What would he do for her? He would give her his full attention, tend to her large shape, love her the way she still loved him, as he had first appeared to her.

I wasn’t allowed to enter Grace’s room when she was not at home, so I had to make haste.

Don’t smile like that. I’m telling you the truth.

They held hands. They put their feet in the water. I love him, Corey told herself.

PEN/Guernica Flash Fiction Series: Of heat and conversations on a rainy day.

PEN/Guernica Flash Fiction Series: A couple at a restaurant is different from all the other diners.

PEN/Guernica Flash Fiction Series: A meeting with Lenin and a bus journey with canine assailants.

At daybreak, a bird flew into our bedroom, smacked the wall mirror, and fell on Darla’s back. She slept on.

You are not going out, he said. You haven’t been out for weeks. People have been in touch with you, he said. Why don’t you see them?

PEN/Guernica Flash Fiction Series: A garden once snubbed becomes a solace.

Future of Cities: “Department of Buildings,” said Frank. “We have a complaint. Can we come in?”

The Future of Cities: “There are hundreds, perhaps a thousand empty villages in Spain like your Valdaves: abandoned, then forgotten. I find them new owners...”

PEN/Flash Fiction: Brought to you by the Guernica/PEN Flash Series.

He doesn’t talk much about his life in Sri Lanka before the war, only after, as if in 1983 when everything ended for some Sri Lankan Tamils is when his life begins.

Whenever the latest woe is me commercial came on hawking the newest painkiller, Mami commanded our attention: “That’s me!”

‘Keep your pecker in your pocket, Paddy,’ Jacques Aubry says, pointing at Mrs. Boyle’s swollen front, ‘and you’ll have less need for marching.’

He lay in the dark, eyes closed, imagining what Lisa would say when she saw the gun. Would she beg?

Flash Fiction: A romance at the time the world is ending.

An unimaginably endless life lay ahead of me, almost frighteningly so. Sometimes, when I thought about it, I became so agitated that I found it difficult to breathe.

“My brave little Marxist,” she will coo, knowing that her own, modest attempts at domestic revolution will as usual come to nothing, and softening in spite of it.

Fortified with sock tea, he attends his morning group, which is called Steps. This to distinguish it from the afternoon group, which is called Group.

Bulgarians are physical people. I discovered that when I left and came to New York.

Flash Fiction: We had no idea that a livid war was advancing on us like a sandstorm. We were committed to life, not death.

Here’s Jacob, in the grip of incomparable sorrow, being a total jaggoff to his friend. Insert interior monologue: What am I doing? When did I become such a dick?

It wasn’t like we hadn’t grown accustomed to male wooers after Pa danced his way out of the picture, but something about Casero, that old bag, pissed me off.

Future of Language: WIFE!—who would not tolerate this complaint of his, who no longer indulged his talking, who could not even bear to look at him.

Future of Language: Your given signs and pairs: mouth, kisses, red-pink, drink-apple, hurry-go. You have no tenses, only momentum into what’s before you.

Her feet were brown. She ambled closer. Darling, I’m you, she said. I’m you from the future.

I could tell that he preferred each and every stranger, even strangers he had not met yet, even strangers he imagined, he preferred those strangers to me.

Male staff members at the Grand waded through the myths that surrounded her, enjoying the feeling of being stuck.

“You’re delicious,” he says, meaning it, remembering the taste of mango.

Flash Fiction: That morning Maureen could tell her ex-husband had been drinking, but still, she helped her daughter into her coat and went back upstairs.