Your cart is currently empty!
Category: Flash Fiction
Flash Fiction from Fiction Attic Press, featuring stories under 1,000 words
-
Eggs
Flash Fiction by Patricia Cosgrove
At the end of the lane, beyond the scrags of gorse and fuchsia and the fields dipping to the sea, the spring tide surged and broke on the shingle. The woman sat on an upturned fish crate in the shelter of the gable wall, eyes closed, counting the wet suck of each ebbing wave on the shore.
‘Mammy, can I have an egg?’ The child had snuck out barefoot, still in his pyjamas.
‘In a minute. Get back inside – you’ll catch your death.’
She slopped the dregs of her coffee under the crab apple tree, its branches gnarled and stunted from the salt winds. The April gusts had felled the blossom, drifting white petals through the cropped grass. She followed her son into the sagging lean-to at the back of the house, pressing her weight against the warped door, and wedged it shut behind her with a breeze block.
The child splashed his feet through the puddle in the middle of the cement floor.
‘Don’t do that!’
He cowered when she picked him up.
‘Please, Sean, don’t do that again,’ she said, stripping him of his sodden pyjama bottoms. She held him on her hip and stroked the small of his back. ‘Mammy doesn’t like that.’
She perched him bare-bottomed on a kitchen chair and scuttled through the pots on the draining board, found the blue saucepan. A greasy scum rimmed the inside and she scoured it. The water spluttered then gushed from the tap. It pooled in the plughole and wouldn’t drain. She took the rubber plunger from under the sink and siphoned out broken strands of spaghetti, chunks of tomato. She’d reminded her husband to scrape the plates before he washed them last night, but he’d forgotten. Cathal always forgot what she asked.
She chewed her lip and stared out at the washing sagging and jerking on the line. The wind snapped the sleeves of Cathal’s shirts into mock salutes and she thought of the tedium later; collar, cuffs, arms, yoke, the hissing tip of the iron nosing smooth between the nub of buttons.
Sean dragged his chair over to the shelf beside the fridge, stretching to reach the purple carton. He opened the lid, did eeny-meeny-miny-mo over the six brown eggs.
‘This one,’ he said. ‘And one for you.’
A small grey feather clung to a shell and he lifted it between his thumb and forefinger and blew it like a kiss at his mother.
‘Get off that chair before you fall!’
He clambered down and sucked in his cheeks as she sparked the blue flame on the stove.
‘I suppose you want dippy soldiers with that?’
He nodded and rummaged through the bottom drawer for the egg timer, stood beside her as she slotted bread into the toaster, peeled back foil from a half block of butter.
‘Move, Sean! You’re always under my feet!’
His thumb went into his mouth before he could help himself. His mother smacked his hand away.
‘Don’t do that,’ she said. ‘Mammy doesn’t like that.’
A squall passed over the sun, darkening the kitchen and a sudden shrapnel of rain drummed the slates, gobbed melts of ice against the windows. The washing, she thought, all the morning’s work undone.
She hurried into the garden, the wet grass soaking through her slippers. The line pole pitched to and fro and she grappled it with both hands, the rusted iron streaking her palms orange. She tugged at a shirt hem, felt it spinnaker away as the fraying rope unsnarled itself free from the branch in the apple tree. The washing trailed in the ground, muck-spattered. She put her fists to her eyes and counted the waves beyond the wall.
The eggs rattled in the pot. The child held the timer up to his face, watching the pink trickle of sand until the last grain fell.
‘Mammy,’ he called. ‘Maameee.’ The door of the lean-to banged in the wind.
He went towards the stove, looked up at the steaming pot and reached for the handle. His scream, the pure clear hurt of it, spliced the wind.
Patricia Cosgrove comes from a small coastal town in North Dublin, where she still lives. As a child, Patricia was told that her constant tale-telling would turn her tongue black. Undeterred, she continues to make things up. This is her first published piece of fiction.
Image courtesy of Helena Bjork
-
The Mourning of the Russian
Flash Fiction by Agustín Cadena, translated by Patricia Dubrava
He wasn’t Russian, of course, but that’s what they called him because he had nearly white blond hair and looked like Ivan Drago, the Russian giant who fought Rocky in the movie. A dozen years of lifting weights had given him an impressive physique.
