Flash Fiction by Linda M. Crate

Zombie Proof

Sylvia was a recluse.  She was just eccentric some would say, others would simply term her as "odd."  She definitely was an interesting case study at any rate.  She loved to speak in foreign languages no one else could understand, paint drawings with a realism and depth that drew an eye in to something quirky and strange, and beards.  She only ever dated men with beards.

Fat men, short men, smart men, stupid men--didn't matter as long as he had a beard.

Sylvia didn't know how to explain this fascination.  It was just one of her many quirks.  Her mother once joked that she would have married the bearded lady had she been a man.  She just might have.

Bruce was a zombie.  He wasn't born that way, no, but in the aftermath of one of the many zombie apocalypses of 3048 A.D. he had been turned by his brother of all people.

Human Bruce had been angry about that, but the zombie Bruce couldn't care less.  He only had one thing on his mind.  Brains.

Sylvia was sitting alone listening to slam poetry with a shot glass in her hand.  Just as she was about to take a swig she caught sight of Bruce.

Bruce was tall, lean and bearded.  It was the longest beard Sylvia had ever seen.  Without even giving him time to register what was happening, she walked over and kissed him full on the lips.

"Hey, stranger!"

Bruce blinked.  That was the first time anyone had approached him since he had become a zombie.  It confused him, it horrified him.  What kind of weirdo was this?  "You're weird," he responded before running out the door.

"No, wait, you had the most beautiful black beard," Sylvia pouted.  "Oh, damn, I even scare zombies away.  Mother's right, I am going to die alone."  She downed her shot.  "Oh well."

Linda M. Crate is a Pennsylvania native born in Pittsburgh yet raised in the rural town of Conneautville.  Her poetry, short stories, articles, and reviews have been published in a myriad of magazines both online and in print.  Recently her two chapbooks, A Mermaid Crashing into Dawn (Fowlpox Press -- June 2013) and Less Than a Man (The Camel Saloon -- January 2014) were published.  Her fantasy novel Blood & Magic was published in March 2015.  Her novel Dragons & Magic was published in October 2015.

Flash Fiction by Mara Buck

Adagio at the Dollar Store

It waits there on a back shelf at the Dollar Store, a slim volume with tasteful cover, dust jacket intact, scarred only by an ugly line of bleeding black marker slashing its bottom edge.  I am intrigued by the title (intellectual, yet playful) and I flip through the pages, give a modest nod of recognition as in reuniting with a seldom-considered friend, and place the book in my basket.  With tax its value is one dollar plus five cents.

Although the stack of others-to-be-read threatens to topple beside my bed, it is to this novel I turn first.  The cover is lovely, just the way such things should be.  The author is middle-aged, and the crinkled eyes of her photo on the back flap smile out with expectant enthusiasm.  Her mouth is a timid question.

"Do you like my work?" she seems to ask.  "Would you want to know the characters further?"

My answers are yes to both questions.

I research her name and uncover precious little.  This debut hardback is indeed her sole published work, and it has been out of print for any number of years, a paperback edition never issued.  Silken lyrical prose.  Haunting characters.  A so-called "quiet" novel, not the stuff of blockbuster fame.  One of those works for which word-of-mouth must prove the surest publicity, and when that dies, when all potential readers and all friends of potential readers have been alerted and exhausted, these bound words, this dream dies softly with neither a bang nor a whimper, only to face a brief resurrection on an industrial metal shelf cosseted between neon plastic flyswatters and kitty litter.

It is a June day and the sun is shining.

Mara Buck writes and paints in a self-constructed hideaway in the Maine woods.  Awarded/short-listed by Faulkner-Wisdom, the Hackney Awards, and others, with work in Drunken Boat, HuffPost, Crack the Spine, Blue Fifth, Writing Raw, Pithead Chapel, Apocrypha, Maine Review, tishman Review, Carpe Articulum, Linnet's Wings, The Lake, Whirlwind, as well as in numerous print anthologies.  A novel is forthcoming.

