Flash Fiction Magazine

By N. D. Blakeslee

There are walls here. High walls. Built with strong things, like stone and metal and blood. Erected to keep the outside out or the inside in. The King’s Men walk the walls, spears and shields in hand. Their eyes—like the eyes for the King—are hidden.

They are another sort of wall.

Houses are packed tight, made of wood and stone, stretching upward because there is no room to stretch outward. The streets are filled with peasants and animals—creatures of filth, spending their limited days scraping together just enough to get through to another day. Town Criers shout the King’s news from every street corner, propagated from the King’s own advisors. “Famine touches the lands outside the King’s city!” “War and poverty!” “Depravity and ritualistic sacrifices of infant children upon ancient altars of the dead gods!”

Dark things. Outside the high walls of the King’s city, the world is lost.

But inside the King’s city, it is safe. Rations are good for the Cause. Work camps are good for the People. Curfew is good for Morality. Hope isn’t a necessity because it only works in tandem with despair, and sadness can’t touch a place with all of its needs met.

The King says so.

Even so, a hunchbacked man sits upon the great wall. A place meant for the King’s Men. He has his hands raised above his head, his voice high and reaching, shouting out to the people of the King’s city. His words are questioning. They probe at the writs of the King and pull them apart. Inquiries upon inquiries suggesting the world is not so bleak outside the walls. He seeks to start the fire within the bellies of creatures of filth, and to get them to question the King’s decrees. His argument boils down to a singular point: there must be more than this.

Halfway through a sentence, one of the faceless guards puts a boot to the Hunchback and pushes. The hunchback falls from the high wall to the ground and breaks in several places, but does not die. He is not so lucky. The King’s men fall upon him, their words and threats punctuated by the tips of their spears. They tie his hands and ankles to their horses and pull him in each direction. They say they’ll put him back in order, and they tell him to take back what he said. At first, he wouldn’t. By the time he would, he couldn’t.

They tried, but all the King’s horses and all the King’s Men couldn’t put him together again.

By Ed Maples

Growing up in Arkansas, Ray was used to doing without things other people had, such as electricity. Ben Hur was the last town to get service and that wasn’t until 1967. There was a tiny general store and post office, a service station with hand-pumped gas and less than one hundred people—barely a town. When Ray was ten, he was ecstatic that electricity had come to his home. Unlike most of the other residents, the Dewitt family was better off than any other residents, partly because they had an electric generator, and while the rest of the town was in the 1800s, the Dewitts were a house on the hill, shining brightly. Because Ray’s dad was the County Judge, they had more basics at their disposal.

[Read more…] about The Green Flame

By James David Fox

You have said nothing for two weeks since you met my parents. Not one word. We are intense, my family, and I know that well. Dad’s jokes, Mum’s fussing. Both of them, adept at making little scenes and ritual conflict. The stuffy little house, the lack of chairs.

I’m not unaware of the way they bring every conversation back to me and what I’ve been doing. The job, the rent, whether I have enough money, why I don’t. A lifetime of concern caked onto me, and they’re not done applying it. It must have been hard being the least cared about person in the room.

And then on cue, as you reached peak irritation, my mother presented me with one of Granddad’s gnarly brewing jars, half filled with garden mud and with tendrils of green ivy climbing the sides. A piece of home to take away with me, she said. It would water itself forever like a little planet; it would always be alive. You stood to leave.

[Read more…] about The Bottle Garden

By Ingrid Hartzell Gallegos

First, brush your teeth. Then, use the bathroom. Next, be sure you have a well-made bed so that when you finally lie down you are only distracted by the conversation you had with the guy who held the door for you, not by the lump that your comforter is making within your duvet cover. Why did you think that’d be a funny thing to say? Why did you grab his arm? He did not seem amused.

Comfort yourself by saying you’ll probably never see him again and if you did, he probably wouldn’t remember you. Then calculate the statistical probability that you will run into him if he frequents that restaurant. Quickly remember that you only took high school statistics and the only thing you remember is “correlation does not indicate causation.” Think of what Mr. Smith is doing now. He had two kids, didn’t he? Kane and…Abel? You’ll have to use the bathroom again at this point. Of course, when you get to the bathroom, you no longer have to use it. Those three minutes, however, are just long enough to reverse your desperate efforts of drifting off to sleep, and the dim light of the clock beckons you.

Never check the time. By checking the time, you are just reinforcing that, instead of sleeping, you’re awake and thinking about your mother. She called you earlier asking if she should get your sister a new scarf or if your sister needed a new lamp because the brass one with the pink lampshade in her living room is just too bright. You reminded your mother that it’s probably the lightbulb and not the lamp that’s too bright.

You begin to wonder how lamps work. Something to do with electrons in the wires and the filament heating up? You knew at one point, but now it’s just a blurry memory from summer camp when you were a kid. You still remember the smell of the dusty room with the large red carpet and the tall bookshelves. Maybe the rug wasn’t so large, you were just small. You remember chasing after some boy you liked and falling in the cold stream. You try to remember if it was hard for you to fall asleep back then as well. You remember you could never fall asleep at naptime, either. You really wish you still had nap time.

Think about your childhood cat that’s now eighteen. It’s probably going to die soon. Or that’s what your mom said. You start to cry a bit. You want to call your sister to try and talk to her about it, but when you pick up the phone you accidently see the time. It’s 1:23 in the morning, which means it’s 3:23 a.m. her time. Try not to remember you have to be awake in about five and a half hours. Five hours and seventeen minutes to be exact. Try not to think about the big presentation you’re giving tomorrow. Try not to dwell on the fact that you wanted to be asleep two and a half hours ago. Two hours and, now, twenty-four minutes ago to be exact.

By this time, you have adjusted and readjusted your sleeping position so many times that your well-made bed has become a pile of sheets and blankets entangling you like a turtle in a fisherman’s net. You start to think about turtles, how that they are conscious breathers and that when they get caught in fishermen’s nets they tend to drown because they stop thinking about their breath. You become aware that your own breathing has become shallow and irregular. At this point you want to focus on steading your breath. Deep breath in, hold, exhale, repeat. You start to think of swimming in the ocean. You begin to sway with the waves. You’ve become a jellyfish amongst turtles.

By Anne McMillan

My sister, the florist, is trying to teach me how to arrange flowers. I’ve had it coming, I know, since the time I killed her bonsai tree (I forgot to water it when she went on vacation) and let her African violets go—well—to pot. This is my penance, I’m sure, but today is an important day when maybe, for once, I’ll get it right.

[Read more…] about Why My Sister is Lovable But Hard to Please

By Richard Krause

“It’s nice to meet someone who is not a damned tourist, but a traveler!” he said to me.

He was crippled and bent over at the waist, so that he walked perpendicular with a cane. He gained a kind of eccentric dominance looking so vulnerable. He sat there with his shirt open and his hairy, white chest exposed, kneading the loose flesh over and over again between his fingers. As I ate, he talked between spoonfuls of oatmeal or bites of toast. He’d clear his throat, sometimes twice in the course of one swallow, breaking a simple sentence in two.

Why I went back to the same restaurant was a mystery to me. I almost stopped on the last morning seeing his car parked outside, but thought there are not many other decent restaurants in town. Be brave, I told myself.

[Read more…] about Hawking