Line 1 14 lines to talk about my mother and her death? Too many, too few. And I’ve never been a poet. Not really. There was that one poem I wrote in 4th grade, the one about the class I was in. It was a rip-off of some poem about trees. My poem started like this: I think that I shall […]
Her cabinet is full of perfumes, and the scents try to escape as soon as I open the door – twined tendrils reaching out – each scent a murmur, a ripple of memory beneath my skin. There are liquid amber and fluid gold, swirling ruby and molten jade, lustrous indigo and glossy lilac – gleaming […]
Tom Crosshill is an award-winning writer whose work has appeared in Flash Fiction Online, Clarkesworld, and other fine establishments. His novel, THE CAT KING OF HAVANA, is a YA story set in Cuba published by HarperCollins. How does an award-winning Latvian author of science fiction and fantasy end up writing a novel that deals with […]
White as china, she is, a new polished plate, ready to be broken. She ain’t more than ten-and-fifteen, made very tiny by the master’s heavy, black overcoat what’s thrown about her shoulders. I stand back as the door swings wide, the carriage crunching away over the gravel, her boots tipping and tapping on the step, […]
“What you burnt, broke, and tore is still in my hands. I am the keeper of fragile things and I have kept of you what is indissoluble.” — Anaïs Nin This month marks my third anniversary as Publisher of Flash Fiction Online. Three years ago, if you’d told me that in September 2016, I’d be […]
The seawall of New-Galveston glistened shell-white in the years before you were born. I paddled over to pick your daddy up from work, pressed my palm to the warm concrete, and waved at the top-men. They worked the blinkie-lighted antennas and got to look down inside the fifteen square miles of the Richie-rich and tourists […]
I recently read The Usual Path to Publication, a collection of essays edited by Shannon Page, where genre writers share the story of how and why their first novel was published. It has its merits, and if you’re a beginner I recommend buying it. I was interested in each of these stories, too, since my […]