Flash Fiction Magazine

By Lane Chasek

He arrived at Hester’s door wearing a red coat with no shirt, dirt-streaked sweatpants, and rubber boots printed with white giraffes. He gripped the boy by the arm—painfully, Hester imagined. The boy might have been six or seven. Sleet fell from the sky, but neither man nor boy seemed to care.

“Have an extra room?” the man asked. The boy stared at some unseen animal, some presence only he could discern, concealed in the cottonwoods surrounding Hester’s home.

[Read more…] about Circus People

By Aviva Gat

When? It was always a question of when. Today, I saw my son’s eyes pop with crimson veins and his tongue sag so long it fell past his chin; I got the answer.

[Read more…] about The When

By Donald Delver

December found me on leave from Germany, visiting my hometown of Cincinnati. A longtime friend had invited me to a Christmas party at her home, a beautiful two-story brick house built in the 1880s. I greeted my friend and her husband, put my bottle on the drinks table, and hung up my coat. Everyone was gathered in the large parlor, either near the fireplace or the huge live spruce.

[Read more…] about Looking Back

By Kenny Mitchell

My mother pulls up to the curb of the penitentiary in the same scratched minivan from my childhood, the one with a pungent stale grease and cigarette smell that clings to the cushions. A man with tattoos, shriveled after years of malnutrition, squints in my direction from the fenced courtyard. We’d become as close of friends as two inmates can be, even shared a hug or two if guards weren’t around—just to feel free. I don’t think he knows I’m leaving. I’m a whale who has just barely come up for air; you glimpse only the top of its back, but it is magnificent. My father is next to my mother in the front seat, and my sister, now in her late thirties, has been exiled to the back seat with me. We are silently trekking to Red Lobster to celebrate our reunion.

[Read more…] about Lobster Facts

By Ruby Gaffney

Angel is holding the worm down flat on top of the wall, and then she lifts one of her fingers and pushes it down hard in its middle, pressing, until it splits in two. One half tries to wriggle away, but she grabs it and pulls it back to her.

“Because it’s a fact about worms,” she says, when Elsa asks her why she did that. “If you break one in half, it doesn’t die, it turns into two worms. Look.”

[Read more…] about Worms

By John Philipp

Paris, December 1940

Six-year-old Elisabeth sat with her nanny, Magda, and her teddy bear, Monsieur Flaubert, at Le Relais de la Tour, a small brasserie next to the Eiffel Tower. Elisabeth hoped Monsieur Flaubert didn’t strain his neck trying to glimpse the top of the Tower from her shopping purse. It was so much taller than she imagined. Magda said one could see all of Paris, but Elisabeth was glad they’d arrived too late to go to the top. Uncle Bernard said even Hitler refused to go to the top when he visited Paris.

[Read more…] about Trouble at the Tower