Flash Fiction by Kristina England

Split Ends

Jennifer knew by the glint of the knife that he was ready for her.

She lowered her body and scooted under the car. She needed time to think.

She couldn’t run. He was a professional runner and her asthma would take her down in less than a mile.

Jennifer bit her lip as she watched her boyfriend’s feet emerge from the weeds.

They were supposed to be enjoying a nice picnic. Champagne. Strawberries. The cooing of Spring birds. A glimpse into the mating rituals of animals. Maybe they’d even get a little frisky themselves. Okay, probably not. He believed in that whole waiting before marriage thing.

But when you date a man with a split personality (willingly), you should probably stay in public settings for dinner.

At the moment, Jacob wasn’t Jacob. He was Ben.

Now if Ben hadn’t been jealous of Jacob, she’d be fine. But who wasn’t jealous of Jacob. He was good looking, athletic, and incredibly kind.

Earlier, Jacob had pulled over and provided his umbrella to an old lady making her way down Park.

“Oh, no, I’ll be fine,” the old lady insisted.

“Now, now. It’s supposed to pour the whole State of Texas on our town. And you know the reputation of Texas.”

The old lady smiled and took the umbrella. Then she shuffled on her way.

“I didn’t know it was supposed to rain?” Jennifer said as Jacob hopped back in the car.

“Oh, it’s not, but imagine if it did. That poor lady!”

Ben, on the other hand, would have shouted out the window, “Get on with it. We haven’t all day. The pedestrian walk isn’t for half dead grandmothers!”

Ben paced back and forth in the road.

“I’m not going to kill you, Jennifer. I just think it’s time to give you a haircut.”

Jennifer’s eyes narrowed. Jacob loved her long hair. What would he think if she let that whack job give her a crooked cut.

“Oh darling, I’ll be gentle.”

Jennifer sighed. She crawled out from under the car.

Ben chuckled.

“I didn’t know your butt could fit under there.”

Jennifer wiped mud from her dress.

Ben stared at her hair and came closer with the butter knife.

Jennifer rolled her eyes.

“You’ll never get anywhere with a butter knife. Here...”

She shuffled through her purse and removed a pair of scissors.

“But scissors are so predictable!” Ben said, stomping his feet.

“Okay, use the butter knife.”

Ben jumped up and down eagerly.

The sun set as he began to saw away at her hair. She wondered how long it would take to get even a handful of hair removed.

“Do you mind if I read?”

“No, go ahead dear.”

Jennifer didn’t actually have a book. She looked up at the sky and watched it peel back the layers of night. When the final glimmers of red began to dissolve, she frowned.

“I never noticed how dull a sunset is...” she said.

“I never noticed how dull a butter knife is...” said Ben, throwing the knife to the ground. “How ‘bout we go to a bar and drink like dirty old men?”

“Well, now you’re talking! Jacob never takes me drinking.”

Ben beamed as if he’d just won a spelling bee.
They got in the car and pulled away just as a Barred Owl began its mating call.

Kristina England resides in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her writing is published or forthcoming in Gargoyle, Haibun Today, Linguistic Erosion, Streetcake, and other journals. Visit http://kristinaengland.blogspot.com/ for more on her writing.

Flash Fiction by Mark Perry

The Most Common Side Effect

Robert had a problem and he determined to do something about it. The urologist gave
him a sample of medication for erectile dysfunction and stressed that the most common side has proven
to be headaches.
“If this works, I can handle a little inconvenience like that, Doc,” he promised.
That evening about thirty minutes after anxiously taking a pill, Robert witnessed a miraculous
resurrection. Excitedly, he leaped naked from the bath into the bedroom and showed his wide-eyed
wife. Her playful smile turned into a fretful frown.
“I’m sorry, Honey,” she said, “but not tonight. I have a headache.”



Mark Perry is a retired English teacher who currently practices law in Georgia. His most recent
work has appeared or will be appearing in Red River Review, Blue Ridge Literary Review, The Stray
Branch, The Germ, Boston Literary Magazine, and Parody.

Flash Fiction by Kristina England

The Distance You Can Traverse In A Minute

Gary woke to snow.  He was fine with snow, but he was hoping for fire.

"It just goes to show, the weathermen never get it right," he said, stretching and shaking off the piles that had collected in the folds of his body.

He dressed in shorts, scanned the room for a shirt.

"Of course not."

