Showing posts with label Flood2025. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Flood2025. Show all posts

Thursday, 19 June 2025

2025 FlashFlood: The Complete List

In case you missed any of the pieces we appeared during the 2025 FlashFlood, here's an index to everything.  Sadly, the 'Blog Archive' list maxes out at 100 titles per day, so use this as your guide to the complete 2025 Flood....

Happy Reading!

 

2025 FlashFlood

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Saturday, 14 June 2025

'That One Time You Loved a Mermaid' by Laila Amado

That one time you loved a mermaid the sea followed you everywhere. 

It leaned on your windows, clouds pressing against the glass, murmured about sunken treasures between the lines of late-night radio broadcasts. 

It roared in the road noise of a faraway highway, sloshed in the glasses of gin and tonic passed around in your favorite dive bar.

It dripped down the shower curtain, rolled to rest at your feet in a scattering of pearls and salt, greeted you in the night with the forlorn calls of lost tankers, when you lay sleepless by her side. In the darkness of the room, her curls on your pillow twisted and twined like ribbons of kelp. 

A sudden whiff of seaweed from the teacup told you she was on her way from the airport. 

A gust of cold wind in a closed room—all ice and brine—told you she was angry with you.

All staircases spiraled like ammonite fossils. 

One time, when you were lying together on the roof of your apartment building and the stars above looked like specks of sun glitter on the surface of the waves, you reached for her hand. “The sea is a graveyard,” she said. “No one to talk to but the shadows of long-gone whales.”

She didn’t love you back, of course. 

Every now and then, you go for a walk along the beach, steps tracing the soft curve of the coastline, and the sea recedes from your feet, forever shrugging away.


Laila Amado is a nomadic writer of speculative fiction. She writes in her second language, has recently exchanged her fourth country of residence for the fifth, and can now be found staring at the North Sea, instead of the Mediterranean. The sea, occasionally, stares back. Follow her on Bluesky @amadolaila.bsky.social







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'Octopus-Hearted' by Jude Potts

I wonder what would happen if I stopped wrapping myself in tentacles, protecting my solitary, sucker-scarred heart. What might we share, beyond stealthy cigarettes on a fire escape, smoke swirling skyward, ash dropping on my sneaks?

‘How’s tricks?’ I ask.

‘Tricky,’ your reply.

Sometimes that’s all we say, and it’s almost enough. My mouth fills with octopuses, I can’t get the right words out without tentacles tangling my tongue. 

‘Did you know, octopuses have three hearts?’ I keep my eyes on the spiralling smoke. If I were octopus-hearted, I’d risk saying so much more.

I watch your lips tighten around your cigarette, sending smoke signals I can’t quite read. Did your hand linger on mine as you passed me your lighter? Did you feel a spark as your fingers brushed my arm?  

Cigarette clasped in one hand, my other arm wrapped around my waist, I console myself I don’t have six more arms longing to reach out, brush ash from your chest, letting fingers linger on the top button of your checked shirt.

Tomorrow, I might ask you for a coffee. On the one hand, you could say yes and later break two of my octopus’ hearts with lies. On another hand, you might say no and immediately break them all. But octopus hearts allow octopus choices, so on one more hand, we’re sipping coffee in bed, a tangled knot of lazy limbs, your body as familiar as my own, our six octopus hearts full.

Love’s tricky with just one heart. Two hands leave me with binary choices. Ask, don’t ask. Yes. No. Love. Heartbreak. I bubble-wrap my lonely heart with tentacles.  I cling to cigarettes and sideways glances, watching smoke dance away, never catching fire. 

 

Jude is bimbling through life, sometimes dabbling in flash fiction, focusing on wry, dry and sly looks at human failings (usually her own). She believes in the magical capacity of shared joy and humour to change the world and tries to contribute.


