Flash Fiction Magazine

By Florian Rose

For many years, everyone who was anyone in the small town had bought their rugs from Aslan. He was a master rug maker, as was his father and grandfather before him, but Aslan was slowly going blind, and the beginnings of senility were apparent, carelessness in the most simplest of things. He had taught his only son, Mahzun, everything he knew. But Mahzun despised the work, although he was very good at it, possibly even better than his father, some said.

[Read more…] about The Last Rug

By K. Di Prima

When Gladys Malone turned up, face down in the water hazard bordering the thirteenth green, her friends were convinced: something nefarious was afoot at Loving Arms Retirement Village.

No ordinary octogenarian, Gladys had approached life the way she’d addressed her Titleists—from the men’s tees. Others ambulated on manufactured knees and hips; Gladys charged the course on her original body parts. She ate like a buffalo and slept like a baby. Gladys wasn’t just “good” for her age. She was spectacular.

[Read more…] about A Good Eighty

By Jack Smiles

All I knew about my dad was that he was a WASP. That’s right, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. So, for my twenty-first birthday, I took a DNA test. I was fifty percent Irish, which I expected from my mother’s side, but the other fifty percent…

Inconclusive.

[Read more…] about Inconclusive

By Malina Douglas

Momma told me not to come here. I went anyway.

At the entrance, I froze. The crude hut was cluttered. Reeking, shriveled herbs hung from the beams of the smoke-blackened ceiling. Sharp bones protruded from a fish on the table. The room smelt of fish guts and foul things dredged up from marshes.

[Read more…] about Dreamcatcher

By L Mari Harris

We wear matching straw cowboy hats and red bandannas, call each other pardner, and yell, Don’t squat with your spurs on! as we race past the beauty salon, the barber shop with the candy cane pole, and the old metal utility building that was turned into the American Legion. We never slow down long enough for the old ladies’ finger waggings and In my day, we controlled our children cluckings.

[Read more…] about Pinky Swear and Double Dog Dare You’ll Stay Forever, Robby Kidman

By Richard Lutman

Al’s latest model, Naomi, liked to click the top of her cigarette lighter open and shut, which annoyed him almost as much as the smell of her lighter fluid and cheap perfume. He tolerated her because she looked androgynous. He didn’t care what anyone thought about his choice for his Christ portrait. She needed the work, and he needed a model with her look for his crucifixion painting.

[Read more…] about Crucifiction