Saturday 26 June 2021

'The Year of Presto Chang-o' by Lynn Mundell

After a hot soak in the tub, her head evaporates in the bathroom mirror. Wiping her hand across the surface, there’s her face, small as her Benjamin Bunny dinner plate. Poof. Gone again. Coins are pulled from her ears and vanish in her brother’s hand. He swallows Mother’s silky scarves, all nine of them! It’s easy to make things go away, but harder to get them back, he tells her. Their turtle, Daltry, is placed under the top hat, which then slowly moves across the kitchen floor. Her brother curses. During a car ride to the beach, a cloud looks exactly like a giant moth—before the sky rearranges and it’s just a cloud again. In the back seat they sleep as the station wagon swerves. When she awakens days later, there is only one of them where an instant ago, surely, there had been two.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Congratulations to our 2023 Best Small Fictions Nominees!

We are delighted to nominate the following 2023 FlashFlood stories to the Best Small Fictions Anthology: ' I Once Swallowed a Rollercoas...