On Discovering My Poetry Causes Hysteria
A ceiling fan cuts the humid air. A decrepit bookstore; the musty aroma of hardbacks. I wait until ten minutes after the hour, to allow for stragglers. Tonight’s audience is equal parts silvery intellectuals and undergraduates in collegiate sweats. As I approach the lectern, a fly lands momentarily on my papers. My shoulders are tight […]
Whoever Gets Burnt from the Porridge, Blows on the Yogurt, Too
Just afore Lent, a crone popped her foul head through my cottage door. “I smell hunger,” she said. “I’m a recent widow with a young son.” “I smell birth.” “I’m with child.” She offered me a coarse wooden bowl. “It fills itself with porridge,” she said. Oh, the nonsense people come up with to plague […]
An Old Life
We were traveling to see an art installation in the country. The artist, now dead, had planted a ten-foot-tall drying rack in a copse of trees far from everywhere. We sloped easily over the mild hills of washed-out arcadia. Our world lay still. Four of us in a blue van, suspended in icy AC. I […]
New Journal Launch!
New year, new journal! Incredibly delighted to announce the launch of our SECOND literary journal. This autumn/winter edition collects all stories published on the site from July to November 2020: twenty-one pieces in total. Just as in the previous edition, these amazing stories, and their authors, represent the best that the flash fiction genre has […]
The Jersey Devil Stays Busy
Have you heard the one where I drive a convertible around the Pine Barrens, playing chicken with oncoming traffic, running the unsuspecting off the road? I like that legend, but I’d never sit behind the wheel. I hitch quite a few rides, mumbling to the drivers from the passenger seat. Not in any physical form, […]
Fire Pit
Dad built a fire pit in our backyard this summer, a beautiful ring of blue granite wrapped around crushed gravel and packed sand. It’s the first project he’s completed since he retired back in March and sold his auto body shop to a national chain, and sitting here in the backyard with him and Mom […]
Defector
It’s 1 p.m., Orbiter time, as I walk through the lunch crowd clogging the west concourse. Larry’s briefing was bare bones, as usual. He heads Information & Intelligence but doesn’t believe in either. He sends agents into the field with background data that would fit on one of the paper napkins that litter the floor […]
Smooch Smooch
Lorna stayed in her cubicle at lunch unlike the dozen or so others in her office. She walked to the break room and got a Coke and went back to her space. She took her brown bag out and opened the foil to get at her turkey sandwich and opened her bag of Doritos spreading […]