Flash | X-R-A-Y

DEATH BED by Dóra Grőber

March 22, 2018

You’re sitting in your bed, legs pulled up to your chest, black, unkempt hair in an unusual ponytail and you don’t talk, not because he’s not home but because you have nothing to say. Just a few hours ago you were standing on your desk and painting on the wall, first with a brush and then with your hands, listening to the song Rolling by Soul Coughing, not on repeat. You didn’t feel like an artist but you didn’t feel fake. You felt like this was recovery or at least some level or element of it, something he could see

CREATION STORY by Bob Schofield

March 21, 2018

At first the world was just one spiral. Then that spiral grew a face. The face was hungry. It filled with water. The face was silent, but never sleeping. A single tooth grew through the bottom. The face was a word, and that word was “lake.” The lake was tended by older creatures. Giants with horns and black spiral faces. The whole earth cooled beneath their shadow. They danced over the hills on cloven feet. The lake was the twisting center of a universe. Gears were built to keep it all in motion. Fish were constructed, to keep the water

THE JANNICK OVERTURE by Avee Chaudhuri

March 20, 2018

Nacogdoches, Texas Jannick Meissner claimed to be from Eastern Bavaria. He spoke theatrically, e.g. “I will revenge myself upon Castro.” Castro had slighted Jannick by not inviting him to an ongoing, Sunday afternoon table-top role playing game. Jannick was livid. “I am an excellent storyteller,” he told me. We were drinking on Jannick’s front porch. I sat and he paced back and forth in a very tortured manner. “I will revenge myself upon Castro,” he repeated. “You don’t even like role playing games,” I pointed out. “This is accurate,” Jannick conceded. Jannick was a very cultured, seemingly intelligent German male

“NO BOOK BLURB, NO CRY” EXCERPT by Brian Alan Ellis

March 16, 2018

An Inspirational/Crazy Informative Guide to Proper Book Blurbage (An excerpt from Sad Laughter, forthcoming from Civil Coping Mechanisms) “[This book] will fry up some prose eggs in your ol’ brain pan.” ⋆⋆⋆ “[This writer] is the kind of poet whose madness and how [he/she] exorcises that madness is a thing of dark brilliance one can admire from afar but if you ever let [him/her] crash at your house for a few days [he/she] would scare the living shit out of you.” ⋆⋆⋆ “[This writer] can fix your pipes and your roofing but [his/her] book of durable, brick-layered stories can also

PENNY GORING’S hatefuck the reader REVIEW by Chris Dankland

March 15, 2018

GET THE BOOK (read online + download epub and mobi versions for free) LENGTH: 7,000 words PUBLISHER: 5everdankly publications, 2016 YOU MIGHT LIKE THIS BOOK IF YOU LIKE: Kathy Acker, Édouard Levé, Sarah Kane Penny Goring’s book ‘hatefuck the reader’ starts with the sound of someone talking so close to your ear that you can feel hot breath: when i was invincible i believed beauty lasts forever and i died every day. you gave me nothing. i prefer to think you hit me because you are ill. i prefer to stroke my cold pillow. i prefer to sit on a chair

ON OUR WAY TO SEE YOU by Ashley Hutson

March 15, 2018

Right now we’re stuck behind a funeral procession and it looks like we’re going to be late. Mack keeps saying, How long, how long? We’re on our way to see you. I adjust the rear-view mirror, and Mack is in the back seat, bouncing around. He never settles down when the car goes slow, refuses to be lulled like other children, does not even want to be sung to. He’s saying, How long, how long? And it is about noon right now, and it is a beautiful day and it is November. There is a hearse way up at the

GHOST SEX by Chris Dankland

March 14, 2018

Lucille died of leukemia in Utah. Richard died in a car accident in Seoul. They were both 16 years old when they died, and now they’d be 16 years old forever, two pissed off sulking virgins condemned to populate the dreams of the living. All those faceless extras that appear in your dreams, where do you think they come from? Just whipped up out of nowhere? No you idiot, those people are ghosts. /// In 1967, a Dominican garbage man in Queens dreamed about winning the Nobel Prize. Lucille and Richard were in the audience, sitting next to each other.

ANATOMY OF A DISTANCE by Elle Nash

March 12, 2018

A list of things you miss. A touch with the lips. The knock-you-on-your-ass touch, the kind that starts in the lower extremity of the leg below the ankle, as he moves closer to you, the kind where he waits for you to wrap your ammunition around him and then he pulls you in and you press with your lips pursed and slightly parted, like an immature form of animal or insect which undergoes some metamorphosis on this fucked earth, together with all of its countries, peoples and natural features which hide in our internal organs, a pear-shaped enlargement of the

YOU ALWAYS GET CAUGHT ON THE LAST ONE by Steve Anwyll

March 11, 2018

Ain’t it always the case. I’m bored as fuck. Life’s like that. So I fill my coat pockets with cans of beer. Drink as I cruise the streets. Stopping to look in windows that aren’t obstructed. And ain’t it always the case? You get caught on the last one. The whole night going good. Then blammo. Out of nowhere. It’s over. Some fucking do-gooder concerned citizen. Prodding into affairs that ain’t their own. Acting tough. And as soon as they start yelling. You know you’re sunk. Like tonight. I’m standing there in the darkness. Behind these shrubs. Tall ones. I

LISTEN, MY SISTER, LISTEN by Gary J. Shipley

March 9, 2018

He watched his legs grow from the armpits of his baby sister every day for a year. Both white calves there on the door of the fridge whenever he looked, and around them the arms of his sisters that through some mistake of birth were limited to two. Their eyes and feet and ears likewise dyadic. And the things they had only one of absurdly depleted in this same way. Your sister was never more than one, the mothers kept saying. For the mother-body also seemed to be hiding someone else inside it, without any admission as to why it