Flash Fiction Magazine

By George Forster

I did not recognize John Doe until the third time his body landed on my mortuary table.

The first time we met, I had scarcely paid him attention. The track marks suggested what the toxicology report quickly confirmed: that he was another overdose. Nobody claimed him, and we could not determine next of kin, and so he was cremated as per guidelines for such circumstances.

[Read more…] about John Doe

By Brianna Di Monda

I told my roommate not to get a rat. But I knew she wouldn’t listen—I’d stopped wearing makeup or painting my nails, I’d buzzed my hair, and I stayed inside on the weekends. Last winter, I’d worn the same fur coat every night and drank until I forgot my address and threw up in the street. I’d lost my authority by getting soft, and maybe also by admitting I wasn’t as femme as I thought.

[Read more…] about I’ll Wipe the Blood Off if You Promise to Bury Him

By Kathryn Kulpa

This Story Won First Prize in Our Contest

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Every night before I go to sleep, I knock four times on the wall. Someday, maybe, something will knock back.

In a horror movie I saw, a vampire banged on the window shutters, begging to be let in. Vampires have to be invited in. Ghosts come whether you ask them or not.

Radiators knock. Engines, too. Anyway, I can’t sleep unless I know the walls are sound.

[Read more…] about Exterminating Angel

By Abby Melick

This is how you ignore the paper sobbing beneath your scratching pencil because it is not your job to show mercy and besides you must keep moving the graphite nub back and forth and up and down to mimic the shading of the upper lip of this might-be criminal before he finishes the fishy tale of his alibi so that you can live up to your self-appointed title of “conduit of justice,” which sounds so much more impressive than “courtroom doodler,” which is how your mother describes what you do to her book club, and you are getting the greasy flow of this man’s hair right when the might-be criminal moves his head

[Read more…] about Catapult

By Henri Feola

The betta fish are the worst. They ship them out to us in those little plastic cups, their bodies dark suspensions, very still. I have to line them up on the shelf, arranging them like color chips for optimal attractiveness: silvery white next to blue, a dazzling red beside aquamarine. I don’t know where they come from—Mark said some warehouse out in Kent and apparently considered my question answered. It staggers me that there is this network of living things, that there are people who run the breeding tanks and people who box the fish and drive the trucks and then people like me who sell them and drop the shitty little pieces of food into the air holes twice a day. And none of us, I don’t think, can be wholly responsible.

[Read more…] about Sales Associate

By Vita Emery

“It’s very good to be a very lonely love poet I think.”

The words are scrawled across the bathroom wall, and I try to imagine the person who took the blue permanent marker to the spot above the urinal. But I don’t want to rob them of this one certain thing, this knowledge, that it is very good to be a lonely love poet. This month, I am dating a man who believes that some people can feel each other across continents. And who is to say that this person, who once owned a working permanent marker, wouldn’t feel me touching the backs of their eyes, reaching around for their sense of surety? But I’ve already done what I always do, running away from myself into other people’s lives. And I think that for at least today I should try and be me.

[Read more…] about Chicken Juice

By Lara Klein

I reached my breaking point at Walbermart. Of course I did. The snowy weather reminded me of when my husband and I were young, and we had nowhere else to go on winter days. We would cruise around and eventually find somewhere—the parking lot of Battery Depot or the Church of the Holy Trinity—where we would make out until our mouths were so wet and slippery we could hardly keep kissing. As soon as we walked into the store, I wished we could get in the car and drive away like we used to.

[Read more…] about Walbermart