I step out onto the back porch near as soon as the storm ends. It’s black outside, cold and wet, the beam of my flashlight bouncing off all the little raindrops and making the whole yard sparkle. Cicadas are screaming in the early morning, the clouds are blocking out the stars, and I’m shivering in my light jacket as I take in the scene in front of me. I’m out here on a mission. There was a noise in the...
I don’t know what to do about the tiny man stuck between my teeth so I go to the dentist and ask him. The dentist yells at me for huffing laughing gas while I was waiting to be seen. Only I wasn’t. So then he yells at me for doing regular drugs, only I don’t. He tells me to open up so he can see this tiny man for himself — and sure enough, there he is. Making himself at...
Noah’s story goes that his father died when he was two years old, due to bacterial meningitis, and his mother died when he was sixteen, from a car accident caused by his older brother, Richard, who at twenty-three hanged himself in prison because he could not handle the guilt. Four years later, his eldest brother Benjamin was killed in the first terror attack, when the city buses were co-opted and bombed. He whispers, I am the last branch of my...
"Girls,” the doctor says, “we believe that you have consumed something strange.” The doctor wears a long white coat and when she raises her arm to check our vitals, we can see that she wears a pink shirt, her armpits ringed with sweat. This is good, we want to tell her, perhaps you know the truth. “So, what have you eaten?” she asks us. “Anything out of the ordinary?” We are not frequent visitors to the hospital. We know women...
Her guest brought a little clock, made of enamel, in a lovely mint-ice color. She had often seen him fiddling with such wounded appliances on the street corner where he liked to sit. When he saw her apartment, he whistled and said: What a swell pad. Don’t it make you sad to live in a big swell pad like this, all by your lonesome? Well, she said, I used to have Oscar. He reminded her of Oscar a little. The...
SmokeLong Quarterly has been dedicated to publishing the best flash narratives since 2003.
June 2026
I have so much to tell you. Issue 92 is a special competition issue: a combination of the top nine stories in The SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction competition and the top three stories in The SmokeLong Workshop Prize competition. All twelve pieces do something amazing with the form. Flash fiction is such a… Continue reading New Front (continue reading)
Registration Opens July 1st!
In September 2022 SmokeLong launched a workshop environment/community christened SmokeLong Fitness. This acclaimed community workshop is happening right now on our dedicated workshop site. If you choose to join us, you will work in a small group of around 15-20 participants to give and receive feedback on flash narratives.
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From the elements of flash, to a deep-dive into concepts that underpin the flash narrative, to a disruptive new approach to editing the flash narrative, the publisher and editor-in-chief of SmokeLong shares his insights in three webinars. In Elements of Flash you’ll learn why flash is not just a word count and why the flash… Continue reading SmokeLong Flash Masterclass — Webinar Three-Pack
John Dufresne lives in Dania Beach, Florida, with his wife Cynthia Chinelly. He has written two story collections and six novels, including Louisiana Power & Light, Love Warps the Mind a Little, both New York Times Notable Books of the Year. He won the 2008 Florida Book Award Gold Medal in General Fiction for his navel Requiem, Mass. He’s also written five craft books on writing, including most recently Storyville: An Illustrated Guide to writing Fiction, two plays, Liv & Di and Trailerville and has co-written two feature films and a TV series. He is a co-editor of Flash Fiction America. His stories have twice been named Best American Mystery Stories. He has edited five anthologies of fiction and nonfiction. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and teaches in the Creative writing Program at Florida International University.
