REVIEW: “Stairs For Mermaids” by MM Schreier

Review of MM Schreier, “Stairs For Mermaids,” Flash Fiction Online 147 (January 2026): 10-13 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Content note: suicide.

This is a story about big sisters and little sisters, and the first-person plural narrator lends the story an edge of universality, telling the reader that this is what all big-sister-little-sister relationships are like. I don’t know if I would have enjoyed this story more or less if the relationship the narrator depicted as universal at all resembled my own big-sister-little-sister; would the story have been more resonant, or less, if I had been the kind of little sister that the narrator seems to think all little sisters are? I don’t know.