Issue #20 Surreal Flash Fiction
Peg by Aimee Parkison

In your favorite foreign movie, the husband wakes at night and sees the elderly neighbor woman in the bedroom, staring at his wife, the young sleepwalker, S, tied to the bed for her own protection.

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Marionette by Nod Ghosh

You pull her up on two-strings, one-string, ten strings. You make her dance her necessary steps, and then you stand her still.

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The Blood Artist by Jefferson Navicky

Like a meteor on Mars, red dust kicks up from the bricks. The men in white suits with gas masks and their little buzz saws are tethered to the scaffolding by what looks like a large scrunchie.

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The Fourth Wall by Kim Hagerich

My neighbor broke the fourth wall. It started innocently enough when we both found ourselves on our verandas watering the plants and she asked about the music we were playing inside.

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Paper House by Robin Littell

Annie lives in a paper house. It is delicate, like the wings of a satin moth. She sits on furniture drawn with charcoal, harsh black lines that leave dusty trails on her skirt.

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Initiation by Stuart Dybek

The doors snap open on Addison, and the kid in dirty hightops and a sleeveless denim jacket that shows off a blue pitchfork tattooed on his bicep jogs forward beneath a backward baseball cap and grabs the purse off a babushka’s lap.

Lady Gaga Considers the Shrimp Scampi by Steve Almond

There were fifty thousand little monsters screaming for an encore, Spaniards, Germans, skinny little French boys, Italians making wet sounds with their tongues.

The Girl In Purple by Bobbie Ann Mason

Near dawn, Dennis Moore saw the iron gate to the courtyard inch open and the wisp of a girl squeeze through, clanging the gate behind her. Two minutes later, on the boardwalk, she halted as if for an invisible dog, then resumed her dog-walker gait. He followed her...

Little Red Riding Hood by Katerina Kishchynska

Grandma gets her episodes at least once a month. She’ll grow out her jaws and if it happens on a rainy day, claws will tear out of her fingers.

Their Closet by Pamela Painter

“What are you thinking?” her husband asked her. In their twenty years of marriage he had never asked her that.