For a centaur, Billie Horace was one-in-a-million. Her auburn hair, parted in the middle, was bobby-pinned into a plaited, cascading braid down the back of her Peter-Pan blouse. Her groomsman tied it into a little knob at the small of her back. She was up early this morning. After a quick look in the mirror and a nibble in the meadow, she trotted to her shift at Milt’s Diner. She always liked an early start, believing afternoon came sooner, bringing time with her favorite stable-boy, Edward. She loved how Edward curried her stifles and gaskins, how he spoke sweetly, always producing a sugar cube of good news. Oh! If only she had human legs she could run away with him! If only. The morning crowd was light; Milt looked up from his betting sheet, said How-Do. He helped her with her apron. Milt loved the horses. He knew Billie was a long-shot, but could be the first filly filly to win the big purse. Milt’s first customer of the morning was Mrs. Speck and her opal brooch, who, as curious customers did, asked Billie how training went. “Look at those gams,” the old woman said. “Hmm-hmm, my son Gilbert is a world-renowned transplant surgeon down at Shore-Leeds Research Hospital. They say he works wonders. Hmm-hmm-hmm — you’d be his ticket to the big time.” Billie sloughed off the idea like chops and gravy from blue-plates, yet later, going home from the track, she passed a newsstand and saw a photograph of Dean Martin’s wedding on the front page. His wife looked so handsome. He looked so happy. Billie’s gallop home slowed to a three-beat canter as she thought more deeply on it, and then slowed to a jog and a walk, and rested, just a moment, on a soft neigh.
Saturday, 16 June 2018
'Reincarnation 4.0' by Nan Wigington
Earlier versions lacked imagination. Dead lovers had few options. You could come back as a pansy or a begonia…and the only color you could pick was pink. Families of pink begonias sat on window sills, ignored, thirsty, and wishing they could at least grow into each other’s pots. Generations of pale pansies turned their backs on each other, sought out the sun instead, and never lasted beyond spring.
Things improved by 2.1. You could come back as a brown cocktail ant, a white-faced saki monkey, or a Venus flytrap. Most engineers thought families would love the complex social mores of the brown cocktail. Only two engineers liked the monkey and the flytrap. Still they rushed Reincarnation back to market leaving those elements in. That could account for why flytraps look so dangerous and the sakis look so lonely. They can’t find their people and are unhappy with all these complexities and mores.
By 3.9, the species list had grown to six million two hundred and five. Timing, though, was wonky. You might appear minutes before your beloved disappeared. I knew of one couple: He showed up as a flatfish in the Baltic Sea just as she became a Baltic fisherman’s flatfish lunch. And what about the newlyweds who came back as a ponderosa pine and a pine beetle? Not a good way to start any marriage. Delivery, too, was awful. Irises popped out of women’s wombs while human babies had to scrabble through dirt to find air.
Now they have 4.0. When you died, I volunteered. What else could I do? The process has been endless. I suppose the engineers wanted to take it slowly this time. I suffered through a long darkness, coughed through stardust. I was a cell, two cells, a toe, an ankle, a leg. Now that I have breasts and buttocks, I have clothes (the engineers never leave anyone naked). But I think the delivery system is still wrong. I’m nowhere near you. I seem to be drifting in space, spinning closer to the sun. I fool myself. I tell myself this coronal mass, that flare heading straight for me is you. Or maybe it's just another design flaw that needs to be reported.
'Body Beautiful' by Cath Bore
He’s high quality. Big boned and tall with good wide shoulders, his hair a little messy, but she can’t abide a fussy man, a flashy man, one who spends more time in the bathroom than she does. He’s actually quite impressive close up, with the exact right amount of muscle, no fat. His chin and cheeks darken depending on what angle she examines him from, one minute clean, the next with a shy acceptable five o’clock shadow. And he laughs at her jokes. So when he asks her to dinner for the fourth time, she says okay. He suggests one of those all you can eat places. She’s been before and liked it, so takes this as a proof of compatibility.