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'Orange Blossoms' by M.E. Macuaga

The last thing I did for you, the only thing I could do for you, was peel you an orange. A little mikan mandarin, from the pile of sweet spheres brought by our neighbor Miyoko from her tree to your hospital room. I plucked one from the paper bag she left along with her regards, and, with its dry rustle still whispering in my ear, I dug my yellowing thumbnail into the soft bare button of the fruit. A fine mist of citrus oil sprayed us and we laughed, bright as the falling sun. Then you watched me from the bed, your gown as loose as your smile. My hands cupped the mikan and turned from each other like a prayer in reverse, a flower blooming as my thumb peeled back the skin to bare its orb. Rind removed from what it had so fiercely, gently protected. Heart tilting, I plucked the segments from their stem. 

There, one for you. 

Here, one for me. 

There, tucked inside, a baby one, naked and awakened now as you once awakened me. 

And here — a seed I set aside, away from your throat.

I think of your skin now, also loose beneath your gown, and your bones beneath your loosened skin, and pithy veins, so soft, and how I could help change your colostomy bag but had to blink my gaze away from the bumps of your spine when the mid-day nurse came to clean you. That’s my job, I’d thought, angry as I left the room for the privacy you wanted. But I had bigger jobs coming, didn’t I, jobs that became mine too soon. To peel you an orange on our last day. To see your loosening. To take that one seed we found, and plant it.


M.E. Macuaga is a Japanese Bolivian storyteller and escape room addict whose diverse work can be found now/soon in HAD, The Cincinnati Review, Epiphany, Seventh Wave, Flash Fiction Magazine, Oyster River Pages, Luna Station Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her communities include Hedgebrook, Ragdale, Tin House, and Storyknife. Read more: curiousstoryprods.com & @memi_writes.








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'That Summer' by Zary Fekete

She said the fireflies are dying. Not enough moonlight, she thinks, to guide them back to the swamp. Her fingers move over the cracked ceramic mug, too warm from the coffee that was never really coffee. But she won’t tell you that. She never tells you what she means.

She said she can smell them still. The ones that lived once, back when the wetland was alive with their hum. "That summer," she whispers, "before the dry winds made it all disappear." You nod. She’s always saying it, that summer. As if it was the only thing real.

The dry wind pushes dust across the porch, sifting through the cracks of the faded wood. She watches it scatter, her eyes not quite focused. There’s a sound, the low rumble of a truck in the distance. You wonder if it’s the one that used to come to pick up the old barrels, or if it’s just another echo from the past.

But she’s still talking, her words like smoke in the air. She speaks of the swamp, of summers spent hiding beneath the cypress, of her father’s hands carving the world out of nothing, of waiting for the rains to come. She speaks like she hasn’t forgotten the sound of their laughter, like she hasn’t been left with the empty spaces in the backyard, with the patches of dirt where things used to grow.

You don’t ask her to stop.

You look down at your hands, remembering how they used to hold her once, tightly.

“Do you remember?” she asks, as if the answer’s in the wind. But the fireflies are gone, and you wonder if you ever really saw them at all.

Zary Fekete grew up in Hungary. He enjoys books, podcasts, and many many many films. Twitter and Instagram: @ZaryFekete Bluesky: zaryfekete.bsky.social

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Debut Flash: 'Molting' by Jenn Keohane

I zippered myself to Christina for years: playdates, sleepovers, whispered secrets about boys we thought we loved. I haven’t seen her since graduation.  

She breezes into Starbucks with a vibrant scarf and dangly earrings, her gaze on my grey sweater and sun-damaged face. We catch up on thirty years: her jewelry business, valedictorian son. My first stint in rehab, bedazzled lighter collection, cozy home. I leave out that it’s an Econoline van. Christina means well, I think, as she places a manicured hand on me. You’ve lost touch with the person you used to be. 

Which version? The nine-year-old with an imaginary dragon, buck-toothed tween dancing naked to Duran Duran, bleached-blonde dreaming of Broadway?

Once, in 9th grade, we double-dated German exchange students—hers handsome, mine homely. They slipped their magic hands into unexplored places. Suddenly, I had a new feeling to chase; I sprinted toward boys, and later booze, shedding my childhood skin that had grown too tight, numbing myself for decades. 

