in this the coldest winter
even a small ember
warms the heart

Stranded by a snowstorm, the man sits at his kitchen table, eating a glazed doughnut and watching a fly make repeated runs at the window. He remembers a few dumb decisions he made in his own life—that married librarian in Atlanta, the time he quit a good paying job when he didn’t have a bed to sleep in. But, if that fly is dumb enough to want to go out in this weather, it deserves to live with the consequences of its decision. The man goes to the window and raises it. The fly circles, descends to the table, and lands on his doughnut.

Dan Gilmore

is the author of a novel, A Howl for Mayflower (Imago Press, 2006), and three collections of poetry and monologues, Season Tickets, Love Takes a Bow, and Panning for Gold. He has won the Raymond Carver Fiction Contest, the Martindale Fiction Award, and multiple Sandscript Awards for Short Stories. His poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, San Diego Reader, Aethlon, Blue Collar Review, The Carolina Review, Sandscript, Loft and Range, KYSO Flash and Serving House Journal.

“Happiest Black White Man Alive,” one of Gilmore’s flash fictions, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and also was chosen by novelist Robert Olen Butler as one of the winning stories to be published in the 2015 Best Small Fictions Anthology.

In his time, Gilmore has been:

• a fry cook,
• a jazz musician,
• a draft dodger,
• a soldier,
• an actor,
• a minister in a Reno wedding chapel,
• a psychologist,
• a single parent of two children,
• a college professor,
• a dean, and
• a consultant to business.

Currently, he lives in Tucson, Arizona and divides his time between playing jazz, writing, and loving his grandchildren, his life partner JoAn, and his cat.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Happiest Black White Man Alive, flash fiction in Serving House Journal (Issue 10, Fall 2014), which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize

⚡ Consternation and two other prose poems in Serving House Journal (Issue 9, Spring 2014)

⚡ The Hyperbolist and three other poems in Serving House Journal (Issue 8, Fall 2013)