Flash Fiction Magazine

By Neeru Nagarajan

My parrot flew away one evening when the sun was a distant clementine I could reach out and cup with my palm. My mother took him to the terrace where the tiles burned your feet and, pointing to the crows, said, “Look, that’s how birds fly.”

When my parrot first came to me a long time ago, he was a quivering baby, looking like a fistful of plucked chicken. His red beak was the only big thing about him. My brother told me he would grow with a collar around his neck, a gift only to the males of the species. I fed him a diet of mush with a syringe until he learned how to walk to me and climb up on my finger. My finger was a candy cane with the red, diagonal slashes from his claws.

[Read more…] about Do You Always Remember Your Way Home?

By Kori Klinzing

My favorite mug—the one with Addison’s picture—was just this side of too hot as I stirred my dog’s ashes into the water. The damn things didn’t want to dissolve, and it took all my concentration to stir gently enough and not to spill all over the counter. They were thick, irregular, with bits of bone that only showed themselves when I’d dumped a spoonful in, and they resisted all attempts at dissolution.

But every bit dissolving would be a little like losing Addison again. And I still wanted to cling to every trace, to see more evidence of his existence than the picture on the mug and the ones on my phone. My sweet mongrel with the warmest brown eyes, his suede-soft ears, that fuzzy patch on his forehead I could never resist running my thumb over.

[Read more…] about Imbibe

By Michelle Wilson

When the flashing red-and-blue lights came into view, Eleanor knew that it was her taillight. She cursed her procrastination as she pulled over. Now she’d have to pay repairs and a ticket. Mind scrambling, she put on her best “sweet grandmother” face.

The officer was tall and broad, with a strong jaw. A man who likely went by the books, but who granted mercy, too. Or so she hoped. Eleanor was good at reading faces; she’d been an elementary school teacher before her retirement. Thirty-seven years of hell or highwater, and you learned right quick how to spot the troublemakers. Got so you could see them coming before they’d even spun up their devious plans.

[Read more…] about Educating Mrs. Eaton

By Michael P Lambert

It was the summer of 1963.

The year the music died. The summer before JFK was shot. The time before the Age of Aquarius and Free Love and the killing fields in Southeast Asia. It was the quiet before the storm of the late ‘60s.

I was sixteen years old and had never been kissed by a non-family member.

There was a plausible explanation for this “never been kissed” condition from which I suffered. For the past three years, I had been a seminarian at a Franciscan monastery.

[Read more…] about Love on Chevy Chase Heights

By Henry Lin-David

It was a ship in a bottle, sort of. No mast or sails, just a messy wooden dinghy made with broken Popsicle sticks. He cradled it in his hands, the bottle and the boat, plus two crooked paddles and dark clay lumps for waves. It explained all that time in the basement, an underground refuge for his rapidly declining manhood.

[Read more…] about What Dad Made

By Caroline Coyle

Lucy hated her, but loved her too.

This is what Lucy hated:
-The stench of her sickness;
-The way she moaned in pain;
-The clawed, bone-white hand reaching.

This is what Lucy loved:
-She was her mum;
-Her faded blue eyes were kind, always;
-She was the only parent Lucy had ever known.

Lucy couldn’t understand. How was it possible to be filled with such conflicting emotions? Sometimes, they ripped through her, changing so rapidly that she felt dizzy. While at school, Lucy tried hard to forget, but instead of classwork, she made lists. Lists bargaining with God for her mum’s recovery. She would gaze at the rain sweeping mournfully across the playground and write promises to improve. Work harder at school, clean the house, look after Mum without feeling bitter anger.

[Read more…] about The Paradox