We finish our coffees, pretending we’ll do this again. She slips off her scarf—it’s from Barcelona and has good juju—and loops it around my neck. It’s tight, suffocating, like a noose, and she’s standing too close. But she’s right: the blue brings out my eyes. 

She hugs me, my first touch since that truck stop rendezvous. 

This could be the start of something new. 

The only thing I want is to twirl, naked and irreverent, with my imaginary dragon, but I don’t remember how anymore.

 

Jenn Keohane has been writing microfiction since 2022. Though tragically unpublished at the time of this submission, she’s been an NYC Midnight finalist several times. She lives in sunny California with her husband. Their young adult children, now off the payroll, have thankfully flown the nest.

 

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'Tenderhearted Optimists at the End of the World' by Diane D. Gillette

We huddle together on the front porch of the house we are currently squatting in. What flickering hope we have for survival will eventually expire with a shudder if something doesn't change. We are thinking that the well here still has water for now, but that the nonperishable food stash is beginning to dwindle. We have packets of seeds for a garden in our possession, but the gray cracked earth here will refuse to yield any bounty for us to consume. 

We constantly worry about scurvy and cuts that won’t heal. We worry that we never saw ourselves as the badass heroes of the post-apocalyptic movies we watched before they became less fantastical and more of a guide for survival. 

We do not voice our worries. We comment on how pleasant the breeze is. Marvel that the sun can still glitter in the sky when there is so much death below it. A deer wanders into view. We catch our breath and wait. It’s a thing of beauty despite its visible ribs, despite its frantic grabs at what little vegetation has managed to grow.

We have talked about this moment. How one of us — tenderhearted both — will have to spill the blood of an innocent if we’re going to survive. But the deer meets our gaze. Looks at us as if trying to place us. We reckon she has likely not seen any humans before. 

We stay frozen. Neither reaches for the weapons we keep at our sides now always, but don’t really know how to use. The deer moves on. We don’t talk about what didn't just happen. It will be minestrone from a can again tonight. 


Diane D. Gillette (she/her) mostly writes short things, but sometimes she strings them together to make longer things. She lives in Chicago with her partner and cats. Read more at www.digillette.com.






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'I am the Wedding Photographer Who Took These Photos.' by Ani Banerjee

I am the Wedding Photographer Who Took These Photos.

The yellow marigold garlands hanging in strands on the front door, twined with fairy lights in red. The bride’s father, blessing the bride before she is handed off to the groom. The bride in red and groom in white sitting half lotus on the floor, the priest and fire in front of them. The bride and groom walking around the fire, the inexhaustible witness to their union. The groom putting the red sindur powder on her forehead. The bride smiling, with the sindur powder dropping to her nose. The buffet table with a thousand items, wish I could capture the smell. The groom’s mother, looking frazzled, searching for something. She is looking under tables, lifting the tablecloth. Someone gave her a metal detector, and she is swishing the floor with it, like it’s a vacuum cleaner. Her kajal smudged on her face, had she been crying? Dancing to Bollywood music, the groom’s father kissing the bride’s mother, his hands squeezing her butt. The bride’s mother and the groom's father walking towards the door. The bride running towards them, holding her saree up. 


Ani Banerjee is a retired lawyer and an emerging writer from Houston, Texas, who was born in Kolkata, India. Her flash fiction has been published in Swamp Pink, Lost Balloon, McQueen’s Quinterley, Dribble Drabble, and others and nominated for Best Small Fiction and Best of the Net.

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'Introductions Over Avocados' by Lisa H. Owens

Double-doors swooshed open and there he was, standing on the Welcome to Walmart mat, the stud of my dreams. He was a raven-haired fella sporting a red tartan sweater that hugged his barrel chest. His head tilted at a jaunty angle and his nose twitched as he hovered in the doorway like a lost puppy. 

