Flash Fiction Magazine

By Rohan Fitzpatrick

We stood in a circle on Hoover Avenue. He waved his hat and tapped his cane. The children wanted photographs with him, old people whispered, grinned. We all clapped, some threw money. He didn’t take it.

“A volunteer?” he asked. He had been speaking very little all morning, teasing us with glimpses of his skills, promising to “shower us with magic.” He frightened rooftop pigeons with little more than a wave of his cane, made telephone cables ripple overhead. Shop doors swung open and clapped shut, manhole covers unscrewed on their own like they were part of a child’s play set. The silence made it unbearable. I wanted him to laugh with us, give us hints as to how it was done, prove that it was all just an elaborate trick.

[Read more…] about Inside Out

By T.E. Hahn

“Grief is emotional inflammation,” Nikki theorized in her best Dr. Freud voice. She scratched an imaginary beard and coughed so hard into her black, fingerless glove that I expected a grotesque organ to appear in her hand. It didn’t. She simply wiped the glove across her Saves the Day hoodie, the one I bought her three Christmases ago.

“How the hell do I fix emotional inflammation?” I sat atop the picnic table in her backyard. My breath was visible in the winter air, but her breath wasn’t. As usual, her parents were gone.

She picked off a chunk of snow from a birdhouse hanging from an ice-clogged gutter. “Advil?” She laughed.

[Read more…] about Inflammation

By Christopher Locke

Connor had the dream again. The one where his daughter was laughing and her clothes were not heavy with the lake. The one where she put on her apron and floured her cheeks, fingered the chocolate ganache from the bowl and popped it in her mouth. The one where she set the table for dinner on the patio and her mom hugged her from behind, eyes closed. The one where she lifted the citronella candle like a lantern and held it towards the dark wood.

Connor opened his eyes.

[Read more…] about Tourists

By Delaney Kelly

Where his brain and eyes should be, the man just has his birds. They don’t see for him, they don’t think for him, they just want breadcrumbs and a place to stretch their wings. Today, they’re hungry. They poke at the lining of his skull and emit loud caws that echo in the cavern where his ear canal begins. The man feels his head slick with birth. There are young ones to feed.

[Read more…] about Bird Head

By Anna Lindwasser

On my last night in San Miguel, Julieta and I see Avengers: Infinity War in a movie theater in a mall outside the city. It’s late, but all the other showings are in Spanish, and I barely speak Spanish well enough to correct cab drivers when they drive past my Airbnb.

We met three days ago at the Shelter Theater, where she read a poem about the dogs we’d often see on the roofs of people’s homes. Once the performance was over I’d gushed about how talented she was. Back home in New York, I’d have gotten on the train and gone home, without a word. In San Miguel there was no one to tell me not to speak.

[Read more…] about Late Night in the Parking Lot of a Mexican Movie Theater

By James Rowe

My grandfather always longed for the water. On good days, when I was very young, he would take me on his knee, under his shelves of swimming trophies, and tell me how to best the Blackpool sea—how the water was a beautiful but fickle being, cradling you one moment and in the next dragging you into its wilderness. At that time, he looked at me as though I too might fall under its spell.

When my grandfather spoke of the water, he did so with the same tenderness as others when they speak of home. When he spoke of its creatures—like the goldfish he bought me in a bowl with a rock pool and a fluorescent castle when I was six—he did so with jealous fervor. “Aren’t they wondrous?” he said to me, pointing a tapered bony finger at those water-creatures, whose eyes looked like painted knuckles. He told me that they had no teeth and that they crushed their food in their throat. It was my throat that his hand found the day that I forgot to feed them.

[Read more…] about The Embrace of Water

By Heather Haigh

There used to be a big stinking pile of shit at the end of the allotment behind Grandpa’s retreat. He said it needed to stay there until it rotted, that rotten shit grows grand plants.

I imagined myself a princess when I walked beneath the floral arches to his retreat. I would pluck my treasures from his garden: baby’s breath, strawflowers, billy balls, chrysanthemums and everlasting. He would indulge my fantasies by weaving them into a crown for me. Then he would cajole me into indulging his.

[Read more…] about The Smell of Copper, Salt, and Urine Is Preferable to the Smell of Shit