The menu tonight is classic and makes her tummy rumble. Crispy aromatic duck, stir fried beef, hot chicken wings, plump chicken thighs and breasts - chicken everything actually - crab meat sushi, lamb sheek kebab, prawns in a nice spicy dip with a tart nip to it, pork ribs slathered with Chinese seasonings. She’s not a big vegetable eater but she gives the aubergine in black bean sauce a good go as well.
A double chocolate fountain is in the corner. She won’t drink from it. The last time she was here, it tasted of finger. Dirty gets, people have no manners. It matters to her what she puts in her mouth. And anyway chocolate fondue is like coffee; it always smells way nicer than it tastes.
He watches her eat. ‘I like a woman who enjoys her food.’
A backhanded compliment; how very disappointing. But he indicates at her up and down appreciatively, not in a sleazy way.
‘I like a man,’ she replies.
He waits for her to complete the sentence. When he realises, his brows dance and he laughs but not too much it’s over the top. He really is quite scrumptious. On the turn of a sixpence, he’s forgiven.
She’s a shallow woman, she can’t resist. And her appetite is whetted at his wide smile, one delicious with wine, she bets. Such a smile opens a face right up. You read and hear about his sort, flaunting themselves and asking for it. He’ll get into trouble one day. She thrills at the thought of what type of trouble that might be. A giggle burps up her throat and she presses her teeth into her bottom lip so hard it hurts; tastes blood, savours it and swallows. Her mouth waters, and dreams up his flavours. Pavlov’s dog is waiting to pounce, but she wipes her chin dry with the back of her hand, and bites into another strip of beef.
'Ladies Only' by Alicia Bakewell
Music helps you remember, wine helps you forget. You take a sip, turn on the radio. She’s still got the same slot, Sunday night lonely heart o’clock. Jazz, on the slow side, ladies only. It doesn’t seem she’s added to her record collection recently. She used to say all the good stuff’s already been made. You take a sip, try to pretend you’re hearing her for the first time. The on-air voice, syrupy and self-assured. Can’t help remembering how quickly it turned to a naggy mezzo-soprano when you came home too late or mentioned another girl. Names roll off her tongue – Billie, Sarah, Nina. Now who’s mentioning other girls then? She always loved them more than she loved you. You take a sip, smile in minor key.
They don’t know her like you do, the other half a dozen listeners. They don’t know that she doesn’t play much jazz at home. They don’t know that she sleeps in an old Patti Smith t-shirt with a hole over the left nipple that you tore with an errant fingernail. They don’t know that she won’t speak in the morning until she’s had two cups of coffee, no milk no sugar. Not a word. They don’t know that she tripped and broke her arm once, as you both ran through the city just before dawn, a couple of drunks singing that song about being hit by a double-decker bus. They don’t know that when it rains, her arm still aches. You take a sip, consider covering the mouthpiece with a handkerchief and requesting some Alice Coltrane.
She says there’s time for one more request. An invitation, a tease. You take a sip. She wants to hear from you. You take a sip. She doesn’t want to hear from you. It’s the daisy game in a glass. She loves you not, of course. Music, remembering, wine, forgetting. Tears, and you always expect them to be Cabernet coloured. Your hand inches toward the phone and you knock the bottle, just as Alice starts to play. Damn that sixth sense that doesn’t become null and void when the marriage does. Now the tears are Cabernet. You drag your fingers through them, paint a little tragedy on the tiles.
The wine you want to remember, the music you want to forget, because the music is her and she is the music and it’s so quiet in here now you’ve turned the radio off. It would take her about an hour to gather up her records, exchange a few words with the country and western fella on the next show, walk to her car in the dark, hit the back roads, come over here and tuck you in. You kiss the air, kiss her goodnight.
'Ladies Only' was previously published at the Australian Writers' Centre website in March 2018.
They don’t know her like you do, the other half a dozen listeners. They don’t know that she doesn’t play much jazz at home. They don’t know that she sleeps in an old Patti Smith t-shirt with a hole over the left nipple that you tore with an errant fingernail. They don’t know that she won’t speak in the morning until she’s had two cups of coffee, no milk no sugar. Not a word. They don’t know that she tripped and broke her arm once, as you both ran through the city just before dawn, a couple of drunks singing that song about being hit by a double-decker bus. They don’t know that when it rains, her arm still aches. You take a sip, consider covering the mouthpiece with a handkerchief and requesting some Alice Coltrane.
