"Seeds of Stars" by Richard Stimac (Buttonhook Press, 2024)

This is a chapbook of 13 Flash pieces from Book of Matches, Wild Words, Your Impossible Voice, The Blue Mountain Review, etc, available as a free PDF from the Buttonhook Press site.

Kids are often discussing grown-up (even spiritual) ideas. Sometimes adults are trying to explain something important to them. Symbolism is often explicit, the author or characters explaining it. E.g.

• "Dead man" - "he told them he liked to stand between the rails, put his arms at an angle so that his fingertips touched at the vanishing point. He didn’t use that term, of course. Instead, he said that his arms stretched to where the rails seemed to meet, and he saw his wife reaching back to him. The rails were her arms open to take him in. His wife was the vanishing point."
• "Seeds of Stars" - “'The dew is the tears from someone missing someone they love. And in each tear is a seed of a star. ... After some time, the seeds of the stars sprout and then grow into the sky. That’s where stars come from. Both the person who is missing someone they love and the person who is loved can both look up and see the star that grew from a tear'. ... A tear fell down her cheek, like a falling star. The man took his finger and caught the tear, on the tip of his finger, then he held it up for them both to see. The kitchen ceiling light kaleidoscoped in the tear. ... Just then, a small cloud, just one, covered so many of the stars, not all, but enough to bring a deeper darkness to the night, like forgetting does loss, not gone, simply unremembered for a time. ... their tears, one by one, fell onto the grass.”

Symbols are shared by stories. E.g. -

• "Fireflies" - “When Rickie was young, the evening air hung thick with fireflies, as if a sea of stars fell from the sky. One could stand on the earth and touch heaven at the same time. ... They’re slowly disappearing."
• "Smoke" - “When I was young, on a summer evening like this, there were hundreds of fireflies. It was like we were walking among the stars. There aren’t so many now.”

There are train tracks, wrong side of the tracks, dogs being cuddled.

There are 2 typos in "Good Friday" - "The boy wen to the kitchen"; "danced like drunken Angles of the Lord" - and the use of "literally" in 3 stories surprises me.