Flash Fiction Magazine

By Steven Moss

As we high-tailed our way out of the flats, my wife Veronica suggested a bungalow in the more retiring part of town. I pressed the address into the sat-nav as she drove.

Once we’d unpacked comfortably into our new conditions, we discovered ourselves half the average age. I bought beige slacks, wore a knitted diamond jumper while my wife complimented her outfits with a headscarf and sunglasses. We’d enough to rest between the sun-kissed, hedge-lined drives for a year or so, so we got busy being neighbourly.

[Read more…] about The Cul-De-Sac

By Christopher Records

He rises, the one in the plaid. The other follows. The follower is wearing a tight baseball shirt.

They are both handsome in a specific, LA way. They are irrationally attractive, but committed to looking slightly damaged. They look like many men who live east of the 405, away from yoga blondeness and granola; they try to look tarnished, they try to gray themselves, make asymmetry happen, make themselves fit thematically into asphalt and graffiti and smog and the LA River, which is really just a concrete drainage channel. Their style is a pastiche of punk and goth and Baroque Catholicism. They look like they yield to the sun, like they incline their faces automatically toward it. They look like they live in a place where blood-colored roses spindle around black wrought iron and the bathroom tiles are seafoam green and the style has never not been Art Deco.

[Read more…] about Two Men Heading Home at the End of a Date

By Kameron Ray Morton

Lacey is on her knees in the front row as she sings, her arms reaching for something that Mary knows she’ll never catch, eyes squeezed shut and brown hair stuck to her forehead from sweat, rocking with the pulsing of electric bass. Lacey has recently returned to ‘walking with Christ,’ having been shown by the Holy Spirit that her drinking and participation in casual sex were contrary to God’s will. Mary has noticed that all of her friends tend to move through their faith in cycles. She thinks she might, too, but for her, the appearance of devoutness is always there. Her father’s job as a youth minister means she can’t rebel quite as obviously as those around her, can’t confess to her sexual sins like Lacey does to ask for absolution.

[Read more…] about Observation from a Pew in Church

By Martha Keller

When I feel the second set of footfalls pound against the hallway linoleum, I know there’ll be trouble. She’s been gone for two days. The duration of her absence alone is not enough to concern me. I survived four days without her once, and nearly a year ago, I went nine days without any contact with another living creature. I don’t complain. I manage. I remember.

The faucet in the bathroom drips at predictable intervals. At mealtimes, I pack extra meat in my mouth and bury the wet clumps along the back baseboard of the closet and in the space between the refrigerator and the wall. Once, I made the mistake of depositing a trivial amount of wet food in the corner of the loveseat. The odor of rotting animal protein gave away my secret. Even now, in her presence, my access to the couch and other upholstered furniture remains restricted.

[Read more…] about The Roommate

By Mary B. Sellers

Evening:

The day after your mother is taken away, when you are thirteen and peeling layers of July heat from your shoulders and elbows and knees and thighs, when your hair is a dirty chlorine green from swim team lessons and cropped like a page boy’s, just like the ones in your picture books with the sweet severity of a bob against the round globe of a child’s face waiting and watching their master—Merlin, reedy with wizardry, tall but stooped, a tenuous pile of ramshackle bones wrapped up in velvets the color of a deep jewel (and his hat! crooked like they always are, it seems, regardless of wizard or witch or even intruding Mickey Mouse), poised against the great 1941 Fantasia cliff, clumsy with his stolen magic and starlight—when you’re outside in your grandparents’ buzzy-hot carport, waiting for your father to say goodbye to his frail mother and come outside and click his car keys so the car will light up and let you in, your aunt says something to you. She has come outside and there is something uneasy in her face. She is blonde and middle-aged and wears lots of animal print blouses and chunky chain jewelry so she’s chic in that specific sort of way southern ladies of a certain age are. ou ready yourself for an embrace because your mother is gone and no one’s said much about it. But she does not do this.

[Read more…] about L’Oreal Hi-Lights

By Chloe Vilette

Cindy Draper jerked her feet and knees out of the river and back onto the mossy riverbank when she saw the scaly, orange body of a fish scratch up against her legs. Catfish had swum past her before without frightening her. However, the critter that had passed by certainly wasn’t a breed of catfish. Cindy knew that catfish didn’t have scales; they have slick skin that passes through your fingers like a frog’s. Nor was a catfish ever the same bright orange as a traffic cone. Curiosity filled her mind. So, with her feet still anchored on the riverbank, she leaned forward to get a look at the critter that swam just a few inches below the surface.

[Read more…] about Dr. Goldilocks