He opened the front door.  The void looked dense this morning.  He closed the door and walked into the kitchen.  He learned a long time ago not to open the fridge or the oven.  He sat down and thumped a finger agains the table.

"What to do... what to do..."

Yesterday, he walked back and forth from the front wall to the back wall for 1,440 minutes.  The day before, he had walked in circles around the kitchen table.

Movement always helped.  He knew what would happen if he sat at the kitchen table for 1,440 minutes.  He would start counting seconds or the strands of hair on his head.  He already knew he had 5,000 strands (God had not been good to him in the hair department).

Gary stood up and walked back to the front door.  He opened it and looked around.  He was tempted to step outside.  What would be there?  Who would be there?  He closed the door again.

What if there was no one out there?

What if even the weathermen couldn't be found?

He listened for their voices.  The chattering broke through the void around him.

"50% chance we'll have 20 to 1,000 meteorites hit our houses today... The void is about 50% desner than it was yesterday... the snow isn't really snow... it's tons and tons of dandruff..."

He looked down at his shirt and touched a white fleck.  It melted on his finger.

"Oh, the boys are getting crazier..."

He sat back and let the void re-enter his head.

He smiled, remembering his wife.  It's too bad he cheated on her.  She really did love him.  He debated again whether she was somewhere in the void.  Would God have forgiven her for suffocating him?  He shrugged.  Did it matter?

He gnawed on his finger, pulled at the wedding ring.  Nope, melded to the skin.

He went back to the door, opened it, looked at the void.

He was done with counting minutes.  The minutes of a day were always the same.

He was done listening to the weathermen.  They were idiots.

He was done walking in circles, sitting down, or waking up covered in cockroaches.

He was done thinking about why the books always said there would be fire.  He'd never even seen a candle.

Hell, he was done with it all.

Gary stepped outside and closed the door behind him.  He counted less than a minute before the void began to change.

Kristina England resides in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her writing is published or forthcoming in Gargoyle, Haibun Today, Streetcake, and other journals. Visit http://kristinaengland.blogspot.com/ for more on her writing.

Flash Fiction by Pratima Balabhadrapathruni

Oranges and Lemons

 

The Dhobi Ghaut metro station was empty. It was the odd hour. Most people would be at work. Celine was going home after cooking lunch at the Chinese restaurant. She got into the train and sat close to the door. It would be easier to get off.

At Serangoon, the crowds poured in like torrents of sudden tropical rain. She loved the crowds like she loved the rain.. When attentive, she could isolate the familiar voices: the schoolchildren, the couple, the mother with her kids, and the group of co –workers.

 

Four more stops to go. She listened to the conversations around her. She heard the couple smile as they spoke. The woman was doing most of the talking. Can we buy the larger red lamp for the Chinese New year? Her voice was persuasive. You know my parents will be visiting us and we need to buy gifts for them and my sister. The man sounded apologetic. What do we buy for ourselves? She had a pout in her voice. A pair of oranges for you and me, is that not enough? He tried to placate her. This year too? The woman sounded disappointed.

 

The public system announced Celine's destination. She could have missed her stop. She got up and moved to the door, reaching out instinctively to counter balance the movement of the train, careful not to step on another’s foot. She often thought of herself as the ballerina of crowded trains.

 

At the neighborhood fruit shop, she bought herself an orange. Back home, she walked with impatience to her desk. The dialogue between the couple offered her a different subplot . She reached out to her keyboard with its keys in Braille.

 

As the clock chimed eight, the cat leaped onto her lap and mewed. She laughed as she got up. Too bad the cat does not like oranges, she thought as she made her way to her kitchenette. Fortunately, they both liked fish for dinner.

 

 

 

Pratima Balabhadrapathruni is a poet and writer from Singapore.

Flash Fiction by Jacqueline Markowski

Ashes

 

 

In another life I was an avid stoner.  My boyfriend, Paul, only knew other stoners.  We went to a party once.  Thick with THC and trying to appease Phthonos, my paranoid mind wove a tapestry:  Paul had sent the quiet dud on the couch to flirt with me -- to see if I would tell on him, to test my loyalty.  Paul told me many times that he'd kill me if I ever cheated.  The dude left the couch when the conversation slowed and I never saw him again.  I spent at least an hour trying to remember the word "entrapment."  I had the "trap" part but couldn't remember the rest.

