The 2025 flash fiction collection contemplates feminine fury and resilience

By Grace Henkel

“It’s not ladylike, but since when has being a lady got us anywhere?”

Hollay Ghadery’s Widow Fantasies, her Toronto Book Award-longlisted collection of flash fiction, lays bare a multitude of inner worlds through visceral prose and striking imagery. Across 33 vignette-like stories, characters endure dismissive doctors in “Well enough, alone,” husbands weaponizing their incompetence and waging pungent wars on their bathrooms in “like your shit don’t stink” and their bodies betraying them in “structural integrity.” 

Ghadery’s stories deliver a deeply-stirring, slow-burn glimpse into numerous distinct feminine psyches: with many characters on the brink of boiling over from grief, disappointment and righteous rage. 

The title, Widow Fantasies, sprung from a phenomenon Ghadery had undergone while working through struggles with post-partum mental health. She remembers drifting in and out of a sort of maladaptive daydreaming state, imagining a life where her husband had perished in some random accident, secretly hoping that somehow, he would just go away. 

Ghadery recalled an initial sense of guilt at her fantasizing, speaking with CanCulture about her work.  

“I didn’t know what to do with that, but I was really finding release in these fantasies,” said Ghadery. “So I spoke to my therapist and she was like, ‘Oh, girl, these fantasies are super common.’”

The phenomenon was never about hoping for harm to come to her partner; it was a private — and according to her therapist, actually healthy — means of escapism through a dark time in her life. Writing Widow Fantasies wasn’t a cathartic act in and of itself, either, as Ghadery had reached a place of peace and resolution long before she put pen to paper.

“I just think that when we live in these heteronormative, neurotypical frameworks, we’re gonna get angsty,” she laughed. 

“I was thinking about how women use fantasies to subvert our lives and to subvert people’s expectations of us and to really just escape this terrible, completely misogynistic and violent world in which we live.” The therapeutic and liberating act of fantasizing is channeled in the flash-fiction collection. To the author, these fantasies can be both “wonderful and horrible, like so many truths.” 

The characters in her stories indulge in and drift through similar fantasies. Many of the narratives hum with desires — often unconventional or inconvenient — of escape from suffocating expectations that suppress pleasure, queerness and neurodivergence by design. 

The body is a key motif throughout the narratives — inhabiting it, hating it, having it examined and quietly dissected, or feeling it fail you on the spot — Ghadery masterfully captures the physicality of frustration and longing. 

In “Squish Squish,” Farrah is secure in her distinctly-Iranian features, but is relentlessly pestered to get a nose job by her cousins, as they insist: “A broken nose, laser hair removal, and botoxed lips are what it means to be Persian these days, in case you missed it.” 

She coolly rebuffs them: “I’m not trying to erase who I am.”

The entry, “Nothing Will Save Your Life, But This Might Buy You Time,” centres an unnamed woman who has experienced the physical and emotional toll of yet another miscarriage. Stuffed with bandages and floating on a painkiller-high, she dreads the thought of another pregnancy, knowing her male partner will “want to try again.” Her close friend, Mellie, a trans woman, cradles her at the hospital and offers words of comfort: 

“Before my surgeries, before all the hormones, I thought that was what was holding me back. That I had to transition. I had to become what everyone said—what everyone accepted a woman should be—and then I would be happy. So I did it, you remember? I did all of it…

“You’d think you couldn’t ever run out of room for emptiness, but you can. You definitely can.”

Mellie’s words are striking — she is tender with her friend, but cautions her to resist lapping up the emptiness being fed to her: the adherence to a singular ideal of womanhood that, let’s be honest, rarely fills us up and makes us all go pretty fucking insane once in a while. 

Ghadery weaves together prose that’s visceral, heart-rending and, frankly, delicious. From a signature perfume clinging to the clothes of a lost loved one, to a beloved, geriatric cat with “marigold eyes,” shitting in the middle of the dining room table, each fleeting piece of fiction feels deeply intimate — each fantasy pulses with truth. 

Find Widow Fantasies at your local bookstore.

---

About the author

Hollay Ghadery is an award-winning Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box, was released by Radiant Press in 2023.