"Aurora Baldealis" by Meg Pokrass and Jeff Friedman

“Bald men flare like matchsticks, lighting up the caves around them,” Jeff Friedman and Meg Pokrass write in Aurora Baldealis, a collection of fabulist micro stories in which two master storytellers imagine a universe where bald men are mirrors for other bald men, where an angel can break or mend a heart, where the Northern lights glow in the memory of all the beautiful, lost souls wandering this world. The veil of the ordinary world is lifted in these stories: A woman belly dances and sells pyramids to the Pharaohs on Sappho Avenue; a mother harvests juicy tomatoes on a space station near the moon; and a son wears special glasses that cause him to see his mother everywhere. Friedman and Pokrass’s Aurora Baldealis is a match for the Northern lights.

These fabulist stories by Meg Pokrass and Jeff Friedman surprise the reader with fantastic perceptions, guiding us to see and feel wondrous realms in marvelous new ways. How light plays in these microfictions illuminates fresh ways of seeing and being: glowing rocks, a tattooed expression, a hallucinogenic picnic, all crystalize epiphanies and mysteries in the brilliant glow that each story casts. Brought to the surface of discovery, we're drawn towards light in extraordinary forms, and we find it here. Aurora Baldealis is an exquisite collaboration— hilarious, poignant, surreal— creating its own scale of originality. After each reading, I said, Wow!

—Guy Biederman, author of Here's Where We Get Off

Here, Meg Pokrass and Jeff Friedman merge their boundless imaginations to create an electric collection: these stunning small stories are clever, uncanny, wistful, and wise.

—Lorette C. Luzajic, author of Winter in June, founding editor of The Mackinaw

Meg Pokrass and Jeff Friedman

Meg Pokrass and Jeff Friedman
MEG POKRASS is the author of First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories (Dzanc Books, 2024) and eight previous collections of flash fiction and two novellas in flash. Her work has been published in three Norton anthologies, including Flash Fiction America, New Micro, and Flash Fiction International; Best Small Fictions 2018, 2019, 2022, 2023 and 2025; Wigleaf Top 50; and numerous literary magazines including Electric Literature, New England Review, Lit Hub, McSweeney’s, Five Points, Washington Square Review, and Passages North. Meg is the founding editor of New Flash Fiction Review, festival curator of Flash Fiction Festival UK, and founding/managing editor of the Best Microfiction anthology series. She lives in Scotland, where she serves as chief judge for the Edinburgh Flash Fiction Award.
JEFF FRIEDMAN is the author of eleven collections of poetry and prose, including Broken Signals (Bamboo Dart Press, 2024), Ashes in Paradise (Madhat Press, 2023), and The Marksman (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2020. His poems, microfiction, and translations have appeared American Poetry Review, Poetry, Poetry International, New England, Review, and The New Republic. His work has also been included in numerous anthologies including Cast-Iron Aeroplanes That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 American Poets on their Prose Poetry, Flash Fiction Funny, Flash Nonfiction Funny, Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, and Best Microfiction 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, and 2026. He has received an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship, two individual artist grants from the New Hampshire Arts Council, and numerous other awards.