So you’re the hotshot diver, he said, if you won’t take any money, let me buy you a hot dog.
There's a man on the bus sitting directly in front of you. He has a small brown spider crawling across his red shirt, near his left shoulder blade.
Area 51 has been hidden from the American people. For a long time. For their own good.
It seared their eyes. Squinting, they watched the light dilate, divide in six. The rocket fell away, limp, useless, and dark as a new star grew against the storm.
Boundaries of Nations: What a joke American pool is. They play with miniature sticks on a tiny table with a bunch of tiny multicolored balls, a bunch of toy balls, just like between their American legs.
Boundaries of Nations: With time, I learned to love and master my scenes.
A year ago he brought the pox blankets back to the natives after a well-meaning group of illegal tourists stole them away. On return he had a sort of quiet breakdown.
He led her away, down one tunnel, then another. He took her through a passage where the bones were piled so high they had to wriggle over them on their bellies.
Flash Fiction: I remember their voices. Hushed when the sun beat on our backs, loud when the moon returned, illuminating our darknesses.
I would examine the black and white photographs of Alpullu’s golden age. In their shadows, I identified the vanished town.
The husband wrote a letter every single day, sometimes more often. Sometimes, she didn’t open them, or deliberately misread them.
They needed a way to keep the fire going until morning—that was another thing they had on their minds.
When I met G I knew he’d figure in my life heavily, but I had no idea if our association would be sad or happy, ultimately—and I still don’t know which it will be, ultimately.
No one knows when exactly he became the thing I fed upon, the thing whose body works for my body, day and night.
I have a birthmark above my butt, which is undeniable proof of gypsiness.
Flash Fiction: Even while she lay in hospital she was trembling for the well-being of her son
Boundaries of Nature: Water is always at work. We don’t even know that it’s eating the very ground from under us.
Boundaries of Nature: In books, he has read about boys and animals, how they form a connection, and then the animal dies. And the boy learns something about the harshness of the world.
Flash Fiction:"What a perfect couple, two halves of the same little orange."
I look at his face; the green eyes, the wet mouth. I still feel the dream-softness of his hair under my hands; I feel like a grandmother, like a mother, like a lover.
They agreed to unspoken rules. Broken windows were OK. Broken bones were fair game. Graffiti was acceptable, as were rubber bullets and tear gas.
For a year or more before the six months that we spent preoccupied with our strange visitor, counterterrorism was our spiritual life.
Stavros Stavros was fat and full at the end of the night. All he needed now was to deflower a virgin.
“I’m celebrating my country! Stop hating my freedom, you terrorist.”
Flash Fiction: “Go? Stay?”— the uncertainty a stain of recursive ink, irremovable—“Stay? Go?”—the choice, the freedom to choose suffocating like a plastic bag atop her head.
Boundaries of Taste: Where we saw shape, line, and shadow—a nude—he saw a naked overweight woman.
Firas rested his head on the back of the sofa, lost in the smoke. He wondered what that meant: a world where you can run wild.
Flash Fiction: Convince yourself the race never stops running, that memory will eat you alive.
When the boy she was dating hit my sister, it made a sharp cracking sound, just like it does in the movies.
Flash Fiction:You were the only person in the whole building who wasn’t singing me.
He told them about the Internet, Steam, Apple, and Microsoft, which were the other names of Satan.
Flash Fiction:They came with their guns and their tools and no time to contemplate Time.
He did not want her to think what might possibly be true: that he was going mad.
Tanya was not surprised to find no one hiding behind the hedges when she looked out her window, but she was disappointed.
Our parents were too busy launching bombs over the river to notice missing fingers.
Boundaries of Gender: In the early seventies, I began sleeping with a married doctor who wanted to cure homosexuality.
Flash Fiction: Her name sounding like coming, like arrived, like I am here.
“They’re back!” we hissed over our kitchen fences. “Someone’s got to stop them! Something must be done!”
“Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum. Straight out of a Western movie.” He handed it over to Brady, who gripped the black rubber handle and ran a finger on the sleek, cold metal barrel.
I met Tracy Pasco in the spring of 1980—in my Pennsylvania hometown, a time of relative optimism and ease.
Flash Fiction: She watched her heart beating again and again like an unanswered question, like a phone in her chest that would not stop ringing.
First there was a little crackle as the pin scratched the record and then the voices would begin to sing or talk and would float into the surrounding inky darkness.
"I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror." —Alberto Gonzales
“I thought you’d get along.” “Why did you think that?” I say. “You do so well with wounded men,” she says.
There were so many places he could have lived, but he lived in the shack so he could dream of his daughter.
The house of the Memory God is filled with junk in piles. It started innocently enough, the way a blizzard starts: a flake here, a flake there.
Flash Fiction: The daughter, the one they think they made all by themselves, holds the hand, and holds also the head, unwise and old and greedy.
I wanted to stop something, everything. I applied for a job in airport security and they placed me here.
PFC Larry Pierson, a 21-year-old Afghanistan veteran from Vermilion, South Dakota, had made off with four M-16 A2s, six thirty-round magazines of ammo, and two M67 grenades.
The apocalypse was quiet. It had a way about it, a certain charm. It could be called graceful. It was taking a long time.
Flash: The twisted leg, the handful of feathers.
“I brushed Michael Bolton’s hair once,” I said, “and moisturized George Clooney too.”
Flash Fiction: I dream of fat cats wearing sweatbands trying to get in shape on treadmills.
It’s that look he loves even though he knows she isn’t really seeing him. He’s part of the landscape, inside her inner eye.
Every profession had its misfits and mediocrities, but few attracted, as his did, the very people it was designed to help.
The Taiwanese novelist's story of a passionate relationship between two young women.
When I came to the window, his motorcycle was lying on its side hemorrhaging gasoline and oil.
A heart-fixer is he, there is nothing he does not see...
It’s no wonder the dead aren’t leaving to go into that goddamned light.
It didn’t matter if they strolled from his periphery or sprinted up from behind. He felt them coming like a warm wind.
Behind him’s two bags on the curb. He needs the ride; I cut him a break.
I do not trust these people, and they are not worth the embarrassment.
Then she did hear something, a scratching deep inside the walls, like something was trapped in there.
Flash Fiction Crazy is not hereditary or anything like that.
She gives me a strange look, turns off the tap and wraps herself in a towel so that her secrets are hidden again.