Flash Fiction Magazine

By Logan Murphy

Hu Yan’s father Dai had started keeping his collection of jade bi stacked in his bathtub, an old ovoid washing basin of hardwood boards banded together with pig iron. Hu Yan had come by on her way home from work, and had brought her daughter Chen Chen, who sat in the living room still wearing her uniform from Jianshan No. 2 Middle School. The window in the bathroom looked out over the bay, with a view of the thunderclouds rolling in from the South China Sea. What diminishing light filtered through the curtains captured the facets of the carved disks in the tub, motifs of dragons and carp, which made symmetrical revolutions around the hole in the center of each disk. There were bi the size of a ring that could fit around Chen Chen’s little finger, and ones so large that they were leaned upright against the back of the tub, a meter across their center and nearly five centimeters thick.

[Read more…] about Jade Disks of the Monsoon Season

By Charles R. Bucklin

The dug well had a monster in it.

And Becky Lee was afraid it was going to eat her.

How and when the monster got into the well was beyond the girl’s recollection.

It just appeared one day, shortly after her Pa had gotten hitched again to his new wife, Alice.

And much to Becky’s anxiety, it didn’t always appear when she lowered the bucket into the well.

The creature usually waited.

[Read more…] about Fetching Water

By Mayee Zhu

Crawling on the freshly mowed lawn, xiao Jia stops her shimmying when she spots a blade of grass taller, greener, and prettier than the rest. Just like New Mom, so much prettier and nicer than Old Mom. Jia crawls closer, further drawn by a dewdrop glistening on the blade. She sticks out her tongue and laps up the dewdrop. Then she takes the proud grass blade and eats that, too.

~

After she tires of eating the prettiest flowers she can find in the garden, xiao Jia wanders around her pretty house. As always, she lingers in New Mom’s room. A light winks from the top of the dresser. Jia stands on tiptoe to see the source. A pair of diamond earrings refracts a beam of sunlight, gleaming like this morning’s dewdrop. Xiao Jia swallows the gems in two gulps.

[Read more…] about Chasing Dewdrops

By Alexandra Amick

January is dangerous because it rolls right into February. There’s very little change between the two. Very little shift in the icicles that dangle from the eves and birch branches. Very little difference in the way the snow glistens in its drifts like crystals and prisms of sky. The prisms like the tiny drops of water that slide off the icicles, each a tear that’s been held at the corner of an eye waiting to slide down and make deep depressions in the snowbanks. Each a tunnel straight to the center of the Earth. First one, then three, then dozens as rain falls and melts a path to the long-buried dirt. For that’s what’s dangerous about Januaries: they roll right into Aprils.

[Read more…] about Januaries

By Stephanie Parent

Beauty is cursed. She has an obsession with pointy things. Needles, open safety pins, long-stemmed roses, Jimmy Choo stilettos, and yes, spindles.

Beauty first displayed evidence of this curse around the time she turned sixteen, and her parents and the school psychiatrist banded together to save her. They hid the sharp objects. They inspected her arms and legs for suspicious scratches. Whenever they found one, Beauty protested that the thin red line was a papercut, or the caress of a stray branch in the woods, and were they going to take books and nature away from her, too? Still, they never listened; they gave her pills to swallow that left her too sleepy to search for needles.

[Read more…] about Dangerous Things

By Jabe Stafford

“No one does more good than we do here at the Caravan Corporation. I’m Eliza Gleen, and we at Caravan built COS Twenty software to take care of the planet. Everything from—”

The voice speaking on the eighty-inch flatscreen on my office wall is mine. One of the new ad campaigns I keep running throughout Caravan’s worldwide properties.

From up here on the sixtieth floor, the view overlooking downtown is to kill for. A gleaming, moonless nightscape of a city that I helped automate. A sprawling city of millions. Bursting with electric cars, solar paneled skyscrapers, and urban forests taller than the state’s remaining nature centers were wide.

[Read more…] about Force of Good