Category: flash fiction

Drained | Sarah Schiff

For the near-decade since she crossed over with baby Maryna in her belly, Vira has been wiping up after grubby college students and waiting to rest. She tells herself they are just kids, but she can’t help cursing them when she finds shit-smeared toilets and banisters dotted with hardened gum. The anonymity of the night shift is reassuring (even if she never stops watching for the watchers), but it’s also a drain on her body, knowing all the while it should be asleep. She leans on the mop as if it is a third leg, studies her feet while summitting the marble staircases, and cleans as she dreams standing up. Sometimes she wonders whether running was a mistake. If she can believe an aunt who never left, things have improved, but this is the only home Maryna has ever known.

Most people at the university merely see backdrop as they pass Vira, but one night a med student actually looks at her. He’s studying in a classroom glowing blue from his computer screen when she wheels in her Metro Deluxe Cleaning Cart and uses her shoulder to switch on the overhead lights. Even though she turns away from him, she can feel his eyes idling as she sponges the chalkboard clean and lets herself fantasize. Maryna has grown independent, the president just signed a new order, Vira has lasted this long in the undocumented dark—even has her own apartment now. Maybe this med student can be hers too.

The next night, he’s there again, this time right by the board, so she has to squeeze by him to clean it, and as she does, she looses a giggle that doesn’t sound like hers.

Older than his classmates and far less privileged, Drew is lonely too. She is more his peer than they are.

He won’t take her back to his place. He has three roommates, he says. Vira doesn’t invite him to hers: Maryna. According to the movies, broom closets have a reputation, and the one Vira uses has a cot. Some nights, Drew brings rotisserie chicken that they eat with their fingers and wash down with white wine from a jug. The wine burns her nose, and she doesn’t care that the chicken-grease on his fingers stains her uniform—until the next day when she has to take an unscheduled bus ride to the laundromat. But she smiles as she counts out the quarters, smelling the chicken in her hair.

Then Drew proposes. He’s moving to the other side of the country for his internship and wants her to go with him. Vira isn’t sure of her own feelings or whether he loves her for her and not for the comfort she brings, but the promise of citizenship is enough. She tries convincing herself that acceptance comes with love, but she well knows how rarely that jackpot is won. They start planning their future, and Drew stops bringing condoms to the broom closet.

Then he graduates and is gone.

Her calls to his phone aren’t answered by his voice, “We’re sorry, the number you have reached…” but she hangs up and dials again, every day. For nine months.

Now Vira has a new baby and no Drew and no citizenship. Milk spills and wets her uniform through the night while she cleans shit, scrapes gum, and curses the students. She pumps and bottles it in the broom closet so Maryna can feed it to Tristan while Vira is at work, but the milk only trickles when she’s at home with him during the day. He sucks at nothing then wails and wails with an exhausting hunger. Vira knows how he feels.

about the author:

If we’re talking about my personal idea of the good life, it would be sitting on the beach, surrounded by friends and family, getting to hear their joys and chatter while my face is buried in a good book. 

A native Floridian and dual US and Canadian citizen, Sarah Schiff earned her PhD in American literature from Emory University but is a fugitive from higher education. She now writes fiction and teaches high school English in Atlanta. Her short stories have appeared in Pembroke Magazine, Valparaiso Fiction Review, The Saturday Evening Post, and Cleaver, among others. She’s been twice nominated for a Pushcart prize, by J Journal andJMWW, was a finalist for the TulipTree Review’s Wild Women Story Contest, and was a 2024 Jack Hazard Fellow. Wouldn’t you know it: She’s currently at work on a novel. More at https://sarah-schiff.com/

Read our Q&A with Sarah here.

The Moon and Nothing Else | Charlie Rogers

The protesters in the park are shouting about peace. I think you’d find it amusing, if you were here—you’d turn to me, rolling your eyes with a judgmental snort. Peace, you’d say, and let me fill in the rest—they don’t even know what it means. I’d smile and shake my head knowingly. If you were feeling brave, you might let your palm graze my thigh.

Peace. It’s what I’m hoping to find here, today.

In the crowd of shouting teenagers, I spot a small girl in a bright purple coat, no more than four years old, tugging at the straw-plastic hair of a naked doll. A redhead, like you. Who would bring a child to an anti-war protest in late winter? No one around her looks old enough to be her parents.

