The Elf by Kelli Lage
My grandmother’s attic holds more yellow light and tinier hallways than it did in my youth. After dreaming of what is left of her, my feet froze when it was…
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A House that Refuses to be Haunted by Gaynor Jones
I’m six years old when I see the poltergeist. My father is long gone, and my mother is watching TV, and my brother is upstairs, clashing He-Men together in violent…
The Things I Don’t Want to Talk About, Even Now as I Tell You This by Nia McCash
“You two would make the cutest kids,” the nurse said. She helped me transfer my husband – post-anesthesia and on painkillers after his septoplasty; the world still spongy to him.…
Healing Hands by Emma McEvoy
The doctor’s sentences pulse with medical terminology. His voice sounds distant and distorted by the pumping of blood through my ear drums. The room begins to spin. Here comes the…
How to Lose an Ocean by Sara Davis
We set up our tent in a campsite midway between the ocean and the salt marshes. Ecosystems crowd together on Assateague island, like a microcosm of the continent: saltwater and…
Tom’s Diner by Rachael Smart
He pours already boiling water from a kettle to a pan for eggs. I tell him I’ve not seen it done that way before. Saves time, he says, and I…
Kitchen Balcony by Lucy N.
When she picked me up from arrivals for the first time, she was wearing a soft jeans-coloured overall amounting to little more than a tank top and shorts. Her bare…
Apple Pie Aphorisms by Ellie Nava-Jones
Grandma always said the best apple pie starts with fruits with the sharpest bite. My house is filled with Christmas carols, bright and clear in digital remasters. We always made…
Let Me In by Ben Slater
A strange sound woke me around two in the morning. I lay listening for a while. A human cry, forming unintelligible words, repeating them after a pause and getting louder.…
Not All Men by Maria Thomas
TW: This flash deals with sexual assault. Not all men, although there was that time when that reptilian managing director pulled me oh-so-close, ran his scaly fingers though my hair…
Dragonfly by Alpheus Williams
Mother has latticed wings, translucent tinted amber, sectioned like leaded glass in church windows. Her flight is poetry, lyrical, beautiful, full of grace, deadly. She kills on the wing, takes prey in…
Risk Assessment by Hannah Storm
It’s almost Halloween and the guesthouse owner has embraced the season with a ghoulish fervour, but it’s clear we have different perspectives on creepy. I tiptoe past pumpkins, a scarily…