Flash Fiction Magazine

By Deborah Burke Henderson

Market days in the square bustle with activity: street vendors, bakers and spice traders, colorful tarps strewn over the dirt stocked with baskets of grains, small teapots, jugs, cooking pots, and other essential utensils. Locals in their burnooses sell eggs, others hawk hand-woven rugs, baknoogs, and blankets.

The souk is my favorite place in Medenine.

Sundays are extra special as Arabian stallions, camels, goats, and other livestock are assembled for viewing. Bartering goes on forever before a sale is made. Conversations carry on over small glasses of hot, syrupy-sweet green tea, poured at arm’s length from a tiny blue metal teapot sitting atop a cylindrical, stunted clay stove.

[Read more…] about In the Corps

By Kathryn Silver-Hajo

After two and a half weeks of obligatory separation, we were itching for a get together. Yet even though we are as conscientious and careful as they come, we couldn’t escape the disquieting sense that we were somehow tempting fate.

We are the three families on our dead end. The Harridans, The Introverts, and The Lonelyhearts. Not our true names, of course, but the ‘stage names’ we gave each other one drunken night when we’d been singing sentimental songs from the seventies.

[Read more…] about Current Circumstances

By Chloe Vaughan

By March, we all thought Ted was going to kill himself. Can you blame us? All the signs were there. Poor old boy had just gone through the wringer with divorce number two, ex-wives had full custody, lived in a barebones condo by the airport, languishing as a low-level drone at a mid-level company, and buying lottery tickets and frozen dinners with any pennies he managed to scrape together. Hell, I would have killed myself too, if I were Ted. But I wasn’t Ted, so when Steve in sales and Marissa in accounting asked me if I wanted in on the little bet they had going, I said sure, I’ll throw some money down.

[Read more…] about Office Pool

By Joe Brocato

A few weeks before he died, we played a stifling trio gig at La Taverna.

After the show, we took our seats at the bar and were approached by a woman with a question for Bill. Once in a while, Freddie and I got a round for free, but Bill got the questions. They nearly always came from women, and they were always for Bill.

Those that did the asking were usually musicians themselves. Or poets, sculptors, designers—that sort of thing. Although, they all had one trait in common: their big break was just a phone call away. This one wrote the best children’s books you’ve never read, and asked a fair question.

[Read more…] about Bill’s Tune

By Jack Adler

“What I was thinking was a spin-off on reverse mortgages,” Morris said as he sat having coffee with his friend Sam. Both in their late fifties, they often brainstormed, throwing out their ideas.

“How would that work?” Sam asked.

“Well, it’s a little morbid, but what with the pandemic, people are more used to these things.”

“Unfortunately.”

[Read more…] about Scams

By Ann Vincent Vila

Cognitively, Maria understood that we have to accept people as they are, not as we want them to be. But one’s rational mind is sometimes overshadowed by a cloud of emotions that juggle around the mind like fruit and vegetables that are mixed and pureed in the blender of time, until what you’ve got is irrational, childlike longings spewing forth wet tears of debris that become delusional desires, daydreams, or even nightmares. So much for rational thought.

[Read more…] about Birthdays