Flash Fiction Magazine

By Travis West

A few days before Thanksgiving, when she was only four years old—certainly old enough to know better, Mama had always lamented—Elizabeth “Ebbie” Downing licked the car lighter from her daddy’s ‘73 Pontiac LeMans. Mama was right, she had known better, but something about the lighter’s orange glow reminded her of the Halloween candy pumpkins her grandpa had bought a month earlier. She had savored the orange and green candy corn taste-alikes in the way in which only small children are capable—and the lighter proved too much to resist. Ebbie just knew the lighter would fill her tiny mouth with that cloyingly sweet flavor residing somewhere between caramel and honey; instead, it left a nickel-sized brand in the center of her tongue.

[Read more…] about Halloween, Aisle 6

By Charita Gil

I wake up to the smell of tsokolate boiling and the faint conversation from the kitchen between Mother and Father—or Nanay and Tatay, as we say in the Philippines. I hear the slowly approaching band playing for the townspeople at five in the morning to celebrate the town fiesta happening in six days. The music is a series of hills and valleys of exuberant notes that pleases my ears.

Sleepily, I walk to the small kitchen. Tatay is now frying tuyo—salty dried fish—which completes the perfect breakfast of rice and hot tsokolate.

[Read more…] about Nanay Hears the Band Again

By Adi Bracken

The sky is metallic like a Waffle House shaker. Sugar, sugar falls from it and from her lips.

“Oh, sweetie,” she said.

Lana’s tongue glides into the air to taste its sweetness. It’s confectioner’s sugar. It’s a warm body. A Hershey kiss.

The cracked kitchen window blurs in front of her glasses.

[Read more…] about Snow Angel

By Christine C Heuner

At June’s daycare, which ran for twenty-one years without a license, she had up to eighteen kids in and out of her Cape Cod each day. She had three cohorts: the elementary- and middle-schoolers who took the morning bus from her house, the all-day infants and toddlers, and the after-schoolers, mostly a repeat of the morning crew. The older kids that she’d raised before they cut their teeth came to visit on days off of school. These she put on snack, diaper, or nap-time duty.

[Read more…] about Some Still Sleep, Unaware

By Paul M Clark

“They sign it in the morning.” Charlie slumped against the wall of frost-hardened mud. “Tomorrow night, it’ll all be over.”

“Aye.” Frank peered through the periscope. A haze of morning mist like a dull, lace curtain across a monochromatic world. Grey skies. Grey puddles in the mud between the trenches. Barbed wire that looked like an unraveled ball of string.

[Read more…] about The Last Day

By Steve Gergley

Ten minutes late, The Incredible Cycling Man stomps down the stairs to the basement. On the way down, the air starts to change; he feels it sloughing off heat, taking on dust, and sprouting a spiny edge. At the bottom of the stairs, he turns on the light and looks to the center of the unfinished basement. Standing there is an old, yellowing exercise bike and a small Formica table. A Norwegian word he cannot pronounce is stamped across the side of the bike.

[Read more…] about The Incredible Cycling Man