Fiction
Ma in the Sitting Room
Ma at the bookshelves, searching for new knowledge. She takes a novel between her calloused fingertips, rummages through the pages like she’s looking for something..
Section
Flash Fiction
Showing 73-96 of 115 pieces
Fiction
Priority One
ATTENTION PASSENGERS: Sorry to startle and disappoint, to inconvenience and annoy, but our priority one is not arrival or commute, it’s code for deliverance of..
Fiction
Mama was a rainbow
Everyone say black is the colour of death. But Emily know it ain’t true. Black is the colour of Mama bein’ alive. It the colour..
Flash Fiction
Absence Makes the Heart
I wake up from my nap. The house is empty. You said you were going to the store, but that was many hours ago. In..
Fiction
Ten
The tears came early that night, something she had expected. She had felt it building all day, a jagged boulder against her chest, sliding deeper..
Fiction
My Mother’s Ring
When I first see it, I shudder. The knuckles are wrinkled and gnarly. The skin is gray. The middle finger tilts too far to the..
Fiction
No Such Number
I remember the last time I saw my father. He left for war and died a short time later, a Marine helicopter pilot, flying in..
Fiction
Grocery List
A lock of strawberry blonde hair peeking out from under a fuzzy winter hat freezes me in the grocery store parking lot. The hat is..
Fiction
The Tall Man
Inspired by an Oneida Tribal Tale and a Selection from the Longer Story, “Cloven” On a stormy summer night just like this one, just around..
Fiction
Door to door in the Banlieue
Sidestep the puddle that stretches from one side of the sandy road to the other, up to the lip of the cement doorstep. Knock on..
Fiction
57 Ways to Talk About Your Time
You did not want it. When it came you’d have to enter that veiled, silent place where the women lived, and the things you loved—the..
Fiction
The Mistaken Time Traveller (circa 2010)
I set the time coordinates for May, the year 2020, ten years from now,I made the jump but, much to my dismay, to a parallel..
Fiction
Not a Lion
1 The fifteen-month-old climbs the winding staircase of their duplex to the small bedroom he shares with his two-year-old brother. The father is close behind,..
Fiction
The Fall
She remembers it differently. The man did not kill himself, he fell. She couldn’t know for sure but she had just talked to the man,..
Fiction
Hiring a Hitman in Chinese
It was on a smoggy Shanghai morning when Wang hired a hitman to kill his wife. Wang’s wife Li Ying was rich, a fuerdai. Her..
Fiction
Tea for Two
The first time our neighbor, Ms. Plinkett, made me a cup of tea, all the illusions of adulthood and demure culture I was working so..
Fiction
A Feminine Rage
After Poe I. Shriveled up leaves hang from the topmost branches of skeletal trees. Black smudges against a ghostly winter sky—like sleeping bat babies, or..
Fiction
Us Kids
In Winter the teachers stop patrolling the school grounds. They stand in huddles, hands wrapped around steaming mugs, finding relief in the alcove out of..
Fiction
Perennials
In the garden. It looks like snow, a surreal May frost, but the sun slaps my winter-paled skin as I hunch over the tiny growths..
Fiction
One Year, One Hundred Years
Imagine entering an apartment building that is outwardly non-descript, concrete, post-modern; it rises shadowing a mosque next door. Imagine the muezzin’s call to prayer is..
Fiction
Lost and found
The old book’s cloth cover had turned gray. A friend, who knows my passion for Eastern poetry, had just given it to me as a..
Fiction
A Natural Arrangement
The caress of the morning call yanks my soul. It screams for attention. I cannot tell who calls whom or why. Beneath me, the dusty..
Fiction
On The Prowl
The tightening in the center of my back and a slight tingling sensation inside my nose let me know that she had arrived. Mid hug with..
Fiction
Checkpoint 104
In the dusty, windy hills above Bethlehem, she drove alone along the lonely by-pass road leading north from Wadi al-Arayis toward East Jerusalem. It was..