Litro

My mother called the next morning while I was getting ready for work to ask about the tick bite. I had nothing interesting to tell her other than it had reduced to a tiny red dot overnight. She sounded disappointed. “So nothing’s come of it then?” she said. “I guess not,” I replied. “You don’t need to see the doctor?” “I’ve nothing much to show them if I went.” There was a pause. “Right. Well, what about your midwife? Don’t you think you should text her?

Flash Friday In Log Run, a children’s picnic is interrupted by a group of young recruits carrying a felled tree trunk. The children fall silent. So do the mothers. In “Log Run,” a children’s picnic sits close to roads, fields and institutional buildings — until a group of recruits passes through. We had set up the picnic things on the grass outside the house. There was a checked blanket with leather backing that kept out the damp.

“Under Supervision” moves between probation work, new fatherhood and the comic exhaustion of being required in two places at once. Public rooms, private exhaustion. “So, just to clarify, you stole a double-decker bus?” “Correct.” “Why, Darren?” “It was cold, and I couldn’t afford a taxi.” “How do you know how to drive a bus?” “My dad used to be a bus driver.” “Oh, well in that case…” I have to say, I was quietly impressed.

Fifteen-year-old Lucy comes home through the back alley to find two open duffel bags on the futon. She already knows what they mean. A snow-lined back alley between brick apartment buildings. Photograph by Jonathan Gagnon via Unsplash. It had just started sleeting and I’d just climbed up on the chain link fence when I spotted that yellow bucket just sitting there, just past the back-porch steps. Shit. Lisa must’ve smelled that pee bucket from where it had sat under the futon bed on our back porch.

Litro Flash Fiction · Flash Friday Weekend Challenge Three stories of weather, place and what remains. BeforeThe Day Before · Jemi Laclé AfterGuard Duty · David Sherman ThroughFaster Than Wind · Miriam Dokotliver BeforeI of III The Day Before Jemi Laclé A plum tree, a grey luminous sky, and the day before the earth shook. The day before the Tōhoku earthquake, I stopped on a hill in Tokyo to photograph it. A plum tree was in full bloom.

“A Pilgrimage” by Emily Ann Zisko. The Pilgrims Highway goes north to Boston and south to Cape Cod: somewhere new, or the end of the world, which is really just the same thing said twice. But Phyllis told me that a thumb over the white line on Route 53 opens the whole universe like a cracked clam. “Phyllis doesn’t know about the whole universe,” my mom–I call her Mel, not to her face–told me. But we still picked up Phyl whenever we saw her thumb out on the shoulder. “Stop!” I yelled.

Image courtesy of Stormtech Performance Apparel. Flash Friday Weekend Challenge 150 words. Three backpacks. One weekend. We’re doing a very quick Flash Friday writing challenge this weekend. In 150 words or fewer, write about a journey, place, object or moment of weather that stayed with you. We’ll choose three winners and publish all three pieces on Litro. Each writer will also receive a Stormtech Norseman Roll Top Backpack 24. It’s free to enter and open worldwide.

Every year, editors are invited to put forward work for Best Small Fictions. We went back through the flash Litro published in the first seven months of 2026 and chose these five. There isn’t a single Litro house style here. One begins as a late-night television monologue. One stays close to the sensory world of a dog after a hurricane. Another moves through a fish market after a change of regime.

Photo by Seyed Amir Mohammad Tabatabaee on Unsplash. He is not. He calls her all the time. He stays over, yes. They have sex. Great sex too. Post fight. But he is not. They fight a lot. She cries a lot. He says that they are done a lot. But they are not. She does not wear that dress now, the bird print one she loves. He thinks it`s twee. Their kids have met. But he is not. They fight. She calls me. Daily. She tells me: I can´t lose him. But I can´t ask: Why? She asks: can I bring him to the party? We don´t say: no.

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