Flash

DOGWALKER by L Scully

July 15, 2020

I Once, when you were still a girl, you loved another person. At the time, they were a girl too and you relished in your mutual girlhood from the roof of the funeral home in which you lived. You stayed in the funeral director’s suite and put up strings of tiny lights and a record player your girlfriend restored from the 70s. You would lay in the park with this friend of yours, heads on each other’s chests, nights spent giggling and intertwined. When they were a girl and you were a girl they were magic. You would crawl out

THREE QUARTERS by Steve Campbell

July 15, 2020

My uncle lost his leg in a motorbike accident. It wasn’t his whole leg, just half of it. And it wasn’t lost either, the doctors cut it off, but that’s what everyone whispers: He’s lost his leg, and then they cock their heads to one side and sort of smile. As I’m buying grapes for the hospital visit with my step-mother, the lady at the check-out makes the same head movement. She comments on how much my step-mother and I look alike. When I open my mouth to explain, my step-mother prods me so the lady can’t see. “Oh, I’m

TO THE RESIDENTS OF NINETEEN-SOMETHING WEST NELSON by MK Sturdevant

July 8, 2020

To the Residents of Nineteen-Something West Nelson, I had sex in your living room. At the time, it was a fetus of a room, a zygote of a house. Your living room had just been set on its paved frames and caissons like a mother hen about to lay some furnishings. You know those tall, narrow windows trending in the new builds around ’07? The streetlamp light was gushing in, there was no glass, just these wings of Tyvek flapping like a slack sail at midnight on the open sea. We had gone for sushi in Bucktown. We were both

OFF COME THE MASKS by Mitchell Waldman

July 7, 2020

I’m driving down 104, out in the thinning herd of metal vehicles in pursuit of essentials, my mask on the seat beside me, right next to the miniature bottle of hand sanitizer and the pack of Marlboros, when I see him standing on the corner of 104 and Lake with his thin frame, long white beard, and the sign thrust up in the air “Prepare to Meet Your God!” I don’t know what comes over me, I slam on the brakes, the car behind almost smashing right into me, bleating its horn. I get out of the vehicle, and walk

SPREE by Meg Tuite

July 6, 2020

Mom has an entire fortress of pillows that she readjusts around her body. “Barricading my skin against bedsores. Stay in one place for too long and you’ll have to order another ass from Walgreens.” Amber prescription bottles layer her bedside table. She marks the empties with a black X, doesn’t throw them away until a refill has been secured. Rustling toes mow through bed sheets as Mom drags up another mini-vodka with her feet. The bottomless cascade of that clear liquid is her Niagara Falls. She is queen of the mini-island. Bottles are stashed away in pockets, beds, pillows, shoes,

UPHOLSTERY by Corey Farrenkopf

July 6, 2020

Silva left the tacks on the floor. Rick said to. Sweep up after, it saves time. The upholstery shop smelled of pulled cotton, dry foam, and whatever scent the furniture carried from its original home. Sometimes it was garlic, sometimes mothballs and wine. The plaid wingback chair propped before Silva held an odd copper aroma. He pried rusted staples from the armrest with a pronged screwdriver, tapping its steel end with a rubber mallet. Sometimes the metal was so old it turned to dust beneath Silva’s blows. Just leave them. I’ll cut them out later, Rick would say from behind

DOG TRACING by Mike Andrelczyk

July 5, 2020

I just remembered a maintenance man I used to work with who said he liked to get drunk and trace his dog on big sheets of paper and his garden was lined with pieces of broken hotel sinks. I just remembered this. Out of nowhere. When things come into your mind from out of nowhere it’s like looking at the outline of a dog on a piece of paper. The dog is gone, but its shape is there. This is a memory. Imagine one of those shitty video dissolving effects now. …. …. …. OK. I was standing in the

KILLING PLANTS by Aaron Kreuter

June 30, 2020

It was during Fletcher’s third week at the new job that he noticed Colleen’s plant didn’t look so hot. The plant’s big green leaves were sagging, nearly touching the desk. Nobody had asked him to take care of the plant during his ten-month contract, filling in for Colleen while she was on mat leave, but the plant was obviously thirsty. Fletcher filled up his coffee mug with water and poured it into the off-white pot, the soil quickly sucking it up. Just to be safe, he tipped in a second mugful; this time, a half-inch of water remained sitting on

TIME TRAVELING ANTIQUE DEALER by Travis Dahlke

June 29, 2020

The owner of Beachman’s eBay store had it bad for my best friend Gedaliah. I didn’t trust him because his eyeballs were made three times smaller by his glasses and it was rumored he kept a time machine in his stockroom used for poaching antiques. The eBay thing was just a front and a former ketchup plant kept the whole operation mostly hidden from public view. Gedaliah paid nine hundred dollars for her walnut pembroke table but the bureau that Beachman sold me was a reproduction with drilled-in wormholes. Gedaliah’s table reeked of tea bags close up. The nails piecing

THE FAMILY THAT SKIS TOGETHER by Kim Magowan

June 27, 2020

“The family that plays together stays together,” Carol’s father used to say, though even at the time Carol had felt skeptical about that assessment, given her mother’s aversion to all forms of competition and her brother’s more specific aversion to losing. Oh, the way Alec’s skin would mottle, the way he would say, under his breath so their parents couldn’t hear, “Well, fuck you,” when Carol would knock his croquet ball into the trees. (And Carol would feel both elated and ashamed, or more precisely, ashamed because elated, and sorry for herself for having a brother who was such a