 

Later we smoked a joint with the couple who lived there.  He rolled it fat, leaving in all the seeds and stems.  he said, through a thick Russian accent, that to truly love cannabis, one must accept and appreciate it all, a sentiment punctuated with the popping of a red hot seed which kamikaze-dove from the forest-for-the-trees-joint into the man's lap.  Cantárida, he yelled.  There was an eruptioin of laughter.  Maybe he was from Mexico.  From there I floated on a cloud of deeper appreciation for the interconnectedness of everything, even the nuts and bolts of weed.  My thoughts meandered peacefully until his wife tugged at my cloud, beckoning me to a dark corner across the room.  She dug through her oversized purse, pulling out rustic tampons and q-tips and denture cream while she searched for her treasure, which I hoped was eye drops or gum.  Finally she pulled out a gallon sized ziplock bag.

 

It was half full of white powder.  I froze in place, afaid it was a felonious amount of something that might counteract this beautifully mellow high.  I was right to be cautious.  My first husband, she said.  There was an hour of silence before I realized that she was finished with the sentence.  I couldn't figure out how to say I was lost in the conversation.  It's him . . . His ashes.  Here . . . she said, clearly frustrated with my cognitive inabilities.  She unzipped the bag, put it to my nose, willing me to smell the act of cremation.  I pretended to inhale, moving my shoulders up above my drooping head.  Still congratulating myself on a damn fine act of pantomime, I saw that she was frowning and disappointed.  Touch him.  After negotiating with reality of what she'd just said, I lowered my hand below the zippered line of the opening of the bag and pretended to touch the contents.  No, like grab some.  Pick him up.  Not yet satisfied, she pinched a thimble-sized amount by way of example.  I tried not to do what she was asking of me.  While my hand was in the bag, hovering over the ask like The Hindenburg, she pulled the bag up, into my hand.  There, she said with a satisfied smile.  I looked up, shocked, hoping maybe it was an earthquake that crashed my hand into her dead first husband's remains.  That would've been so much easier.

 

Behind her I saw Paul walking toward us, looking curious, hurried.  Believing it possible he might feel threatened, I quickly pulled my arm out of this poor dead man's burnt body.  But my hand was covered in him.  Up to my wrist.  I had fisted the mother fucker!  And now what?  I was left with yet another awkward conundrum.  Should I clap my hands together so that most of him would fall to the ground and then blow off the rest?  Would that be considered rude in this type of situation?  Should I wipe him on my shorts?  Should I excuse myself and wash him off in the bathroom sink?  What had she done with the thimble-full?  If only I had paid attention.  Typical me, always missing the details.

 

What did I do?  I wish I could remember but I can't because suddenly my boyfriend grabbed my arm, hard and pulled me toward the door.  I couldn't even utter a word, I barely had my footing.  He dragged me to the car and drove us away furiously.  At first I thought he was being noble, saving me from the horrible social predicament of what to do with a fist full of some chick's first husband's ashes.  But he wasn't.  He was pissed.  He had received the report from the flirting couch-dude.

 

 

 

Jacqueline Markowski's work has appeared in Chronogram Magazine, Cochlea/The Neovictorian, Permafrost Literary Journal, Camel Saloon, Pyrokinection and Jellyfish Whispers and she has been anthologized in Backlit Barbell as well as the upcoming Storm Cycle (Kind of a Hurricane Press).  She was awarded first place in poetry during the 2006 Sandhills Writers Conference.  She is currently working on a compilation of short stories and a collection of poetry.

 

 

 

 

Flash Fiction by Linnea Harper

He Met Somebody at a Conference

He waited till we were in bed to spring it on me. You what?!? I sputtered. I probably sounded more upset than I was, but I had just ordered the bumper sticker he wanted, the one that says, My Girlfriend is a Goddess from Northport, and I was in no mood to pull it out of him piece by piece. So that’s why he never answered his cell. We didn’t have sex, he defended, like that was the point, like now I would roll over and say, Well, cool then! What’s her name? When is she coming to dinner? Honestly, it wouldn’t have mattered that much. It’s a conference tradition— almost a requirement, really. The folks with an eye out find each other fast. And bang. Bang bang bang. But all they did was ditch meetings, take walk, and shop for clothes they had no intention of buying. They picked things out for each other, tried everything on. He just kept talking, and I held my tongue

 

I was getting a pretty good picture of how it was, how she studied him, standing there with her head at a tilt while a triptych of mirrors shed light on every angle and made him a multitude. Her eyes took in the whole of him, runner’s calf to GQ jowl, looking at him so intently it felt, he said, like she was looking all the way into the depths of the very black hole he feared he was, but then he would kind of flip inside-out and into a parallel universe with just the two of them. It was odd and a little eerie how it happened, and he thought that it must have felt almost like almost dying, but without the fear.

