fiction that lingers long after the flash
flash
The Bride Is Eating Cake and the DJ Is Playing Werewolves of London
The couple at the next table has brought a three-year-old to the wedding reception. Martha sports a pinched look, but we do not speak. Words have failed us. The child’s mother pours herself a third refill from the bottle of red; the father devours a shrimp cocktail....
Kintsugi
One time, a porcelain doll lived within a music box. Beautiful, everyone who saw it said, pale skin and dark hair, raised en pointe with hands brushing the sky, forever dancing in an endless twirl. The doll was fragile; everyone knew that, but no one paid much mind....
Blackberry Pie
Cora couldn’t explain why she was baking a blackberry pie at three in the morning, even though she hated blackberry pie. She couldn’t explain why she dug into every cardboard box, searching for all her kitchen tools. She couldn’t explain why she tossed everything else...
Weed
The sky went dark on a Monday, pushing the straining sun behind a curtain of smoke, creating an opaque swath of grayness where light would catch – lost – never making it to the retina, never lighting up the things we had been used to seeing: tree leaves in the...
Another Friday
Back home inside our first floor apartment at 2PM, as we were, after a morning at the city library where we spent several hours while mom searched through the mysteries for one that suited her and I picked out a couple of graphic novels, after mom had splashed the...
Good Dog
Dad calls it “Eyesore Trashtown”. I don't read perfect yet, but looking at the letters on the sign, I don’t think that’s right. “It’s called Eastlake Terrace,” Mom says, hugging her purse tight and shooing me into the elevator. “Dad thinks he’s funny.” Dad wasn’t...
Scintilla River & A Boy Under Glass
His body was cocooned in ice. A casket of ice. Like one of those gag gift ice cubes—plastic-clear with a fly trapped in the center. Illinois winter was that plastic cube and he—that boy—miles and years downriver—he was that fly. He was that fly. If he’d been alive...
Dog Years
I was on our excuse for a back porch, no one ever put in screens, and it smelled like oranges under my finger nails. Jack lowered himself into the lawn chair next to the old Boy Scout cot I was on, looking up at the rain-stained roof with bits of tar paper peeking...
Nest
“The birds are always watching,” Mama used to say. We had a bird cage in nearly every room of the house. The parakeets in the living room seemed more at home than I did. The lovebirds in the kitchen reminded everyone how bonded they were every time you tried to make...
micro
Coyote, Bones, Howl
CoyoteThe house slept while I stayed up stretching, trying to fit my body into this world, knowingsomething ancient lives inside me and needs to ease into sleep. It worms its way through mybloodstream. A howl, released with a stretch to hide its strangeness. It is all...
A Perfect Pair
My husband has this idea to marry a laundromat and a bowling alley. “A perfect pair,” he says. “Like us.” He’s an idiot. Who’d want that? “Think about it. Now they wait for free, but we could clean up.” I roll my eyes. “Maybe some video games or an air hockey table...
Boys in Boxes
The men are dying. We’re the boys who see them. In tabloids, on news bulletins. Faces pocked with purple lesions, bodies ravaged by weight loss. Their abandoned eyes, their hollowed-out stares, hold us. We’re told it’s a plague of our own making. Our fathers—both Holy...
Our Father
There’s a photo of our father, donning a black suit, standing under a tree, with a mischievous smile and a diamond stud in his left ear. He was at a wedding, at a funeral, at a party, at a business meeting, outside a church, behind a courthouse, in another city, in...
Secret to Marriage
They sit in silence on the farmhouse porch. It’s nothing, he hopes. Earlier as his wife lay sleeping, toes twitching, nightgown transparent from sweat, he’d turned away, denying her protracted slumber meant anything. He brushed teeth, brewed coffee, ignoring his...
I Come From Aliens
There’s a picture from my wedding where my father looks at me with his face all screwed up with concern and his hand scratching his head. Forty years later, on the couch at the dementia ward where he now lives, and I visit, he gives me the same look. This time, I’ve...
Neighborhood
Occasionally I walk here, when the weather permits. Today I spot a man watering his garden, a riot of grasses and Yarrow bushes colonized by bees, prairie flowers penned up with Zinnias. A tall and forbidding something with bulbous green knobs that attracts...
One Night, the Moon Starts Crying
Tears falling to earth in gulps of rain. No one knows why the moon is crying but everyone’s making a guess. Mr. Blake from the hardware store blames it on the fact that no one buys light bulbs anymore. “Got them LED things that never burn out, and soon,” Mr. Blake...
You are pulling your hair again
and I don’t say anything as you drop each strand on the ground and I wonder are you okay do you need help is that good for you as I see patches spread across your head and I know that it’s not good for you, but it must be if you are still doing it even after everyone...
contest winners
The Bride Is Eating Cake and the DJ Is Playing Werewolves of London
The couple at the next table has brought a three-year-old to the wedding reception. Martha sports a pinched look, but we do not speak. Words have failed us. The child’s mother pours herself a third refill from the bottle of red; the father devours a shrimp cocktail....
Kintsugi
One time, a porcelain doll lived within a music box. Beautiful, everyone who saw it said, pale skin and dark hair, raised en pointe with hands brushing the sky, forever dancing in an endless twirl. The doll was fragile; everyone knew that, but no one paid much mind....
Blackberry Pie
Cora couldn’t explain why she was baking a blackberry pie at three in the morning, even though she hated blackberry pie. She couldn’t explain why she dug into every cardboard box, searching for all her kitchen tools. She couldn’t explain why she tossed everything else...
Ghost, Fable, and Fairy Tales Prize Judged by Dan Chaon Longlist
Congrats to all of our long-listed writers! Your story stood out to our readers and editors, and we're excited to continue reading to find the perfect shortlist to send to Judge Dan Chaon! Longlist: Temptation a white horse runs without its rider The Bureau of Exiled...
Gods & Monsters Challenge Winner & Shortlist
And the winner is… What the Bones Remember by Melinda Li We loved this story from its opening line. The way it plays with paradox creates this liminal space between a god and their people. The story had a great structure with the god returning in new forms, each one...
Weed
The sky went dark on a Monday, pushing the straining sun behind a curtain of smoke, creating an opaque swath of grayness where light would catch – lost – never making it to the retina, never lighting up the things we had been used to seeing: tree leaves in the...
Another Friday
Back home inside our first floor apartment at 2PM, as we were, after a morning at the city library where we spent several hours while mom searched through the mysteries for one that suited her and I picked out a couple of graphic novels, after mom had splashed the...
Good Dog
Dad calls it “Eyesore Trashtown”. I don't read perfect yet, but looking at the letters on the sign, I don’t think that’s right. “It’s called Eastlake Terrace,” Mom says, hugging her purse tight and shooing me into the elevator. “Dad thinks he’s funny.” Dad wasn’t...
Scintilla River & A Boy Under Glass
His body was cocooned in ice. A casket of ice. Like one of those gag gift ice cubes—plastic-clear with a fly trapped in the center. Illinois winter was that plastic cube and he—that boy—miles and years downriver—he was that fly. He was that fly. If he’d been alive...