Flash Fiction by David O'Neal

Ocean Beach, San Francisco

    Gone the bustling amusement park at Ocean Beach, gone Skateland and Playland, gone into burnt brick and ruined concrete walls are the once sprawling Sutro Baths, gone the Chateau-like Cliff House which exists only in old pictures and postcards.

    But the slow-sloping Beach at the edge of the infinite ocean is there in all its natural stolid solidity and aloneness: five miles of it from Lands End, where tourists gather for views of the Golden Gate and Marin Headlands, south to the Fort Funston cliffs where moth-like hang gliders soar 500 feet over the wind-swept land, riding the ridge-lift, held aloft by the up-drafts. Tiny Bank Swallows nest in the cliffs there – their only known coastal nesting site. Ocean Beach, paralleled by the Great Highway, is two hundred yards wide all the way, its flatness modulated by occasional low sand dunes. 

    It’s wind, wind, wind at Ocean Beach: strong wind, whooshing wind, whipping wind, forever wind, cold, steady, unrelenting wind. Wind carves waves, froths the breakers, and forms white-caps in the distance. Wind drives the sea into the shore, and the constant sounds of wind and waves together seemingly radiate from far beyond the horizon of incoming swells; the crash, roar, dip and hush; the pulse, shape and duration of multiple sea and wind sounds; the rush, constant pounding and plangent resonance of ocean and air; the weight and power of the ocean tamed only in small measure by the Beach. And shrill calls of snowy plovers, gulls, geese, ravens, pelicans, cormorants.
The slippery visual wash of waves; the sight of their rhythmic rise, thrust, collapse and retreat; their differing motions; their curves, filigrees and lacey shapes; the ever changing dots, specks and lines, jagged and smooth, on the moody ever-changing sea surface; inlay of scintillating light; tankers diminished by distance to toy boats; the grainy sand underfoot and in the hand; the briny taste and smell; salt on the lips. Do onlookers not see inward and stare into the sea-tides of their souls?

    All San Francisco comes here. Waders like the gentle slope of the Beach and children play in the foamy spoor and backflow of the water; flyers of kites unloose their birds and dragons to the wind; surf-casters cast out; sand sculptors compete in the annual contest. Surfers love the heavy swells and miles of beach break: they mount the liquid planes below and above the rising waves and read the changes and shapes of the swells, then glide down cutting back and forth along the long spiral roll of falling wave crests. Kite-surfers, lift-pulled by the wind, slide and glide colorfully through the glassy shallows. Warming bonfires and barbeques glow on the beach day and night while runners and bikers flow on the sidewalks of the Great Highway.

    Yet swimmers beware! Lives have been lost from the achingly cold water, strong rip tides, currents and undertows, and fierce waves. Wind driven waves have grounded many ships and pounded them to pieces on Seal Rocks and against the jagged cliffs at either end of the Beach.  Once in a while, at low tide, the ghostly hull of the King Phillip, an old clipper ship wrecked in 1878, surfaces eerily through the sand at windswept Ocean Beach.
    

 

 

David O’Neal is a retired rare book dealer now enjoying a second career as a writer, especially of poetry. His recent creative work has been published in The Eclectic Muse, Vision Magazine, Mississippi Crow, Two Hawks Quarterly, The New York Times, The Lyric, Open Minds Quarterly, Bird Keeper, The Magazine of the Parrot Society U.K., etc. and in anthologies such as The Marin Poets Anthology, Voices of Bi-Polar Disorder, Nurturing Paws, and Science Poetry. He has also written several books and compiled and edited Babbling Birds: An Anthology of Poems about Parrots from Antiquity to the Present.

Flash Fiction by David MacPherson

How to be Calm

 

If anyone asked, Ray would say, “The most important part of getaway driving is looking calm while waiting for them to come back. When they do return all crazed and hopped up, that’s when you are your most calm. That’s when you just go with it, whatever it is.”

 

He remembered this as he waited down from the jewelry store. It was a big store. one of the biggest he’d seen. In his head, Ray began to list all the songs by the Rolling Stones that he could think of, which was his trick for looking relaxed and in his place.

 

The back door opened up and three people jumped in. They peeled off their masks and stored their guns and one of them barked, “Hit it.”

 

Ray looked in the rear view window and then turned all the way around. “Wait a minute, who are you guys?”

 

There were three men, all who were strangers. The guy in the middle, with the long stringy hair, “Damn, we went into the wrong getaway car again.” The other guys groaned.