He liked the nickname. Actually, he thought any nickname was preferable to his own name. Florentino. And the problem wasn’t the name itself, but its diminutive, which certainly wasn’t masculine. In school he’d had to beat to a pulp the few who dared call him “Flor.” That’s how he got used to fighting. Flower. He hated that name, even for women. So he always introduced himself: “They call me El Ruso.”
In the neighborhood everyone knew he worked for the secret police. That’s how things are in a small community: the secrets of one are the secrets of all. No one had a reason to betray him: he was a silent and solitary neighbor, but agreeable. He’d been seen helping some woman carry her groceries or scolding children who played on the block without watching for cars. The girl at the store found it endearing when he came to make his purchases, because, since he didn’t even have a girlfriend (only a cat, and who knows if it even had a name) he took one of each: a bread roll, a tomato, one beer, one apple. And of course, milk and a little bag of kibble for his cat. A wonder it didn’t occur to him to buy in bulk, which would be cheaper and more efficient. He always paid and thanked the girl without smiling. Perhaps he wanted to hide that he liked her, because with the other neighbors he became a little more expressive.
In his work he was different: there he couldn’t be nice. He knew that it was because of his physique, more than any other reason, that the other officers had made him a dark legend. They used him to terrify those they arrested, often without even needing his presence. “Leave him alone,” they would say, tired of beating some suspect. “If he doesn’t sing, we’ll let the Russian interrogate him.”
So it was. But this story is about when his cat died, not about any of that. No one knew what happened. Perhaps the cat was very old, that’s all. The fact is, one day the Russian appeared in the store with the face of a chastised child and didn’t buy one of each thing, but several of each, as if making provisions. Except kibble.
“And you’re not getting anything for the cat?” the girl asked him.
“The cat died,” he responded. He put money on the counter and left without waiting for his change.
He didn’t go out all day. The girl told the story of the cat to all the neighbors who came to buy something, and by nightfall, the Russian’s solitary grief was the main topic of gossip. The nosiest busybodies loitered at the door of his apartment and watched the light of his window in the night. The Russian didn’t appear. Nor did he go out the following day. Who knew what he did with the cat’s body: perhaps he was mourning over it. The trash truck guys said it didn’t come to them.
On the third day, curiosity had become a vague, undeclared anguish. The neighborhood felt unprotected without its guardian. Someone said they should knock on his door to ask if he was O.K., but no one wanted to risk making him angry. They drew straws. The dry cleaner guy lost, the biggest coward of all. Arming himself with courage was a waste of effort: the Russian didn’t open the door. At last, a schoolboy had the brainstorm needed: he began to shout “Flor! Florecita!” from the street.
Only then did the Russian come out. He came out angry, ready to pound the insolent idiot, whoever it was. It seemed to him that many pairs of eyes were watching him, hidden behind curtains, but he didn’t find the person who dared disturb his mourning. And his mourning ended there.
The life of the neighborhood returned to normal.
