flash fiction: results 1–24 of 30

Sir, I remain faithful that you will still grant this request to charge. My men and I are still waiting for the enemy's attack on this promontory in Batangas, but it seems they, too, have lost their strength. Every night, we keep watch over that part of Manila, Cavite, and Laguna that is engulfed in flames. We know, as the fire gets closer, your arrival also nears.

I sprinted towards the doors, without hesitation; Ian and Kate close behind me, pushing and shoving—propelling me forward. Once at the door, I crept in slowly, excited and relieved to feel the warm, humid air—mingled with the thick smell of chlorine. On the opposite end of the Olympic size pool, was our school motto, painted in large, sweeping, chirographic strokes: Scientia Auget Vires (Knowledge Increases Strength).

"Is anyone else in the building today?" I wondered aloud, suddenly nervous.

When Kev came home from walking Ruffo, the Shar-Pei, he noticed the sofa and easy chair were gone.

"I'm having them reupholstered," Tiffany told him.

The Oriental carpet was also missing. "Being cleaned," she said.

Sixty-two year old Paul McCartney, a bankrupt businessman of Liverpool, strolled down Penny Lane watching children laugh behind the back of a banker with a motorcar. He worried how he was going to pay the rent due next week on his flat across the hall from Father McKenzie. He carried an old transistor radio that he had pilfered from the junkshop down by Strawberry Fields.

"Don't look down."

The one in charge was the one who said it, though that changed depending on who brought the best toys. We started with rocks. Then bottles, plates, fly-fishing lures, paper airplanes and doll heads. One day we'd fling ourselves.

The day her husband died, her period stopped. It just shut itself off and left her, left the blood building and boiling inside, fermenting into this rage that she could only release at the piano. It wasn't supposed to happen like that…

You've always feared that modern art was a sham, that a bunch of apes with Crayolas could do the same, if not better. I can prove otherwise in spades.

In the morning her postcard lay in the mail safe, a little apart from the other mail, singing, "Enjoy yourself. It's later than you think."

My boyfriend is a helium balloon, way above me, gently tugging at my hand. His head tosses in the breeze, craning whichever way the wind blows, his neck long and flimsy. I tell my friends how jealous this makes me—that he's looking at other girls—and they say I am being silly.

Richard is an outcast. He has bony elbows and a face that's all nose.

Somewhere in New Mexico. The bar is almost empty and the sun cuts a pattern like a paw print across what was once a beautiful countertop, giving it length, making a confessional out of the tiny crevices of its beveled edges. The bartender is a man who used to be handsome—now he has to work for his living. He begins with a conversation.

In second grade I learned about abuse and the German language.

Club meeting, convened. Fluorescent lights shine candescent where once our faces were lit dimly red and blue by beer-sign neon glow. Captain up front, popping his gavel made from the antique walnut stocks of a Colt Peacemaker.

My friend says, "If you look for love you'll never find it." Then she tells me how she and her boyfriend take a shower together every morning.

This is an outsourced text. The authorial voice known (or, for the most part, unknown) as Ptim Callan has outsourced the creation of this short story to a multinational contracting agency whose name could not appropriately—tastefully—be given here.

I nod off? Listen. Call it a bell though it buzzes. More crackle than buzz. All my life, houses. Houses have bells. Apartments buzzers. Townhouse Georgia calls it. Shithouse. Listen.

Near the old Jefferson Airplane mansion, in back of a cab on the right side, drunk on more than wine, I'm looking over at the sedan next to us. The passenger is the stellar blonde replica of a porn star/exotic dancer of some repute.

Still in the sunlight he had to squint. His eyes, never his most trustworthy apparatus, still hurt. Sunglasses were an option at first but they made him self-conscious, as baneful a death as blindness.

In her dreams of November Isabel was always free. Consider: November in the district of Novaliches is the perfect medias res.

Trains run late. They always run late. Do they even have a schedule?

Their legs are trees. He jaguars into the room. He stalks in pajamouflage. A tree root guts him with an upkick, flips him, stunned. He looks up like he's down in the lesson tub looking up at Father. A man's smile wavers in a whiskey glass.

She's so angry with me, the scissors buttermelt from the friction when I cut her hair. She fruitchecks my cheek and hostage negotiates the soggy clippers out of my hand.

Twenty minutes until my brother's wedding and I'm drunk and my mouth is hot and thick with vomit.

The enamel market isn't what it used to be. And with the cost of raw materials up through the roof, I don't know how much longer I can stay in this business. Profit margins can only shrink so much, you know.