best flash fiction

“Would You Rather” by Anne Marie DiStefano

NEW FICTION

(c/o hiltondotcom)

My career as a Seattle restaurateur has really taken off. A food magazine recently referred to me as “the grande dame of the Northwest dining scene.”

On a dark gray day, in the pouring rain, you pull up outside my flagship restaurant in a brand-new black Corvette. When you roll down the window, my employees recognize your distinguished profile and say, “It’s him! He’s back!” 

I take off my apron and hand it to my manager. I get in on the passenger side. You tell the car’s voice-activated navigation system to find the freeway on ramp, and we speed south down I-5.

We spend the first night at the Benson Hotel in Portland. The pillars in the lobby are made of Circassian oak, and the floors are marble. We reserve one of the suites, and have dinner in the steakhouse. People turn their heads when they see us together, because they know who we are.

The next morning, we find that the car has turned into a Mercedes. It’s still raining, but the sky is brighter, colors are more vivid, and everything seems less blurry. We spend the second night at the historic Ashland Springs Hotel. We taste the lithia water and eat dinner in a restaurant with a Midsummer Night’s Dream theme.

By the time we leave the Travelodge in San Francisco, our car has become a Honda hatchback, and we listen to classic rock on the radio. On the steep rise of the Grapevine, the car gradually loses speed, and it shivers every time we’re passed by the hulking, honking semi trucks. We have a friend who’s going to UCLA and she lets us crash on her dorm room floor for the night.

We cross the border into Mexico in our VW Bug. We have to stop to top off the oil, but the engine doesn’t overheat. After asking for directions several times, we finally find our way to a place at the end of a dirt road where they rent hammocks and you can sleep on the beach. That night, we hear whales breathing in the warm shallow water of the Sea of Cortez. In the morning our car is gone. We have no way to get back. We’re two sunburned kids sitting on the hot sand, playing “would you rather” and trying to figure out how we are going to pay for breakfast.

(photo c/o daltonjohnsondotcom)

Anne Marie DiStefano was, until recently, the owner of the Lucky Horseshoe Lounge in Portland, Oregon. She has owned a historic movie theater and worked as a freelance journalist and as a columnist for The Portland Tribune. She studied English literature at Reed College and Oxford University.

“Tupac Shares Nachos, Tells a Fable in Denver Terminal TGI Friday’s” by Sarp Sozdinler

NEW FICTION!

(photo by Perry C. Riddle/LAT)

The terminal was too bright for that hour of the morning, fluorescent lights pulsing in sync with the hum of a thousand tired travelers who hadn’t learned how to sleep upright. Tupac, sitting at the counter of TGI Friday’s like he owned the joint, looked out of place in the best way. A neon green cap on his head, a hoodie that said The Future is Ours in cracked white print, and a plate of nachos that seemed too perfect, too symmetrical for such a place.

I was just getting off a plane that was delayed for two hours, staring at my phone like it would tell me some kind of truth. I could hear Tupac’s voice, low, as if he was talking to himself. I didn’t know if he was even supposed to be there, but there he was. He was eating the nachos, passing them around to the three strangers sitting next to him, and then he was telling a story. Something about wolves.

I looked around to figure out if I was the only person seeing this. No one was laughing.

“You see,” Tupac said, handing the last tortilla chip to a guy in a business suit, “a wolf doesn’t fear the night. It understands that the darkness isn’t an enemy, it’s the space where life belongs.”

I wasn’t sure if he was talking about his life or life in general or just trying to make sense of something else. Maybe he was just sharing, like he always did, even when he wasn’t singing. The people around him were laughing now, like they finally got it. Or at least that they wanted to. A woman in a red scarf nodded, her fingers tracing the rim of her coffee cup, like maybe she was going to say something too. But she didn’t.

Tupac took a breath, almost like he was deciding whether to keep going. “See, what I’m trying to say is, you don’t run from things just because they’re scary. You run toward them, Martha. Even when you’re hungry. Even when they’ve already eaten you.”

I didn’t get the analogy. But maybe I wasn’t supposed to. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten nachos at 4 a.m. in an airport, or why it felt like I had. Or why Tupac was here, talking about wolves and nachos, as if it all made sense. But it did, somehow. That was the thing. It made more sense than anything else. At 4 a.m. Inside the Concourse B of the Denver International Airport.

The waitress came by, filling my coffee cup without asking, and Tupac, now sitting back, eyes closed like he was just waiting for the next flight to land, smiled. 

“You lost?” he asked, stealing a nacho from the hand of a man in three-piece suit.

I didn’t know what to say. I watched the steam curl from my coffee like it might spell something out on my behalf.

“Yeah, no,” I finally muttered, then gave a half-shrug. “I’m just going home.”

Tupac nodded, as if he had heard enough. “That’s what all we do, man. We all have places to be.”

And then the terminal felt quieter. Like the night had finally caught up with the lights.

Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Vestal Review, Fractured Lit, HAD, Hobart, JMWW, Trampset, and Maudlin House, among other journals. His stories have been selected or nominated for such anthologies as the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Wigleaf Top 50. He is currently at work on his first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam.