Flash Fiction by C. Angelo Caci

Fish

It flops upon the deck, so desperately trying to gulp air, just to feel that cool, cool, sea water once again flowing through its gills.  To extract a breath . . . even if just for the moment, just one more time . . . just a breath . . . a breath of air . . . one breath of oxygen, of life, from water.  But there is no water, only air . . . just air.

Fish cringes at the sight of the hand, the hand which feeds it--and that's it, the hand, that of its captor as he grasps its tail, lifts, lifts high--fish flying--the purist blue of a sky in the background, the sun shimmering, gracing its sleek body in a shroud of gold glitter . . . then the hand that feeds and destroys, smashes its head upon the gunwale.  The fish convulses momentarily.  It is then stilled, as if composed.  Its tail--the flag of surrender--slowly relaxes until it falls flat against the cockpit flooring.  Fish cringes from the violence . . . then sniffs the remains.  Squeamish, she backs off, her mouth moving as if in articulation of . . . then she relaxes, or rather relinquishes to . . . She looks to Merv, desperate, confused, drops her tail and slowly retreats to the cabin below, step by step, careful.  She'll share later in the bounty, when the sweet scent of its death permeates the air as its filleted torso roasts upon the grill.  Fire changes everything.



C. Angelo Caci has been published in many venues, both eBooks and print.  He lives and works in Santa Barbara, California.  Website:  https://sites.google.com/site/chrisangelocaci/home

Flash Fiction by A.J. Huffman

Following Her Footsteps

He had come to the beach to dig his own grave. 

It was early Monday morning, or late Sunday night depending on your perspective, and  the sun was still sleeping somewhere below the horizon line.  The seagulls ignored the fact he was overdressed for both the weather and the location as he wandered the edges of the waves. 

His shoes were getting soaked, but he did not notice.  His body was on autopilot, heading for the spot just above lifeguard station 22. 

Even at his zombie pace, he reached the rocks in no time.  He immediately fell to his knees, began digging with a child’s plastic shovel. 

By the time the sun opened its golden eye, his suit was soaked with sweat and salt water.  His unkempt hair fell in his eyes, but did not deter him from task.  Deeper and deeper he dug.  

When he had managed a hole about two feet deep, he stopped, removed his jacket.  He sat down in the hole as if it were a welcoming recliner, smiling for the first time in a year.  Slowly he began pushing the removed sand over his legs.  He leaned back, continued covering his chest.  When he could cover himself no further, he tucked his arms to his chest, still clinging to the tiny yellow toy. 

As he lay there, waiting for the tide to claim him, he remembered his daughter’s hands releasing that same handle before taking off into the water without warning.  She had been seven and so sure of her ability to navigate the waves that she ignored her father’s warnings. 

He had only taken his eyes off her for a moment, but a moment was all it took.  A small wave knocked her off balance.  The following wave took her breath.  The undertow had her before either of them could do anything. 

The lifeguard had been nowhere to be seen, probably off flirting with bikini-clad teenagers, while he rushed into the waves, desperately searching for a glimpse of her hand or hair.  He saw neither.

Her body had washed up hours later, miles down the beach.  He knew this unforgiving beach would not hesitate to claim him as well. 

They found him hours later, still half-buried.  His face bloated from salty submersion, his hands still locked around the plastic shovel.

A.J. Huffman has published twelve solo chapbooks and one joint chapbook through various small presses.  Her new poetry collections, Another Blood Jet (Eldritch Press), A Few Bullets Short of Home (mgv2>publishing), Butchery of the Innocent (Scars Publications), Degeneration (Pink Girl Ink) and A Bizarre Burning of Bees (Transcendent Zero Press) are now available from their respective publishers and amazon.com.  She is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, a two-time Best of Net nominee, and has published over 2400 poems in various national and international journals, including Labletter, The James Dickey Review, Bone Orchard, EgoPHobia, and Kritya.  She is also the founding editor of Kind of a Hurricane Press.  www.kindofahurricanepress.com.

