It seared their eyes. Squinting, they watched the light dilate, divide in six. The rocket fell away, limp, useless, and dark as a new star grew against the storm.

Boundaries of Nations: What a joke American pool is. They play with miniature sticks on a tiny table with a bunch of tiny multicolored balls, a bunch of toy balls, just like between their American legs.

Boundaries of Nations: With time, I learned to love and master my scenes.

Flash Fiction: Here where I find myself in a razor-sharp eternity, grant me one deep free breath.

A year ago he brought the pox blankets back to the natives after a well-meaning group of illegal tourists stole them away. On return he had a sort of quiet breakdown.

He led her away, down one tunnel, then another. He took her through a passage where the bones were piled so high they had to wriggle over them on their bellies.

Flash Fiction: I remember their voices. Hushed when the sun beat on our backs, loud when the moon returned, illuminating our darknesses.

I would examine the black and white photographs of Alpullu’s golden age. In their shadows, I identified the vanished town.

Then high school came, and my brother and I didn’t talk. I was some bitch-majesty in the schoolyard, and whoever said all tomboys are loved has never been a tomboy.

The husband wrote a letter every single day, sometimes more often. Sometimes, she didn’t open them, or deliberately misread them.

They needed a way to keep the fire going until morning—that was another thing they had on their minds.

In the deserted thoroughfares I heard the rumble of thug music, heavy with bass and shot through with electric guitar.

When I met G I knew he’d figure in my life heavily, but I had no idea if our association would be sad or happy, ultimately—and I still don’t know which it will be, ultimately.

Flash Fiction: He dug his nails into the smooth cover

No one knows when exactly he became the thing I fed upon, the thing whose body works for my body, day and night.

I have a birthmark above my butt, which is undeniable proof of gypsiness.

Flash Fiction: Even while she lay in hospital she was trembling for the well-being of her son

Boundaries of Nature: Water is always at work. We don’t even know that it’s eating the very ground from under us.

Boundaries of Nature: In books, he has read about boys and animals, how they form a connection, and then the animal dies. And the boy learns something about the harshness of the world.

Flash Fiction:"What a perfect couple, two halves of the same little orange."

It’s an open secret that every officer, regardless of rank, is allowed to step in and ask for special consideration for one fuck-up.

I look at his face; the green eyes, the wet mouth. I still feel the dream-softness of his hair under my hands; I feel like a grandmother, like a mother, like a lover.

Flash Fiction:“You’re so very lucky,” he said, “to live this way.”

They agreed to unspoken rules. Broken windows were OK. Broken bones were fair game. Graffiti was acceptable, as were rubber bullets and tear gas.

For a year or more before the six months that we spent preoccupied with our strange visitor, counterterrorism was our spiritual life.

Now that she had shared a story, the Mother said, he must tell her one of his own. Something that had happened to him. He could tell that she meant something terrible.

Flash Fiction: “Macacos”

I didn’t tell my husband, but there was a part of me that could have lived like that: eating cockroaches in the dirt, catching flies.

Flash Fiction:"We pull the tide towards the shore."

Stavros Stavros was fat and full at the end of the night. All he needed now was to deflower a virgin.

“I’m celebrating my country! Stop hating my freedom, you terrorist.”

Flash Fiction: “Go? Stay?”— the uncertainty a stain of recursive ink, irremovable—“Stay? Go?”—the choice, the freedom to choose suffocating like a plastic bag atop her head.

Boundaries of Taste: And as I parted my lips and then, later, my legs, watching the last clouds of smoke slip upward, I kept hearing my mother’s voice say, “Jesus is a fire.”

Boundaries of Taste: Where we saw shape, line, and shadow—a nude—he saw a naked overweight woman.

Firas rested his head on the back of the sofa, lost in the smoke. He wondered what that meant: a world where you can run wild.

Only then can you forgive a girl for being pretty: if she’s an idiot or a liar.

Flash Fiction: Convince yourself the race never stops running, that memory will eat you alive.

She studied her face, looking for any change. A bad person. A cheat. A lesbian. A cheating, barren lesbian.

When the boy she was dating hit my sister, it made a sharp cracking sound, just like it does in the movies.

Flash Fiction: Ibex. He loves the majesty of the word. And she possesses a majestic beauty, it is in the ellipse of her eye, the rearward drift of her horns.

Flash Fiction:You were the only person in the whole building who wasn’t singing me.

He told them about the Internet, Steam, Apple, and Microsoft, which were the other names of Satan.

“I hope you pathetic little boys are proud of yourselves!” she cried. “I honestly do!”

Flash Fiction: But you're a lesbian, aren't you? You become the person in his head.

