Guernica/PEN Flash Series

The series is a collaborative effort in which both journals publish the best flash out there.

Letter to Europe

to see the web that your rivers / have created, like lines on the / palm of a hand. From these, fol- / lowing the Rhine and the /… More

Axe Wound

Snatch. Slit. Box. Words were too dense now. They sat thick on tongues. You had to figure out the right way to say them or you’d choke. More

View on an Accident

Yesterday on that same corner, a young man on a motorcycle was hit by a car. I heard it happen: the familiar shriek of tire on asphalt, the crunch… More

The Chains That Keep

He sees me staring through the rearview and stops. Every streetlight we pass, his face gets shinier. He unzips his jacket, I notice blood on his shirt. Stabbed, probably.… More

1950

All we did was move from our house to a stranger’s house, then one after another. Every so often an army officer yelled at us to keep heading south,… More

An Odd Bird

Amal didn’t see when they took her mother away. She closed herself in her mother’s bedroom and smelled the lilac on her mother’s pillow until the sounds of the… More

Um Girassol da Cor do Seu Cabelo

Sometimes you have to stare a hundred times before an image sticks, before you understand half of what’s hidden there, still living, behind the snapshot. Uncle Pedro used to… More