Flash Fiction by M.J. Iuppa

Strange Looks

Mirror, Mirror, on the wall--I'm fed up with imitations.  I
will not look into your eyes this morning and be satisfied
with a summary of misgivings.  You big baby.  Don't start.
I could spoil you with a There, there, it's another day, darlin'
but perfection doesn't come without practice.  You have
to get messy now.  You have to say it with your eyes.  I will
never leave you.  Even if I turn my back on you, I will be
right back.  You can count on it.  Don't give me that face.  I'm
too busy.  I can't do this anymore.

M.J. Iuppa lives on Red Rooster Farm near the shores of Lake Ontario.  Most recent poems, lyric essays and fictions have appeared in the follow journals:  Poppy Road Review, Black Poppy Review, Digging to the Roots, 2015 Calendar, Ealain, Poetry Pacific Review, Grey Sparrow Press, Snow Jewel Anthology, 100 Word Story, Avocet, Eunoia Review, Festival Writer, Silver Birch Press, Where I Live Anthology, Turtle Island Quarterly, Wild Quarterly, Boyne Berries Magazine (Ireland), The Lake (U.K.), Punchnel's; forthcoming in Camrock Review, Tar River Poetry, Corvus Review, Clementine Poetry, Postcard Poetry & Prose, among others.  She is the Writer-in-Residence and Director of the Visual and Performing Arts Minor Program at St. John Fisher College.  You can follow her musings on art, writing and sustainability on mjiuppa.blogspot.

Flash Fiction by Daniel Clausen

Rachel

He saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind back when things like two-dollar movies theaters still existed.  He drove up to the movie theater in his beat-up clunker and went to see it two weeks after Rachel broke up with him.

He was going to Boston for school on a scholarship.  He wanted her to wait for him in South Florida.  Wait till he was set up and reading Chaucer and the first chapter of his novel was finished, the one he had been working on since sophomore year of high school.

As he watched the movie, not really funny, even though it had Jim Carrey in it, he thought about how dissimilar they were.  her with her spider tattoos and her dark lip gloss.  Her smoking habit.  The way she tried to intimidate others with her callous stares.

In the end, though, she was just a girl.  In the most diminutive way you can mean "she's just a girl," she was just a girl.

She worked two jobs and competed with her two older brothers for her parents' love.  In the end, it was her friend who had confessed to him that she "liked" him, as if they were still in middle school.

Other girls in their school were pregnant or had kids.  He spent most of his time at the community college.  He barely even took high school classes.  Most of his friends were grown up or growing up, but Rachel seemed like she was still a girl.

Right then in the movie Jim Carrey is with Kate Winslet's character in the bookstore, and she says to Jim Carrey's character, "Remember me.  Try your best.  I know you can."  The scene is a touching one because we know that the effort will be fleeting.

James had never particularly been shy, but Rachel put off scary vibes.  The kind of scary vibes that would almost negate her hotness.  Almost.

So when he had approached her for the first time in the lunchroom, he'd been a little surprised when he noticed how nervous she was.  Yes, she was a girl trying to pass herself off as something she wasn't.  For the first two weeks they dated, he had trouble even comprehending why she had bothered with the tattoos or the cigarettes.  She could have been some straight-laced preppy school girl or a future librarian.

They'd hardly said complete sentences to each other for a week.  So finally he said, "I don't get it.  Why the punk rock, the lip ring, and the tattoos?"

"Why not?" she tried to sound cool, but it wasn't working.  "I have to express who I am."

"And who are you?"

He watches Jim Carrey on the beach.  His memory of Kate Winslet is almost completely erased.  He truly looks like a man who's about to lose everything.

It's the same look Rachel had when he told her he was going away for school.  He didn't understand why she looked that way or why she believed that she wasn't the type of person who could one day meet him there.

She told him many things.  About work and money.  About the unfairness of the world.  And it occurred to him that she was a girl trying to cover herself up.

She yells at him aggressively.  Talks a lot about what a shit he is and how the school will eventually change him.

He actually hopes this is true.  That's the point, right?  Why else would he go?

He wants to say one more thing, but he doesn't know how to say it.

The movie ends exactly the way it should.  I won't spoil the ending.

When James leaves the theater he calls Rachel up.  She must be at work because she doesn't answer.

He leaves a message on her answering machine.