Flash Fiction:They came with their guns and their tools and no time to contemplate Time.

“Some are really crazy,” the nurse said. “Others are just pretending.”

He did not want her to think what might possibly be true: that he was going mad.

Flash Fiction: Every now and then, for my troubles, I get a little reward.

Tanya was not surprised to find no one hiding behind the hedges when she looked out her window, but she was disappointed.

Our parents were too busy launching bombs over the river to notice missing fingers.

He smiled, shyly, and then came toward Evan, and although in the red light the scars on Evan’s chest were not visible, Billy found them and kissed them.

Boundaries of Gender: In the early seventies, I began sleeping with a married doctor who wanted to cure homosexuality.

Flash Fiction: Her name sounding like coming, like arrived, like I am here.

Sam wants to see the Mississippi River at night. He has heard of Tom Sawyer and he looks for him in the faces of boys they pass.

“They’re back!” we hissed over our kitchen fences. “Someone’s got to stop them! Something must be done!”

Flash Fiction: Stars are not meant to be kept in boxes.

“Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum. Straight out of a Western movie.” He handed it over to Brady, who gripped the black rubber handle and ran a finger on the sleek, cold metal barrel.

I met Tracy Pasco in the spring of 1980—in my Pennsylvania hometown, a time of relative optimism and ease.

Flash Fiction: She watched her heart beating again and again like an unanswered question, like a phone in her chest that would not stop ringing.

First there was a little crackle as the pin scratched the record and then the voices would begin to sing or talk and would float into the surrounding inky darkness.

"I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror." —Alberto Gonzales

Flash Fiction: When I feel a human-sized void, is it instinctual that I fill it with a human?

“I thought you’d get along.” “Why did you think that?” I say. “You do so well with wounded men,” she says.

There were so many places he could have lived, but he lived in the shack so he could dream of his daughter.

If he were superstitious, he would have blamed the monks for cursing him.

The house of the Memory God is filled with junk in piles. It started innocently enough, the way a blizzard starts: a flake here, a flake there.

Flash Fiction: The daughter, the one they think they made all by themselves, holds the hand, and holds also the head, unwise and old and greedy.

The stories of the kidnapped always begin the same way.

I wanted to stop something, everything. I applied for a job in airport security and they placed me here.

PFC Larry Pierson, a 21-year-old Afghanistan veteran from Vermilion, South Dakota, had made off with four M-16 A2s, six thirty-round magazines of ammo, and two M67 grenades.

The apocalypse was quiet. It had a way about it, a certain charm. It could be called graceful. It was taking a long time.

Flash: The twisted leg, the handful of feathers.

Flash Fiction: Then she drew his legs. She skipped the body because that moment she forgot that men had bodies—chests, torsos, bellies and all.

Flash Fiction: I turn to see the man raising the stick and swinging it hard against the boy’s hip.

“I brushed Michael Bolton’s hair once,” I said, “and moisturized George Clooney too.”

Flash Fiction: I dream of fat cats wearing sweatbands trying to get in shape on treadmills.

It’s that look he loves even though he knows she isn’t really seeing him. He’s part of the landscape, inside her inner eye.

Every profession had its misfits and mediocrities, but few attracted, as his did, the very people it was designed to help.

He wanted words to mean one thing. His cheeks burned. He knew this was a stupid wish.

The Taiwanese novelist's story of a passionate relationship between two young women.

When I came to the window, his motorcycle was lying on its side hemorrhaging gasoline and oil.

A heart-fixer is he, there is nothing he does not see...

It’s no wonder the dead aren’t leaving to go into that goddamned light.

It didn’t matter if they strolled from his periphery or sprinted up from behind. He felt them coming like a warm wind.

Behind him’s two bags on the curb. He needs the ride; I cut him a break.

I do not trust these people, and they are not worth the embarrassment.

What kind of a war was this, anyway? All we did was move from our house to a stranger’s house, then one after another.

Then she did hear something, a scratching deep inside the walls, like something was trapped in there.

People around Red were saying they were going to charge Piggy with a hate crime.

Flash Fiction Crazy is not hereditary or anything like that.

She gives me a strange look, turns off the tap and wraps herself in a towel so that her secrets are hidden again.

Flash Fiction from PEN's Prison Writing Contest: I have written 721 pages of letters to you. The paper I write letters to you on is 8' x 10.5'. I hate that.

I had felt him in my blood vessels, for he had come to live in me and I had begun to smell like him, and with his eyes...

“You’ve killed zero point seven something people today. That’s like, a torso and a head.”

I could understand how difficult it must’ve been for two beautiful boys to resist one another, you, and my friend. But what happened next was what I had a hard time wrapping my head around.