FLASH FICTION
The Skins by Tyler Barton
The producer wanted wet hands. Sweaty and tense to where the sound really snapped. So my team detained the clappers in an overwarm anteroom beside the recording booth. Made them wait. Clammy, anxious, beating on the soundproof door: We’re…
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Being the Murdered Extra by Cathy Ulrich
The thing about being the murdered extra is you set the plot in motion. You were a girl good at walking past cameras, background girl, corner-of-the-frame girl. Never-held-a-script girl, went-where-the-director-said girl. You’ll be found in an alley, it’s always…
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Details from… by Maria Kenny
Kay folded her arms and looked across the table at her husband. The young woman peeled potatoes at the sink. Kay had told Sarah there was to be no home help, she could mind her own husband. “I like…
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Twelve-Step Program for Quitting My Life by Kristen M. Ploetz
1 Work the cold meat from the last bone. Still numb from the fight, I eat Gil’s leftovers. He ordered his usual two dozen of Blazin’ Hot. Bastard. He knows habanero burns my gums. Lick the buffalo sauce off…
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Lasso by Essie J. Chambers
It’s the summer before third grade, and I’m not allowed to play in the front yard anymore. Mamma says it’s because of the heat, but I know it’s about the police cars that circle our house like sharks. The…
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Eating Strawberries with Strangers by Pia Ghosh-Roy
I was walking with the broken pieces of my day in a thin cloth bag when I saw them sitting by the river, three women with the sun setting on their hair. They were eating strawberries, drinking rosé in…
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Flash from City by the Sea by Doug Ramspeck
Doppelganger In his dreams the people of the city are ghosts. The writer is walking down a crowded sidewalk, but the pedestrians around him are made of mist or smudges of light or dust. They speak in the…
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Fire / The Haunting / My Debt Collector by Brenda Peynado
Fire When I was eight years old, I watched a fire leap over the forest in glowing arcs and the men in my family battle it away. The fire had taken out farms on the panhandle for a…
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A Little Like Hope by Jason Jackson
O was twenty-nine when he died, and now he lives in my head. He says it’s like swimming. He can’t breathe. “You don’t have to,” I say. “You’re dead.” But he just sighs. At first, there was a lot of…
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“The Deepest Part of the Lake” by John Haggerty
The most exciting thing that ever happened around town was when they found out that Russian mobsters from LA had been dumping bodies in the lake. It was the bridge, arcing gracefully out over the narrowest but deepest section of…
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