We met at an anti-war rally three years ago. I lost my balance, and you helped me back to my feet. You told me you’d evaded the draft because of your asthma, while my lottery number was keeping me safe for the moment. We left together, and you took me to your tiny walkup below 14th Street, and we listened to Joni Mitchell’s “The Pirate of Penance” over and over—every time the song ended, you’d move the needle back—until I worked up the nerve to kiss you. By “Cactus Tree,” I was in love.

I spin the cold metal band you gave me around my finger. It’s not as tight as it used to be—I’ve had so little appetite since my discharge from the hospital—but I remember the moment you opened your palm to first reveal it to me.

It’s not real, not to them. But… we know. Chip, would you marry me?

The February chill seeps into my bones, and I tug my jacket tighter around me as I sit on our favorite bench in Washington Square. If I was a woman, you would have brought me back to Central Park, where we met, and sunk to a knee—so traditional!—instead of sliding this ring onto my finger as we stood at the stove, waiting for the coffee percolator.

Peace.

I thought the rings would give us cover. We’d sit in bed and make up stories about our fake wives. Pamela was your high school sweetheart, but you caught her in bed with the TV antenna installer. Janice was in the same secretarial pool as my sister, at a marketing firm uptown.

Snowflakes drift around my head, aimless. The abandoned newspaper by my side reads: California Supreme Court Voids Death Penalty. We planned to visit San Francisco this September.

I stand and jam my hands into my pockets—the ring catches on the lip of the fabric. It’s never done that before, in the year I’ve been wearing it. On my way out of the park, on my way through the crowd, I’ll walk past the spot where it happened.

Peace.

I’ve been asking myself: why us? We did everything we were supposed to. No holding hands, no displays of affection. We lowered our voices so no one would suspect anything unusual about us. You talked about Nixon’s upcoming trip to China. I was concerned about a hole in my boot. Then the boys appeared, four of them, teenagers in ratty coats, hovering in front of us like ragged shadows. One waved a butterfly knife in our faces, demanding money. The others hung back, paradoxically more scared of us than we were of them. We did as they asked, though we only had eleven dollars between us, and no valuables. Except—

“Please not the rings,” you said. In your fear you must have forgotten to keep your register low, and your affect came out. I heard it. I saw on their faces that they heard it. One of the shadow-boys stepped forward, wearing an expression of pure disgust. I knew what would happen, my worst nightmare rising up to greet me, and stepped forward to protect you.

I remember being surprised at how little it hurt when he stabbed me in the stomach. It felt like being punched, but I’d taken harder blows. After that, the memories swirl together like colored oils, and only flashes remain. The sound of the boys retreating, their shoes crunching against the light snow. The reek of urine as I realized I’d lost control of my bladder. Your eyes. Your beautiful, forest-colored eyes, reflecting the moon and nothing else.

It’s too much, the onslaught of memory. I stagger to the nearest bench and settle onto its rotted wood, biting back emotion. I thought I was strong enough to return here, where hippies dance on the spot our blood colored the snow, leaching onto the pavement like it was never ours. I close my eyes.

I try to summon your voice, its soft lilt, so I can beg you for guidance, but you remain silent.

Something taps my leg.

I open my eyes and find the little girl in the purple coat standing before me. She holds her doll to her chest, pudgy fingers gripping the toy by its legs, and her other hand restlessly twirls her hair. 

“Are you okay, mister?” She stares up at me with the greenest eyes I have ever seen.

I shake my head.

She nods, considering this.

I scan the crowd for her parents, but I see no other redheads, only her and the absence of you. Maybe they aren’t here. Maybe her father is off in the jungle somewhere, wondering about her.

She pushes the doll in my direction, an offering. 

Peace.

“No, she’s yours.” I shake my head again. “But thank you.”

The little girl clambers onto the bench beside me, struggling to hoist herself up. Once settled, she puts her tiny hand on my leg. “I’ll keep you company ‘til you’re better.”

I know it’s a coincidence that she resembles you. But in the moment, I imagine you’ve sent her somehow, the visitation I prayed for. I know it isn’t real. You’re gone. Forever.

“I’d like that,” I say.

about the author:

Charlie Rogers (he/him) is a gay writer, former photographer and aspiring hermit who lives in New York City, writing the same story over and over, ignoring birds and their portents. He is originally from Beacon, NY, and studied literature at Cornell University for some reason. His work has appeared in BULL, Uncharted, and Ellery Queen. Website: charlierogerswrites.com

While Making Out the Lineup for Tomorrow’s 12U Softball Championship Game | Jim Parisi

1. TABITHA, whose mother sent, at the start of the season, a spreadsheet documenting her myriad allergies (line fifty-seven: lukewarm tap water?). Despite the ever-present risk of anaphylactic shock, Tabitha is an on-base machine who sets up the power hitters who don’t need to be encased in a plastic bubble when the team enjoys its post-game snack. 

