Bedroom: Wake in a bed composed of him, your cheek pressed into the downy lanugo padding on his skin, your skull tucked gently into the whorl of his ear. Keep your fingers suctioned inside the wet cave of his mouth. Curl your limbs around the softness of his gut. Let his breathing roll you like a lifeboat lost at sea. Pull his plump pink arms across your empty torso. Ignore the alarm clock. Let his coos and gurgles ripple like...
On an island called Jeju, barnacled women pull cockle and seaweed up from the sea earth. It is generational–grandmothers, aunts, cousins, and mothers all learning to breathe underwater, lungs long pillowed by salted air. They croon a language that is whistle, signs, and buzz. The first time I talk back to my father, my mother teaches me how to take my fight out on the brick of our front steps, just like she did against the walls of her own...
My father loved to watch other men play golf, the graceful way they swung their clubs, the ball soaring over the fairway, small and true. He wore cashmere sweaters he couldn’t afford. Slept with people he barely knew, coming home late at night in a cab, with a bouquet of excuses. Tiny red lines meandered across his nose and cheeks, like rivers that had lost their way. He met my mother on a cruise. They hit golf balls into the...
You are not allowed to touch the birds. You are not allowed to place the little dropper above the desperate wide open beaks of the rescued infants, who are screaming for your help, and squeeze a few white drops of nutrition that you have prepared into their hungry throats. You are not even allowed to clean their cages, or come within 15 feet of the City Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, unless accompanied by someone else. You are most certainly not allowed...
We are co-conspirators crouched together in an empty hotel parking lot when my dad teaches me how to start a fire. He cups his hand over mine, holding the magnifying glass above a pile of dry leaves. He shows me how to focus the light into a small dot, hot. We watch the leaf char, then ignite. We have a tradition where he takes me to stay at Best Westerns, a different one every time. He gets a room with...
SmokeLong Quarterly has been dedicated to publishing the best flash narratives since 2003.
December 2024
I have so much to tell you and so much to ask. These are troubling times, but you will have noticed this. What can an independent online journal do to resist rising fascism choking the arts and putting people at risk? In my last letter from the editor I mentioned the Kennedy Center, and now… Continue reading New Front (continue reading)
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Have you just written some new flash and don’t know what to do next? Is there a story that won’t let you go but that never quite feels ‘there’? Do you keep submitting a piece you love that never quite lands? This session is designed to help you attack the process of editing and polishing… Continue reading High Intensity Interval Training for Flash Writers: All New Editing Edition, 2025
Beth Sherman’s writing has been published in more than 100 literary magazines, including Flash Frog, Gone Lawn, Tiny Molecules, 100 Word Story, Fictive Dream, and Bending Genres. She has a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center and her work is featured in Best Microfiction 2024. A multiple Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net nominee, she can be reached on X, Bluesky or Instagram @bsherm36.
