Flash

SLEEPY TIGER by Matthew Bookin

August 9, 2019

Paul started doing deliveries. He was 19 days sober. The passenger side of his car still looked like a carefully crushed soda can. The travel bottle of Listerine was still in his glove box. Emir’s food truck business had expanded into an actual restaurant. Paul was hired on as their 31-year-old delivery boy. He picked up racks of steamed dumplings from the restaurant and loaded them into the back of his nearly defeated red car. It was early summer and sometimes, mostly on the weekends, he could be out making deliveries until dawn. He felt quiet and newly alive. He

AS SEEN ON TV by Kyra Kondis

August 8, 2019

Bedazzler It’s your idea to go as KISS for your first real Halloween party in your freshman year of high school, and of course nobody warns you that your three friends will back out of the costume at the last second. You won’t get their text until your mother drops you off a block away from the party’s actual location. A few weeks before, you’d begged her for the $19.95 you needed to punch plastic rhinestones up and down the legs of too-small black jeans; you have to wear these jeans. It starts to drizzle before you get to the

COYOTES by Dan Crawley

August 6, 2019

I find myself fading under ballooning khakis, a parachuting buttoned-down shirt. I let myself in Big Sis’s place through an open sliding glass door. Last time, I found a bundle of twenties in a kitchen cabinet drawer, next to the stove. I ripped out most of the blue paper from a pad on the counter, keeping a few twenties on top of the rubber-banded roll. This time, a million paper clips and batteries like polished coins and plastic measuring spoons litter the bottom of the drawer. I could weep four ounces. Then I hear another’s weeping and I see Big

NEW CORNERS by Alexondria Jolene

August 5, 2019

The ocean goes unseen. Water scares her, she chokes as she sips it. She stays in her room while new people load in. It happens every few days. The room doesn’t have a window. The feeling of waves make her sick; she can’t stand to look at them in motion. A tiny pastel painting of a palm tree reminds her of one she saw in a doctor’s office as a child. Coiled on her bed, the silence strains her ears until horns and fireworks make tiny explosions. They sound small. They sound far. She steps into the hallway for some

FRIDGE NOTE by Matt Boyarsky

July 31, 2019

Good morning, my little junkyard dog. Sleep okay? I put on a fresh pot, and your old man is propped up sturdy in the recliner. I sprayed him with Febreeze to be safe. He’ll be fine. He’s not going anywhere. Please come watch the sunrise with me? That spot — down at the reservoir, where we made love, where we rolled around in the lithium, and I thought I grew a third ear as I climbed out from the sludge a monster, and you asked me if I was scared, and I said, “shit yeah”— that’s where I’ll be. I didn’t

THE PIPES by E.M. Stormo

July 30, 2019

Mom doesn’t let me drink from the pipes. “Don’t be a dog,” she says, but I can’t help it. All I hear is “Be a dog.” On the outskirts of the city, there’s a pipe that flows all day long. You have to squat in a ditch to drink, but it’s worth it. At night, nobody bothers you. Giant women make neon eyes from the city, but that’s it. The pipe-water tastes fresh, although Mom says, “It’s probably sewage.” I hear her calling me home from miles away. My ears itch of worms, so she must be saying my name.

KIWI by Lee Matalone

July 28, 2019

You need to put the diaper on the other way, stupid, your brother lectures you, as if you hadn’t practically changed his diaper growing up, such a hot mess, from day one. Though you are twins, Jade wasn’t truly potty trained until years after you, pissing in his bedsheets till he was four, five years old. You two aren’t all that similar, as a matter of fact. As a baby he never cried, he didn’t speak really until he was six or seven and even then words were spare. For Mama his cough was a gift from God. You on

FRANK’S BOUGAINVILLEA by J. EDWARD KRUFT

July 25, 2019

“When Joey’s husband died,” Stefania stage-whispered to their guests, “he was out of his mind. You know, they moved here to begin with partly because of Frank’s house. Really! Joey’s been…what?…well, obsessed really isn’t worded too strongly. “You know, it’s only a half a mile from here, as a crow flies.” The outdoor speakers crackled and Stefania shook her head. “Gerry Rafferty! It’s his newest thing. Who the fuck is a Gerry Rafferty fan? I swear to God, I shit Baker Street.” Joey approached and Stefania placed a finger to pursed lips. “Is she boring you with the bougainvillea story?”

MISAPPREHENSION DUET by Graham Robert Scott

July 24, 2019

Even by nine a.m., the heat’s settled in like a blanket, calories by the zillions, welling out from laboring bodies and machines under the desert sun, trapped under layers of atmosphere and cloud and smog. Damp handkerchief in one clenched fist, Dale Brenner mops brow and crown. He aims his lips at the reporter—Gina? Tina?—and bellows against a cacophony of straddle carriers and trucks, of containers crashing into place: This freight’s all dead tires. Once it makes port, it’s on its way to ’Nam. A sideloader grinds by. As G(T)ina checks her phone, its driver gives Dale the bird. It’s

FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY by Julie Watson

July 23, 2019

Two weeks after Jane and Richard sent their only son Bobby to college, Richard lost his job. He’s been talking in his sleep non-stop ever since, nearly six months now. Jane is exhausted. She knows any sane woman would have exiled her husband to the guest room by now, or marched him into the office of a reputable sleep specialist. But for Jane, Richard’s new habit is revelatory. Since he started talking in the night, Jane has learned more about her husband than she did in the entire twenty-two years prior. Richard’s job search is going poorly. In order for