cover art "Peace in a Time of Monsters" by Marty D. Ison Our Mission: SmokeLong Quarterly is dedicated to bringing the best flash fiction to the web on a quarterly basis, whether written by widely published authors, or those new to the craft. The term "smoke-long" comes from the Chinese, who noted that reading a piece of flash takes about the same length of time as smoking a cigarette. All the work we publish is precisely that—about a smoke long. Issue Seventeen Letter From the Editor Smoking With Bob Arter Daniel Bailey Renoir Responds to Aline Charigot’s Charges of Painting Her Ugly Christopher Battle Cymothoa Exigua Gary Cadwallader Oblivious Debbie Ann Eis The Wedge in Between Kathy Fish One Purple Finch James Hanley Clouds Kyle Hemmings Mousafa's Woman Ric Jahna First Night Stephanie Johnson My Great-Aunt Meets Jesus at the Mobil Station in Montana Sandra Maddux-Creech Old Leningrad Mary McCluskey Selective Memory Stefani Nellen The Attraction of Asphalt Jim Nelson Of Potential J.M. Patrick Portrait of a Mother, Beforehand Tiffany Poremba Midnight in Albuquerque Jake Ruiter Flatlining in the Edward G. Bellacosta Memorial Park Claudia Smith Prow Tavia Stewart I Know This Man; He is My Father. Beth Thomas In the Last Frame Veronica Thorn My First Two-Headed Boy