erica Plouffe Lazure’s flash fiction collection, Heard Around Town, won the 2014 Arcadia Fiction Chapbook Prize. Another fiction chapbook, Dry Dock, was published by Red Bird Press in Spring 2015. Her fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, the Greensboro Review, Meridian, American Short Fiction, The Journal of Micro Literature, Fiction Southeast, Flash: the International Short-Short Story Magazine (UK), Southeast Review, and elsewhere.