Everything seemed to stop. William’s accordion lay silent against his chest and Beatrice stopped giggling. We held the warm slices in our hands and breathed in the sweet smell of sugared dough. Even there, standing on the grate above the sewers—the smell of sugared dough.

And as we put the bread in our mouths, our eyes blinded with contentment, our stomachs grew quiet, and our bodies loosened and became still.

And a woman stared as she stood beside a newsstand. Her eyes were envious behind the veil of her hat. And she was unhappy not to have the things we clung to, the thrill of surviving and the taste of our bread.

—Reprinted with author’s permission from his book Things Like This (Arroyo Seco Press, 2026); piece was published previously in the anthology Flash Fiction Festival Three (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2019).

Dave Alcock’s

debut collection of flash literature, Things Like This, was released in April 2026 by Arroyo Seco Press. He has been interested in flash fiction ever since 2016 when he received Flash Fiction Forward (ed. James Thomas and Robert Shapard) as a surprise gift. He read the first page and was hooked and he has been ever since.

Alcock’s writing has been published by Every Day Fiction, Flash Frontier, and MacQueen’s Quinterly, as well as some other excellent lit-zines, and can also be found in two anthologies published by Ad Hoc Fiction. He works as an editor and lives with his wife and two children in Devon, England.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Sycorax, microfiction by Alcock in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 20, September 2023); nominated by MacQ for Best Small Fictions anthology

⚡ Wishing Well, microfiction by Alcock in Issue 18 of MacQ (April 2023); nominated by MacQ for Best Microfiction anthology

⚡ A Defence of Imitation, photograph and essay by Dave Alcock, with artworks by Catherine Alcock and Petrus Christus, in The Ekphrastic Review (22 February 2023)

⚡ Congeners, microfiction by Dave Alcock in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 13, May 2022); nominated by MacQ for Best Microfiction