Meg Pokrass is the author of "Damn Sure Right" (Press 53 ) and serves as Editor-at-Large for BLIP Magazine (formerly Mississippi Review ) and before that, for SmokeLong Quarterly . Her stories, poems, and flash fiction animations have appeared in nearly one hundred online and print publications, including Mississippi Review, Gigantic, Gargoyle, The Nervous Breakdown, HTML Giant, Wigleaf, The Pedestal, Keyhole, Annalemma, Smokelong Quarterly, elimae, Prime Number, Women Writers, and Joyland . Meg creates and runs the popular Fictionaut-Five Author Interview Series for Fictionaut , and consults with Writing MFA programs about online publishing. Meg lives with her small, creative family and seven animals in San Francisco, where she edits and teaches flash fiction privately. Visit Meg's website at www.megpokrass.com .

The Color of Scotch (May-ish, 2011. Issue 28.)

For nights after Benson left, her dreams were of him on a dirt bike, with a horn-like nose, barefoot, no helmet. A danger-seeking Benson with a vicious parrot, pleading, "Wipe your lips! Or this will spread!" Some kind of bird disease.

Benson was a visual artist, he painted Chloe's lips in different shapes and textures. Sometimes they looked like people. Sometimes they looked like houses or beehives. Her lips hung all over his walls.

Half asleep, she smoothed her wrists over her mouth and chin, again and again, to free him. The motion woke her up, and with nothing better to do... she drove around. Driving and listening to the sound of motion, happy to be moving through the sloppy night air without the use of lipstick, something she had not done in years.

She went back to the place they'd met. The new, cute bartender said, "Feeling thirsty tonight?"

It has been three years. Chloe could feel his face swimming drunk from images of them there, kissing the first night.

"Huh?"

She could not resist the color of scotch.

"Yes," she said.