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)
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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.
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Now in the shop
We’re doing it again! Promptember, an in-between almost month squished into the crannies of autumn, is an intense addition to the mensal calendar. It’s special. During the almost month of Promptember, we’ll meet regularly for generative write-ins and mingling. Promptember also includes three webinar/workshops and two open mics. There will be a dedicated space in… Continue reading Promptember 2026
Sara Hills is the author of The Evolution of Birds (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2021), winner of the 2022 Saboteur Award for best story collection. Her flash-length stories have been taught internationally in schools and workshops as well as widely published in anthologies and journals, including The Best Small Fictions, SmokeLong Quarterly, Bath Flash Fiction Award, Fractured Lit, Cease Cows, Flash Frog, New Flash Fiction Review, Fictive Dream, and elsewhere. Originally from the Sonoran Desert, Sara lives in Warwickshire, UK. Find her online at sarahillswrites.com.