 

Ray shouted, “What do you mean wrong getaway car? How many getaway cars do you think there are?”

 

The round guy on the left shrugged. ‘I think there were three robberies going on when we came in. So maybe four getaway cars probably. It’s a big store. It does a lot of volume.”

 

The tall guy on the right looked behind him, “Can we get going already?”

 

“I’m not your getaway driver. Find yours, I’m waiting for my crew,” Ray said.

 

The middle guy said, with a little panic in his voice, “I’m sure they’ll be fine. There’s always cars ready to book out of anywhere. Look around you, there’s a ton of cars. So now you are in our crew. Let’s go, you’ll get your cut.”

 

“But they are my bros, I’ve been with them for ever.”

 

The tall guy said, ‘Really your bros? They didn’t look down on you? They didn’t make fun of the guy with the car? They wouldn’t leave you here?”

 

Ray turned back to the wheel and thought. His crew had three guys. Frank threw cigarettes in his direction. Jimmy called him an idiot grease monkey and Mike never even looked at him. His crew, looking for any convenient getaway car.

 

Ray popped the clutch and shot the car into traffic, going wherever you go when you need to flee.

 

 

 

 

Flash Fiction by Adam Natali

The Mighty Eagle

 

 

The American Motors Corporation (AMC) was bought out by Chrysler in 1987, but during the three decades of their existence, they gave us such wonders of the modern roadway as the squat yet spacious Pacer, the sporty AMX, and the off-roading Wagoneer. But no vehicle in their fleet commanded as much respect as the four wheel drive Eagle station wagon.

When my grandfather was looking for a way to spend his hard earned horse track winnings, he considered the obvious choices: Buicks, Oldsmobiles, even Cadillacs. But gramps was a man in the classical sense of the word, and he didn’t have time for streamlined quality or aesthetic beauty. He wanted a machine that could burrow through the trenches of his trailer park when man-sized snow drifts would frighten lesser machines into dead batteries and frozen windshield wiper fluid.

The AMC Eagle wagon he purchased in 1985 had a tan, faux leather interior and a cream body complimented by coffee brown trim. It resembled a fossilized mushroom with an engine fused to the front of it, and after a few pumps of the gas pedal (but not too many, because the engine would flood) it would roar like a lion woken from a dream of drinking cocktails mixed with the organs of dead gazelles. 

And upon my sixteenth birthday, the beast became my own. My grandfather had passed a couple years before, and the Eagle spent those lonely 24 months majestically rusting and dripping transmission fluid in our driveway. As I slid across the faux leather driver’s seat, not as a child with a dream, but as a man with an ignition key, a bond was formed that would last through the remainder of my teen years. 

The Eagle and I spent our mornings transporting friends to school, and afternoons waving to one another as I swung at softballs during gym class on the fields just beyond the parking lot. At night we would claim the streets, lawns, and medians as our own. From off road jaunts through the goal posts at my old elementary school, to dust storms created along the rubble of road construction projects.

Then one evening, the mighty Eagle would conquer yet another frontier.

We sat grumbling at a stoplight at the intersection of Golf and Barrington Road. The golden arches of a McDonalds added a yellow light to the orange glow of sulfur street lamps. My best friend sat by my side with two more friends sharing the back seat.

Then a Mustang pulled up beside us. It had the classic nineties shape, little more than a Taurus with sharper contours, but it purred with a souped up engine, or at least a souped up muffler.

I turned and made eye contact with the car’s driver. A mocking smirk crept upon his lips. He seemed to find it amusing to be sharing the road with such an unorthodox creature as my Eagle. But I would have the last laugh.

I shifted my car into neutral and pressed the gas. Ancient elm trees knelt to the godlike rumble set forth by six cylinders of American made fury. 

The Mustang howled in return, but the slightest trace of fear could be detected in its neigh.

The light turned green. I slammed the Eagle into drive, but pressed the gas slowly to keep her from stalling. We crept over the line with the grace of an ostrich, but the Mustang hesitated. Apparently, its jockey was inept at driving a stick shift. We roared across the intersection, leaving the whimpering nag in our wake, and clutching our fists in victory.

