Flash Fiction Magazine

By Julie Howard

The robin gazed at her, its eyes dark and glassy, drunk on the berries from her crabapple tree. She’d always thought of those birds as cheerful harbingers of spring, but in the frigid north, they flocked to her trees in mid-winter, stripping it bare.

It was her anniversary. Eight years. Megan turned from the window.

In her closet, she slipped on her tallest heels, the ones with narrow stakes that propped up her calves to their shapeliest limit. They elevated Megan’s uninspired behind into a delicious curve and made her feel as though she were tip-toeing across the room.

[Read more…] about Here, Kitty Kitty

By Paul Luikart

Miles from last night’s campsite, Dennis comes to a stream. It runs smooth over sandstone chunks, chirping and sloshing in its winding groove through the woods, across the trail, and further on through the trees to his right. Melt water, he thinks.

He lets his pack slide off his shoulders and thump to the ground. He sits on a cool, moss-covered rock and puts his hands in the water. It piles up at the upstream side of his wrists and slides away in thin fishtails on the downstream side. The water is freezing. He throws handfuls of it on his face, and the bitter sting fades to a cool shine in the evening air.

[Read more…] about Bird Bones

By Grant Canterbury

Tighe said, “Last time I was on this trail was forty years ago today.”

We had met by happenstance, as it seemed, and were hiking upslope together under the ponderosa pines. I said, “You know it to the day? August 11th? Must have been memorable.”

“Well, I came up from Boulder and hiked up to the peak with a girl I knew. We had a nice interlude watching the sunset.”

“Pretty place for it.”

“Was. Unfortunately, we argued on the way back down. She asked me my sign, started talking astrology. That got my back up, so I turned the question around on her. If there was anything to it, she should have been able to guess my sign from knowing me, right?”

“No luck?”

“Eh, she couldn’t get it in ten goes, so I considered that pretty conclusive. However, I crowed a bit too much. By the time we got back to the parking lot, Amity said she never wanted to see me again, and she got in her car and took off spraying gravel.” He frowned. “She never did, in fact.”

“Well, I hope it’s the good memories that come back up there.” So I said farewell—actually neither of us had given our true name—and let him go on past. It was just us on the trail, apparently. If Tighe had any security at all, it was way back. Peculiar for a billionaire.

I called Central. “Ruby, see if you can find anything about a woman named Amity that Tighe knew in the old days.”

~

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree… Peter Tighe had made his first fortune in the original dotcoms, amplified it hopping cryptocurrencies, got out before the crash, and tripled it again in PV and nano. But it was his Domes that got the Agency’s attention, and the world’s. Over the last five years, he had erected in various locations gigantic hemispheres of nanoengineered polymer over carbon-fiber lattice, featureless and doorless, milky-translucent, ranging in diameter from seventy meters to over a thousand. The Tighe Foundation had bought off and relocated communities, infused cash into national elections, developed a suspiciously opaque arrangement with the Chinese government. In India and Paraguay and Uganda, fields and forests were cleared; foundations were poured and the hill-sized structures erected. And then there were the marine operations. A vast dome emerged from the South China Sea. Immense, pale shells rested submerged on the seabed in the central Pacific and off the coast of Chile. All executed with rigorous security and without any hint of the project’s purpose. Biosphere III? Armageddon bolt-holes? Modern art? Ultra-weapon? The Foundation was utterly close-lipped. The Agency became concerned and assigned our team to investigate.

Tighe profiled as personable, bright, apolitical, and pragmatic, but prone to obsession. He guarded his privacy. He had romantic involvements with a string of minor celebrities, mostly kept out of the tabloids, but had never married. An enigma.

Within the last week, two drone fleets based on Tighe-owned ships in the remote Pacific had been systematically sowing hydrophobic smart-powders over hundreds of square miles of ocean—vantablack and retroreflective prismatics. They formed two smeared circles, one bright and one dark, vaguely visible from space. A few Japanese fishermen and geoengineering watchdogs had posted complaints, which were being professionally neutralized by botnet swarms and strategic charitable donations, and had gained no traction. Tighe had cleared his business calendar and disappeared to the Colorado Rockies.