Agustín Cadena was born in Ixmiquilpan, Hidalgo, México. He taught at UNAM; at Austin College, Texas; and currently teaches at the University of Debrecen, Hungary. Essayist, fiction writer, poet and translator, Cadena has won numerous national prizes, including those for short fiction in 2004 and 2005, and for poetry in 2011. He has published twenty-six books, among them collections of short fiction, essays and poetry, three novels, and four young adult novels, most recently La Sed de la Mariposa, 2014, and Fieras adentro, 2015. His work has been translated into English, Italian and Hungarian. The three short short stories submitted here are from a manuscript called Dibujos a Lápiz, (Penicl Sketches) to be published in 2016. Cadena blogs at elvinoylahiel.blogspot.com
Patricia Dubrava chaired the creative writing program at Denver School of the Arts, where she also taught Spanish. She has two books of her own poems and one of stories translated from the Spanish. Recent translation publications include stories by Agustín Cadena in Aldus, Winter 2013, and Café Irreal, August 2013, 2014 and 2015. One of her translations of a Cadena story is in New Border Voices: An Anthology, 2014. Her translation of a Mónica Lavín flash fiction appeared in Norton’s Flash Fiction International, 2015. Dubrava blogs at www.patriciadubrava.com
image courtesy of Henry Lornzatto, via unspalsh
-
Sometimes We Choose What We Remember
Flash Fiction by Luke Allis
The old cliché that time heals all wounds is simply complete bullshit. Time dulls the shock, but when you have a hurt that runs deep enough you always feel the sting. I thought this as I stood in front of your coffin, staring at your lifeless face. Your skin looked so fake, like a bad wax figure that had been stored in a garage in Arizona. The inch-thick layer of makeup that was supposed to make you look more masculine was funny in a morbid kind of way. The dead never look like themselves. Death takes the very essence of the person, even the body. You looked like a stranger. The difference in you would not have been so stark if they had not put you a suit and tie and given you a crew cut—you looked all wrong. They put you in that itchy suit you hated, the black one that you were forced to wear to your high school graduation. Your tie was the standard diagonal red and sliver stripes. I was there to mourn my sister, not the brother our parents insisted that I have. I pictured you in your favorite dress: blue with small white daisies littered all over the cotton fabric. I wish I could have given you the funeral you desired, the funeral you deserved.
Your funeral was nothing that you would have wanted. It was in a Catholic Church. I stood and knelt more times than I can remember, and lip-synched the prayers that I never memorized. They called you “he” and “James” instead of she or Lily. It felt all wrong. There were a lot of tears, but little crying out. Everyone was grief stricken; almost no one was able to talk. Those that did speak, talked about you as the brother and son you haven’t been in a long time. Each wrong pronoun brought me to an electric anger. You know me, I never talk in front of others unless I absolutely have to. But at your funeral, I knew that I was the only one that would stick up for you and remember you as you meant and deserved to be remembered. I made sure to address you as: she, Lily, and my sister in front of everyone. After that no one else got up to speak. Our mother yelled at me afterward: “I can’t believe you ruined your brother’s funeral by bringing up his sickness. We should remember him as he should have been not as he was.”
You’d never believe what I told her if you were there: “Fuck you Mom, that is exactly why SHE is dead now. You and your fucking hatred and denial did this to her.” Then I walked away. I haven’t spoken to any of our family since.
I wish your funeral had felt more intimate, more like a celebration of your life—like those old Irish wakes Grandpa would go on and on about. Where you partied, laughed, and told stories of the person’s life; where the only crying was from too much laughter. I am determined to remember you this way.
Luke Allis holds a BA in creative writing from San Francisco State. He is currently an Instructional Designer, aspiring writer, and MFA candidate at San Jose State University.
-
The Snorer – Flash Fiction by Sophie Nunberg
Flash Fiction by Sophie Nunberg
He was insecure about the things he could not really control: his male pattern baldness, the red hair that grew only on his little toe, and his snoring.
He loved his wife, very much, and he hated how his droning nighttime noises kept her from rest and fantasy. She had tried waxy earplugs or playing their record player at night but the former was easily penetrated by his incessant noises and the latter kept their children awake.
His noises filled the room, ricocheting off of her vanity and his small bookshelf, pillaging the sleep that rested in her overly sensitive ears. Most mornings, when he finally awoke and saw the skin under her eyes irritated, swollen, his neck flushed red. He was always exceedingly apologetic, often bringing home flowers or small gifts. But it was difficult to compensate for the something he took from her each night.
They saw doctors, who took samples, weighed him and then examined his nose and lungs but never asked about anything other than allergies. Her next-door neighbor had told her, casserole cocked on her hip, about nasal strips that her husband has purchased during a business trip to Japan. His friends were no help. Hers gave diet recommendations over a card game or the pews of their church.
And though she loved him, too, very much, she had never known the depths of her love for uninterrupted rest, for sleep without caveats. Even when he slept on the couch, his snores vibrated in the floorboards, rattling her awake. For their seventh anniversary, he carpeted the entire house. But his noises scraped across the loops of soft fabric, always finding their way back to her.