A gust of wind swept in, bringing winter's chill into produce, and a silver haired door-greeter looked over—perturbed.

 “Make up your mind, pal, in-or-out,” and that’s all it took. My Scottish dreamboat casually strolled across the threshold, his man in tow.

At this point, I grew shy. What would he think of me? There was no denying I was a big-boned gal, and in my uncertainty, I tucked behind a tower of avocados, my golden curls spilling into my eyes, watching the man loop a blue basket over one arm. 

“C’mon, Scotty,” he said and they walked straight toward... the avocados! 

I looked around, panicked. My lady held a dark-hued Hass in each hand—squeezing for ripeness. Such antics. What would they think?

Scotty dragged his companion to the spot in which I stood, and the man went to work—squeezing avocados. He juggled a bright green specimen, hand-to-hand, and glanced at my lady, a shy smile on his lips. 

“It’s taco night,” he said, an attempt at conversation, and my lady said, “Hmmm,” and kept digging.

My attention came around to Scotty and I hunkered while he cordially sniffed my butt, getting to know me. I turned to do the same, ecstatic to learn he was old... and fixed, for I was well past my prime. 

“Aha!” They spyed their quest at the same time, their hands intertwining while reaching for the same gnarled Hass. They locked eyes and sparks began to fly.


Lisa H. Owens, a former humorist columnist, resides in North Texas with two senior rescue dogs and a possum named Harry who lives under her backyard shed. Her stories are sometimes inspired by true events, including family secrets, and her work's been published in dozens of ezines and multi-genred anthologies.








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'Brocade' by Eirene Gentle

‘Why do dragons have scales’ Mia asked as she picked the blooms of raw skin on her arm. I smoothed lotion over her limbs in long, slow arcs she mimicked on the sleeping round of cat. ‘Why does Mimo have fur?’ She stroked the smooth grey pelt right down to the belly with its tiny rivered scar. 

My clear flesh as I dressed her in soft oversize cottons drew a border between us she wouldn’t let me cross so I took her out to find familiars. ‘Look’ I said of drowsing roses so like the pinking of Mia’s flesh and meant ‘how perfect you are.’ But she ached to be a bristling thing more durable than petals. ‘Girls should have thorns’ she said, not knowing she did. 

It was softer in the rainy season. We’d watch fractured sky hurl creeks at our window and pretend to swim, her scalloped flesh like fins in silvered light. But it vanished with sun. 

On the way back from the vet, Mia’s hands hot from the last touch of Mimo’s fur. Pale vomit splashed on roadside sumac where we pulled over, the cat’s crate already cool and Mia deep in the woods without me. What if I left her there where wild things grow? Would she learn why dragons have scales? Could she forgive cats for staying such a short time? Ungraspable, this child of cloud and brambles. How many ways are there to fracture? 

I found her crouched in last October’s leaves staring into moss-furred wood and lichen furls. The glow of it, emerald and gold on rain-black trunks and Mia’s shuddering breath as she pushed up her sleeves. ‘So beautiful,’ she said, and was. 


Eirene Gentle is a writer of lit, mostly lit, based in Toronto, Canada. Published in The Hooghly Review, Litro, Jake, Maudlin House, Bull, Ink in Thirds, Leon Literary and more.






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'In Praise of Moderation' by Susan Fuchtman

She loved the gold floral recliner, despite its missing antimacassar and cracked back leg. When she sat in it, the chair melded to her body as if it had been waiting to embrace her. “But,” she mentioned to her aunt on the phone on Thursday, “Furniture Mart is having a sale, and it might be a good time to upgrade the old thing.”

Friday, upon arriving at work, she spotted one of the gold floral arm covers stuck to her trouser leg. She joked with her co-worker, “The chair doesn’t want me to leave!” 

Saturday, she spent more time in the chair than usual, making phone calls and reading. “Now I don’t want to leave the chair,” she thought, huffing to her feet to make lunch. 

