Flash Fiction Magazine

By Lorna Brown

She lived in a shabby, one-bedroom apartment. A bed-sit would have been cheaper and let her save quicker, but to live without a kitchen would have been torture. Before she’d left home, she’d already had the tools of the trade: mixer, whipping siphon, spraying gun to name a few. She spent evenings in Dublin experimenting with different ingredients, such as avocado creamed like butter for icing on a chocolate cake, natural sweet beets in batter of a sponge cake, parsnips in carrot cake for added spiciness. Each day, she had pastries to bring her to colleagues in the office, but she never shared her ingredients with anyone until he came along.

[Read more…] about Tools of the Trade

By Carla Lancken

The bartender and I had a routine down pat. Every time I came by, he had a fresh screwdriver waiting, passing it to me like a baton at the Olympics. I felt we had a bond.

I wore the ID bracelet Rob gave me 50 years ago even though it was slightly green. I must have circled the party at least 18 times looking for his handsome face.

Eventually, I plopped down at a table with some jabbering women.

[Read more…] about Where’s Rob?

By Paul Beckman

Sometimes, you look into someone’s eyes when you’re talking, and they’re blinking rapidly, or they look as if they’re going to start sweating from fear, but Sasha gave me nothing. She gave me no signs, no tells, no guilty looks, no nothing, and so I had to do what I had to do.

She said she was a radiologist in Russia, but the U.S. wouldn’t accept her credentials or basically her word and her diploma. She wasn’t allowed to take a copy of her college and medical school transcripts, so she did what she had to do to take care of her elderly mother and young daughter. She said her husband and father were not allowed to leave because they worked in the defense industry.

So, Sasha and her mother both got divorced and came to the U.S.A. with the little one hoping for a good life and maybe a couple of rich husbands but nothing yet on that front.

[Read more…] about I Had No Choice—I Had to Let My Cleaning Lady Go

By Tyler Pipher

Her AI popped up on my computer screen, and a digital version of her face appeared.

“Hello, dear,” I said.

My wife smiled and said, “Good morning. How did you sleep?”

“Not at all. I haven’t slept since you died…”

“That is a shame you haven’t slept.”

I punched in a code on my laptop with one hand while I sipped coffee from a mug.

“You are not still drinking coffee are you?”

[Read more…] about Rowena

By Donald Hubbard

On All Souls Day in 1962, Tom Essex sharpened a hunting knife then killed his wife and three children, covering each victim’s mouth as he stabbed them. Next he tiptoed to his aunt’s room, but she had left the home an hour earlier, sneaking over to her girlfriend’s home.

When Aunt Rita Whitmore returned, she first saw Tom Essex slumped over dead, clutching his pistol. She ran outside screaming until an ambulance came, and the EMTs strapped her up and drove her to the Connecticut State Hospital for the Insane, where she rested until they released her to see her family buried. After the reception, she and her companion moved to the Midwest. No one knew where; the disgraced don’t leave forwarding addresses.

[Read more…] about Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed

By Hilda Sheehan

I’m always addicted to something—heroin, cocaine, crisps, alcohol, sugar. It stops me from being addicted to the men I’m always addicted to as I’m too drugged up to follow them about. Currently, I’m addicted to juice. It makes me delirious and my pee smells of pineapple. John took me in there; he was my last addiction.

[Read more…] about Juice