Doctors gave her baby-blue chalky pills whose middles had been hollowed and whose results were hallowed. She slept but too heavily, too close to death.
She gave birth a couple of times and each time, for a while, things got better. She told him that lack of sleep was not overbearing when her deprivation had purpose.
But the purpose waned and their children grew and she could not bear the unrelenting reliability of his disturbances. She could not bear the solitude of night, their bedroom too dark for her to read, the world too abandoned, her company only his violent susurration. The world’s weight pressing down upon her but she could not push back.
When she left, she told him it was for another man, not a new bedroom, new mattress and delightfully quiet sleep.
Sophie Nunberg graduated from the University of Chicago in 2012. She lives in San Francisco and is the Communications & Content Manager for the anti-trafficking division of the Alameda District Attorney’s office. She previously interned for McSweeney’s. In her free time she manages and edits a music blog that currently has over 350,000 followers.
Image, Solar Eclipse III, courtesy of Superfamous.
-
The Paper City
Flash Fiction by Rebecca Harrison
Our city was paper. It was warm. When the winds came, we heard the cathedrals tear. We saw the towers ripping. We tried to hold our walls to the ground, but the winds blew the city into pieces and carried them away. Some of the scraps fell at my feet and I put them in my pockets. When the winds had gone, I counted them. I kept them safe.
We followed the winds. We looked for pieces of our homes in the skies. I tried to remember the shapes of the city. I drew the towers and cathedrals on the paper scraps, so that I would know how to put the city back together.
We stopped searching. We live among brick and stone. I’ve watched the others forget, but I’ve kept the paper scraps. I listen for winds. I gather paper. I don’t know if the pieces are from my home.
Rebecca Harrison sneezes like Donald Duck and can be summoned by a cake signal in the sky. Her best friend is a dog who can count. Her stories have been published in Remarkable Doorways Magazine, The Fable Online, Maudlin House, 99 Pine Street, Rose Red Review, Axolotl Magazine, and elsewhere.
Image courtesy of LesEnfantsParis
-
Whose Hand?
Flash Fiction by Preston Gralla
He stood behind her, not daring to touch her shoulder. He took a breath. Reached out. Then stopped himself.
“Can I touch you?” he asked.
“Of course you can. Why would you think you need to ask me that?”
He pushed her hair aside, brassy blonde now so many decades after the soft gold of her youth. He touched her shoulder, felt it not just in the present, but through time: bony and taut as a 12-year-old, pillow-soft at 17 cradling their newborn son, full and firm in the voluptuousness of her thirties and forties, slowly losing muscle each decade beyond. Now the flesh beneath his hand was slack.
Whose hand was it? Whose shoulder?
“You need to get ready, Bob. They’ll be here soon. I told you. It’s nearly two o’clock.”
“That’s right,” he said. “I forgot.”
Who was coming? And why?
“No, Bob, she said gently. “Not in that. Dress in something more comfortable. Maybe sweatpants. And those special sneakers we bought you yesterday so you could walk more easily. You need to be dressed comfortably for them. Remember? I told you that before.”
Before? Had she told him that? When was before?
“That’s right. I forgot.”
He slowly dressed himself, pleased he could still do it. Out of his sight she packed his bags. She put them in the bathroom and would get them when the visitors arrived. She walked with him to the living room and they sat on the couch. He smiled uncertainly.
She’s beautiful. Who is she, again?
They waited together for the doorbell to ring.
Preston Gralla’s work has been awarded a Fiction Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and has won the Yudis Prize for fiction from Union College. Under Gralla’s editorship, PC/Computing was a finalist for General Excellence from the National Magazine Awards. He has published more than 40 books of non-fiction, which have been translated into 20 languages. Gralla’s work has been published in the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the Dallas Morning News, and the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, among others.
Did you enjoy this story? Please consider subscribing to Fiction Attic to help up us discover and promote more great writing.
-
Architecture of the Eye
Flash Fiction by Mitchell Grabois
1.
I wrote about nature, about parents and children and the terrible things they do to each other, about unemployment, poverty and humiliation. Now, every poem is a sonnet to sexual dysfunction and an ode to Viagra. There’s a new calm in the world. I’m a master of resignation. I might sound old but I’m not.