Sunday, she skipped lunch. Instead, she snoozed, watched TV, crocheted, read, and snoozed some more. 

Monday, she had a sharp pain in her calf. Calling in sick, she told her manager, “I’ll elevate it and rest. That should do the trick.”  

Tuesday, her forearms had an upholstered feel, and she noticed little metal balls on the base of her wood-grained feet. 

Wednesday, her lap was covered in a familiar floral pattern.

Thursday, her head felt stuffed and soft. 

Friday, the phone rang and rang.

 

Susan Fuchtman writes poetry and short fiction, with work in Stonecrop Review, Short Edition, Reckon Review, Plume, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City where she is a board member of PorchLight Literary Organization, a non-profit that supports writers through community-based, collaborative, and multi-disciplinary approaches to creative writing.

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'When the Circus Left Town' by Tara Campbell

When the circus left town, they left behind their tent, deflated swaths of parachute cloth wriggling. At first we thought it was just the wind bringing the black-and-white fabric to life, but when the wind died, the tent didn’t. Things moved beneath the remains of the big top, bulges roving from side to side, shapes shifting, leaping, inflating and deflating.

Muttering and growling things.

We called the circus organizers. 

“What do you want?” boomed a man’s voice over the phone. “Were you not entertained?”

“Oh, yes, yes, we were entertained,” we stammered. “But you left some things behind.”

“Impossible,” he barked.

“Oh, but it’s true,” we said. “There’s something underneath the cloth. Are you, by chance, missing any monkeys?”

“Ridiculous,” he scoffed. 

“Any sword swallowers?”

“No.”

“Any storytellers? Llamas? Elephants?”

“No, no, and no.”

We swallowed. “Any lions or tigers?”

“I’m telling you, no. We had to get rid of our tent, but every other part of our circus is with us right now.”

“But it isn’t,” we insisted. “There’s something alive under that tent.” 

“Perhaps…” We could have sworn we heard someone else whispering behind him, could have sworn we heard the word “curse.”

“Have you looked underneath?” he asked.

We wrung our hands. “No,” we said. “We’re afraid to.”

“Well…” he began. For a moment all we heard was the click clack click clack of the train carrying him farther and farther away from us. “You should be,” he said.

Then he hung up.

And the circus tent roared.


Tara Campbell is a writer, teacher, Kimbilio Fellow, and fiction co-editor at Barrelhouse. She received her MFA from American University. Previous publication credits include SmokeLong Quarterly, Masters Review, Wigleaf, Jellyfish Review, Booth, Strange Horizons, and CRAFT Literary, as well as two novels and four collections of fiction and poetry.





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'Newton’s Laws of Childhood' by Lenny Eusebi

Football helmets rattled skulls, big boys with big inertia. When violence closed in, the coaches scolded Billy for tossing the ball away as he’d done in playground games of Kill the Carrier. Coach Mike said adversity molds you in the shape of your heroes.

Billy had the opposite reaction. No sports molded you into a lightsaber-wielding farm boy or prodigal assistant pig keeper. He decided astronauts were the answer: adventurers sculpted by equations and star charts. And no one gave you dead arms or wedgies in the school library. Astronauts took derivatives, not fastballs to the ribs.

The gravity of actual astronauts on the cafeteria TV pulled him into its orbit.  Not quite the Enterprise, the shuttle was still a marvel: gleaming white threaded with structurally sound black. In the Florida sunlight, it lit the whole cafeteria from a single screen. Billy glued his eyes to it, eating mechanically in time with the pre-launch countdown. Mission Control spoke: mellow, confident. Air exchangers and static hissed behind the tin can voices of astronauts. He’d memorized their names, even the teacher, reading them over and over on his promotional sticker. They were so cool. As T-minus ticked toward plus, pilot and commander battled jitters and sputters.  

Pressure built. Rockets roared. A great white cloud of exhaust spiraled into the blue, then puffed outward like a firework made of cotton. Every voice flatlined, even Mission Control. Billy stared at that fluffy white burst, so soft and safe-looking. He peeled off his sticker, a rough velcro sound suspended in the silence.

