When the aliens landed I was in an Applebee’s parking lot, sitting in a Ford Fiesta, crying into a virgin mudslide (which I guess is, like, just a milkshake?), and contemplating failure. The Applebee’s on 185th. You know the one? Between the Taco Bell and the daycare center with that sign out front that needs a comma: Slow children playing. And it wasn’t even my Ford Fiesta. I should probably rewind a little. My manager (I guess former manager now?),...
The one picture I have of my parents together was lifted from a tumblr account called The Lesser Folks, which featured sixties folk singers who achieved only minor regional success. My parents, for instance, were pretty hot shit on the south side of Philadelphia for half of a single summer, when their song “Put Your Weapons Down for Lazy Hour” played on local radio every forty-five minutes. Their voices had that clear, insistent quality all singing voices seemed to have...
The way everybody’s favorite gameshow works is the contestant goes into this white, soundproofed room—really not much of a room at all, more of a glorified closet—the door closes behind them, and they shut their eyes. Then, after some theatrics, the contestant comes out as whatever object the audience wants them to be. The fun of it is the contestant doesn’t know what the audience will choose. Sometimes it’s hilarious. Like when a contestant comes out of the room as...
I keep the hatchet close at hand. On our kitchen table, on my nightstand, in my lap if I’m sitting on the couch watching the weather channel. We’d heard of families in New Orleans who’d fled to their attics to escape the rising water, but then became trapped and drowned. The hatchet is for chopping our way out through the roof. The driveway is underwater. My wife finds me, drenched with rain, trying to redirect the water downhill toward the...
The illness appears fully formed. Like fruit; green, still hard and hanging at the top of an unlikely tree. The doctors nod at their charts, the X-rays, and intermittently at the boy. He is so young, the men with the charts say. Newly formed, a child, how can they take that innocence away, or – looking at the boy’s father – how can they break that fragile spell of hope hanging over his face? Sometime later, another doctor tells the...
SmokeLong Quarterly is dedicated to bringing the best flash narratives to the web.
September 2022
I have so much to tell you. I know I always say that, but I always do. So much is happening at SmokeLong, and there are so many people to thank for making it happen. Our submissions editors read 2800 submissions this quarter. I’m so grateful to each of them for giving so much time… Continue reading New Front (continue reading)
The SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction
The SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction (The Smokey) is a biennial competition that celebrates and compensates excellence in flash. The grand prize winner of The Smokey is automatically nominated for The Best Small Fictions, The Pushcart, Best of the Net, and any other prize we deem appropriate. In addition to all this love, we will also pay the grand prize winner $2500. Second place: $1000. Third place $500. Finalists: $100. All finalists and placers will be published in the special competition issue in December 2022.
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Janelle Bassett‘s writing appears or is forthcoming in Passages North, New Delta Review, The Offing, Washington Square Review, and Wigleaf. Her story collection THANKS FOR THIS RIOT is a semifinalist for the Pamet River Prize and she is a fiction editor at Split Lip Magazine. Find her on Twitter @hazmatcat
