I step out onto the back porch near as soon as the storm ends. It’s black outside, cold and wet, the beam of my flashlight bouncing off all the little raindrops and making the whole yard sparkle. Cicadas are screaming in the early morning, the clouds are blocking out the stars, and I’m shivering in my light jacket as I take in the scene in front of me. I’m out here on a mission. There was a noise in the...
I don’t know what to do about the tiny man stuck between my teeth so I go to the dentist and ask him. The dentist yells at me for huffing laughing gas while I was waiting to be seen. Only I wasn’t. So then he yells at me for doing regular drugs, only I don’t. He tells me to open up so he can see this tiny man for himself — and sure enough, there he is. Making himself at...
Noah’s story goes that his father died when he was two years old, due to bacterial meningitis, and his mother died when he was sixteen, from a car accident caused by his older brother, Richard, who at twenty-three hanged himself in prison because he could not handle the guilt. Four years later, his eldest brother Benjamin was killed in the first terror attack, when the city buses were co-opted and bombed. He whispers, I am the last branch of my...
"Girls,” the doctor says, “we believe that you have consumed something strange.” The doctor wears a long white coat and when she raises her arm to check our vitals, we can see that she wears a pink shirt, her armpits ringed with sweat. This is good, we want to tell her, perhaps you know the truth. “So, what have you eaten?” she asks us. “Anything out of the ordinary?” We are not frequent visitors to the hospital. We know women...
Her guest brought a little clock, made of enamel, in a lovely mint-ice color. She had often seen him fiddling with such wounded appliances on the street corner where he liked to sit. When he saw her apartment, he whistled and said: What a swell pad. Don’t it make you sad to live in a big swell pad like this, all by your lonesome? Well, she said, I used to have Oscar. He reminded her of Oscar a little. The...
SmokeLong Quarterly has been dedicated to publishing the best flash narratives since 2003.
June 2026
I have so much to tell you. Issue 92 is a special competition issue: a combination of the top nine stories in The SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction competition and the top three stories in The SmokeLong Workshop Prize competition. All twelve pieces do something amazing with the form. Flash fiction is such a… Continue reading New Front (continue reading)
Registration is Open!
In September 2022 SmokeLong launched a workshop environment/community christened SmokeLong Fitness. This acclaimed community workshop is happening right now on our dedicated workshop site. If you choose to join us, you will work in a small group of around 15-20 participants to give and receive feedback on flash narratives.
Your donation helps writers, editors, reviewers, workshop leaders, and artists get paid for their work. If you’re enjoying what you read here, please consider donating to SmokeLong Quarterly today. We also give a portion of what we earn to the organizations on our "We Support" page.
Now in the shop
Flash writers approach the page–both drafting and editing–differently from writers of longer narrative forms. If you’re new to flash, you can now view the recorded version of “Elements of Flash” with Christopher Allen, the publisher and EIC of SmokeLong Quarterly. This 45-minute version of the workshop–without breakout rooms and timed writing slots–covers foundational aspects of… Continue reading Elements of Flash
Joshua Geller Schwartz grew up in the suburbs of Baltimore and lives in Brooklyn with his partner and his cat, Bubbeleh. His work has appeared in OTHERSIDE. You can find him on Instagram @joshuagellerschwartz or at joshuagellerschwartz.com.