Lenny Eusebi is a poetry and flash fiction enthusiast living near Boston. He has studied physics, designed computer games, built a career in applied science, and told many stories to his two young daughters. Inspired by the grandmasters of science fiction, he loves anything compressed and oblique and speculative.
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'Appalachian Appaloosa' by Court Harler

Most people don’t know how to say Appalachia. It’s like Nevada—you say it differently if you live there, if you’ve ever lived there. Nevertheless, a horse lives in Appalachia, high in the Cumberland Mountains. She descends into the valleys to eat red apples off stunted green trees. Those trees, they twist, and she, the horse, rears on her hind legs to get at her favorite fall fruit.

I met her there once, in the apple orchard. Like many Scientologists, I believed the horse could be my mother reincarnated into a free, wild being. My mother always said she’d come back, so I hiked the hills around our farm until I found my mother in her new horse shape. I recognized her by her haunches—plump and bouncy. My horse mother galloped away at first, but I sang her a song about an appaloosa. She didn’t have any spots on her new coat, but the song still worked. She came closer and closer to me as I sang, nudged me on my shoulder. I pet her black mane, tapped her knobby knees. I don’t know why, but her knees, they fascinated me. They were black like her mane and tail, not brown like her body. I guess I’d call her a bay, and quite a common horse. If she hadn’t been my dead mother, I wouldn’t’ve looked twice at her, much less broke and rode her.

 

Court Harler is a queer writer from Northern Kentucky. Court is currently editor in chief of CRAFT and editorial director for Discover New Art. Court's multigenre work has been published around the world. Learn more at harlerliterary.llc.

This piece appeared briefly online with Writing By Writers in February 2018.

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'Half Moons' by Preeti Chandan

Mom swiftly rolls the dough into a perfect two-inch round, stuffs it with sweetened powder of cashews, almonds, raisins, folds it into an elegant half-moon karanji and hands it to me. To crimp its curve, an artistic touch.

Fumbling fingers search for the pinch-pull motion mastered as a young girl, atrophied over the years, like other traditions left behind with the native land. Nah, mom says to the first with an uneven fringe. Naaah, to the second. Both defective goods, set aside.

A memory surfaces: Mom, aunts, grandmas chatting, chuckling in the kitchen, week before Diwali, the festival of lights. Their ample frames shaking with merriment. Deft fingers rolling and filling, folding and sealing plump semi-circles. One leaning toward seven-year-old me: Here child, here’s how. Fold-pinch-pull. Tight folds, tiny pinches. 

Then in the years following: Let the child crimp, she does it best. The sweet fragrance of the fried delicacy swirling, wrapping around us. 

I find myself humming and try again. Fingers catch the old rhythm: fold - - pinch - - pull. An arc of neat pleats begins to crown the half-moons.  


Preeti Chandan grew up in Mumbai, India. She is a former journalist who now works as a sales and marketing professional in Southern California. Her micros and flash have appeared in 101 Words, 50-Word Stories, Flash Fiction Magazine and other online journals.




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'St. Louis Blues' by Kathryn Silver-Hajo

Chaz is a baseball player turned hockey pucker, an entrenched chewer of chaw, plug, qat, call it what you want. What his guitar-twanging wife, Daisy knows, and he knows too, is it makes teeth rot, heart stop, yields all manner of cancers: Mouth! Esophagus! Throat! Pancreas! When that list doesn’t stop his cud chewing, sewer-sludge-spitting, scourge of a habit she pulls back one finger for heart disease, another for stillborn offspring, a pinky for preemies, middle one for wives who are queasy, weary, and utterly disgusted (and don’t go whining that cud—as she calls qat—ain’t tobacco.) Chaz snuck some back from his Yemeni “hiking” trip in his duffel, lucked out it wasn’t sniffed out. Snuffed out, she’d snorted. Habit-forming, mind-altering so they say (just so! he agrees), gastritis-causing, esophagus-wrenching, vaso-constricting. Yet so, so satisfying, he counters, not to mention performance enhancing (in bed, he adds with a wily wink). To which Daisy twists her lip, cups the C-shaped maple neck of her instrument around her breast, hugs it tight, declares his vice ain’t nothin’ but a heart-wrecker marriage-breaker, but now he can munch, spit, slather and stink all he wants because she’s done with his honking stonker of a habit and before he can hock another boggy loogie anywhere in her vicinity she’ll be halfway home to the sticky-floored clubs of Nashville with her ‘65 Strat between her thighs. She’ll strap it around her neck and stroke those steel strings ‘til they moan with melancholy and heartbreak.


