Flash Fiction Magazine

By Kirsty Jones

After the storm, I found you in your plastic nest. You were crinkled and pink, with skin paper thin. A tiny bandage lay across your forehead, blinding you from the things you were not supposed to see yet. I folded myself into a wheelchair beside your incubator and stared at the wires crisscrossing in and out of you. I rolled the hem on my nighty and swallowed cloying lumps. Hunkered down, I became submerged in your chorus of alarms and mechanical ventilation. It did little to drown out the distant cries of other people’s babies.

[Read more…] about Baby Bradshaw: Twin Two

By Kate Weaverette

He coughs. The cough has become more frequent, more alarming. He coughs again. From the opposite side of the table, I watch him warily over the rim of my coffee cup, waiting. Birds twitter in the Japanese maple in the yard. On the counter behind me, the toaster clicks loudly as it ejects a slice of bread. He wipes his lips. I exhale and realize I had been holding my breath.

[Read more…] about The Cough

By Mark Crimmins

During my early months in Osaka, a staple of my diet was takoyaki, an Osaka specialty: small pieces of octopus cooked in balls of batter an inch across. In those days—during the late eighties boom—octopus balls were mostly sold from stalls near train stations. My neighborhood station was Nishitanabe on the Midosuji Line of the Osaka Metro. Just outside its entrance, an old woman had a takoyaki stand.

[Read more…] about An Osaka Girl

By Maxwell Radwin

It was the broken glass that took my husband’s life.That was all it was, just a little piece of broken glass from an old syringe, slicing through his palm during our morning search through the recyclables. We lived by the basurero, the garbage dump in Zone 3. It was where all the waste of Guatemala City went, although it was not waste to us. Like everyone else in the neighborhood, we turned in the plastic for a good price, collected the food scraps, and burned the newspaper and boxes on cool nights. We were happy.

[Read more…] about As Told at the El Valle Detention Center in Raymondville, Texas

By A. Elizabeth Herting

The waves dance gently upon the shore, summer opening up in an endless horizon.

Early June. The time of year when frivolity reigns. Families gathering at the beach, children with skinned knees and sunburned noses. Lovers stealing away behind jagged rocks, hiding from disapproving elder eyes. Dogs and sticks to be fetched. Fishing poles and lazy hammocks. Long summer nights that go on forever and ever; shooting stars and crystal clear constellations in the sky. Love and leisure.

[Read more…] about The Beach

By Judy Darley

Evasion

Summer stirred hot milk, folded in the pink of Hal’s gran’s powdered rouge, and added a smidge of salt for mouth-feel. Sunburn pink with an aftertaste of phlegm—yum. Hal’s gran’s photo looked on from the kitchen wall, eyes pinched to crevices from the effort of remembering never to disappoint.

[Read more…] about Three Shades of Summer

By Danielle Epting

Realize you are late. You are late to most things, but this is not like most things. This is different from the time you showed up fifteen minutes late to your married friend’s dinner party, and they had already served the salami and cream cheese rolls.

[Read more…] about Baby Blues