~

Above, Tighe wandered over the granite knob, a mere red-jacketed fleck. The sun was lowering over the Rocky Mountains, silhouetting the far ranges, peak rising above peak on the western horizon.

My phone pinged and began to stream notices. Worldwide, every visible Dome had suddenly bloomed with inner light. Images from the far side of the world: a half-illuminated white hemisphere amid rain falling on the South China Sea; the Dome in Africa shining ruddy, mottled light reflected from Lake Victoria’s nighttime waters; and the largest, over a kilometer across, rose up and up against the overcast sky of India showing turbulent, swirling bands, cream against brown, a vast, reddish oval upon its flank.

A long moment before I recognized them: Venus. Mars. Jupiter.

The Domes shone for an hour and then went dark.

~

A while later, Ruby called me back. “He knew an Amity Betancourt in college. But she’s deceased. Head-on car crash in Colorado. Evening of August 11, 1988.”

~

Eventually it was shown that the global placement pattern of the Domes precisely specified a particular moment in history. Each planet, at 01:15 GMT just forty years before, had poised exactly at the zenith as seen from a specific place on Earth. The angular size of each corresponded to the dimensions of the Domes. And, of course, the sun and the new moon over the Pacific. Thus, the celestial sphere mapped upon the terrestrial one.

At that moment, the local time in Colorado had been 7:15 PM. Not yet the moment of the accident, but just before sunset. Nearly time for watchers on the peak to rouse and consider going back down.

~

Tighe came back to the parking lot by moonlight. I asked him, “Did you find what you’re looking for?”

He smiled ruefully. “Not this time.”

~

Three months later, we learned Tighe was dispatching couriers across every sea and continent. I followed one to the fringes of the Gobi Desert and, by telescope, watched her anchor a baseball-sized sphere upon a barren hillside. For one hour the next August, it blazed as blue-white as Algol.

For four years now, Tighe has returned to Colorado each August, but his work remains incomplete. They have not yet emplaced the stars below the third magnitude.

By Rick Hoffman

I’ve stolen fifty-one dogs. People leave them unattended outside of stores. I don’t keep them. I just take them for a few hours. I give them treats, brush their coats, and play fetch. Then I return them to the address on the tag, but I never accept rewards. That would be fraud, and I’m not a fraud, just a dog borrower. I’d like to have my own dog, but my lifestyle isn’t suitable for that. First of all, I can’t afford the expense, and besides, my building doesn’t allow them.

I’m going to stop at fifty-two because the Hebrew word for dog is כֶּלֶב—kélev—and its numerical value is fifty-two, and I’m not even Jewish, but there are fifty-two weeks in a year, and the year is almost over, and I’m not crazy, and it all makes perfect sense, but don’t tell anyone because they won’t understand. No one ever understands.

[Read more…] about 52 Pickup

By Sharon Ava Ezekiel

Wash is what they called him. He was one of my daddy’s farm hands. I always wondered how he got that nickname because he was never clean. He wore the same plaid shirt everyday and smelled like rotten eggs. Wash had a really long body, like something from Mars, and Daddy said he was ninety pounds soaking wet. He took a lot of naps, and sometimes he would curse at the animals. My dad was the exact opposite of Wash. My daddy was big and strong and could lift anything. He got up really early and didn’t stop working until it was dark outside. Taking care of the alpacas and the cows was hard work.  Daddy said someday the alpacas were going to make us rich, and I would go to the best schools and wear the prettiest dresses.

[Read more…] about The Storm Cellar

By K.D. Kelley

Every Monday, she brought him flowers. At first, her tokens were lost in the sea of bright bouquets that disguised the sterile hospital room with mylar balloons reflecting the fluorescent lights with wishes of Get Well Soon and Thinking of You. As time wore on, the gifts dwindled, the balloons deflated, until only hers remained to mark the weeks, the months, of a battle still fought. Each Monday, it became harder to enter the flower shop and face arrangements for happy occasions, balloons with messages of Happy Anniversary and Congratulations. Harder to ignore wreaths with ribbons shouting Loving Father and cards whispering Our Condolences and Praying for You.

Both the joyful and tragic were beyond her reach. The hospital room, no matter how comfortable, no matter how tastefully decorated, was still a hospital room, with no past or future. A stasis chamber for their life.

[Read more…] about Maybe Tomorrow