2. AGNES, your best all-around player. She lives at the end of your block with her two moms. You spent numerous nights this past winter in their living room, drinking too many Modelos and failing in your efforts not to burden Holly and Audrey with your tales of woe.

 3. MARTHA, who hasn’t made an out since early April, always bats third. Her father set in motion the chain of events that has reduced you to sitting in bed unable to sleep, in an empty house, as the clock approaches three in the morning.

4. MADELINE, erstwhile resident in this three-bedroom Cape Cod, which never seemed cavernous until her mother pulled up stakes in January. You wanted to work out a rotating co-parenting arrangement that would keep Maddie in the house full-time. Becca told you that wouldn’t fly because she and Maddie were moving in with Steve and his three kids. You protested that she had started seeing Steve a mere three months earlier, after your separation became official. You lost that argument and got custody every other weekend, plus practices and games. This year has been difficult, but the big test will come when the offseason starts around six tomorrow night. 

5. ROSE, who speaks only when spoken to and sits alone at the far end of the bench. Her mother insists Rose can’t wait to get in the car to head to the field. You recognize echoes of your own mother in Mona’s rictus and the ropy muscle bulging in her neck as she stands along the outfield fence; the yearning for her quiet, sensitive kid to fit in; the living and dying with every at-bat and every chance in the field. You try to visit Rose’s end of the bench every couple of innings; on a good day you can induce a hesitant smile at a corny dad joke. But Rose springs to life on the basepaths, stealing with abandon and always taking the extra base. 

6. CASSANDRA, sister of Martha and younger daughter of the instrument of your professional demise, Bill Trager, whose first initiative upon becoming mayor two years ago was to adopt the supermarket model of self-checkout for municipal services, starting with your domain, the public library. Trager’s budget not only replaced clerks with self-service kiosks, it also eliminated funding for your head librarian position. You wonder if your decision to start a twelve-year-old at shortstop ahead of Cassie, who at ten was new to the team, convinced him to seek revenge. Trager sits in the first row of the stands to yell encouragement to his daughters. You hate yourself for lamenting that he is not a more toxic presence in their lives.  

7. GISELE or GETRUDE, twins you haven’t seen since they sprayed line drives all over the field at the first practice. You assumed they had quit the team, but on Friday morning, their father texted to say the girls would be arriving at four on the dot, coming directly from ballet class. You fear going into the championship with two outfielders who haven’t picked up a softball in three months. But their surprise appearance is your only hope of averting an embarrassing forfeit. 

8. GERTRUDE or GISELE, not that it matters.

9. MABEL, your daughter’s new roommate, whose pinpoint control and natural movement will determine your team’s fate. The girls have had a rapport since the first day of 10U practice, when Maddie raised her hand to strap on the catcher’s gear and Mabel strode from behind the gaggle of teammates to say, “I’ve got pitcher, Coach.” Your throat catches every time you hear parents call the duo “the sister battery.” You tried to make Steve the villain after Rebecca broke the news last fall that their casual dating had turned serious. But things between you and Becca had been on the skids for years. You prefer to remember the Steve who used to smuggle illicit beers under his jacket for impromptu Friday happy hours in your library office. And you can’t blame your former friend for being in love with the woman you fell for, hard, when she trusted your spindly arms to catch her in a team-building exercise at freshman orientation. If you could rekindle those happy hours, you’d ask Steve if he ever finds himself marveling at Becca’s ability to command every room she enters, always knowing the right thing to say to gather a crowd around her; if he’s found the spot on her lower back, an inch to the left of her spine, that sends a shiver through her entire body if you touch it with just the right amount of pressure; if she scrunches up her nose when she laughs at his jokes, the way she used to for yours, before all the laughter stopped. 

[OUT: BEATRICE, MURIEL, and ESTHER, triplets on a pilgrimage to Disney. You beg parents not to schedule vacations until after the playoffs end, but every year, one family bolts town as soon as school is out. The girls don’t control their own schedules, which is the only reason you feel guilty for hoping a smallpox outbreak shuts down EPCOT.]

