Sheila Rittenberg
Sheila Rittenberg
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Stories

Nonfiction

“The ceremony is rose-scented honey. The family sits in living room rows, each person an open petal in the afternoon pastel. Your daughter-in-law sings and her voice breaks. Everyone looks down.”

Cold Call | January 2025 Does It Have Pockets

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“She couldn’t let go of California, in spite of expensive housing, big down payments, high taxes. Expensive everything. We tried to talk her out of it. We lost. We didn’t have time for a going-away party. She brought us banquets of food from her freezer.”

The Long Overreach | March 2026

Summerset Review

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“Until then, I’d believed everyone who’d said I was so cute, such a lovable face. And that was what I’d always seen in the mirror. Their praise lifted me in the mornings, tucked me into bed at night.”

Full Circle | April 2024

The Bluebird Word

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“You're a teen and for once he is moneyed so your father buys your mother a car, a flirty Corvair. A convertible. The car unleashes something in her and she drives with flourish, like she means it, unlike what happens at home.”

Seduction | March 2026

Summerset Review

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“…Wendy and I chatted in the slow rain. She held herself with a masculine nerve—feet rooted as if on two pillars, as if she owned the world, a god. Her laugh was crisp, like bites of the season’s first apple, her voice feisty. She knew life’s punchline and I didn’t. […] I’d never talked to anyone like her.”

Mother Lion, Baby Fawn | July 2025

COMP: an interdisciplinary journal

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“She was slight, this woman, bird-like, dropped, it seemed, into layers of clothing, a crumpled woesome face peering out of a cloth nest.”

She Could Have Millions | July 2025

Litbreak Magazine

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Fiction

“She wondered if there were ever an actual front-seat passenger [in the hearse]. Someone who wanted to take over, put on the brakes, stop the trip to the cemetery, stop death, go back to when their person was alive.”

A Drive for Life | November 2024 Fiction on the Web

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“He sucked away his nerdiness and shyness and ewwwness and joined a men's group called Serenity. Something he had no idea men wanted. Once a week the guys tangled with defining masculinity and what a "good" or a "bad" death is and how much savings to have in retirement and how to deal with your wife's menopause and how to be freely gay when you have grandchildren. He wondered if this was the talk you'd find in a "healthy family" (Serenity term).”

Serenity | May 2025

Voices

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Sheila Rittenberg
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