You remember when Dad shaved his mustache. How thin his lips were. In art class, every paper plate waited for a face, for markers, for yarn, for pipe cleaner eyebrows. How your teacher wouldn’t let you pick someone else’s face for the project because it was supposed to be for Father’s Day, and how you refused to put anything on your father plate but two Xs where the eyes should go. And how about a few years later, when Dad...
A lot of things happen that week: trees, their roots gone nonporous from drought, thunder down all over California. David Crosby dies. My son tells me about Mongol warriors, unaffected by plague, flinging plagued human bodies, well past caring, over the high stone surrounds of small cities that wouldn’t look so unfamiliar to us now as we might think. The paper of record publishes another article wherein a white woman complains about wokeness and censorship when she is already inside...
I am glad my daughters see me cry and launch themselves against the bathroom door. They bang and shout things like they want to see me whole, or something I can't quite hear, and I do falter for a minute: Am I being fair, do they have a point? In my culture if we make it to the bathroom alone, alive, we are just glad, too glad, that for a second, we are not out there amidst the clamour. My...
we live in salt now, you say, & then lick my cheek. once, twice, three times doggish. you smack your lips while i wipe my wet-glossed skin with my shoulder. you taste like summer. what about me? you bend down so i can reach your neck. i stand on my tipi-toes & take a taste: your skin rolling under my tongue & then falling into my throat. after a few seconds, my answer: like celery. you shake your head &...
We were more alive at that party than we’d ever been. We were so young that everyone’s 3am felt like our 9pm, except for these two middle-aged guys (like, over 30) who were playing a Tom Petty song on repeat and singing along deliriously while holding each other. When we left the party I was so drunk I drove through a roundabout the wrong way. I didn’t hit anything because in our rural hellscape there was only wind on the...
SmokeLong Quarterly has been dedicated to publishing the best flash narratives since 2003.
June 2023
I have so much to tell you. With five of the best stories from A SmokeLong Summer 23, Issue 81 is a bit meatier than usual. We’re thrilled to share work by Lindsey Pharr and Frances Orrok, the winners of the CNF and fiction competitions of our summerlong workshop. They will each receive $500. And… Continue reading New Front (continue reading)
SmokeLong Fitness--The Community Workshop
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Join SmokeLong as we celebrate the fourth year of The SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction with the flash community. The Smokey Winter Fête includes the following for only $49 until the end of the year: — Two months of SmokeLong Fitness beginning in February 2024 ($55 value) — Peer review in small groups (optional)… Continue reading The Smokey Winter Fête
Olivia Schwartzman lives in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in Emerge Literary Journal.