Flash Fiction by Rhys Hughes

My Biological Prism

On the road outside his house was a dead rainbow.  It might have been an oil slick that had separated into bands of color, but Hogarth had no interest in that explanation.  He stopped and peered.  Was there anything he could do to erase it?  Then it twitched.  It wasn't dead after all, just badly injured!  He wrapped it in his coat and took it home, intending to nurse it back to health.

He used his bedroom as a sickbay and kept the rainbow in a cardboard box filled with fistfuls of cotton wool that resembled summer clouds.  The rainbow regained its strength and soon was able to arch itself without assistance.  Only now did Hogarth realize how young it was, not exactly a baby, but certainly a toddler.  He fed it on fake raindrops squeezed from a sponge and beams of electric light.

When it was fully recovered, it followed him everywhere and became totally domesticated, sleeping against the ceiling over his bed.  Hogarth felt it was his duty to reintroduce it into the wild and took it for long walks under vast skies.  But the rainbow never strayed far from his side.  Hogarth's friends began to frown with disapproval whenever they passed him on the street.  Then the rainbow uttered its first word.

"Prism!" it cried loudly.  "Prism!"

Hogarth was touched but also concerned.  The rainbow was dependent on him to an unhealthy degree and wouldn't survive on its own.  He had to make a renewed effort to loosen the bonds, to undo the damage.  One morning he left the house earlier than usual, before the rainbow was awake, and he didn't return until after sunset.  He found the rainbow in an acute state of agitation because of his prolonged absence.

"It's time we had a little talk," he said gruffly.

The rainbow quivered anxiously.

"I'm not your prism," continued Hogarth, "not your real prism.  I adopted you when you were an infantile spectrum and raised you as my own, so in fact, I'm just your step-prism."

The rainbow remained perfectly still.

"It's true," said Hogarth almost defensively.  Then he fumbled in the pocket of his coat and withdrew a transparent wedge of glass.  "I went to all the curio shops, toured all the street markets, and finally I found this.  Don't you recognize it?"

"My biological prism," said the rainbow.  It was neither a question nor a statement and Hogarth sighed.

"Reunions like this don't come cheap.  The owner of the antique store span me an improbable tale about the prism that Isaac Newton bought at Stourbridge Fair in 1665, a casual purchase that led to his discovery that white light is a mixture of all the other colors.  That prism was an ancestor of this one, the owner said.  I don't know how that could be.  Do you feel it might be true?  I think it's just a fable."

The rainbow sagged under its own barely detectable weight.

Hogarth set down the glass wedge with an audible click on the top of his bedside table.  "I'll leave you alone together.  You need time to get properly acquainted.  But you can't live here any longer, I'm afraid.  My friends think I've become some sort of pervert.  Goodbye!"

He turned to leave, then paused at the door.  "Take your sponge with you but leave the lamp.  I can live without indoor rain but I enjoy reading in bed.  I'm going to stay in a hotel in another town for a few days.  Please don't be here when I get back.  That's everything."

The empty streets were straight and grey.  Crossing the bridge, he happened to glance down.  A large prism was floating on the current of the river and a shoal of rainbow fish followed it.

"Adoption just isn't for me," said Hogarth finally.

Rhys Hughes has been a published author for the past 25 years.  He has published more than 30 books and has been translated into 10 languages.

Flash Fiction by Liah Paterson

Conversation with a Suffolk Moth

The moth's belly is plump and soft and if I reach with my finger, I imagine that I will break through it as though it were a ghost.  I tell it that in a high school biology class many years ago I heard that moths' and butterflies' average lifespans are somewhere between eight and nine months.  "That's only as long as I was in the womb."

"Yes, and weren't you happier then?  Birth is the very first trauma that we experience."

"I guess you're right.  I couldn't have known sadness in the womb.  But at least I've had time to experience everything that I've experienced.  Traumatic or not.  Don't you worry that you haven't got enough time to understand the world?"

