micro fiction

ISSUE 27: SEPTEMBER 2020

1D978D0B-B853-46E3-86A3-3BEB2D4ADDCBIAN IN GLASGOW
By Madalyn Aslan

We’re all in the little guy’s car on Belswain’s Lane when Ian tells me his dad is in Broadmoor, prison for the criminally insane. I tell him I was born a bastard and we are poor. Ian counters, “But you’re rich in looks.” And I am like, man!

So we fall in love. He’s thirteen like me and looks like an angel and is going to be a playwright when he grows up. I love his hands. In the pub he talks about books with my mother. We discuss, seriously, names to give our future children. His mother Mae is a joyful drunk, fat and sexy in a tight flower dress, always coughing and laughing. She and my mother light up cigarettes with great animal sighs. My mother says she is from Scotland. So Ian is, too. After the little guy breaks it off with Mae, that’s where she and Ian disappear back to. (more…)

ISSUE 26: JUNE 2020

C5941FB4-8F9A-4B46-9387-C0F6162DAA89Portrait of a Young Woman During Quarantine
By Darcy Casey

Ten at night and the woman’s stomach rumbles; sleep is impossible when her insides have so much to say. She turns under her blankets, a crocodile rolling in a kill’s final moments, but nothing dies except her resolve. She peels the ruined blankets from her body, careful not to wake her husband. From her guts rises a more insistent growl. The stomach, itself a cavernous brain, knows where she is going and is glad. She walks and, reflecting on the day, is pleased to realize she has not eaten a full meal. But wait: can this be true? She considers. It is true. (more…)

Issue 25: March 2020

766EC72D-18EE-4A7D-9AC9-6236F2C13A0AMICHEL
By Cody Pease

Michel waters the plants in rotations. He starts with the tillandsias hanging in the copper-wire cages, then the oreganos and vanilla orchids near the south-facing window, then the begonia on the dining room table. The succulents need to be split, and the philodendrons need more sunlight. His hands are too weak to lift the watering pot; instead, he uses a wine glass like I showed him. It’s a small task to strengthen his muscles. “How are you doing?” His movements are slight and slow, but he smiles. “Well,” he says. I’m afraid to press him further. I leave him to water, then I peel the sweet potatoes for dinner. (more…)

Brilliant Flash Fiction Now Pays for Stories

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.

ISSUE 23: SEPTEMBER 2019

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. (more…)

ISSUE 20: JANUARY 2019

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. (more…)