Flash Fiction Magazine

By Dan Bennett

Only a mother could know her grief. Wearing all black, including the deep roots in her blond hair, she couldn’t look up from the time she sat down in the front pew. Tears splashed onto her lap. Her remaining children sat on one side, as her sister tried to comfort her from the other. “Nobody wants to do this for their kid. But we gotta get through it.” The sisters clenched hands. “You’re a good mother,” said the children’s aunt, “and don’t you forget that.”

[Read more…] about Bastard Funeral Services

By Rachel Fung

It started with a postcard. From the land of Minerva, signed with a kiss and a sigh. Lipstick smudge on the margins of “Love, XXX.” With a sunset dripping off one side, it cast hues of orange and red so deep they washed the tiles anew when the sun hit it in the afternoon. You slipped it into a drawer to bury under old books and receipts, but felt the heat still of that orange sun, radiating in the height of night.

[Read more…] about Dear Your Name

By Annie Smith

Outside, the rain slows to a fine mist. I shake the stiffness from my limbs and leave my desk for a better view. The mist seems to both rise and fall. It hovers and obscures, shifts in heaves and sighs. Droplets run down the fine-fingered needles of the lofty pine. The branches of the oaks droop beneath the weight of saturation. The mist clings to the tree trunks, filling the space between, shielding the neighbor’s house from view. The trunks are dark brown, no longer the dry, almost ashen gray they were before the rain. The grass is vibrant, lime green, and the tree foliage and ferns are that deep dark green that screams “I’m alive!”

[Read more…] about Outside, Inside

By Tina Nazerian

My nose stands between me and who I want to be.

I’m a California surfer girl in every way—blonde hair, blue eyes, fit body—except for my bumpy nose. If you only saw my nose, you’d think I was one of those witches in children’s fairy tales. Or some toucan/human hybrid.

[Read more…] about What Stands Between

By Shrutidhora P Mohor

The game keeper’s mustache smells of wild berries. I would have never known this had it not been for my sister.

She wears a green apron over her dress and tucks sunflowers inside her pocket. One day, she drives her hand down her pocket and brings out an earthworm. Releasing it on our dining table, she calls out for Mom to see her exhibit. Mom forbids her to dig into the soil, saying that what lives in the soil should be allowed to be there.

[Read more…] about The Game Keeper’s Party

By Laurel Ferejohn

Debris from tonight’s last fix, an aerial nav radio likely to see action in Vietnam, lay around Tomby’s workbench, deep in the echoing shop hangar. Only thing left was to make his workstation clean for its day-shift Marine. He whisked bits of solder and wire ends into a dustpan, wielding the whiskbroom hard against bench and floor, like he could push the minutes, make them move faster. But oblique glances at the moonlike clock confirmed time was a slow bastard.

Night shift was good for one thing—less chance of guys hammering at you to go into town. Only he didn’t like leaving the hangar in the pitch dark. He always timed it so he wouldn’t be leaving with Stan and Howie. Cretins.

[Read more…] about Night Shift

By John Brantingham

On Sunday, Henry designs and builds a bat house all by himself to his parents’ loud praise. On Monday, he tells the kids about it at school during lunch until Joey Cogsworth at the next table starts laughing, and soon everyone at the table is laughing, and then they’re calling him Batboy. On Tuesday, Henry takes another round of laughter and names and girls calling him creepy and the coach at P.E. looking at him and shaking his head the way he does when he doesn’t like a kid and wants everyone to know it until school lets out, and Henry goes over to his job, helping at his father’s hardware store.

[Read more…] about On Becoming a Bat