And then she told Jack off, flash fiction by author Slawka G. Scarso. Published in Temple in a City literary journal.

When the bomb rolled out of Rennie’s mouth and smashed down onto the dinner table, there was just time enough for you to marvel at how something as tiny and weightless as a single word could land with such impact, but then the shockwave blasted you into the exosphere, where you hung by ice-numbed fingertips on the dark curve of space, gaping at the devastated table below; the splintered wine glasses, the slap of burgundy on white linen, crystal shards winking from the spinach salad, and the gravy-spattered guests, who avoided looking at where you were or where you had been because Ellen had put so much effort into the Chicken Marsala and Rennie didn’t mean it like that, of course, and because as long as they didn’t look toward your chair or see you fighting to breathe at the edge of space, dinner would not be ruined, nothing would have happened, so they continued to eat with their heat-twisted silverware, picking at mushrooms from between the cracks in their plates, crooning in such soothing honey-sweet tones that you found yourself descending back to the table, eating alongside them, wondering whether there really had been a bomb and whether you really had gone to space, and you were almost convinced that you’d imagined it all except that with every bite, glass crunched between your teeth, and your tongue was absolutely lacerated. --- Barbara Diggs’s flash fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Wigleaf, SmokeLong Quarterly, Fractured Lit, Emerge Literary Journal, and Your Impossible Voice and Best Microfictions 2025. She has also won Highly Commend awards with Bath Flash Fiction and The Bridport Prize. She lives in Paris, France. Bluesky: bdiggswrites.bsky.social.

She once was a nurse. She looked after the elderly in a care home. One of the elderly men fell in love with her and gave her most of his money. His daughter, who never came to visit, still accuses her of seducing him, after twenty years, but sends her a Christmas card every year anyway, because they used to be best friends in primary school.  When she was a kid, she jumped off a trampoline without looking below. She told her mum she didn’t know her younger brother was waiting underneath. She had not seen him. She had not heard him. She visits his grave whenever she’s in town. The reason why she’s in this café opposite the court, is because she’s just been proclaimed not guilty of running over her husband, and her legs are still wobbly and there’s nobody at home waiting for her anyway. Not anymore.   --- Slawka G. Scarso works as a copywriter and translator. Her words have appeared in Gone Lawn, Ghost Parachute, Fractured Lit and Scrawl Place among others. She was shortlisted for the 2023 Bridport Flash Award and for the 2023 and 2024 Oxford Flash Fiction Prize. Her debut novella in flash All Their Favourite Stories is available from Ad Hoc Fiction. She lives in Italy. More words on www.nanopausa.com

As the back end of the 32 bus recedes down the Edgware Road, a breathless Prince Charming straightens his crown and curses. Fairy-Tale-Character Academy didn’t warn them about public transport.  ‘Always Stay in Character’ was the only Learning Objective. ‘Be your destiny’  his tutors stressed. Destiny. That’s a laugh! Seems a golden crown, luxuriant curls and direct lineage from a land-grabbing warlord don’t guarantee eternal happiness these days. Or even satisfaction. Destiny should mean dwelling in a palace in Disneyland, looking down on the hoi-polloi from the saddle of a white stallion. Instead he’s teaching ballroom dancing to lumpen minor baronets before bussing it home to a bedsit in Dollis Hill and a doe-eyed wife who sings to mice.  If only he hadn’t had that ridiculous glass slipper fetish once-upon-a-time. What was he thinking? He’d be better off with one of the stepsisters. At least they had an edge to them. Like they’d seen the bottom of a few Jack Daniels bottles. Rolled their own smokes with their toes. Enjoyed a good Rave…  But no, he’d been obsessed by an undersized foot!  A  wolf in a crocheted bedjacket joins the bus queue, followed by a genie, a giant, and three piglets whinging about London house prices. Oh, to be that ordinary! Anonymous... Free… A woodcutter whistles at him, then turns and stalks into Starbucks, his silken stockings showcasing an exquisite pair of buttocks. Prince Charming blushes. Fairy-Tale-Character Academy never warned him about lumberjacks and Merry Men. Never mentioned the constant propositioning in hostelries, forests and changing-rooms. Never explained why he has to stay in character when everything in him that’s real strains to fling off his crown, run into Starbucks and buy two iced lavender lattes, shake out his monogrammed handkerchief, dab at the froth on the woodcutter’s waiting lips.   --- S.A. Greene writes short fiction featuring capybaras, wombats, tables (kitchen, picnic, dining), a moray eel, a musical vagina, a foetus with a dodgy political agenda, whales, and a blue kitchen sponge. Her work has appeared in lovely places like Flash Flood, trampset, Mslexia, Janus, New Flash Fiction, Fictive Dream, The Phare, Reflex, Free Flash Fiction, Maudlin House and a number of anthologies.

