Flash Fiction Magazine

By Kelly Craig

We have one friend who is not like us. At restaurants, she orders Coke instead of iced tea or water. She works three part-time customer service jobs. When we come back to Las Vegas to visit our parents, we spare a few hours to see her.

At nineteen, she drops out of college. She calls us to tell us she’s living in her childhood bedroom again. We call each other from our dorm rooms and apartments in cities far away from Las Vegas. We agree that she’s making a big mistake. She tells us she’s met someone. We blame him.

[Read more…] about Not Like Us

By Phoebe Gennardo

After the rape trial, I took Hillary to stand in a puddle. I led her down the limestone steps of the courthouse, harboring her hand in mine and rubbing the small wart on her pinky finger that had hardened like a tic-tac, smooth and shiny. There I handed her a pair of knee-high, purple Hunters. She sat on the lowest step, handed me her matronly pumps, and shimmied the boots over her plaid pantsuit. She followed me around the building’s sharp corner and across the street. Mist gathered on the wool of our matching blue peacoats in clear domes, like how sugar water gathers at the end of a butterfly’s proboscis. Removed from the moment as I am now, I see that bringing up butterflies in a metaphor seems wrong to the situation, but what is there to do? It’s already been written. I can’t change it now.

[Read more…] about Bathing in Puddles

By Lyn Harris

When Stan’s wife died a year ago, it had undone him. He’d seen it coming and thought he was ready. He was not.

He’d been a whistler all his life. He whistled old tunes, classic melodies, pop songs from the radio. It was like breathing to him, soothing yet energizing. His wife loved his whistling, told him it cleaned the air in the house. If she recognized the tune, she would join in and sing. A musical duo, perfectly in tune.

[Read more…] about The Whistler

By Donald Hubbard

Ted Kaczynski—no, not that Ted Kaczynski, the Tadeusz Kaczynski born in the Polish section of Hale, Connecticut in 1900—polished off his last Budweiser of the evening.

His pay for playing bass at the Copernicus Club on their polka nights, a bottomless glass of Haffenraffer Beer, known locally as Green Death. A malt liquor with a dreadful, poisonous taste but a high AP. He never felt cheated by this stingy remuneration—five beers of Green Death and you were French-kissing the angels.

[Read more…] about A Good Night

By Charles Breckenridge

“Good morning, Lord. I’m Jack Bennet. Of course, you know that, don’t you? Because you know everything. Since, for some reason, I seem to be the only politician up here, the others have asked me to be sort of a representative, just one person to reach out to You so we don’t get all bogged down like we did yesterday. The Catholics, particularly, are more comfortable with this arrangement.”

[Read more…] about Day Two

By David Batteiger

Amanda awoke, cheek numb from a night on the tile floor. She wiped away a trickle of drool from her bottom lip with the back of her hand. Her wrinkled, black party dress and the vigilant pounding in her head explained why she’d slept in the bathroom.

[Read more…] about Heaven’s Helpdesk