She says there’s time for one more request. An invitation, a tease. You take a sip. She wants to hear from you. You take a sip. She doesn’t want to hear from you. It’s the daisy game in a glass. She loves you not, of course. Music, remembering, wine, forgetting. Tears, and you always expect them to be Cabernet coloured. Your hand inches toward the phone and you knock the bottle, just as Alice starts to play. Damn that sixth sense that doesn’t become null and void when the marriage does. Now the tears are Cabernet. You drag your fingers through them, paint a little tragedy on the tiles.
The wine you want to remember, the music you want to forget, because the music is her and she is the music and it’s so quiet in here now you’ve turned the radio off. It would take her about an hour to gather up her records, exchange a few words with the country and western fella on the next show, walk to her car in the dark, hit the back roads, come over here and tuck you in. You kiss the air, kiss her goodnight.
*
'Ladies Only' was previously published at the Australian Writers' Centre website in March 2018.
'The End Of An Affair' by Sylvia Petter
I’ve cleaned under the house at last. I threw things away. One of them was Papua and New Guinea with the bit known as West Irian back then. It looked like a bird, a sort of prehistoric one. It was a map in relief mounted on plywood. I’d painted the green hills and the rivers. Stuck a pin into Port Moresby. I’d made it at school. Can’t remember the year. Don’t know why I kept it all these years. Must have just been forgotten.
Stowed away,
like so many things one hangs on to,
it reminded me of you.
People said cannibals lived in West Irian. I still have a bag made from twine and decorated with wild boar incisors a friend of my mother’s brought back from one of her visits to Papua. The friend’s daughter was working for development, she said, some UN thingy in Moresby. The man across the road, the one who never recovered from the war, told me stories about fuzzy wuzzy angels. They saved his life, he said. But the experience must have blown his mind.
You told me stories about leprechauns riding rainbows. How they would surf on electric storms all the way to New Zealand. You said you’d walked through the streets of old Japan with Anjin-san and that you skewed raw fish on a train.
I could see it,
puffing through the ravines,
or was it the bullet train from Tokyo?
I’d run my fingers through the jungle of your hair, run a thumb over your wishbone that jutted out like a crag and we’d play hide and seek behind the waterfall at Dunn’s River. How ever did we get all the way to Jamaica? We’d swim in the Ontario summers of Algonquin and dry ourselves in the folds of a sleeping deer. Bambi? Felix Salten also wrote porn, but you didn’t tell me that straight away. Well, I thought that sort of thing was porn, but in Vienna I did some research. It was all part of the times.
Maria Theresia clamped down
on the morals of the city,
but clever ways were sought
to circumvent her will.
I trace my finger over the ridges of West Irian. It’s now called West Papua. Tribes have become extinct and people have been killed. You told me about a prison island. Can one half of an island be a prison?
Things are not always as they seem, are they?
When you told me you were going down the River Styx, I believed you. I knew that you didn’t believe in God. We were all insects, you said. Grist for the compost. At least you believed in a sort of after-life.
Where’s the after-life
now,
now that you’re gone?
Stowed away,
like so many things one hangs on to,
it reminded me of you.
People said cannibals lived in West Irian. I still have a bag made from twine and decorated with wild boar incisors a friend of my mother’s brought back from one of her visits to Papua. The friend’s daughter was working for development, she said, some UN thingy in Moresby. The man across the road, the one who never recovered from the war, told me stories about fuzzy wuzzy angels. They saved his life, he said. But the experience must have blown his mind.
You told me stories about leprechauns riding rainbows. How they would surf on electric storms all the way to New Zealand. You said you’d walked through the streets of old Japan with Anjin-san and that you skewed raw fish on a train.
I could see it,
puffing through the ravines,
or was it the bullet train from Tokyo?
