'Shapes of ships from the shore' by Laura Besley

Samuel is the sixth and last son of a sailor and a sailor’s daughter and is born on an unseasonably warm February morning cocooned in his caul. His mother screams and he opens his black eyes, stares at her from inside.

One by one his older brothers grow tall and broad and take to the waves. Each time, Samuel stands on the cobbled wharf, studying the shapes of the ships.

At fifteen, he takes an apprenticeship with the local glassblower. At night by candlelight, he builds intricate vessels and nestles them inside the bottles.

He never once leaves the shore.

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Laura Besley is the author of (Un)Natural Elements,100neHundred and The Almost Mothers. She has been widely published in online journals, print journals and anthologies, including Best Small Fictions. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, twice nominated for Best Micro Fiction and she has been listed by TSS Publishing as one of the top 50 British and Irish Flash Fiction writers.
Having lived in the Netherlands, Germany and Hong Kong, she now lives in land-locked central England and misses the sea. Read more of her writing on her website (laurabesley.com) or connect on X @laurabesley

'As the Sugar Moon Rises' by Parker M. O'Neill

Dad is alone among his maples, augering syrup taps which will soon spew sap through spiles to buckets hanging off the trees like supplicating tin gargoyles. He always says Mom boiled him down, the same way he concentrates the sap into syrup and draws sweetness from something watery and thin. He says any good in him came from her like how the light of the sugar moon is just the reflected light of the sun.

None of us kids or the grandkids have time to help him anymore but we all got his sweet tooth: maple cream and maple candy and double helpings of salted maple pie. He goes on alone in the cold early spring and the maples rise around him like the ribs and vaults of a silent cathedral. Arthritic fingers work the tools shakily through mittens which Mom used to knit the snags out of and which are now five years torn.

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Parker M. O'Neill's fiction appears or is forthcoming in Crepuscular Magazine, Writehive's Rescuing Curiosity Anthology, and Hungry Shadow Press.

'This is a story about squirrels' by Shelley Roche-Jacques

‘What do you want to get out of life?’ the doctor had asked her that morning and she’d said nothing and hung her head apologetically.

Now she is standing at the window of the dayroom watching the squirrels rough and tumble in branches of the chestnut tree. They look like they are trying to get something out of life – frantically seizing something in their tiny paws then turning tail, scampering along dead-end branches, realising there’s nowhere to take it to, nowhere outside of life to bury it or squirrel it away.

The multi-volume pain diaries, notes on sleep and cutting this or that: caffeine, gluten, sugar (sugar! The insanity!). She hadn’t dared tell the doctor she’d ripped the pages out and thrown them away. In a fit of madness or clarity.

She presses her cheek to the cold window and listens. For the squirrel’s heartbeat. For the grass growing. Nothing. A mercy probably.

“Don’t keep pushing things down,” her husband had said to her. Before. “Don’t keep making things about things they’re not about.”

She thinks about the squirrel who lives inside of her. Fuzzy, blue, adorable little guy. She likes to invite him to climb up into her brain, into the control room, to help her assess the pain (is it a wave? A spiky ball? A slab of sensitive fudge?). Together they watch the sensation, with curiosity, from a well-wadded distance, like watching clouds go by.

She listens harder. Cranes to hear something nearer than the roar on the other side of silence – something between a squeak and a bark – are the squirrels singing? Always the squirrels. There must be something more, she thinks, breathing deep and placing her hand over her heart, trying not to bury the feeling.

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Shelley Roche-Jacques’ work has appeared in magazines and journals such as Litro, Brevity, Flash: the International Short-short Story Magazine, and The Boston Review. Her poetry pamphlet Ripening Dark was published in 2015, followed by a collection of dramatic monologues, Risk the Pier, in 2017. Her short fiction has been highly commended in the Bridport Prize and shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Prize. She lives in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, and teaches Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University.

'Anadromous' by Zach Keali'i Murphy

Elliott crouches atop a jagged rock on the shore of the river, spine contorting like a tree branch, skin wrinkled like a fallen fig, his weathered eyes squinting at a run of salmon as they swim upstream and launch their slippery bodies toward a crashing waterfall. He admires their ceaseless tenacity, their magnificent hearts, their silver scales glistening in the sunlight. The frigid wind whips through his beard, the color of sand, as the river water splashes his freckled cheeks. His dark blue veins are a map of where he’s been, where he’s going, and where he went wrong. Mosquito bites and scratch marks paint his arms and legs, but he feels alive. So alive. He takes a deep breath, lunges into the river, and submerges his head beneath the ice-cold water. He looks around and sees stones that have known the river longer than him. He sees his mother’s green eyes in the floating bubbles. He hears his father’s angry roar amidst the rushing water. He hears the silence of the son he always dreamt about but never had. He ascends back up through the river’s surface and exhales everything he’d kept locked up in his brain and in his bones. His salty tears disappear into his soaked skin. He smiles the widest smile he’s ever smiled, his teeth — abandoned shells. The river feels like home. Like home. The salmon swim past him in a frenzy. He looks toward the waterfall and follows behind the salmon, his magnificent heart leaping from his chest.

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Zach Keali’i Murphy is a Hawaii-born writer with a background in cinema. His stories appear in The MacGuffin, Reed Magazine, The Coachella Review, Raritan Quarterly, Another Chicago Magazine, Little Patuxent Review, Flash Frog, and more. He has published the chapbook Tiny Universes (Selcouth Station Press). He lives with his wonderful wife, Kelly, in St. Paul, Minnesota.

NFFD New Zealand's 'A View From Here' - free panel discussion with flash fiction editors (and more!)

FlashFlood launches at midnight!

If you'd like a little something to distract you from the wait, have a look at New Zealand's National Flash Fiction Day line-up of events.  (NFFD NZ is completely independent from our UK-based NFFD project, but we're certainly kindred spirits!)

There's so much going on at NFFD NZ, including some fantastic free events in their Festival of Flash...including an online panel discussion with flash editors, 'A View From Here' which includes FlashFlood editor Ingrid Jendrzejewski.  You can find the line-up here:

https://nationalflash.org/2024-festival-of-flash/

Keep in mind that these are listed New Zealand times; 'A View From Here' takes starts at 21:30 on 14 June in UK time, and at 8:30am on 15 June in New Zealand time.

And don't forget to scroll down - there are so many great events throughout the month!

The Water Levels Are Rising...

There's less than a week left before National Flash Fiction Day 2024 when we'll share another veritable flood of flash fiction here at FlashFlood.

From 00:01 - 23:59, we'll be publishing one flash every five to ten minutes.  

We encourage you to read as many as you can, and share widely.  This year, we've added author bios to make it easier to find and connect with the authors you love.

Happy reading!

FlashFlood is OPEN for submissions until 27 April 2024!

FlashFlood is OPEN for submissions from 12:01 a.m. BST on Sunday, 21 April to 23:59 BST on Saturday, 27 April 2024.

You can read our submission guidelines here, and read about this year's editors here.

We're looking for submissions of up to 300 words on any theme.  (Shorter pieces are very welcome; there is no minimum word count.)  We are happy to read up to three pieces per author per year.

We are happy to consider previously published work as long as it was published before 2022, you give us full publication details, and you retain rights to republish.   We consider all previously unpublished pieces for award nominations; we nominate for Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction and Best of the Net.

Please note that we do not accept AI generated work at this time.  Whilst we appreciate that AI can come up with some very interesting things, we have a very human team of editors volunteering their precious and limited time.  We simply don't have the resources to deal with a deluge of AI generated work.  Please be kind to our editors by only submitting work that you yourself have written.