Flash Fiction Magazine

By Timothy C Goodwin

It was about 10:30 at night. Had to be: I was into my fifth or fourth drink, things were going surprisingly well, and Mel had actually cracked her first smile since the funeral.

So this bright blue light, like, spotlights into our third-floor apartment window, and we’re like, okay? Cops? Ambulance? New Will Smith movie? It’s NYC, so. You know. Could be anything, right?

But nope. We blinked out into the co-op’s courtyard, and there was Eleanor, everyone’s least favorite neighbor, getting beamed up or whatever, floating right out of the window right next to ours. She was lying on her back, asleep-like, like in the movies, hair drifting about, her body wrapped in that ever-present 70s-y bathrobe while her 60s-y curtains billowed out, as if trying to grab hold of her.

[Read more…] about Aliens & Janice

By Angela Teagardner

They met at low tide, when the beach was deep, and rock pools teemed with crabs and blennies. She saw him watching her as she picked her way down the misty coast, a pail in one hand and rubber boots on her feet. The seals watched, their eyes shining in smooth, damp faces. They weren’t uncommon on that pebbled coastline, but the intensity of their curiosity was new. The largest seal sat perched on a rock above the others and followed her with his dark eyes. She kept clear of his pod and scooped shellfish into her bucket while the wind tossed her ginger hair.

[Read more…] about The Selkie’s Bride

By Adam Altman

At thirty meters below sea level, the diver paddles his black rubber fins. At thirty-five meters, he peers through the gauzy water, sunlight filtering down to the distant seafloor. At forty meters, he snaps photos of jellyfish, damselfish, lionfish, yellow tang.

At fifty meters, an air bubble forms in the diver’s left pinky toe—the tip of the dorsal digital artery, the body’s remotest outpost. The pressure at this depth hits five times harder than on the surface; it squeezes the bubble through the needlelike artery from toe to arch. The bubble enters the dorsalis pedis. It has a long way to go to the heart. The path is not straight, and the walls get narrower before they get wider. Yet motion is simple for a bubble; gravity swells underneath, while density tows it toward the surface. A bubble moves in the only direction it can—upward.

[Read more…] about Air Embolism While Diving

By Victor T. Cypert

These days science was her husband’s only passion.

“The equation dictates the system’s behavior. No other factors may enter into the decision,” he said, his voice tinged with cold reason resonating in a humorless vacuum.

Tears welled up in her bright, green eyes. “But it’s not enough to simply measure the specimen, set the dials, prepare the reagents, and hope that all goes well, John. There’s a human factor, a quality for which science and logic can’t account. It’s not some coefficient based on time, radiation, or mass. It’s a feeling.”

[Read more…] about The Specimen

By Terry Tierney

Ink dries like scabs on his fingertips, sticky on the wheel of his Dodge pickup. He shifts it like a Mustang, winding out the clutch with each gear until the engine screams the next octave. His elation accelerates with the pickup until both are moving too fast for the gravel road. But he knows there’s still time to turn around and make the agent tear up the contract. Just like you, Blake, he can hear the agent say, always figured you’d change your mind, keep the old ranch after all.

[Read more…] about Escape

By Clémence Deleuze

M. Brown had been coming every Saturday into my small bookshop to buy himself a novel for the week. He wasn’t a snob and would more often browse the romance section than the classics. At first it surprised me, because M. Brown was always extremely well dressed; a blindingly white shirt with a lustrous black coat in winter and a perfectly cut tan suit in summer. He dressed like an old-school university professor, and yet his taste for books was eclectic, verging on the pulpy.

One particularly gloomy Saturday, he walked briskly into the bookshop to escape the rain, and I noticed his new umbrella as he struggled to close it. It looked cheap, clashing with his otherwise immaculate outfit. The edges were clearly frayed; its black synthetic fabric was stained with greyish white spots, and I could swear that one of the ribs was bent. Noticing my incredulous look, he explained that he had been caught in the rain without an umbrella and found one in the street. He left it in the holder by the door and went to meander through the shelves.

[Read more…] about The Black Umbrella