Flash Fiction Magazine

By Eric Schaller

We always held our breath when passing Hazelwood Cemetery. Blame our parents. They didn’t know the legends that circulated among us kids about ghosts, about possession. Our parents drove, and we sat imprisoned in the back seats of their cars. Parents never really listen. They always take the shortest route. And so, when the bordering fence appeared, we gulped air and held our breath for the long seconds it took to drive by the toothed gravestones of marble and pitted lime, the close-cropped grass, the elongated shadows of trees that fed on corpses, the ghosts, waiting. God forbid, alarmed by bulging cheeks and whitened eyes in the rearview mirror, a parent ask something stupid like, “Why are you holding your breath?”

By Siobhan Wright

School Girl curtsies for her plaid-skirted peers who line up like pigeons on a wire. She poses beside Nest Man who is curled up on the sidewalk near a puddle. She conjures a yellow apple, presents it on the palm of her hand for the crowd. Girls giggle, clap, and squirm. When they hush, she plucks the golden fruit by its stem and dangles it over the homeless man’s head, close to his nose.

Without opening his eyes, he swipes the apple from the air. It vanishes. The girls applaud and toss change into his cup for the street performance. As they disperse, the homeless man eats the apple, even the core.

By Eric Persaud

My poor mamba has been so dreary of late. She just lies there, coiled right in the corner of the varnished floor of my apartment, head pressed low and her eyes piercing back at me, even though she’s only a few arm’s lengths away.

The vibrancy of her leafy green scales against the imitation mahogany of the floor almost appears if she were in the jungle trees themselves. Instead, the wood floors and baby blue walls encase us four stories above a jungle of concrete, people and car horns bustling below.

By Meredith Maloof

Hundreds and hundreds of hummingbirds blurred inside the thin fibers of the hanging cage. They swarmed amongst each other like a great wave, fizzling with movement and energy. Queen Zizira slowly ran her long fingernail against the metal.

“This is the largest collection in the world,” she told her son, Prince Tavas, who barely stood as tall as her waist. “I require that every person who seeks an audience with me must first present me with a hummingbird that they caught themselves. I know no better judge of character.”

By Paul Mills

There was no electricity in the gallery, so we brought torches, several of them. Mischa said not to shine them directly on the paintings, so instead the two of us arranged them in the alcoves around the walls, according to a system of hers, so that one part of the room at a time had enough light to see by, and the rest was a shadowy nothing.

Most of the paintings were torn. Some were shredded so badly you couldn’t see what they had been; others just had a single, cursory tear in them. A picture of the sea at sunset had a boot mark over it. A couple of large paintings had been taken down from the walls and either dropped or thrown on the floor. When I got closer to one, I saw it was stained with brown and yellow. It had been used as a toilet. At the far end of the room, a statue of a man was in pieces. I took a torch and walked over to it.