You close your laptop. The printer comes to life down the hall. You press your back against the headboard and finger the ridged border of a red checker, a one-month sobriety chip you awarded yourself yesterday afternoon. You know that no matter what happens in the game, you won’t wake up the following morning beside a lineup of beer cans on the nightstand.

Read by the author:

Jim’s story was selected as the 2025 Honeybee Flash Fiction Prize winner by Tom Paine. Tom had this to say about the work…

Kurt Vonnegut didn’t do book reviews, as he said nothing was easier than sticking a warm knife through the butter of a book. He knew how hard it is to write, and frankly, how noble to try to capture the topside beauty of life while capturing “deeper things” in the nets of words we call sentences. As a fiction professor in an MFA, I try to water the garden, to promote growth. Which it to say: hooray for these finalists. Each shows deep pixelated attention to life, and attention is love. Let me say up front readers have biases, and mine own is toward a writer sharing the strange and grievous experience of living the fleshy life. I want full 3-D communion with the people in fiction others call characters. When writing is artful and attentive to the minute building blocks of a life others call random details, I feel less lonely, and even soul-vitalized. Which is a long-winded way of saying the story that locked me into a shared experience of life was “While Making Out the Lineup for Tomorrow’s 12U Softball Championship Game.”

What an absurd and impossible conceit for a story! A coach pondering the players in a young girl’s softball game the following day. But woven into a coach’s list of pondering, each player comes to life in a grocery list of offhand but life-giving details. But within those thumbnails, the coach unveils a snapped love, alcoholism, and their own splattered but hopeful heart. Art’s secret is that the closer you zoom in on the details of anything, even a random coach’s player list (!), the more it glows with the bickering mitochondrion of a life. So yes, this writer has made something gorgeous out of a coach’s hidden melancholia; shown us the gods in the quotidian. Even a coach’s notes otherwise heading for the trash on the floor of the car.

about the author:

What comes to mind when I think about the good life is vacations with my family: sitting on the nearly deserted beach late in the afternoon, the sun setting behind us, the sound of the waves crashing, the sense of peacefulness. I think I’ll need to make a concerted effort to conjure that image to counteract the sense of dread that pervades my thoughts whenever I think about the state of the world.

Jim Parisi lives in Occupied Washington, D.C., with his long-suffering wife, Beth, and Dolce, a spicy mix of boxer, pit bull, and Australian cattle dog. (Their two kids, Aidan and Nora, have flown the coop.) Much of his free time is spent coaching Little League softball. His writing has appeared in FlashFlood Journal, The Bluebird Word, Five Minutes, Wandering Lights,  Club Plum, and ihavethatonvinyl.com.

Read our Q&A with Jim here.

The Summer He Left | Alison Ozawa Sanders

Mom lets you choose the perfect spot – close but not too close to the water, equidistant from the people to either side, far from annoying kids who might steal your sand toys. You walk right out of your flip flops, leaving them behind you like footprints, plop down in the cool sand, and plunge your fingers in. The drive from the valley felt like it took forever. Mom was crying again. Then she suddenly wiped her face and said in a wobbly voice, We girls just need a day at the beach. You felt her watching you in the rearview mirror, silently begging you to smile, to say something cheerful back to her. Your eyes refused to meet hers. And then she started sighing a lot, which, these days, means she’s going to start crying again. You just stared out the window and watched the green freeway signs fly past.

But now, the sand is soft beneath your thighs and you can feel the crashing of the waves like thunder in your chest, and the wind is wild, whipping in your hair. You fill your lungs with the briny air and look to the horizon. All of this feels like it could almost wash the rest away. 

You want to get right to it – run straight into the waves, do cartwheels at the water’s foamy edge, bury yourself in the sand – but Mom says Sunblock first. Standing side by side, both looking out over the water, you pass the bottle back and forth, smearing the lotion over chests and limbs and cheeks. It smells like coconut, and the scent is deeply familiar but also faintly repulsive, cloying. 

Honey, can you get my back? 

You ignore her. She lowers herself to sit on a towel so that you can reach, and she lowers the straps of her swimsuit over her shoulders. You instinctively look for someone, anyone else, who can do this. But, of course, there is no one. You scan the beach and imagine that every other mom has a husband who does this part, and then they trade places, and the moms do it for the husbands. They both like it because it’s sort of sexy and that’s what grown-ups do. But not your mom. What she told you was: Dad left us. But you know that has to be a lie. He left YOU, you want to scream at her, but she already cries so much all the time, you don’t say anything. You hate how splotchy her face gets when she cries. 

