Flash

JUST ANOTHER FRIDAY by Stefanie K. Yang

August 6, 2025

When Gary died, nobody mourned—not even his siblings. Everyone agreed he lived like a ghost, practically invisible and emerging only when absolutely necessary. He had no children and accomplished very little. He wouldn’t be missed. Like many before him, Gary simply ceased to exist while time and the universe continued on. Yet, for a brief moment, Gary mattered. Gary was murdered. He was killed in his own home in his own bathtub on a Thursday evening between nine- and ten-o’-clock. The most conspicuous evidence was his severed leg. The killer left it in his bathtub in a shallow pool of

PRAYER BREAKFAST by Emma Ensley

July 30, 2025

I knew that downloading music was illegal, but my dad was the one who showed me how to do it, so I didn’t worry too much. I still prayed at night for God to forgive me, just in case. *** The Australian’s username was koala_rocks47 and he was thirty-two, though I didn’t know that yet. I was eleven and three-quarters. I’d found the John Mayer fan forum through a Google search after Drew read the lyrics to “Why Georgia” in Literature class, during our poetry unit. “am I living it right?” over and over again, while his hands shook. I

FOREVER by Spencer Lee

July 25, 2025

I’m sitting at the pool with the boys, listening to the gardener trim the hedges. The world right now is loud and whirring. When the gauze comes off, everything will be graceful and good. My surgeon’s a short man with steroid face–large, skeletal nostrils–but he has great taste in women’s faces. My face feels taut and ready for anything. Underneath the bandages, I swear that I’m smiling down at the boys. I lower my feet into the lukewarm water. The sun is injecting undulating crystals of white that look like ominous little spirits. Or Xanaxs. I wonder what my husband’s

SWIMMERS by Tobi Pledger

July 24, 2025

Doc Raeford lifted the tail and stepped back to avoid the torrent of steaming bull shit. After the last wink of the bull’s anus, he leaned forward and pushed the electroejaculator probe into the rectum, completing the docking maneuver. “Bull’s eye.” Mike would never have imagined that he’d enjoy helping a veterinarian anally penetrate a two-thousand-pound Angus bull, but he did. Raeford shrugged. “It’s a gift.” The bull resisted the intrusion, lunging forward, shoving his chest against the gate of the squeeze chute with a jolt. His nostrils flared, flecks of foamy mucus blowing out on the exhale. The Texas

MUTUAL by Caroline Porter

July 21, 2025

Amelia-Rose followed first. She even had the audacity to message Francis afterwards, as if following real life acquaintances on Tumblr was normal. Hi Francis! It’s nice to see someone else who is as online as me lol. xoxo—AR Francis freaked, of course. She couldn’t picture Amelia-Rose as a fellow Columbiner, not even as one of the fangirls exclusively in it for horny reasons: the ones who posted crime scene photos of Eric’s body captioned idk hes kinda cute without his face, who posted drawings of a shirtless Dylan Klebold, passably rendered in ballpoint pen—not that Francis thought there was any

PARROT by László Darvasi, translated from Hungarian by Ági Bori

July 15, 2025

As was his habit, he lay down for an afternoon nap, although next door they were building a church. The sounds of drills, hammers, and other tools kept waking him up. He fumbled his way to the kitchen, drank two glasses of absinthe in quick little swigs, plopped back in the armchair, and stared at the ceiling. Up there, the light was moving back and forth, forming streaks and patches, devouring itself. They were puttering around next door, and he remembered that the foreman had once said to the workers that not all of them would live long enough to

POCKET UNIVERSE by D.T. Robbins

July 14, 2025

I find a pocket universe in my apartment building. A whole ass other universe two floors below me! On the 23rd floor to be exact. You’d never know it was a pocket universe by looking at it. From the outside, it just looks like another normal door to another normal apartment. The pocket universe feels like it’s made for me. Like its dark energy and matter and various particles all exploded from the nethermost parts of my soul during its creation or my creation, or maybe they happened simultaneously and that’s how love works. The first night that I’m in

JITTERBUG JOHNNY by Grey Traynor

July 11, 2025

Jitterbug Johnny made it to the back of a dozen trucks and sports utility vehicles in the form of a sticker: “Jitterbug Johnny 1965-2023 – ‘Drive faster than an eagle takes flight!’” Jitterbug said the phrase any chance he could: before and after taking a shot, getting out of cold above-ground pools, even while receiving the toothiest blow job. However, it was a phrase that bothered some folks, sticking in their ear like a stubborn wad of wax. Did eagles take to flight faster than most other birds, they would wonder, shouldn’t this pithy encouragement have more to do with

ANOTHER WORD FOR IT by David Hering

June 13, 2025

The woman who wrote Beowulf considered it juvenilia. She composed it during the years she roamed close to the old hall, hearing the revelry, watching the fighting and fucking from the slippery dark outside. Over the long seasons she recognised, in her observations of the hall, a will that sprung from its inhabitants; a mode of life that ran in tight, obsolete cycles. Drink spilled, offence taken, necks opened, blood added to mud, children made, killed. These dances played out, accumulated nothing. Over time, she moved away from the hall and disavowed the tales she wrote about it. In their

PERSONAL LIFE #35 by Ulyses Razo

June 12, 2025

In 1983, when I was 32, I invited my Sorbonne classmate Renée Hartevelt to dinner at my apartment at 10 Rue Erlanger, under the pretext of translating poetry for a school assignment. I planned to kill and eat her, having selected her for her health and beauty, characteristics I felt I lacked. I have had a lifelong suspicion that people find me mentally and physically repulsive. However, many of those who meet me find me to possess obvious intelligence and a sense of humor. They also find me handsome, although of austere appearance. I am often regarded as “very self-analytic.”