Kathryn Silver-Hajo’s work appears, or is forthcoming, in Atticus Review, Centaur, CRAFT, Emerge Literary, Ghost Parachute, Gone Lawn, Milk Candy Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Pithead Chapel, Ruby Literary, The Phare, and others. Books include award-winning flash collection, Wolfsong, and novel, Roots of The Banyan Tree. kathrynsilverhajo.com; facebook.com/kathryn.silverhajo; twitter.com/KSilverHajo; @kathrynsilverhajo.bsky.social


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Debut Flash: 'What We Talk About When One of Us Is Out of His Mind on Percocet' by Jim Parisi

“If this was the Middle Ages, I'd be shunned.”

“Shunned because you had meniscus surgery?” She forgets how funny he was when he got high. 

She stops at the light and turns her head. His left leg, swaddled in a cocoon of cotton padding secured with an Ace bandage, stretches across the back seat. 

“Without modern medicine I’d be a dead man limping, cast off to the outskirts, forced to rely on the charity of the few benevolent souls who took pity on me.” He scratches under the dressing with the business end of an ice scraper. “Who knows what would happen with the kids? You'd be forced to sell your body so we could eat.”

“We’d definitely starve.” She hits the blinker, decides not to needle him this time about how they’d get along fine without his pin money. “How much Percocet did they give you?” 

“Enough to make me feel goooood.” He titters, a high-pitched giggle she hasn’t heard in years, maybe since when the kids were in training pants.

“Listen.” He pushes himself up on his elbows. “You’d have men crawling over each other to get with you. I’d be first in line. I’m sherioush.”

“I know you are, honey.” She’s banished him to the guest room for less. But she smiles, all teeth, in the rearview mirror. “That’s really sweet.” 

The light changes. She turns off the blinker, hits the gas.

“Why didn’t you turn?” 

“The kids won’t be home for another hour. Let’s take a drive.” 

Her eyes catch his in the rearview mirror. His face erupts with the lopsided grin of a five-year-old; he waves as if noticing her for the first time. 

“Lie back and relax, goofball. And tell me all about our life as medieval outcasts.”

 

 

Jim Parisi is a freshly unemployed editor who lives in Washington, D.C., with his long-suffering wife and their sweet but highly reactive boxer-pitbull mix. He has published personal essays about music for ihavethatonvinyl.com.

 

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'Shooting for the Moon' by Jessica Klimesh

Ellee asks the boy next to her what he’s going to be when he grows up. The teachers are always asking, and this time the teacher has told them to talk about it with a partner, to write it down. The boy shrugs, but Ellee already knows, so she writes fast, then hands the boy her list, tells him that she’s also included things she’s already been, like a bird, a comet, and an Antarctic researcher. The boy only glances at her list, so Ellee reads it to him, says she’s going to be a dancer, a teacher, an astronaut. Now your turn, she says. The boy says he hasn’t been anything yet, but that he’d like to be famous someday, maybe a serial killer. Ellee pushes the piece of paper towards him, prodding, and he finally writes “cereal killer,” making her giggle, imagining someone gunning down bites of Toasted Oats or Wheaties. They are both too young to think about death. 

