Flash Fiction Magazine

By Stephanie Grella

This Story Won Third Prize in Our Contest

The boys at school didn’t like Mathieu, but all the girls did. He was the only boy ever allowed at girls-only sleepovers. He played with our hair like he was one of us, brushing his own and wishing it was long like mine, blonde like Olivia’s.

Mathieu and I were in the same ballet class, but he also did tap, jazz, and pointe. The girls crowded around him in adoration, insisting he teach them how to do a proper pirouette. His legs were long and lean, longer and leaner than any of ours. He moved around the room as I imagined a swan glided across water.

[Read more…] about Mathieu

By John Bubar

Dingo’s job this morning, like every morning since I’d tasked him with doing my unit’s deadliest job, was to search for booby traps. Dingo and the new kid they’d christened Jerkoff, Dingo’s personally chosen trainee, had turned the body over after a careful search. Everything we knew about booby traps we learned on the job. I waited for the day our training caught up with the war we fought.

When an explosion didn’t shred the rolled body, I credited those two with doing their jobs. Again. Dingo hadn’t planned on Jerkoff brushing him aside and searching the body for—who knew what. The bomb went off when the dumbass pulled on the dead guy’s belt. Fucking amateur move.

[Read more…] about Not Your Brother, Your Father, or Your Friend

By Avery Mathers

On the last night, Lucy finished Heather’s bedtime story with typical panache: And do you know what, my darling? The bear lived happily ’til the end of his days—which was the following Tuesday. Heather laughed, a seven-year-old Lucy in the making. Unlike Connal, Lucy and her daughter lived in the moment, full of joy and free of sentiment.

Their arrival in his life had made no sense. He’d gone out for a sandwich and came home with an instant family. There was no agreement. For that matter, there was no invitation. It just happened. For two months, he shared his flat with their exuberance and his bed with Lucy. He loved her beyond reason, yet he knew that the curtain would drop. Inevitably, Lucy would take her bow and leave; the natural condition of an actress.

[Read more…] about Lucy

By Andre Anthony Moore

I’m dreaming as the news blares out of my clock radio. A dazed three-year-old freezing in the rubble in Syria, a koala bear paralyzed by flames closing in on him in an Australian forest, a mink being dragged to a killing chamber in Denmark. Weird how I take the most gruesome things happening in the world and weave them, still half asleep, into my dreams.

Images of the three-year-old, the koala bear, and the mink fade as I sit up in bed, leaving me with an aching back and a knot in my chest.

[Read more…] about Poppy Seed

By Alexander Evans

I’ve been standing next to a display of teriyaki jerky for at least 180 seconds waiting for you to notice me. You are browsing the T-shirt selection. You stop briefly at a blue shirt with an eagle on the front of it. In the eagle’s claws, there is an American flag. It is on the extra-large rack. That is something I like about you. You are extra-large.

[Read more…] about Rhonda

By Jody M Keene

Apple trees surrounded Apple Orchard Apartments. The old orchard even bore fruit—hard, tiny apples that were good only for applesauce made with lots and lots of sugar.

The old woman climbed slowly up the stairs to her apartment. Her arms were ringed with plastic grocery bags bulging with the last of the good fruit pulled off the branches she could reach. Above her head, three little faces peered over the second-floor railing.

[Read more…] about The Poisoned Apple