I’d run my fingers through the jungle of your hair, run a thumb over your wishbone that jutted out like a crag and we’d play hide and seek behind the waterfall at Dunn’s River. How ever did we get all the way to Jamaica? We’d swim in the Ontario summers of Algonquin and dry ourselves in the folds of a sleeping deer. Bambi? Felix Salten also wrote porn, but you didn’t tell me that straight away. Well, I thought that sort of thing was porn, but in Vienna I did some research. It was all part of the times.
Maria Theresia clamped down
on the morals of the city,
but clever ways were sought
to circumvent her will.
I trace my finger over the ridges of West Irian. It’s now called West Papua. Tribes have become extinct and people have been killed. You told me about a prison island. Can one half of an island be a prison?
Things are not always as they seem, are they?
When you told me you were going down the River Styx, I believed you. I knew that you didn’t believe in God. We were all insects, you said. Grist for the compost. At least you believed in a sort of after-life.
Where’s the after-life
now,
now that you’re gone?
We are the Rising Tide
Welcome, once again, to FlashFlood, now in it's 7th year.
In just a moment, the tsunami of flash will start and you will be drenched with perfect little stories for the next 24 hours. One will appear every 10 mins (with a few extras thrown in because the submissions were just too good) and if you manage to read them all in that time you will deserve a medal.*
Thanks as ever go to our sterling editing team who did wonderful work again this year:
Cassandra Jane Parkin
Susi J Holliday
Susan Howe
Ingrid Jendrzejewski
Caroline Kelly
Diane Simmons
and me, your humble host.
But the most thanks must go to all the great writers who sent us so many stories. We had nearly 400 emails, most of them with 3 stories in, so whatever that works out to, it meant a lot of wonderful words and so the choosing was all the harder. So thank you, flash people. You are, ever always, the best.
Anyway, that's enough for me.
Get ready to get soaked with stories!
We are the rising tide and we will lift you all.
Calum Kerr
Co-Director National Flash-Fiction Day
In just a moment, the tsunami of flash will start and you will be drenched with perfect little stories for the next 24 hours. One will appear every 10 mins (with a few extras thrown in because the submissions were just too good) and if you manage to read them all in that time you will deserve a medal.*
Thanks as ever go to our sterling editing team who did wonderful work again this year:
Cassandra Jane Parkin
Susi J Holliday
Susan Howe
Ingrid Jendrzejewski
Caroline Kelly
Diane Simmons
and me, your humble host.
But the most thanks must go to all the great writers who sent us so many stories. We had nearly 400 emails, most of them with 3 stories in, so whatever that works out to, it meant a lot of wonderful words and so the choosing was all the harder. So thank you, flash people. You are, ever always, the best.
Anyway, that's enough for me.
Get ready to get soaked with stories!
We are the rising tide and we will lift you all.
Calum Kerr
Co-Director National Flash-Fiction Day
Thursday, 7 June 2018
The waters are rising - Get to your posts!
Yes, it's that time again. We're back and we're getting ready to flood the internet with flash-fictions to celebrate National Flash-Fiction Day on Saturday 16th June 2018.
The rules are the same as ever, we are open for submissions for just one week. Stories should be no more than 500 words (not including the title) and should be on whatever theme you fancy. You can submit up to three entries, and there is no cost.
7 editors (one each day) will read your work, and make their decisions, and then the deluge begins at midnight on the 16th.
Full submission guidelines can be found at http://flashfloodjournal.blogspot.com/p/submission-guidelines.html.
So far, this journal has had over 409,000 views, and we want to hit the half a million mark if we can. So, get writing, and send us your very best.
We can't wait to read them!
The Editors
FlashFlood
The rules are the same as ever, we are open for submissions for just one week. Stories should be no more than 500 words (not including the title) and should be on whatever theme you fancy. You can submit up to three entries, and there is no cost.
7 editors (one each day) will read your work, and make their decisions, and then the deluge begins at midnight on the 16th.
Full submission guidelines can be found at http://flashfloodjournal.blogspot.com/p/submission-guidelines.html.
So far, this journal has had over 409,000 views, and we want to hit the half a million mark if we can. So, get writing, and send us your very best.
We can't wait to read them!
The Editors
FlashFlood
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