by Dawn Tasaka Steffler Melissa Llanes Brownlee’s Bitter Over Sweet was the 2023 winner of the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards. This accomplishment was huge for Melissa, but also for the Flash community. As she says in this interview, and has mentioned...
Kathy Morris must have been half-bat, half-opossum because no human could hang upside down for so long and not feel funny about it after. She’d flip herself over the monkey bars and chase us back into school like it was no big deal she’d just hung there with her hair...
Overnight, the lake reveals itself. We wake to the sudden beating of its body against our properties. The sudden beating. The sudden beating. At first, we ignore it. We see it but pretend not to. Like we often do with our neighbors. But then our pets begin to...
We had always been many-in-one, even before witch-woman Nnenka's curse made it flesh. Our mothers stood at different cooking fires, our fathers prayed to different ancestors, yet destiny pulled us together like scattered beads finding their way back to a single...
Between Abuela's mobile home and mine, a white sand path interweaves the moonlit scrub pine. Sometimes it is ribboned with the tracks of sidewinders, so we watch our step, especially near the Spanish bayonets beneath which they like to coil. If the snakes have any...
This shortlist didn't come any easier to decide as we received so many great stories with unique premises and characters! There was a great response to this contest, and so many great stories that it took us longer than usual to decide, but we're excited to share with...
Writers and Readers! We've been spending our time this summer and into the fall reading for this contest, and we've finally set our longlist! There was a great response to this contest, and so many great stories that it took us longer than usual, but we're excited to...
My dad sits on the couch after Thanksgiving dinner and announces he wants buried in Carhartt overalls. He's 82, retired from the mines, and too cheap to buy Carhartt while he's alive. "I hear they’re warm. Leave a clawhammer in the pocket." He pats his jeans. "If...
The television casts a garish parade of colors across your unlined brow. From the corner of the bar, you watch me, not the game, but drop your eyes when I meet your gaze. More mating whisper than mating call. Wesley, the sleepy-eyed bartender, spies my nearly-finished...
Your older sister is the amusement park at the end of the boardwalk, the one that’s been in the mayor’s family for a century and looks it; the one the mayor doesn’t maintain because the newer one, halfway down and closer to the big hotels, gets all the foot traffic...
Seeking a companion. Need not be romantic; platonic is fine. Just someone to wake up to for that morning breath that feels stale with closed-mouth soft snores, and those eyes holding long, floating eyelashes that I want to touch but won’t. Just someone who will empty...
during a 50-minute massage. The grading, the emails, the sunken cold: my mid-back balled into a walnut. At Hand and Stone, a blind masseuse named Homer leads me to a room with prancing emerald lights: hospital sink, mirror from Marshall’s—a franchised underworld....