He says, "I'll never understand why exactly you decided to date me.  But I'll say this, you're not the Rachel you show to others.  Your true self is a person only I've ever seen.  It comes from a place more real than your tattoos or nose rings.  When you grow up and find the person I fell in love with, come find me in Boston.  I might not be someplace you've ever heard of.  When you feel panicked like you can't go forward, think about what drew you to me in the first place.  Think about that.  Don't hide from that feeling.  Just go, get on a bus or a plane, and find me.  I'll always be closer than you think."

Daniel Clausen has wanted to be a writer since elementary school.  His work has been published in Slipstream Magazine, Spindrift, Leading Edge, and Zygote in My Coffee, among other websites and journals.  His short fiction collection "Reejecttion" is free for everone on Issuu. http://issuu.com/danielclausen/docs/the_reejctts-7-23-2014/1)

Flash Fiction by Linda M. Crate

Chimera

The real monsters aren't vampires, werewolves, things that go bump in the night, or things with claws--the real monsters are like you and me.  Sometimes they are you and me.

I don't think anyone really plans on becoming a murderer.  It isn't something that you discuss over cornflakes with your parents or something that you think about when you're pouring yourself a glass of orange juice.  At least, not if you're me.

For me, it was an impulse.  Once I couldn't ignore.

I was a chimera so I knew that I wouldn't easily be caught.  Chimeras are rare, if you have any idea what I'm talking about.  You probably don't so let me enlighten you--I have two different sets of DNA coursing through my veins.  It makes getting away with murder all the more easier.  Especially when your DNA doesn't match what they have at the crime scene.

I think my parents knew--how could they not?  But they didn't say anything.  Almost as if it were an unspoken agreement between the three of us.  It wasn't something to be conversed about.  I can't exactly think of a good way to bring about the topic:  "Hey, son, did you kill that girl on the subway yesterday?  Oh, by the way you have a message on the answering machine."  Yes, that was never going to happen and we all knew it.

Yet one day our unspoken agreement was broken.

"You can't keep going on like this."

"Like what, dad?"

"You think we don't know?"

"I never said that you didn't."

"You do know what I'm talking about don't you?"

"Of course, I do.  I thought we had an agreement.  Not to talk about it."

"We did, of course, but you've taken it too far.  We never should have let it get to this point."

Let it?  He thought that he had any control over me, at all?  Now that was funny.  "I'm not going to stop. I can't."

"Then let me help you."

"You can't."  Yet he wouldn't relent.  Finally, I sliced through his abdomen.  I watched with relish as the blood spilled all over the floor like red wine.  The acrid taste of salt filled my mouth when I licked the knife clean.  "I told you that you couldn't help me.  But, no, you had to insist.  See what good that did?"

Then, of course, my mother threatening to call the cops on me was another brilliant idea.  So I had to kill her as well.  She went down a lot harder than dad, ended up scratching me several times.  I slapped her hard across the face, broke her nose and her ribs, and then I stabbed her forty seven times.  Yes, I kept track.  I'm neurotic like that.

I incinerated the bodies in my parents creator so no one would come sniffing around for them, cleaned up the blood and went to school like any other day.  You may call me a monster, and you would be right.  I'm a chimera.

Flash Fiction by Jim Meirose

Time Passes; Time Goes

The small frame house set in the edge of a development of identical houses two miles over the hill from the Rocky Hill Quarry.  The sound of the blasting from the quarry went on all day, all night, all year, every day and the sound swept across the development seeping into the kitchens and dining rooms and bedrooms of all the houses, including the small frame house where Tom sat at the head of the kitchen table eating his breakfast before leaving to catch the banged-up yellow bus at the corner for school.  His Mother bustled in a flowered apron putting away dishes and pots and pans she was retrieving from the dishwasher.  It being spring, the windows were open and through the screens came the distant rumbling of the blasting that punctuated the entire breakfast, indeed, that punctuated their very lives.  They were having a conversation about a question Tom had asked about the ocean.

Why doesn't the ocean water just soak into the ground and go away like it does when I dig a hole and fill it from the house and it just soaks away into the ground?  And the lakes and rivers--and all that?