"I've seen a lot already.  Last week, I saw a little girl drop her ice cream cone and scream out in glee when a stray dog approached to lap it up.  I drank the dew from the leaf of a rosebush.  I saw you yesterday make love to your other and eat citrus fried with your fingers afterwards.  I understand."

"Humans live an average of eighty years in most parts of the world."

"That is a long time to be a human being."

The moth rests on the leaf of a houseplant who's genus I've long forgotten.  She is green with long, veiny stems that are thick and strong and hold up all of the life coming from them as if that were no work at all.  When the moth opens and closes its wings, the plant does not even shake.

Liah Paterson is an Interlochen Alumni as well as a long-time member of the Nosebleed Club writing collective.  She has been awarded the Scholastic silver key in prose and has been published in Rookie Magazine.  She is twenty, from New Jersey, and sticks her fingers regularly with embroidery needles.

Flash Fiction by Melodie Corrigall

Mendelssohn's Eye

Since waking that Sunday, April had been in a tizzy, anxious to reveal her creativity to her husband Jeff.  She'd have snapped the laggard from his snores but, having found the bed empty, she'd hurried to the kitchen.  She was crestfallen to discover that the room was deserted.  Her suspicions that Jeff had ducked down to the garage to check out the new guy were later confirmed.

Having nailed down her inspirational words on a notepad, ready in the bedside table drawer as advised by a writer's magazine, April awaited Jeff's return, flitting impatiently from feeding chickens to vacuuming the upstairs hall.

The moment she heard the front door open, she grabbed her masterpiece, and rushed downstairs to corner her husband.  As quick as she had been, Jeff was already crunched into his kitchen chair sipping coffee out of his Best Dad cup.  The inspired poet cleared her throat and proudly recited her verse.

Red berry Ruth
Blueberry Pie
They all had enough
For Mendelssohns eye.

After the final phrase settled into the room, only the sound of a persistent wasp, caught behind the ill-fitting screen, cut through the dead-sea silence.

April waited anxiously, aware that it would take her husband--who was no poet--time to digest the verse.  But when, instead of words and wonder, a stilted heaviness descended, she despaired.

Always slow on the draw when replying to his wife, this time Jeff had been stunned into silence.  He scratched his cheeks rough from his early morning shave and swished his coffee around.  "Wasn't Mendelssohn they guy who said two peas aren't alike?" he asked tentatively.

"No, dough boy," April snapped.  "He's a composer."

When she scribbled down the poem, she recognized that Mendelssohn was famous but for what she wasn't sure.  She'd checked online to discover that Mendelssohn, although long dead, was a celebrated musician.  Although she often listened to music when she was feeding the cows, she couldn't remember any of Mendelssohn's tunes.

"Would I know any of his jingles?" her husband asked suspiciously.

"No, but it's music poetry people know."

"You're sure you got the words right?"

"Of course, I wrote it down as soon as I got up," she said, handing him the paper.

Jeff tugged his glasses out of his shirt pocket, cautioning April not to nag about the two broken pairs
he'd similarly stored.  Peering hopefully through the grimy lenses, he slowly picked over the lines.

Red berry Ruth
Blueberry Pie
They all had enough
For Mendelssohns eye.

"Shouldn't it be Mendelssohn's eye with a possessive mark?" he finally asked.

Didn't that sum him up, April thought.  Where she discovered poetry, Jeff was caged in a world of punctuation marks.

"Never mind," she'd snapped, snatching the paper from him and sailing out of the room.  Fortunately, for all concerned, the crack of the screen door slammed shut muffling his query about lunch.

April headed across the field on a brisk walk to let off steam.  Was she expecting too much of Jeff?  After all, everyone couldn't be a poet nor could everyone appreciate poetry.  Jeff did contribute to her art by driving her into town in stormy weather to attend her writing group.  She wondered if Mendelssohn had had a wife and if so whether she had been understanding of his efforts.

