Stories tagged flash-fiction

Leaving Home

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She refused to leave her parents to marry him.

The Modern Man

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He tussled the whitetail deer and the windmills and the tractors and a gray bomb he found laying in a hay field.

Bubble Gum and Paperback Books

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A block after his first crime, he found a bookstore to commit another.

Recycled

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I am important. My existence has meaning.Today I am a newspaper in the hands of an important man. He sits in his office, reading me for important news. He makes notes in my margins, studying the information I provide. Alas, tomorrow comes, he buys another paper, and I rest…

Tangerine Slip Cat

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I knew my cat was capable of telepathy when I began to have isolated, random, non-cause-related thoughts about food and feelings, little signals, and I realized that the signs — images of tangerines, tuna, bones; the idea of choice; slate, names; the feeling of…

And Then You Weren't

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Once, I painted a green field, you standing in it, the wind in your hair and in the lace hems of your dress. You cut the skin from your breast and gave it to me. I set my hair on fire and gave you the ash. We made love in the moonlight, that field now grey,…

Why Mr. Doss Had To Die

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He held my little hand in his and guided it through the dirt.

The Ridges of Ancient Battles

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“It smells like turkey,” she said, rubbing her one good eye. “No. I think it’s more like mutton,” I reply, tugging the lapels tight. The steam rose from the corpse in ripples, the matted fur stiff, stuck together in places. Where it came from we had no

Orchestra

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We are, in fact, a pack of dogs. Our ensemble was formed by chance. We did not choose to be put together in this dingy backyard. It is no kind of conservatory.

Drown

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Arlene drowned, though no one drowned her. Nadav told me that she had drowned. Something about making it specific like that probably took the pressure off him a little.

Innocence

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Where were you when I stood on the forest's edge looking for signs, wishing to know love and lust and longing? It was the man in the goat skin who came--not you--the man with the horns. I was a girl, how could I know? How could you expect me to know?

Familiar Things

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After lunch I left my office and trickled along like a slow leak, a notch above meandering; gravity had become a lateral force that pulled me forward.

Shorondra Reynolds

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When Shorondra Reynolds was a baby we lived in a Baltimore brownstone on the edge of Pigtown. Just me and my mother, when there were no single mothers, just Adele’s mother or Mary’s mama, or Kiki’s madear and their like. It was a time when a five year-old

After Hours

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What was ruined now – truly ruined, and not just fraying at the edges like everything else – was the act of reading novels. Certain stretches of our hero’s life had been defined by fiction; he’d learned to read English in a country where little English wa

Family First

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“Don’t do this Jack. You are better than this.” He pleaded. My lips curled, “Maybe I am, but you’re not.” I spat. I lifted up his delicate frame and threw him back against the wall of his office. I watched as his head bounced off the decorative brick