A ceramic square plate slides across my front with steak barely touched—maimed faintly by a blunt knife. Or a bad knifeman. Waiter mumbles that customer wants it "more on the rare side" and could I "please attend to the mouth-feel." Mouth-feel. Through the pass, I watch customer butter his bread roll with a fish knife that my regulars use to dismember their branzino. His date—a green Lagos girl who adjusts her dress straps every second—is entranced by the performance. I...
The house is burnt pink and deep in the canyon. Phil and I have sex on the shag carpeting while a lizard watches from a fogged tank. This is the first time I’ve seen the house. It’s also the first time he’s felt my breasts. Phil is a documentarian—more of one than me, who’s only trying. He has a long brown ponytail. He likes lizards and alien things other people consider weird. I wonder, while he’s in me, if I’m...
Pittsfield’s children chased insecticide trucks like ice-cream vans. We laughed, mouths open, fogging our tongues with DDT like communion. Summer turned our throats metallic. We ran behind the tailgate as if wonder came in a white plume; it did—Pavlovian joy, a bell for dogs and boys. Later, the town twitched—tiny lightning in wrists and eyelids—shuffle-footed ghosts practicing for a quieter world. Nights, the radio kept watch. A jazz DJ preached his midnight gospel: “Yeah, daddy… cool, daddy… uncool,” reading weather...
Cal Stone tells Jigger McGrail good night. Jigger says, Forget what I said about the old lady. I was just feeling sorry for myself. What Jigger said earlier was that his wife Noelle had gotten so fat she disgusted him. Cal pulls his Bruins knit hat over his ears and says, I didn’t hear a thing. Jigger says, Nothing good ever comes of feeling sorry for yourself. Cal taps his knuckles on the bar, zips his parka, wraps his woolen...
Their kids aren’t friends. Yet the two women talk after dropping their kids off at school. It’s not every day, because the two women aren’t close friends either. But they like the talk when it happens. Thirty minutes. An oasis of uninterrupted, non-logistical adult conversation amidst slotting playdates on the calendar, marinating chicken, music lessons, soccer practices, listening to their kindergarteners talk on and on about parakeets who escaped their cages and created a liberated colony; work smushed in between....
SmokeLong Quarterly has been dedicated to publishing the best flash narratives since 2003.
March 2026
I have so much to tell you. The last couple of months have been a whirlwind in many ways. We’ve all just come back from AWP where we didn’t get to spend enough time with 12 of our editors! Our off-site reading was devoted to celebrating them, and we had a blast. I wish we… Continue reading New Front (continue reading)
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A SmokeLong Summer 26 is closer than you think. This year we’re starting early and staying late. The summer just got longer.
As always, at the heart of A SmokeLong Summer is our peer-review workshop in small groups of around 15 writers, drafting to 3 writing tasks each week. Our peer-review workshop is all in writing, so you can participate from anywhere, anytime. This summer our writing tasks will be generative and thematically leaning towards community. Our theme this year: “The Global Flash Village”. Writing doesn’t have a be a game of Solitaire; it can be a team sport.
Our participants often say their writing has dramatically increased in community. A SmokeLong Summer 26 will take you around the world, introducing you to writers from every corner of our beautiful planet.
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From the elements of flash, to a deep-dive into concepts that underpin the flash narrative, to a disruptive new approach to editing the flash narrative, the publisher and editor-in-chief of SmokeLong shares his insights in three webinars. In Elements of Flash you’ll learn why flash is not just a word count and why the flash… Continue reading SmokeLong Flash Masterclass — Webinar Three-Pack
Cate McGowan writes fiction, poetry, and essays. She is the author of Sacrificial Steel (Driftwood Press, 2025), winner of the Driftwood Editors’ Pick Poetry Prize, Writing Is Revision: Compositions from the Feminist Fringe (Brill, 2025), the novel These Lowly Objects, and the story collection True Places Never Are, winner of the Moon City Press Short Fiction Award and a finalist for the Lascaux Prize. Her shorter work has appeared in Flash Fiction International (W. W. Norton), Glimmer Train, Shenandoah, North American Review, and elsewhere. Recent honors include second place in the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize and first place in Glossy Planet’s 2026 “Cult of Productivity” challenge. She lives in Florida with her husband and several deeply opinionated pets.