Finally, her legs started to tire, and April decided it was best to go home and call a truce.  As always, it was she who had suffered but, from all she read on the subject, that's what made artists great:  suffering.

She'd make some waffles.  That should bring Jeff back to the house.  And she'd not even comment when her husband drowned his breakfast in Maple Syrup.  She'd even join him--even though she was trying to cut down on her carbs.  After all, it had been a hard day, and poets had to eat.

Melodie Corrigall is an eclectic Canadian writer whose stories have appeared in Litro UK, Freefall, Halfway Down the Stairs, Bethlehem Writers Roundtable, Six Minute Magazine, Mouse Tales, Subtle Fiction, Emerald Bolts, Earthen Journal, Switchback, and The Write Time at the Write Place.  www.melodiecorrigall.com

Flash Fiction by Phil Lane

Slats

You fell asleep with your socks on and had a bad dream.  I watched you twitch, heard you call your mother a bitch.  When you woke up, you asked me what's the point of life?  I stared into the gloam.  There were 22 slats in the blinds.

Phil Lane's poems and stories have been appearing periodically online and in print for the past decade.  He lives in New Jersey, works as an English/Writing instructor, and is a Bob Dylan and Boston Terrier enthusiast.  He can be found online at twitter.com/thephillane

Flash Fiction by Barbara Tate

Night of His Own Loneliness

Each time I saw him he seemed smaller, shrunken.  The old man had nowhere to go, shoulders hunched against the snow that blew in off Lake Erie, he'd never belonged anywhere till nowhere was where he belonged.

I saw him a week ago last Tuesday where I'd seen him before, sitting on a bench at the Lorain Avenue bust stop tracing old age spots that spread across the back of his bony hands.  I nodded and sat down wanting to ask him how he was doing but you never knew what would set him off in a downward spiral of self pity.  I played it safe, unfolded a newspaper and turned to the horoscopes.

"I saw her staring at me this morning from 15,000 feet," he said.

I lowered the paper and looked at him.  Not knowing whether he was talking to me or some imaginary friend that frequented the bench, I decided to ask.  "Who?"

"Mama.  She was in a cloud," he said.  "My days are like a shadow that declineth," he recited.  "I am withered like grass."

"You what?"

"Psalm 102:11," he said.  "Yep, withered like grass.  That's me, Clarence." he thumped his chest with his skeletal fingers.  "Withered like grass," he repeated in a small childlike voice.  "Clarence."

With the hungry look of the hollow eyed, he pulled his faded jacket tighter against the cold and yanked his stocking cap lower over his ears.  "She'll be back," he said.  "One of these days she'll get off the bus and Clarence will be right here like a good boy, waiting right here like she told me to."  Existing in a night of his own loneliness he went back to tracing the old age spots.  "I'll be good, Mama, I promise.  Clarence'll be good, you'll see.  Clarence'll be good."

I said nothing.  There was nothing to say.  He saw the buses approach, struggled to his feet, standing as straight and tall as his old age pain allowed and watched the third one in line.  The door opened and closed.  No one got off.  Not today.  I folded the paper, wanting to say something.  But what?

His shoulders sagged with the look of the defeated.  "Clarence'll be good Mama, Clarence'll be good.  Just come back," he whimpered as the bus pulled away.  Without a backward glance, shoulders hunched against the wind, he shuffled down Lorain Avenue like a drifting ghost and disappeared in the snow.

Barbara Tate is an award winning artist and writer.  Her work has appeared in The Storyteller, Arizona Quarterly, Santa Fe Literary Review, Modern Haiku, Contemporary Haibun Online, Frogpond, Cattails, Bear Creek Haiku, and Magnolia Quarterly as well as Switch (The Difference), Objects in the Rear View Mirror and Element(ary) My Dear Anthologies.  She is a member of the Gulf Coast Writers Association, Haiku Society of American and United Haiku and Tanka Society.  She currently resides in Winchester, TN.