Tag: BRILLIANT Flash Fiction

ISSUE 24: JANUARY 2020

~ Brilliant Flash Fiction

5972065B-DFD2-4915-805A-5A488BA375AFConfrontations
By David Galef

Maggie and I lived in a prim white house at the intersection of Maple Road and Main Street, and when she left to teach every morning, I’d stay home and stare out the front window because I lost my job at the bank. It’s a busy crossing, particularly when children are walking to and from Fielding Elementary School, where Maggie once taught fifth grade. The crosswalk is marked by a plastic stop sign in the middle of the road, with a capitalized warning for cars to stop for pedestrians. Yet drivers zoom by, narrowly missing people. I’d bang on the windowpane occasionally, to no effect. I don’t like that kind of response, as Maggie well knew. After enough mornings, I left the house and crossed the street, taking my time. I crossed back again. I waved my arms, getting in the motorists’ faces, forcing them to stop. Continue reading “ISSUE 24: JANUARY 2020” →

BRILLIANT FLASH FICTION NOW PAYS FOR STORIES

~ Brilliant Flash Fiction

fireworksHappy New Year!

Beginning January 1, 2020, Brilliant Flash Fiction (BFF) will pay 20 U.S. dollars for each story published in its quarterly online journal. Payment will be made upon publication, through PayPal only.

Authors submitting their work should first study the submission guidelines on our website: brilliantflashfiction.com.

For a $10 donation, you can order a print copy of the Hunger anthology featuring the editors’ “best of” choices from the BFF first five-year archives. Contact us at brilliantflashfiction@gmail.com to order your copy.

BFF is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. The online journal is entering its sixth year of publication and donations made on our website enable us to provide publication opportunities for writers without fees.

Thank you to everyone who donated in 2019. We are deeply grateful for your support.

FLASH FICTION WORKSHOP WITH KATHY FISH

~ Brilliant Flash Fiction

Food_For_Thought_Bug_AlternateJoin us for a FREE flash fiction writing workshop with Kathy Fish during the Fort Collins Book Festival on Friday, October 19 at 11:15 am in the Storytime Room at the Old Town Library in Fort Collins, CO. We are thrilled to have Kathy Fish host a flash fiction event right in our hometown of Fort Collins, CO. Space is limited, so register online today! Continue reading “FLASH FICTION WORKSHOP WITH KATHY FISH” →

ANTHOLOGY LAUNCH PARTY!

~ Brilliant Flash Fiction

2019_bookfest _Logo_basicThe gang at Brilliant Flash Fiction will launch its “best of” fifth-year anthology during the Fort Collins Book Festival on October 19, 7-9 pm at Wolverine Farms Publick House. Flash fiction writer and teacher Kathy Fish will host the evening, announcing the shortlist and top three prizewinners in the FEED US Writing Contest. Authors whose writing appears in the anthology will read their work, and copies of the anthology will be on sale. Kathy will share her wisdom on what makes a good flash piece work, so it’s an event not to be missed. Everyone is welcome—no registration needed.

Wolverine Farms Publick House is located at 316 Willow Street, Fort Collins, CO 80524. www.wolverinefarm.org

2019 GOLD SEAL FOR TRANSPARENCY

~ Brilliant Flash Fiction

Brilliant Flash Fiction has earned a 2019 Gold Seal for Transparency from GuideStar, the world’s largest source of information on nonprofit organizations. Check out our profile at guidestar.org where you can find in-depth information about our goals, strategies, capabilities, and progress. If you want to support our cause, the donate button is on the sidebar of our website!

ISSUE 23: SEPTEMBER 2019

~ Brilliant Flash Fiction

5627196B-20E4-4A95-A8A4-22BCB0209CB4Register 8
By Charles Rafferty

There’s a funny smell around Register 8 and none of the cashiers want to use it, but it’s Saturday, a couple of weeks before Christmas, and Maggie is stuck there.

Maggie is the cutest girl in Marshalls, and she worries people will think that she is the source of the smell. This is preposterous. The sight of her in the break room makes me think, unaccountably, of vanilla extract, of cakes leavening behind the little window of my grandmother’s oven.

