flash fiction
-

“Some doors don’t open with force. They wait for the right hands, at the right time.” bb grey Yard sales weren’t Robert’s thing. Not even close. But Beth—Beth thrived on them.“Look at this! A whole world of treasures just waiting to be rescued!” she’d say, grinning like she’d found buried gold in a box marked
-

The desert doesn’t care about your plans. This was the first lesson Jack Write learned when he traded his graduate thesis on Kierkegaard’s concept of despair for a tool belt and a 1998 Ford F-150 with questionable AC. The second lesson: heat warps everything—glass, metal, morals. Palm Springs at 3:17 PM was a study in
-

The dashboard clock read 6:38 when I pulled into the gravel lot. Eight minutes late – early by my standards, when considering Luna’s habitual tardiness, but for Luna, this might as well have been standing her up entirely. She leaned against her Honda, arms crossed, one foot tapping. Stein, her 110-pound mastiff mix, sat obediently
-

Marylyn murmured “good night” through the phone, and Hank fired back a curt “Night,” thumb smashing the end call button before her rejection could hit—just a silent void now, no echo of the old days when a handset’s clunk marked the end. Gone was the heft of plastic in hand, the small speaker and microphone
-

Part I The San Gabriel Mountains stretched across the horizon, their peaks rising anywhere from five to ten thousand feet, dusted with the remnants of winter’s last breath. The recent storms had draped elevations above 5,000 feet in fresh snow, transforming them into inverted ice cream cones dipped in vanilla. As the sun climbed higher,
-

The scratching of his pen filled the room, frantic, almost desperate. Ink bled into paper, curling into letters that barely kept up with his thoughts. The desk lamp buzzed faintly, casting a cone of light that barely held back the dusk seeping in through the window. A cigarette smoldered in the ashtray beside him,


