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Forty-Eight Hours in Miami by Christina Simon

Image is a color photograph of a rain puddle on a street covered in brown leaves; title card for the CRAFT 2023 Flash Prose Prize Editors' Choice Selection, "Forty-Eight Hours in Miami," by Christina Simon.

“Forty-Eight Hours in Miami” is one of three editors’ choice selections for the CRAFT 2023 Flash Prose Prize, guest judged by Kathy Fish. Our editors chose these pieces as exemplars of the power of flash prose to convey complexity of emotion within the constraints of concision.

In “Forty-Eight Hours in Miami,” Christina Simon encapsulates an entire essay in one sentence. There is no time to transition. There is no time for the reader’s emotions to recalibrate. There is “boisterous joy” and then there is Trump. There are the Kardashians and then there is war. There are two teenagers at college, one being praised on the tennis court, and another preparing to join the army. The reader experiences the weight, the chaos created by other men, in each brief pause. The genius of this piece is how Simon calls upon heavy concepts and emotions with everyday language. She creates connection by putting off finality. With each phrase, each semicolon, it is as if the unnamed protagonist is saying, “No no, I’m not done yet. I’ll be just a second longer. You just have to keep listening.”  —CRAFT

 

My first time in Miami is tiny cups of sweet Cuban cortadito; and going to the Miami Open with my husband to join the crowds cheering for Carlos “Carlitos” Alcaraz, the Spanish teenage sensation and World #1; and rainy rainy rainy, but never gloomy days; and dense humidity; and flirtatious palm trees; and lechon asado at Versailles; and inhaling the smell of musky vanilla perfume on a girl walking by too fast for me to ask what scent she’s wearing; and then stopping to ask an Israeli couple and their teenage daughter to take our photo at the touristy Miami Beach sign; and staying to talk about where they’re visiting from and letting the conversation wander until the couple revealed their outrage at Netanyahu’s attempt to demolish the Israeli judicial system, which led to a comparison about who is worse, Trump or Netanyahu; and when I jokingly offered to trade Trump for their prime minister they declined; and then the wife asked me if I felt America’s racism all the time and I responded yes, every day; and I told her I was the only one in a line of hotel guests asked by the security guard to show my room key to enter the pool area of our beachfront hotel; but my white husband wasn’t asked to show his card and then we talked about American versus Israeli television; and we agreed that Fauda is a great show about an Israeli Mossad team and their complicated relationship with Palestinians; and the show’s portrayal of Doron and Shirin is the most romantic Israeli-Palestinian love story ever; and then their daughter said she likes the Kardashians but I told her I don’t like them and then we laughed; and then I said I miss my son and daughter who are away at college; and the girl’s parents told us they were on their last vacation before their daughter joined the military; and I remember how they seemed so very calm before returning home to send their only child off to war.

 

CHRISTINA SIMON is the former nonfiction editor for Angels Flight • literary west. A 2023 Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, her most recent essay is forthcoming in J Journal. Her nonfiction work has been published in Salon, The Offing, Cleaver Magazine, Slag Glass City, Columbia Journal (winner of the 2020 Black History Month Contest for Nonfiction), Another Chicago Magazine, The Citron Review, [PANK] Magazine’s Health and Healing Folio, Cutbank Literary Journal’s Weekly Flash Prose and Prose Poetry, (mac)ro(mic), Santa Ana River Review, Barren Magazine, and The Palisades Review. Christina received her BA from University of California, Berkeley, and her MA in urban planning from University of California, Los Angeles. Christina lives with her husband in Los Angeles. She misses her son and daughter who are away at college.

 

Featured image by Aimee Giles, courtesy of Unsplash.

 

By | FPP 2024, Flash CNF, CNF | April 1, 2024

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Author’s Note

The choice of flash nonfiction felt right for an essay about my brief but busy trip to Miami in the winter of 2022. I have a degree in urban planning, which has deepened my interest in cities as settings—a persistent theme in my writing. I’m fascinated by a city’s façade and all the more so, what lies beneath the surface. A city’s sense of place can be both universal and individual, depending on who you are and where you live. I’ve lived most of my life in Los Angeles, a place where I rarely talk to strangers. In Miami, by contrast, my husband and I ended up in a deeply personal conversation with an Israeli family we’d just met. Eventually, I chose the essay’s list-like form, one long sentence separated by semicolons, because it could reflect the initial fast pace of our vacation and then offer a slower, more introspective rhythm near the end.

Jaquira Díaz, who grew up in the Miami area, has utilized a similar form, and I’m indebted to her work. Yet, as another point of contrast, Díaz’s Miami is one of poverty, public housing, violence, and racism, though supported by the bonds of incredible friendships and the love of family. While there, I wondered if I would experience Díaz’s Miami. Mostly, I did not—until the security guard asked me to show my key to get into the pool area of our hotel. I will always remember the beauty of Miami, with its art deco architecture and stunning beaches and the intoxicating pace telling me to keep up, keep up, keep up—albeit with a reminder that no matter where I go, I am a Black woman who can be stopped and asked to prove I belong.

 

CHRISTINA SIMON is the former nonfiction editor for Angels Flight • literary west. A 2023 Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, her most recent essay is forthcoming in J Journal. Her nonfiction work has been published in Salon, The Offing, Cleaver Magazine, Slag Glass City, Columbia Journal (winner of the 2020 Black History Month Contest for Nonfiction), Another Chicago Magazine, The Citron Review, [PANK] Magazine’s Health and Healing Folio, Cutbank Literary Journal’s Weekly Flash Prose and Prose Poetry, (mac)ro(mic), Santa Ana River Review, Barren Magazine, and The Palisades Review. Christina received her BA from University of California, Berkeley, and her MA in urban planning from University of California, Los Angeles. Christina lives with her husband in Los Angeles. She misses her son and daughter who are away at college.