How the Mind Works, by Kat Meads

Prose, chapbook, 40 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

On occasion, the mind tends to go haywire—wouldn’t you agree?

The flash fiction collection How the Mind Works offers up quick tales that explore predicaments: the odd, the surreal, the inexplicable and the seemingly ordinary.

Apparitions advise nieces on the art of courage. Nephews fall into a state of malaise gazing at the sky. Couples arrive for a sunset dinner and never depart. Sleepers sleep for four days and four nights and wake unrecognizable. Picnickers drift obliviously out to sea. The wives of absent husbands levitate. Vacationers hide in their rooms and refuse to sightsee. Neighborhood miscreants bash mailboxes. Children are forced to share the last slice of lemon pie. Temperatures fall and fall and fall inside a bedroom blooming colors, and lonely houses breed lonely inhabitants on vast and open plains.

Kat Meads is the author of more than 25 books and chapbooks of poetry and prose, including, most recently, the novelette While Visiting Babette (Sagging Meniscus, 2025). Her flash fiction has appeared in Gone Lawn, Maudlin House and Your Impossible Voice and was cited on Wigleaf’s 2025 “Top 50” list. She is the recipient of writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and Montalvo Center for the Arts and won her third Independent Publisher medal in 2024 for an essay collection, These Particular Women. Her short plays have been produced in New York, Los Angeles and Toronto. She lives in California. (katmeads.com)