She once was a nurse. She looked after the elderly in a care home. One of the elderly men fell in love with her and gave her most of his money. His daughter, who never came to visit, still accuses her of seducing him, after twenty years, but sends her a Christmas card every year anyway, because they used to be best friends in primary school.  When she was a kid, she jumped off a trampoline without looking below. She told her mum she didn’t know her younger brother was waiting underneath. She had not seen him. She had not heard him. She visits his grave whenever she’s in town. The reason why she’s in this café opposite the court, is because she’s just been proclaimed not guilty of running over her husband, and her legs are still wobbly and there’s nobody at home waiting for her anyway. Not anymore.   --- Slawka G. Scarso works as a copywriter and translator. Her words have appeared in Gone Lawn, Ghost Parachute, Fractured Lit and Scrawl Place among others. She was shortlisted for the 2023 Bridport Flash Award and for the 2023 and 2024 Oxford Flash Fiction Prize. Her debut novella in flash All Their Favourite Stories is available from Ad Hoc Fiction. She lives in Italy. More words on www.nanopausa.com

She once was a nurse. She looked after the elderly in a care home. One of the elderly men fell in love with her and gave her most of his money. His daughter, who never came to visit, still accuses her of seducing him, after twenty years, but sends her a Christmas card every year anyway, because they used to be best friends in primary school.  When she was a kid, she jumped off a trampoline without looking below. She told her mum she didn’t know her younger brother was waiting underneath. She had not seen him. She had not heard him. She visits his grave whenever she’s in town. The reason why she’s in this café opposite the court, is because she’s just been proclaimed not guilty of running over her husband, and her legs are still wobbly and there’s nobody at home waiting for her anyway. Not anymore.   --- Slawka G. Scarso works as a copywriter and translator. Her words have appeared in Gone Lawn, Ghost Parachute, Fractured Lit and Scrawl Place among others. She was shortlisted for the 2023 Bridport Flash Award and for the 2023 and 2024 Oxford Flash Fiction Prize. Her debut novella in flash All Their Favourite Stories is available from Ad Hoc Fiction. She lives in Italy. More words on www.nanopausa.com

She once was a nurse. She looked after the elderly in a care home. One of the elderly men fell in love with her and gave her most of his money. His daughter, who never came to visit, still accuses her of seducing him, after twenty years, but sends her a Christmas card every year anyway, because they used to be best friends in primary school.  When she was a kid, she jumped off a trampoline without looking below. She told her mum she didn’t know her younger brother was waiting underneath. She had not seen him. She had not heard him. She visits his grave whenever she’s in town. The reason why she’s in this café opposite the court, is because she’s just been proclaimed not guilty of running over her husband, and her legs are still wobbly and there’s nobody at home waiting for her anyway. Not anymore.   --- Slawka G. Scarso works as a copywriter and translator. Her words have appeared in Gone Lawn, Ghost Parachute, Fractured Lit and Scrawl Place among others. She was shortlisted for the 2023 Bridport Flash Award and for the 2023 and 2024 Oxford Flash Fiction Prize. Her debut novella in flash All Their Favourite Stories is available from Ad Hoc Fiction. She lives in Italy. More words on www.nanopausa.com

128 pages ISSN: 2009-857X ISBN: 978-1-917161-17-6

128 pages ISSN: 2009-857X ISBN: 978-1-917161-17-6

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It isn’t even me. It’s my husband who comes up with the idea the second night. At 2 a.m., while the little energy I have left drips out of me in tears, he takes a brush we used to paint the nursery an...

It isn’t even me. It’s my husband who comes up with the idea the second night. At 2 a.m., while the little energy I have left drips out of me in tears, he takes a brush we used to paint the nursery an...

It isn’t even me. It’s my husband who comes up with the idea the second night. At 2 a.m., while the little energy I have left drips out of me in tears, he takes a brush we used to paint the nursery an...

Flash fiction by Fiona McKay