The boy will move away in fifth grade and, in college, Ellee will study music, physics, and political science. And she’ll remember that once she was a bird, that once she was a comet, that once she wanted to be an astronaut. But she won’t recall the boy, his name, or even what he looked like until his face flashes across the TV screen one night. There will be a faint spark of recognition, the name familiar, but Ellee will dismiss the nagging thought. If she ever knew him, she’ll think, it was a long time ago, and they were both very different people then. 


Jessica Klimesh (she/her) is a US-based writer, editor, and writing coach whose creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Flash Frog, Milk Candy Review, and Neither Fish Nor Foul, among others. Her work was also selected for Best Microfiction 2025.




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'Between Spines and Silk' by Alyson Tait

Roads stretch beneath a cloudless sky that doesn't have vocabulary to forgive—to have mercy. Heat presses close to the earth and everything between, thick and unmoving, and within it, the saguaros stand in ranks. Tall. Unshaken. Spines a warning. But the elements don’t show fear. They don’t ask permission before brushing against them. The rain doesn’t hesitate before running down their ridged skin, sinking deep into their roots. The desert doesn’t apologize for what it is, and the cacti don’t bend. 

And then there’s the bed—where breath catches, fingers trace the curve of a shoulder,  sighs slip between parted lips like wind through canyon walls, skin against skin, without fear, heat against heat, without apologies; the slow reverent unraveling of something that was never tangled to begin with. Only the confirmation of what had always been. The quiet certainty in the way a body moves when it's exactly where it belongs, once a tongue has tasted the skin of a perfect match. The world tried to carve doubt into bone and to make the heart believe it's a question rather than an answer. 

Outside, the saguaros remain, standing guard and providing sanctuary as they always have—spines raised, armor intact. But even the strongest roots crave rain. And even the fiercest things, given time, will flower. Even saguaros eventually seek confirmation that it belongs—deserves—planted in the hot desert dirt. 

In one form or another, they will always remain.

And so will this. 

And so will we.


Alyson Tait was born and raised in the Southwest USA, where she walked alongside cactuses and scorpions before moving to Maryland. She has appeared in (mac)ro(mic), HAD, and Pseudopod. She has chapbooks published by Querencia Press, Bottlecap Press, and Fahmidan Publishing, and one book forthcoming with Graveside Press.



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'Locks' by Kelli Short Borges

We never walk alone at night. Never. Only stupid girls ignore that rule and we know what happens to them. If we need reminding, all we need to do is watch Dateline and listen to Keith Morrison, watch breaking news in any state any city any day. We never forget the girls’ faces. Their Bambi eyes, their yearbook grins, hair shiny as rearview mirrors. We click deadbolts, check them twice. We lock our bedroom doors at night—a lock inside of locks. We never take cocktails from strange men. We travel in packs, never leave a girl alone, never drink more than two martinis. We remember the girl who went missing last month, the ghosts of her eyes, her Chiclet smile stapled to a Starbucks bulletin board. A girl who broke the rules. It won’t be us, we say. We never walk to our cars without our keys in hand, nails flashing Kick Ass Red, metal splayed through our fingers like weapons. We are cortisol-flushed, animal eyes alert. We are ready. We never forget the rules. Until our keys are hung, our pajamas on. Until we’ve turned locks upon locks upon locks.

We never see them coming. Until their whiskey breath runs hot down our necks. Until their arms slip around us, familiar as locks. Until we remember Keith Morrison, his baritone warning, it’s always the friend, the boyfriend, the husband, it’s always someone you know.

 

Kelli Short Borges writes from her home in Phoenix, Arizona. Her fiction has appeared in Peatsmoke, Moon City Review, Lost Balloon, and elsewhere. Recently, Kelli's work was chosen for the Wigleaf Top 50 longlist and the 2024 and 2025 editions of Best Microfiction. She’s currently working on her first novel.

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2025 FlashFlood: The Complete List

In case you missed any of the pieces we appeared during the 2025 FlashFlood, here's an index to everything.  Sadly, the 'Blog Archiv...