Flash Fiction Magazine

By Ed Kratz

Mindy’s friend Tiffany says she’s foolish to dream of true romance with a zombie, but she’s wrong. Mindy and Bobby have been together for a year, and she’s sure Bobby is the one.

It’s Friday night, and she and Bobby have just come back to their place.

They had dinner at their favorite seafood restaurant, and Bobby ate like a perfect gentleman. He didn’t faceplant and devour the sushi. He used chopsticks. Okay, some spilled from his mouth onto the plate. But he was sweet and got Mindy’s approval before he gobbled the fish straight off the table. Clumsy zombie traits are appealing when your boyfriend resembles Robert Redfort—a young slightly moldy Redford—but Robert Redford where looks count.

[Read more…] about Mindy and Bobby a Zombie Romance

By Pam Walters

Okay, okay—I admit to wearing pointy-toed high heels and cramming my tender feet into shoes that were several sizes too small in order to make my feet look petite. I suffered through bone-crushing pain. Foot binding was outlawed decades ago, and here I was using it to torture myself. The abuse to my poor toes lasted for close to twenty years before my little piggies started, literally, to turn on me.

[Read more…] about And This Little Piggie

By Chris Cocca

It was coming up on three; the shadows from the rowhomes reached back to the alley. Behind the alley, other rows; much farther back, the mountains. The girl was picking tree bark from her tidy yard. The boy, watching from his porch, had spent the summer in the buttonwoods that lined a strip of grass between their houses and the main road in and out of town. The girl had spent the summer with her grandma in the mountains.

[Read more…] about Brick and Mortar

By Mags L Halliday

The sound of the sea is distant, thrumming like the autumn wind in the sycamores outside her studio window. The shell had been sitting in the bottom of a cardboard box, in the last cupboard she and Viv had cleared, buried by years of set lists and broken equipment. Clare presses the shell closer to her ear, till she feels its ridges pushing on tiny, fragile bones. Closing her eyes, she steps forward into the warm pool of late sunshine on the carpet.

[Read more…] about Echo Beach

By Gabrielle Doue

“My nana says you’re a whore.”

I glance up from my wrinkled copy of The Sun Also Rises to see a pale face pressed against the chain-link fence, its cheeks generously filling the gaps like dough left out to prove. The boy smiles, revealing two milky front teeth growing in crooked. I return to my book.

“Did you hear me?”

I brush away the sweat that’s collecting at my hairline. “Didn’t your parents teach you not to talk to strangers?”

[Read more…] about Fence

By A A Turner

You sit on a chair outside the meeting room feeling like you’re twelve and have been called to the counsellor’s office after being wrongly accused of taking a classmate’s book to replace the one you lost. You fidget and take a deep breath. Now, as then, you’re ready to make an impression. The last time you presented at this meeting, everything came out in the wrong order. This time, you’re better prepared.

Sam pops her head out and says, “They’re running late, Jaz.”

“How late?”

[Read more…] about The Meeting

By Lisa Pellegrini

I can still see the cobalt mosaic tiles across the backsplash of my neighbor’s kitchen the day I chose Puffy out of the litter of five kittens. An ocean of new life inhabited my heart for the next eighteen years. I remember how she pounced on her siblings, an explosion of gray and tan cotton balls ready to take on the world.

[Read more…] about Mosaic Tiles