Flash Archives

WE COULD BE ANYONE by Alicia Bones

January 13, 2020 · Fiction

I knew I should feel sympathy for Laura, but her fire-bright face in the Abernathy-Smythe backyard unsettled me. She was telling me the details of her life, the really private, personal ones, though we’d only met a few times at parties hosted by shared acquaintances. “My father is a drunk, and my mother is sociopath,” Laura said, staring off into the fire. Jesus Christ, was all I could think as I twisted up my fingers. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t even think of what I should say. I was well-adjusted, a truth about myself that had bothered me…

x-r-a-y magazine

GIVING SPEECHES IN YOUR UNDERWEAR by Roslyn James

January 12, 2020 · Fiction

You are stirring onions, slowly caramelizing them. You can’t believe you’re married again. He’s in the other room, well not the other room. The long galley kitchen you’re standing in is attached to the living room. You can see him, sitting on the couch with his football game on, the volume turned way up, waiting for his dinner. He will not appreciate these onions you are laboring so long over. His favorite meals are ground beef tacos or chili. Two dishes you’ve grown to despise. Later that week, you come home for lunch because he asked you to. He’s not…

x-r-a-y magazine

THE DUMPSTER GAME by Rachel Mans McKenny

January 11, 2020 · Fiction

The Hu Palace had a classy buffet, with slippery chopsticks that went into the dishwasher not the break-apart kind. Baxter raised himself on the lid of Hu’s dumpster, hanging off it with forearms and elbows as anchor. The graying cabbage landscape and jagged Styrofoam iceberg looked the same as yesterday. Then a faint scratching. Something was alive, a small something. His foot found a cardboard box island in the sea of decomposing food. The box took his weight, so he swung the other leg inside, pushing the trash aside with a sneaker. A chick, brown wings folded under its body. …

x-r-a-y magazine

MY TORNADO by Joshua Bohnsack

January 9, 2020 · Fiction

While I could reach outside my tornado, it was still difficult to hug my date at the end of the night. He never asked me specifically about the tornado, but he did keep asking if I was okay. I said, “Yeah. Sure. Thanks for asking,” and knocked the saltshaker over. He took a pinch of salt and threw it over his left shoulder. “For good luck. It fixes it.” “Ah.” I tried to do the same, but the salt grains got stuck in my tornado and I became reminded of my failure every few seconds, when the salt would wrap…

x-r-a-y magazine

I KNOW ALL ABOUT COMBUSTION by Allie Marini

January 3, 2020 · Fiction

On the night of your funeral, I stand in front of a raging bonfire licking its way up to the blacked-out stars hidden in the sky above & let the snowstorm the radio says is on its way whip oily lashes of my hair across my cheeks. Drag them like a dirty razor kisses the skin to let something bleed out—you know all about the bleeding. How quietly it leaches into pine straw. How pine straw crackles when you throw it into a bonfire burning in rusted-out washing machine drum in the backwoods of Alachua county. You know all about…

x-r-a-y magazine

FOREVER by Jennifer London

December 30, 2019 · Fiction

Clara sat on the edge of the tub, smoothing the hem of her dress compulsively. Forever was an awfully long time, she thought. Forever was endless, sprawling, impossible. It was unnatural and unlikely. But maybe. Perhaps. Forever could be parties and dinners and clinking wine glasses. It could be laughter and snuggles and warm touches in the dark. For a moment the murmur of voices outside the bathroom door didn’t sound quite so ominous. But a memory came to her, as sudden and sharp as a slap in the face: her mother and father shouting at each other, a spray…

x-r-a-y magazine

ALL THE THINGS WE’LL NEVER HAVE by Christopher DeWan

December 29, 2019 · Creative Nonfiction

I remember, there was going to be a birthday party for Michael. He was turning ten. Michael was always interrupting, saying things that weren’t funny or important, because he couldn’t stand not being the center of attention. My mom said it was because he didn’t have a dad. But Michael’s party meant I could go to the toy store to buy something I wanted, even if I would have to give it away. And the party would be a chance to see Karen. Karen was older and maybe that’s why she didn’t suffer so much from not having a dad….

x-r-a-y magazine

SOMEPLACE ELSE by Emma Stough

December 28, 2019 · Fiction

I am here now. Wide unexplained sky. How did I get here? Wait. Let’s stop. No, let’s start. We are here now. Again, I think. Purple wallpaper. My family huddled around the TV watching Seinfeld re-runs. I am squeezed between Aggressive Older Brother and Sensitive Younger Brother—I am boiling with discontent. My family huddles like this for decades. The living room stays the same: plush green sofa (embedded with chips and cat hairs, is the cat still alive?) and purple wallpaper. Purple like the dregs of the bitter plum tea. Purple like the dying breath of stormy sunset. Purple like…

x-r-a-y magazine

GIRLS OF THE ARBORETUM by Brianne M. Kohl

December 27, 2019 · Fiction

The girls of the arboretum are just girls. Nothing more, nothing less. They do not speak to one another. Why would they? The wind blows through their branches. Everything that must be said has already been said. The world is over four billion years old. When no one is watching, the girls pluck spider webs from each other’s hair and stretch the silk across the grass, blade to blade. They spend hours measuring the spiral burrs of a pine cone. In moonlight, they find constellations within the veins of Maple leaves. The girls of the arboretum have not yet discovered…

x-r-a-y magazine

FISH GHOST by Kevin Richard White

December 23, 2019 · Fiction

My sister spoke of a fish ghost that occupies a nearby river. She raised her voice as if her sentences had a weight. But in reality, she’s timid. “It has bones and fins,” she said, “but it is poor at cutting through the water.” “Amanda,” I said as she swayed, a wind tearing through my hoodie that she always wore. “Something like an urban monster.” Her eyes widened. “Legend, you mean.” “Whatever.” It’s possible she’s correct. There’s always been rumblings from neighbors and lifers that there’s a creature existing in our milieu. Cameras mysteriously break when one gets close to…

x-r-a-y magazine

« Previous 1…62 636465 66…95 Next »