CURRENT ISSUE
| precious little fictions in 500 words (or less). |
Things to Read
Story from Issue 16
Spelling
by Kirsten Rue
11/16/09
The words never come simply to her, never just arrive the way milk bottles shiver down the shoots in old factory footage, each lid smacked on with a popping sound. They aren’t just ready; they aren’t just there.
She works around them. Perambulates. Circumlocutes. She asks her mother to pass the steel wedge. Her sister looks ... more »
Story from Issue 16
Ghost Problem
by Jim Ruland
11/16/09
Ignore the knocking from the lying-in room while you rake the leaves. Your wife irons the bed sheets and stacks them in the closet. The house shudders like a sleeping horse, and the teacups rattle on their hooks. Out comes the silverware polish. The chandeliers are next. The trees are bare, and the blackened limbs ... more »
Story from Issue 16
Fences Fly By
by Salvatore Pane
11/16/09
Nick calls and says he’s driving across America and needs a place to crash for the night. I tell him I’ve got a futon, and he shows up at dusk in a real beater, explains he’s shipping out to Iraq in a month and wanted to see the country. We go to Church Brew Works, ... more »
Story from Issue 15
It Doesn’t
by Randall Brown
11/15/09
They come up to tell me what a good person I am, for letting the cook’s daughter swim with us. The girls build a village of sand hamlets—and a man carries chairs, sets them up, covers each one with a towel, adjusts the umbrella. I ask him about his own kids. They live in Canada with ... more »
Story from Issue 15
Parcel Post
by Lydia Copeland
11/15/09
Under the three bays, a billion particles stir lightless, a cool upwelling and plankton like dark moons. A woman looks out at one of the bays from a dock. In this bay, blue and rust container ships float past. She thinks of independent movement, flagella. Atoms behaving wildly at absolute zero. And whales. Back home ... more »
Story from Issue 15
Their Health
by Dylan Nice
04/11/09
She had me riding a ten-speed down a reclaimed railroad bed. She was talking about things she liked while I thought of things I did not like.
more »
Review
Mad to Review: Her Notes on his book Mad to Live
by Mary Miller
01/01/09
I read Randall Brown’s prize-winning chapbook Mad to Live in an hour, an hour and a half, and was sorry it didn’t last longer. Soon, no doubt, I will have an entire book of his stories, especially considering how quickly Flume Press sold out of the 500 copies printed. And with good reason—these 18 flash ... more »
Fiction
Groove
by Claudia Smith
05/15/08
Someone gave them a blender after they got married in Vegas; the blender made them both happy, because it was fancy and probably cost more than all their garage-sale clothes and furniture combined. In the mornings, she made smoothies. She bought the fruits she grew up with but were harder to come by here: mangoes, ... more »
Interview
Oh Baby, It’s Kim Chinquee Interviewed!
by Jennifer Pieroni
05/13/08
Statistically speaking, if you’re going to pick up a random back issue of Quick Fiction you have a 38 percent chance of getting wowed by Kim Chinquee’s incredible talent. Her work has appeared in five issues (6, 7, 9, 12, 13) of Quick Fiction and in over a hundred other journals, including Noon, Denver Quarterly, ... more »
Fiction
Gutenberg’s Lament
by Thomas Israel Hopkins
05/13/08
Many wring their hands over the fate of the physical book, today’s threats to literary culture, but who remembers the various and sundry dangers posed to our libraries of yesteryear? Sheets of white paper pressed from wood pulp or cotton, printed with sequences of letters in neat and orderly lines, folded into signatures, bound at the ... more »