 

 

 

Adam Natali is a freelancer who graduated from Columbia College Chicago with a Bachelor of Arts degree in creative writing. His fiction has appeared in The Cynic and Short Story Me, he's done articles for HD Living magazine, and he spent a year as a staff writer at Groupon (www.groupon.com) composing daily deals, merchant profiles, and stupid jokes

Flash Fiction by Anna Zumbro

High Jump

 

 

Too slow for the relay team and too weak for shot put, Davey was sure as hell going to compete in high jump.

 

“Higher,” he insisted in practice, “taller than me.”

 

The captain snorted. “You’ll be eating asphalt.”

 

Davey ran, twisted, and dove upward, inverting gravity. He thought of the rhyme, hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon… He cleared the moon and was rounding its dark side.

 

Back on earth, sunlight forced open his eyes.

 

“Dude, you okay? Might have a concussion, angled a bit wide of the mat."

 

“Did I clear it?”

 

“Yeah, you did. Welcome to the team."

 

 

Anna Zumbro writes short fiction and lives in Washington, D.C.

Flash Fiction by Ken Seide

Memory Pillow

 

 

“Sleep well?” she asked.

“Yes, but strange dreams,” I said.

“How’d you like the memory pillow?” she asked.

“What? What’s that?” I said.

“It conforms to your head and neck,” she said. “It’s my daughter’s. I took it off her
            bed.”

“Has she been to Tzfat?”

“Yes, it’s one of her favorite places. Have you been?”

“No, but I remember it now.”

 

 

Ken Seide is the pen name of a resident of Newton, Mass. His short stories have appeared in Poetica and Cyclamens and Swords. His poems have appeared in Poetica, Kerem, Voices Israel, Muddy River Poetry Review, and other publications.

Flash Fiction by Leilanie Stewart

Twenty Questions

 

“I can’t get it. I give up!”

Andy stared at his wife. “After nineteen questions?”

“It’s impossible with you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Shirley smirked. “You should know.”

“Huh? How is 'belly button fluff' any harder than 'naked mole rat'?”

“See? It’s always a war with you – I’ll never win. You think of the most obscure topic.”

“You could’ve played along – for just one more question!”

“Played along? Forget nineteen questions; this was nineteen years – of hell!”

Shirley got up. Nineteen years. After nineteen years of marriage, a nineteen year old wisp of a girl had got between them. He didn’t know she knew. He liked to play games. He wouldn’t win this game. She wouldn’t let him.

Nineteen questions. Nineteen years of hell. A nineteen year old girl. Nineteen steps to the door.

“It was only one more question,” Andy yelled.

Only one more step. Shirley walked out the door. She shut it hard behind her.

 

 

 

 

Leilanie Stewart’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Carillon, Monomyth, Blood Moon Rising, Wufniks, The Crazy Oik, Sarasvati, The Pygmy Giant, Linguistic Erosion, Stanley the Whale, The Neglected Ratio, The Absinthe Literary Review, Ariadne’s Thread and Mad Swirl. By day she runs a creative writing workshop for teenagers, and by night she writes and promotes her work at spoken word events. She currently lives in London with her husband, writer and poet, Joseph Robert. More about her writing can be found at www.leilaniestewart.wordpress.com

 

Flash Fiction by Nancy Purcell

Wasted Lovers                            

           He left home the summer prior to his senior year; not because of bad grades, but because of bad friends. It was the music that stitched them together, his guitar in particular; his long fingers born to create magic. 

           Pot was his first date, then uppers became his steady. But it was his marriage to heroin that got under his skin.

           Two years later, on a grey January morning, our dog moaned by the bedroom door. I pushed away bed-covers and followed him to the basement door. I flicked the light switch, grabbed the railing and tread slow-steps toward my expectation: the boy, our long gone son, had broken in and returned to his early music spot. Propped against the wall, he looked ragged and used up, the needle still in his arm.

           Close by, leaning against a chair, was his guitar, the only thing he'd valued more than life.

Nancy Purcell's publications include RiverSedge, The MacGuffin, Pangolin Papers, Troika, LongStoryShort, The Square Table, DiverseVoicesQuarterly, among others. Her work has been included in anthologies and on the "Writers' Radio Show" station WAWL, Chattanooga, TN.   She served as a NC Writers Network/Elizabeth Squire Daniels Writer-in-Residence, Peace College, Raleigh, NC under the direction of Doris Betts. She facilitates a Creative Writing adult education program at Brevard College, Brevard, NC. and quick-coaches aspiring writers. Nancy also served 7 years as Transylvania County's representative for North Carolina Writers Network.