You kneel behind her, hold the bottle aloft, and squeeze a big blob directly onto her wide back, sprinkled with moles and freckles. You spread the lotion with the pads of your fingers only, wishing it would sink in faster. That blob was a bit much. Peering down at her hunched form, you think of a Thanksgiving turkey – soft and pink and vulnerable before it goes into the oven. You smear the lotion as quickly as you can, wanting to be done. 

When she does your back, she rubs the lotion in her palms first, so it’s warm when she spreads it up your neck, over your shoulders, down the neat stack of vertebrae. Okay, okay, you say, though you know she’s not done yet, and you scamper to the water on colt legs. One day I’ll run away too, you don’t dare say.

Later that evening, back at home in the valley, she undresses in the little bathroom with the light that hums like a beehive. You glance up to see your mother’s back striped with pale streaks – your four fingers. One shoulder glows an angry red, scarlet blotches bloom at her armpits and along the edges of her swimsuit, and you feel guilty, for a moment. That must hurt, you think. But neither of you says it aloud.

That night, you wake in the middle of the night, chest slick with sweat, heart jackrabbiting in your throat. In your dream you were falling, falling. You go to her then, silently, and her room is cool, and into her bed you climb, nestling behind her. Through the thin T-shirt you feel the heat of her skin on your cheek. She smells like the ocean, and your eyes drift shut.

about the author:

Alison is a mother, an attorney, and a lover of all things fiction, living in Santa Cruz, California. Her writing has appeared in Stanford Magazine, Cleaver, Seaside Gothic, Bluebird Word, Flash Fiction Magazine, Bright Flash Literary Review, Short Beasts, and The 2023 Swan Song Anthology. She is working on her first novel.

Solitary Creatures | Charlie Rogers & Jaime Gill

It’s not the first time I’ve seen myself on a MISSING poster. One version of myself, anyway, a face that never really belonged to me. The chalk-white skin, shock-red beard, deep green eyes—they were always borrowed. My new face, with its porcelain-perfect features, still feels foreign to me, just like this new black hair rippling to my shoulders.

I know the man taping up the poster. I watch him, studying his movements with a mourning so deep I feel it run down my spine, through my shins, and deep, deep down into the soil below. 

Diego. 

I have nobody to blame but myself.

There are rules. From the moment I could understand human speech, my mother drilled them into me—they’re not like you, and if you forget this, they’ll kill you. Or worse. Until I met Diego, I’d never been tempted to break any rule. I’ve cycled through nine bodies now, a new one every fourth year, and never once allowed myself to attach to a human. That’s the first rule.

The second is not to hang around after a change—too risky. I try to migrate at least a hundred miles for every new identity. 

I shouldn’t still be in this city, let alone in Diego’s favorite park. I convinced myself I was stopping here to savor one last autumn afternoon—the new colors unleashed by the change of seasons— before heading south. A lie, of course. As soon as I saw Diego, the truth revealed itself.  

I’m breaking Mother’s rules yet again, for one more moment in his long shadow. His face is leonine handsome, and that loose shirt hides a taut, elongated body… but I know better than most how meaningless surface details are. It’s what lives behind those cheekbones that drew me to him.

We met three summers ago, on the other side of this park. I’d lived decades avoiding humans, lurking in the undergrowth at the edges of their lives, but I found everything about them fascinating. I’d spent forty-five minutes imagining the life of the stranger who’d left behind a quarter-filled coffee cup on my park bench. But then Diego appeared, his face etched with consternation, as he taped a different poster to a tree. I waited until he was gone and approached it, studying the inscrutable expression of a tortoiseshell cat named Ralphie. Black on one side of her face, mottled brown on the other.

“Oh, sorry.” I was startled by his lilting voice behind me. “I wasn’t sneaking up on you. But I saw you looking and wondered if you’d seen her?”  

I shook my head, profoundly wordless.

“She’s my neighbor’s,” he continued. “I’m just helping out…. We’re worried sick about her.”

That was the moment. I couldn’t fathom being so concerned about someone else’s house pet—it was as if he was speaking to me in a foreign tongue. A language of kindness, an empathy so all-embracing I later believed it might even be expansive enough to include the real me.

“I’m Patrick,” I said, wishing I’d chosen a better name for myself. Mother’s rules hissed at me—never volunteer information—but for the first time, I let myself ignore them.

