Category: Flash

Jackson opened his apartment door cradling the lamp he’d made a decade ago in high school shop class against his hip like it was a three-year-old or a koala and saw a woman holding a clipboard standing where the welcome mat used to be. The woman wore an ID badge on a string around her… Continue reading What Now?

Tomorrow I will call it a relapse, but tonight I want to write about meeting her again in a bar in the old part of Denver, the part where the sidewalks aren’t cement but red flagstone worn smooth by thousands of footsteps and millions of raindrops, raindrops that might have been falling out of a… Continue reading Too Late

I was standing on the street corner outside the Crossroads Bar looking at the road signs when a man walked up to me and introduced himself as Dundee Ragland. When we got done shaking hands, I looked back to the road signs. One said CR 19 and the other CR 54, and I could believe that,… Continue reading Small Town Rain

Max thought I was never coming back. Everybody else did, too, but Max is the only one who told me to my face. The rest of ‘em, I read it in their eyes. Max and I were smoking cigarettes on his front step after band practice when he told me. Our band wasn’t going anywhere… Continue reading Seven Years Gone

You can fall off the edge of a word the same way you fall off the edge of the world. When you’re not looking. Or by slipping. But there’s no need to worry. Falling off the world’s like falling off a horse. All you gotta do is climb back on. You might want to lay… Continue reading Edges of Words

“Benny? That you?” “Nobody else at my house this time of the morning, Walter.”  “You’re not gonna believe this.” “Then wake me up and tell me?” “I’ve got fifteen hummingbirds outside my window.” “So?” “Well, they’re either smoking or holding tiny pieces of chalk in their beaks and scribbling all over the rock we just… Continue reading Caribou Transmitters & Hummingbird Math

Addisyn couldn’t sleep the night before she was scheduled to rotate back to Earth. She slipped into her uniform and wandered the quiet hallways of the base. Without meaning to, she found herself standing outside Pappy’s enclosure, idly stirring her chamomile tea. The sugar was long since dissolved. She just liked watching the tea go… Continue reading Baboon Fingers on Glass

Bathtub Dan learned the hard way: if you are taking a bath with a woman, memorize her last name. Just in case. Because she’ll be pissed if you don’t know it.  Most women have a first name and a last name. Not Madonna. Not Beyoncé. Was it a singer thing? What about Grimes? Dan wasn’t… Continue reading Practical Life Advice from Bathtub Dan

Nora pushed the empty mayonnaise jar around the tiled floor of Luca’s apartment with her nose. She didn’t know it, but Luca had named her for the woman who had broken his heart.  Nora—the whippet, not the woman—had found him slumped on a stone bench in Oaxaca’s central plaza as the October sun crept over… Continue reading Things Nora Didn’t Know

Vernon didn’t see the cricket coming. He’d figured he’d while away the lonesome lockdown hours teaching himself to pick a banjo, so he swept the faded floorboards in his bedroom, faced a wooden chair to the window, and set to. It was slow going at first but Vernon didn’t mind, he didn’t want to teach… Continue reading A Reason for the Moon to Return