Flash Fiction Magazine

By J.D. Bagley

He was very big. He must be. She could tell by his shoe. It was nearly big enough to block out the light to the crack under the door. It would take a very big foot to fill that shoe. She stared at the shoe, one side of her face pressed against the carpet, imagining the foot inside that shoe being hard and hairy like a giant. Big enough to stomp on her, and maybe stomp her whole house. She had seen a shoe like that before. Her Daddy had worn them before. Before this place. Before they said Daddy was in the box on the table by the piano. Before this man with the big shoe started saying he was her Daddy.

[Read more…] about The Shoes

By Tamara Rogers

The woman—lines just starting to show around her eyes, hair beginning the long, slow transition into straw—stands by my bed.

Her eyes show sorrow if I didn’t know better.

They tear up, salty water buds glistening across her eyelids. She ain’t no sad person, though, no. Those tears are happy tears. They’re the sort of tears you have when you’re cracking open the fizzy wine.

[Read more…] about Insert Pictures

By Nick Thornburg

Before our family claimed this parcel, back when the town wasn’t but a rotted livery and an inn with a single bed, where you paid extra for the planks to set between you and the other guests who shared it with you—back then, a fella could make a wage as a wolfer. That’s what Grandpa Milton done. He come out here on a wagon, and when he looked West and saw there wasn’t any end to it, he thought he might as well turn around and head back to Pennsylvania. But he couldn’t find a one person facing East he could hitch himself to, so he stayed put.

[Read more…] about The Wolfing Club

By Kaely Horton

Just before the reenactment was due to begin, eight-year-old Bailey put up a fuss. She balked in the kitchen doorway, her thick brown hair threatening to burst from its braids, her streamer dragging across the linoleum like the scruffy pink tail of a kite. Sunlight poured like lemon juice through the window. Her siblings clustered in the kitchen in matching blue and gold fealty badges heavy against their collarbones, fists gripping the splinterlike ends of streamers.

[Read more…] about Shards

By Aimee Pogson

Eberly was on his way to his desk when Frank hit him in the hand with a hammer. It was only a ball-peen hammer, tiny and fashionable in the way that miniature objects often are, but it was enough to break his ring finger and make him spill his coffee all down the front of his shirt, which was sky blue. “Jesus Christ,” Eberly said. He gazed down at his ruined shirt.

[Read more…] about Tuesday

By Arya F. Jenkins

When you fly out of the closet, don’t come at her like a monster, eyes wide, arms out like a bogeyman. You will scare her half to death. Stand fast on those heels, braving hands on hips, smiling at her through your roughly rouged cheeks and lipstick-smeared lips, like “who is the better mom?”

[Read more…] about Legacy