The Vietnamese guy at the nail salon asks me how my day’s going. I sit down and smile politely answering proudly in flawless German “alles gut, und dir?”
Welcome to Litro’s A Flash of Inspiration series! Once a month we will select a flash fiction or short story submission that we find especially intriguing and run a brief ...
Tom wasn’t keen, but there was no choice near the jetty before we caught the tour boat.
I was heading toward the frozen-food aisle, my mind filled with visions of chicken nuggets, when I bumped into something — hard. When I turned to see what I had ...
Manual labor suited Kiichi best. After the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923 killed his wife and young daughter, he ended up in Kobe and worked at the port as a ...
Our tourist stood at the street corner. They didn’t know how to get to where they were going and were too scared to ask us for help.
The wind blew their ...
The anechoic chamber lay at the heart of six concrete onion layers, a nesting of rooms within rooms, each room with twelve-inch thick walls. The chamber made no contact with ...
How strange to think of life in your bedroom, staring at the wall, or at the kitchen window, waiting for the kettle to boil; to remember dark days after work, ...
I took the last picture I still have of you with a cracked old Polaroid we found at a yard sale in Andersonville.
His bottle’s gone. His power.
He turns towards The Lovely Adrienne to tell her: stall them, feed them a line. Too late, she’s already in the ring, her feathers sweeping the ...
So the plane is landing and I’m sitting next to my friend Sara who is going to NYU — in business class, mind you — we got upgraded — and ...
In the fourth grade, boys in the town of Huntington Harbor started to notice which girls were getting tits and who looked like Farrah Fawcett. They divided the girls into ...
He’s got that new song by The Streets stuck in his head, the one with the music video filmed up the road in Chicken Village. Mike thrums his fingertips on ...
Shamu Cam came live from Shamu’s tank at Sea World, Orlando….
Her screams were top shelf. The kind of earsplitting, blood-curdling shrieks that cut to the marrow, leaving you dazed and numb.
I once lived in a three-bedroom unit in an elegant condominium with white paint in Simei, in Singapore.
He first disappears just before I am born. I have no memory of it, of course, but my mom still wears it years later like a lead vest, releasing a ...
Out on the front patio of the old coffee shop — they meet here every day, discussing their backs and their wives and the minutiae of their lives. One older ...
I drove a different way, the last time, taking a road that turned out not to be a road at all, wherein I mean it began as a road and ...
I would question the sanity of anyone who’s not questioning their own sanity nowadays, Doctor, but this patient of mine — Patient Z, let’s call him — put even me ...