I don't know, said Mother, struggling to put a glass pot onto a top shelf.  The glass rattled and clattered making shards of sharp sound in the air like it was breaking but it wasn't breaking.

Do you think Dad would know?

Rumbling rolled in from the direction of the quarry through the yielding rusty screen but they weren't hearing it anymore; it was real as the walls and floors and ceiling were real; the kind of real that isn't noticed any more.

Dad, yes, she said, closing the cabinet--Dad would know the answer to that.

She stopped short of saying but Dad is because in her mind Dad was not and the rumbling blasts went off in a sudden string, and Dad would be home later to answer the question but too late to see Tom they worked very late at the quarry that was what she said--

I can ask Dad when he comes home tonight, she told Tom.

But why can't I stay up and ask Dad?

Dad will be home very late again.  They work late at the quarry--

The distant rumbling crackled hard fading all around them.

Tom sat back holding up a fork of eggs.

Yes because I'm a little afraid Mom--I'm afraid the Ocean will someday be like the little holes I did.  All empty and then we won't be able to go there anymore.

Oh no, she said--that won't happen--oh, and oh yes I need to tell you.  Dad will be staying at the men's quarters at the quarry this weekend--he called.  He told me.  They got a lot of work to do over there so he needs to stay over and work the weekend and there's no point in driving back and forth when he can just stay there.  They're working double shifts.

None of this meant anything to Tom except he would not see his Dad for even longer and the explosions in the distance continued--strings of explosives were being set off.  They must be bringing down whole walls; whole walls of stone.

So when will I see Dad?

Oh, she said, pulling back her hair--next week probably--no not probably.  For sure.  For sure.

Why is he working so much?

The money is tremendous, she exclaimed.  That's why he's doing it.  For the money--but now you never mind Tom.  Eat your eggs.  The bus will come soon.

She put her hand to her forehead and a thought crossed her mind.

--everything passes; time passes until buses come; water passes away into the ground; next week will come because time passes what will I do next week after that time passes what will I tell him then--and will the oceans really empty in that time in that time--

Oh if everything would just stand still stand still--

Distant crackling rumble; then a great blast.  Echo, fade, silence.

Jim Meirose's work has appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including Blueline, Ohio Edit, Bartleby Snopes, Innocate, the Fiddlehead, Witness, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Xavier Review, and has been nominated for several awards.  Two collections of his short work and three novels have been published.  Two new novels will be released in 2015 and 2016 by Montag Press.

Flash Fiction by Paul Smith

Shine a Light

"She's been missing since Friday and you're not worried?"

"Of course I'm worried."

"You don't act worried."

"She's our daughter.  She's done this before."

"Not a whole weekend.  I think you are the problem, you and your male indifference.  You are why she did this."

"It's not me."

"Who is it, then?"

"It's Heisenberg."

"Who?  Who's Heisenberg?  The football guy or the guy in the band?"

"A scientist."

"Now she's hooking up with a scientist?"

"No.  Heisenberg had a theory about atoms.  When you shine a light on them, their electrons react to the light.  So you can't predict their behavior.  His theory is called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Theory.  It applies to teenagers too.  The more scrutiny you put on a teenager, the more he or she will avoid your scrutiny.  And that's our daughter Kate -- the avoider of our scrutiny.  So I say we go to bed, and she'll show up."

"When?  When will she show up?"

"When she feels no scrutiny."

"How is that?"

"Turn out the lights."

"I'm worried about her."

"Me too, but this lamp in the living room is emitting millions of electrons that are laughing at us.  We'll go to bed and turn off their laughter."

"You are impossible!  Alright, the lights are out.  Now what?"

"Patience."

"I'm not good at patience."

"You would make a terrible neutron or proton.  All we do is sit around the nucleus and watch electrons."

"My husband -- the proton."

"Hear that?"

"Yes, the back door."

"Patience."

"Mom?  Dad?  Why are the lights out?  It's only nine o'clock."

"We were going to bed."

"Me too. Good night."

"Kate?"

"Don't mom.  Don't."

"I'm just going to turn on the lights."

"See?  It's me."

"I know dear.  I just wanted to be certain."