 

And I’m thinking what a piece of work. After confessing to three days eyeballing that tart in public, using their faux shopping trips for cover, and making it all sound like church, he wants my blessing. I always knew it was temporary, what with him barely older than my son, two little kids already, and a couple of pissed-off exes. I just didn’t see it coming this soon. And last week I loaned him money. Should have known better. We met at a conference too.

 

 

Flash Fiction by M.V. Montgomery

DREAM JOBS

 

housebreaker

 

I was a housebreaker, but definitely in the wrong place at the wrong time, a neighborhood get-together. All the residents were paying visits to one another. It took me awhile to catch on to this and to realize that the sooner I left, the better. I escaped onto a back porch, trying hard to conceal a couple of small items I had stolen. I was greeted immediately by an elderly lady who said, Oh, do you live here? I was just admiring your flowers. 

 

She painfully bent over to smell a rosebush near the porch, then asked me to show her around. So I started to take her into “my” home. From within came a friendly greeting: Hello, who’s there? 

 

He’ll show you around, I said, and fled quickly. 

 

 

beach clean-up

 

I am cleaning up a beach area, hosing off tables and umbrellas even though other workers stationed there do next to nothing. I am told by the manager, whom we all call “Mother,” to find a rake, which I do. It isn’t the best tool for the job because a fine mesh covers the sand. Only later, after scraping against the surface with the rake and accomplishing nothing, do I find another tool with plastic teeth like something used for cat litter. It pushes the sand back through the holes in the mesh. But then I press too hard and crack the handle. I am wearing sunglasses and a floppy hat: my late teen self. Next to the beach is a DJ stand where partiers wait impatiently for us to ready the area.

 

 

drifter

 

My partner and I were Depression-Era drifters traveling from town to town looking for any work we could find. We stopped at an open pit area, where our job was to get a box 1’ by 6”, fold it, label it with a number, then take it to the pit to fill with dirt. 

 

Once filled, each box became a brick in a wall designed to keep unwanted immigrants out. We decided to quit once we discovered this wall: twelve feet high, three feet thick, decorated with a large skull. 

 

 

angel in the house

 

Babysitting a young nephew. He was a toddler and acting up, apparently because he no longer fit well into his pants. So we went searching for another pair. 

 

Then I was trying to finish reading some essays by Virginia Woolf and needed to find a quiet place. A crowd of people were hanging out in the kitchen. I took my book, spotted a bottle of gin, and thought I would sneak both back to my room. But en route, there were so many stray dishes and glasses lying around that I couldn’t help becoming the Angel in the House and clearing them. 

 

 

preacher

 

I am a black preacher-civil rights leader dressed in a dark coat and a wide-brimmed hat. Coming out of an assembly, I lose sight of my driver. So I begin to walk the few miles home. 

 

It is a drizzly day, and I pause at a diner for shelter. There, I am accosted by a man wielding a knife who is on the verge of slashing me in the face. But the proprietress opens fire with a shotgun and the man’s head explodes over my clothes. 

 

 

not dressed

I arrive at my job as a factory janitor. The day shift still hasn’t left; the place is full of workers in a festive mood, singing and playing guitar. In one area is a line of short Hispanic ladies being judged in a beauty contest. A gruff foreman approaches and warns me I am improperly dressed for my shift. I tell him I have a change in the duffel bag I carry and proceed to get ready. Then I am handed a pay envelope with little doughnut stickers glued onto it to reflect all the bonus hours I have worked. But I have never been paid, and most of the rings have fallen off.

 

 

poor prof

 

Only a poor professor, I found myself on the verge of being driven to prostitution to pay for an operation for a friend. When a student heard of this, he wrote me a check for $15,560 to cover all costs. In return, I took a vow of chastity and swore to become a monk. Twenty years later, I had many followers. Some even tried to buy me out of my vow!

 

 

 

M.V. Montgomery is a professor at Life University. His short story collection Beyond the Pale will be released by Winter Goose Publishing in May 2013.