A men’s wear price check comes over the PA, and because I’m in the pants section, I’m able to make it to the register more quickly than Adam, who is over in the dress shirts, straightening the rows. Adam has been hitting on Maggie ever since he got hired for the Christmas rush. Maggie and I are year-rounders, and the first thing I check on the schedule each week is when our times will overlap. To take a belt or a fleece jacket from her hand means the possibility of contact, of rapture. Continue reading “ISSUE 23: SEPTEMBER 2019” →

ISSUE 22: JUNE 2019

~ Brilliant Flash Fiction

31FBAC04-A176-41F4-8D0B-DD91BD484236Here We Are on Planet Earth
By Meg Pokrass

Today we are tanning near each other on bright red beach towels on the sand at Hendri’s beach. This time I don’t let my mind worry too much about Blythe’s exhibitionist traits. I’ve overcome my shyness, and we both have our bikini tops off. They’re lying next to us like useless rags.

Sometimes, there’s a language in her eyes that makes me freeze in my tracks, but my goal in this world is to become less uptight. We are thirteen, and happily, only one of us has an attractive face. The other one of us has an attractive body. My body has some potential but there is no way to know if things will turn out.

Driving around in Blythe’s brother’s SUV, we make weekend plans. We whisper in the back seat. Blythe calls him Jeeves and we hate his jokes. Sometimes he flips us off in the rearview mirror. Continue reading “ISSUE 22: JUNE 2019” →

ISSUE 21: MARCH 2019

~ Brilliant Flash Fiction

27FB5691-4F58-48B2-8C63-4720F72AF995Grocery Shopping With My Dead Mother
By Jodi Freeman

Under the store’s florescent lights I see that this handwritten recipe for Chicken and Dumpling Soup is as fragile as dry butterfly wings. The creases are as good as rips. The page is the color of rancid butter, dotted with grease marks, marred by years of being folded into fourths and stored with 3X5 cards and Good Housekeeping clippings in the unremarkable yellow plastic box.

I snuck my mother’s recipe box out of my father’s house with the other kitchen items I took to my first on-campus apartment. Not that he wouldn’t share it with me, but he would have insisted the artifact itself remain safe at home. I didn’t trust myself to explain that I’m hollow and imagine my mother’s food will fill me. Everyday things that will hold my skin to my bones. Won’t articulate that these recipes may be the letter she never left, explaining what I needed to know about being a woman that she didn’t live to tell me. Continue reading “ISSUE 21: MARCH 2019” →

THANK YOU, EVERYONE

~ Brilliant Flash Fiction

9A045634-E7F3-4227-BDCD-C7554CDCB8CDMany thanks to all the Brilliant Flash Fiction supporters who contributed to make our Fifth Anniversary anthology possible. In just nine days, we reached our goal of $1,500 to cover the cost of producing our first print publication, an anthology of the editors’ picks of the best flash fiction featured in Brilliant Flash Fiction (online) over the past five years.

The anthology will also include stories shortlisted in a writing contest to be announced in June.

The anthology launch/celebration will be held in Fort Collins, Colorado, on October 19, 2019, in conjunction with the Fort Collins Book Fair. All our supporters are invited to attend the book fair, where Kathy Fish will lead a flash fiction workshop. Kathy has also agreed to judge our writing contest, and to speak at our launch. We are thrilled to have such an inspiring teacher and speaker at our first event. Continue reading “THANK YOU, EVERYONE” →

ISSUE 20: JANUARY 2019

~ Brilliant Flash Fiction

img_2148Starlight
By Paul Ratner

Hiroshima, 6th August 1945

I was sitting in class staring at Mr. Takashi writing algebra in big loopy lettering on the chalkboard when the bomb landed. He was wearing a short-sleeved white cotton shirt with black slacks that billowed around his skinny legs and a pair of black-rimmed glasses that perched on the bridge of his rubbery nose.

I’m not sure why I can remember him so vividly now. It was just an ordinary school day and me and my thirty or so classmates had no idea when we filed into trigonometry that morning that this day would change our lives.

But somehow every minute detail of that day is seared into my memory, like it’s a part of me and I’m a part of it. And so my life became divided in two—those childhood days that came before the bomb and the days that marched onwards defiantly after. The bomb itself is somehow outside of my life now, like a break in a paragraph, instead of a chapter in itself. Continue reading “ISSUE 20: JANUARY 2019” →