It’s one hour till the end of the world and Mr. Chan is watching the sky. He can’t see the asteroid behind his cataract clouds, but he enjoys the heat on his face. Six days a week, I walk through the park on the way home from the call center. And six days a week, I see Mr. Chan sitting on the same bench under the same tree. We chat for a few minutes, maybe an hour. I’ve been in...
Phone. Wallet. Keys. A modicum of dignity. An ocean of guilt. For me, the humiliation of Bobby Chandler beating me up in fourth grade. For her, her grandmother’s admonition that life was short, eat dessert first. A wad of ones, enough to tip a reasonably competent stripper. Childhood phone numbers long since assigned to someone else. The ticket stubs from our first date (J Lo in The Cell). Dogeared photos of our boys when they were four, back in the...
It’s our anniversary and also my birthday and she is in the pine needles on her hands and knees. She scrapes up poop and clears her throat, her shoes only halfway on. “I will not let them fuck me,” she says. The house is a product of the modern American security state. Cameras provide complete and total coverage of the property, ensuring we are not in the hot tub a minute past 10pm as the sound of bubbles and light...
Ibo's Landing? That's the place where they bring the Ibos over in a slave ship and when they get here, they ain't like it and so…they march right down in the river…back to Africa, but they ain't able to get there. They gets drown. - Floyd White (1930) Ain't you heard about them? [They] rose up in the sky and turned themselves into buzzards and flew right back to Africa…Everybody knows about them. - Wallace Quarterman (1930) I. It was...
When Mama returned from the grocery store on Tuesday, she told us the beer factory had flooded our town. She said she walked through waist deep liquid after her car flooded too, occasionally falling in, finding her mouth filled with dirty booze that tasted of road and tires and oil. She was able to walk only twelve steps before nearly drowning but she managed to make it home with the groceries because she loved us. We believed her because we...
SmokeLong Quarterly is dedicated to bringing the best flash narratives to the web.
September 2022
I have so much to tell you and so many people to thank. First, I’d like to thank Paul Bilger for all the work he did as our art director the last few years. Paul left us in November, and we wish him all the best. To all the interviewers and Michael Czyzniejewski, our interviews… Continue reading New Front (continue reading)
A SmokeLong Summer 2023!
From June 5 to August 27 2023, SmokeLong is going to host the superworkshop, A SmokeLong Summer for the second year. We want to spend the summer with you, the flash community. Our asynchronous workshops take place on a devoted website where you can create a profile, interact with the flash community, and take part in group discussions on craft, but A SmokeLong Summer is much more.
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Denne Michele Norris is the editor-in-chief of Electric Literature. A 2021 Out100 Honoree, her writing has been supported by MacDowell, Tin House, VCCA, and the Kimbilio Center for African American Fiction, and appears in McSweeney's, American Short Fiction, and ZORA. She co-hosts the critically acclaimed podcast Food 4 Thot, and is hard at work on her debut novel. Follow her on Twitter and IG @thedennemichele.
Now in the shop
Folktales, myths, and fairy stories are often the blueprints through which we learn narrative as children—though their content is frequently dark and bloodthirsty. Let’s interrogate their rhetoric, musicality, and cultural insight (and impact) as we harness their sway over our imaginations with original fairy-tale flash of our own. — Jasmine Sawers You will work in… Continue reading Fairy Tales, Folklore, & Myth in Flash — A One-Week Intensive
Jack Bedrosian is a writer from Greensboro, North Carolina. His work has been featured by In These Times, SB Nation, The Cauldron, and Defenestration. He holds an MA in Global Politics from Loyola University Chicago and makes a living doing manual labor for a nonprofit in Los Angeles. Currently, he is working on a novel about living with sex addiction.
