Katie Zeigler’s The Last of the Cursive Writers brilliantly achieves the goal that flash fiction sets out for itself: to render prose that works like poetry. Each story in this dazzling collection drops the reader into a unique world that blends the mundane and the bizarre:  Mother Nature wonders how a traffic delay will affect her dinner plans; a wedding ring slowly strangles a woman’s finger; a comatose woman yearns to tell someone about the person she used to be.​ One story, “West,” shows Zeigler’s skill and ease with traditional narrative format, as she gives a nightmarish account of a woman who leaves her daughter with her estranged father for the last time.​ Zeigler’s language is as precise as it is illuminating. “…she placed her hand atop the baby’s chest, small bird-like breaths rising against her.” “The way his jaw clicked when he chewed, like a metronome keeping time.”​ A breathless quality suffuses the stories in The Last of the Cursive Writers – terrible truths are told in a whisper, and patiently. There is also compassion for the suffering of all of the characters, including a surprisingly moving eulogy to an ovarian cyst. The stories in The Last of the Cursive Writers are gems that are as beautiful as they are strange – and like unknown gems, you can appreciate them without needing to name them.