Sky So Blue

Great. Now you’re crying in the middle of giving a blowjob. Luckily, Steve the engineer isn’t paying attention to your face. With a mouthful of his cock, and one of your hands pumping double time, he better be completely transported.

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flash, 2016SLMMonet Thomas
The Pipe Bomb

The pipe bomb will be eight inches in length, two inches in diameter. It will contain shards of broken glass, some nails, a few screws. It will be born after Jimmy Reed has one bad day too many, after Matt Lacey hip-checks him face-first into his locker, after the right lens of Jimmy’s glasses cracks and the frame bends and the air vents scrape his sideways-turned head, drawing blood.

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flash, 2015SLMChris Negron
College Roommate

Dean keeps asking me hypotheticals. Takes swigs of vodka and raises his pool cue for another shot. “How ‘bout you were in a day-old toilet, and shit is all you have to eat. Would you eat it or would you rather die?” I take my turn and tell him if he asks me one more question I will pose my own, and he won't like his choice between death and death.

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flash, 2015SLMDaniel Lassell
The Knife

Many years ago, my wife and I were living in New York City together making landscape drawings. We were squatting in this abandoned apartment, so whatever money we made we spent on movies and food. We had a friend who worked at an art house cinema, and she gave us free popcorn—we saw lots of foreign movies and bad student films.

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flash, 2015SLMKaj Tanaka
Five Flash Fictions

Things were almost over between us, but we didn't know that. It was a mild December. You needed help moving your belongings from the dorm to your parents' house for the holidays. We spent a whole half-hour sorting and discarding the minefield of your car.

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Beneath the Skin

She peeled an orange and found an avocado, the sort of week it had been. The feel of buttery green on her tongue failed to be what she needed as she ate it. Between trips to the cleaners, the library, the morgue, she held her hands steady on the wheel— the grip of an adult, certain and not trembling, her gaze definitely not looking left at the swish of angels, their wings like a coat of rain across the grass.

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flash, 2015SLMBeth Konkoski
Taliaferro

No one I know has ever been to Taliaferro County, so I don’t believe it’s real. There is data out that says it has 1,700 or so residents and I’ve never met a single one. The closest I’ve come is I found a couple guys in a bar in Atlanta one night who said they owned a few thousand acres in Taliaferro between the two of them.

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flash, 2015SLMGreg Sullivan
Two Flash Fictions

Smack me with what you know, baby, I’m asking for it. Make those ten dollar words zip like a switch, make that jargon sizzle. Sting me with words you can correctly pronounce so I’ll stop suspecting you don’t know as much as you think you do.

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flash, 2015SLMKelly Magee
Host

They lived in Indiana together in a red, brick house. A famous writer lived there before them and left a signed map of New York City taped over the solid Midwestern writing desk. They wrote in bed, on the second story of the house. They began thousands of stories they never finished, Lucky Dragon, Going to Colorado, a whole host of aborted voyages.

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flash, 2015SLMJulie Babcock
Eighth Grade Bio

When the caterpillar is crawling in the dish, do not measure it with your ruler. Do not classify it according to the phases of growth illustrated in the chart in your book. These were the things of seventh grade. Now you are in eight grade and must interact with the caterpillar on a new level.

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flash, 2015SLMNina Alvarez
Linda

Outside was a man {had she seen him before?}. A non-descript man. He could have been any man. When she answered the door, it was about three seconds before he threw a vile lie in her face {a vial of lye}.

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flash, 2015SLMJesi Bender
Kudos

Yesterday, Marilyn from the web team brought me lunch from Snyder’s deli and I had to ask, What’s up? as if I did not know what her weekly check-in would bring me.

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flash, 2014SLMRobin Throne
The Pull

That time my dad took me camping by the Eel River at the Fortuna KOA. As we lay under the stars with the fire dying, he told me people eat spiders in their sleep—hundreds in a lifetime. They crawl toward the smell. “Don’t be a mouth-breather,” he said, and then he rolled over.

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flash, 2014SLMKara Vernor
Once a Month

Because of him, she bought her first pair of thong underwear. She paints her sad, short fingernails. She looks at the mirror as he fucks her from behind, wondering about her ass. Cellulite? Ingrown hair? She takes action, exfoliating, sweating in the sauna, hours of exercise.

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That Girl

We double-dutched in seventh grade and beat the girls from room 209 to win that trophy made of wire hangers and cardboard then went for pizza, grease sliding off the cheese like syrup. We chewed the rim of Styrofoam cups, spitting at one another and laughing. Then from our identical porches only a few feet away, I saw the pink and black thread from your friendship bracelet coming undone.

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flash, 2014SLMCyn Vargas
Whiskey

You can spend your time in the card aisle, but it’ll most likely just be wasted. There’s not much solace in those cards, not much heart or feeling or sincerity. Just little words like “Sorry” or “Condolences” that just translate to “I didn’t take the time before and I can barely be bothered now.”

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flash, 2013SLMChristopher Ullery
Heat Wave​

“Well, what about tomorrow after lunch,” she suggested, squinting up at him even with her sunglasses on. He was tall and she liked that. He was looking somewhere beyond her, over her left shoulder though his body was turned toward her close enough, she could tell he was looking at the three women who had just walked by them, she could still see their silhouettes in his glasses.

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flash, 2013SLMCheryl Diane Kidder