Here and now, I’ve been staring, and Diego’s noticed. He strides towards me with such purpose that a sudden breathlessness overtakes me—does he somehow recognize me? I should be alarmed at the prospect of discovery, but I’m not. So many nights in our bed I lay still and sleepless, desperate to tell him the truth, or some version of it. I crafted whole monologues in my head, reworking my explanations, but never worked up the courage to say a word of them. The thought of disappointing him frightened me more than the knowledge I’d have to leave.

“Excuse me, Miss.” That last word stamps out hope like a boot on embers. Yet his voice is a forgotten song, a drumbeat calling me to a home that no longer exists.

He peels the top poster off his stack and hands it to me. “Have you seen this man?”

I still haven’t acclimated to this new body. Usually, the transition is easier—my biggest worry is the invention of a new life for myself. But it’s been twelve years since I’ve shifted into a female form, and I’d forgotten how much smaller I’d be. Diego towers over me now. My fingers brush his as I take the flyer—his touch electrifies me, same as it ever did.

I study my old face as if trying to remember where I might have seen it before, then look up into Diego’s eyes. A thousand volts surge, but now—for the first time—only in one direction. “I’m sorry, I don’t think so. What happened to him?”

The moment I hear my strange, soft voice ask the question, I know it’s a mistake.

“He’s my boyfriend.” Diego takes the seat next to mine. There are only inches between our arms now. They might as well be a universe. “He’s been missing for three days. He didn’t take any of his stuff, so I’m worried. This isn’t like him.”

When I was eight years old, Mother vanished. I was already assuming adult forms—changers mature faster than humans—and we were posing as brother and sister in Miami. One afternoon she took me to a parade and ditched me in the crowd. She’d warned me it would happen, but not when. I searched for her, of course, hours spent wandering through hordes of drunk revelers, hope leaking away like water from a basin. She was gone. That was that. Sometimes I wonder if she ever tries to check up on me, but she’d have no way of finding me again, and I wouldn’t recognize her even if she did.

I never—not once—thought about how that day might have felt for her. Diego and I once watched a nature documentary about a tigress who had abandoned her almost full-grown cub. Tigers are solitary creatures, just as my kind are meant to be. I ached to tell Diego the truth then, but I couldn’t think how to explain myself—Mother never taught me.

“That’s terrible.” That’s all I can think to say now. “I hope he turns up.”

The lie feels cruel. For a fleeting second there, I thought perhaps I could reach Diego again through this new body, but now I understand the stark impossibility. He used to look at me with hunger. Now it’s a kind of indifference—he has no interest in this new form. That was too much to ask. 

Finally, I understand why we have these rules. It’s not just to evade detection, as I always believed. I wish it were.

It’s to avoid this.

I fold the poster in half, the crease running across my old mouth. “I’m Lyss, by the way.” Why am I telling him this? Am I still nursing some kind of hope?

“Diego.” He stands up again, but then he turns to me and some life sparks back into his dark, tired eyes. “Wait. Have we met before?”

He does recognize me. Somehow. But as understanding and forgiving as I know he is, he could never understand this. And I can’t confess that our three perfect years together were all a lie. 

I’ve been a walking lie since the day I was born.

What’s one more? 

“I don’t think so.” This untruth shouldn’t be any different but it is, my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth. 

Diego stands and nods a sad-smiled goodbye to me before bustling off. I sigh. He’s as awkward as ever.

A breeze picks up and rains leaves around me, a riot of reds and yellows. I reach forward to catch one. A glossy chartreuse, shed from the ginkgo one bench over. They won’t have those trees where I’m going. The leaf appears so vibrantly alive, but that’s an illusion. It’s already dead. 

I stand. Diego and his shadow are walking back home, and after watching him a few more seconds, I turn in the opposite direction and force my legs to move. The bus leaves soon.

Read by one of the authors, Charlie Rogers:

about the authors:

Charlie Rogers is a writer living in New York City. His stories have been Pushcart-nominated and featured in several publications including Bull, Permafrost, and Uncharted, as well as the anthologies Weird Weird West, Hope, and Alchemy.

Jaime Gill is a British-born writer living in Cambodia. He is a Pushcart-nominee and his stories have won a Bridport prize and been published in Trampset, Blue Earth, Orca, New Flash Fiction Review and others.

Charlie and Jaime are Trans-Pacific friends and collaborators, with shared interests in queer lives, writing, cinema, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. More at
www.charlierogerswrites.com and www.jaimegill.com.