2.
Tums rules this dyspeptic universe. In other words: we can’t stomach the world. In other words: human nature is too much to take. Medical marijuana eases nausea. Acid reflux is one more aggravation. The acrobat on his unicycle balances a ten foot stack of dishes. I can make out a slice of pizza and a Ruben sandwich. He pedals backwards. He balances a ball on his nose. With his chin he eases a bottle of Tums from his shirt pocket. He tosses the bottle in the air. The tablets fly out like a spray of stars. All the constellations have stories. They all have something to complain about.
I wasn’t going to tell you, but I am suffering from stomach cancer. In the early days, friends would hear the news and say: I’m sorry, and I’d nearly shout at them: Don’t tell me you’re sorry. Tell Cancer you’re sorry. Because I’m going to kick Cancer’s ass, send him back to the Cancer Ward where he belongs, where he can lay on a bed naked and bleeding, and lick his wounds. That’s what I said in the early days, the Days of Hubris.
3.
God engineered the Universe, a masterwork of physics, chemistry, mathematics and art. His earthly animal designs contain mind-boggling genetics. Consider the architecture of the eye. But He fails at communication. He’s a monster. When His children misbehave, all he can think to do is drown them all, like a future sex offender down at the riverbank with a burlap sack of new kittens.
He is worse than Frankenstein’s monster. His clumsiness knows no bounds. Still, He demands our love and obedience.
4.
I cannot stop looking at your photo in its digital frame that my aunt has set up in her parlor and is lit twenty-four hours a day, like an electric memorial candle. Your overmedicated blue eyes are bright as marbles. Under your blue denim shirt, your skin is energetic, as are your small pointy breasts.
The photo shifts to one of Odetta, the blues singer. She holds up her hand like a milagro. Then that photo dissolves. There you are again, freckles on your nose and under the illuminated marbles that are your eyes, your throat bony, your expression inscrutable.
I awake from a two-second nap. Here you are again, no more scrutable, making your known unknown. It’s time to boil the forceps, you used to say. Your eyes are so blue, they have sucked in the sky and left the world sunk in blackness.
Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois has had over seven hundred of his poems and fictions appear in literary magazines in the U.S. and abroad. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize for work published in 2012, 2013, and 2014. His novel, Two-Headed Dog, based on his work as a clinical psychologist in a state hospital, is available for Kindle and Nook, or as a print edition. He lives in Denver.
Image: Eye by Dave MeierEnjoy all of our stories and support emerging writers by subscribing to Fiction Attic Press.
-
A Clear Shot
Flash Fiction by Andrew O’Kelley
Calvin felt an itch arise near his ankle and willed it away. Steady, purposeful movements, his father had insisted. That didn’t include scratching, toe-taping or picking your nose. The dry leaves ticked in the branches around his tree stand, twirling downward in a gentle wind. A tree can’t reach to scratch, so why should he. The sun had risen now above the ridge, the tall grass bending in the breeze. He studied the trail, the clearing, he’d get nothing today it seemed. But he’d wait.
He heard a soft knocking sound, lower, over the crest of the hill. Moving steadily, then faster, much faster. He scanned the grove of pine that hid the trailhead. A flash of blue. Then into the open field; a woman, running. The wooden bucket swinging wildly on its rope handle, her long dress buffeting, catching here and there on the dry brush. Her dark hair twisting across her face as she glanced back. No sound but the rapid draw of her breath. And then a movement. He almost missed it.
He almost missed it. Women will do that to you. His father had a lot to say about women, but Calvin had hoped to learn on his own. The Taylors, preacher Bob and his wife down the ridge, had two daughters just about grown. Probably one of that clan he guessed, but he was more concerned about the movement. Coming low through the tall grass, stalking. He’d only seen it once before, far off, but there was no mistaking the malevolent crawl of a big mountain cat. It moved like the shadow of a cloud; skimming across the valley, the color changing with the terrain, relentless as the wind. He raised the rifle, steady, purposeful, tracking the muscled blur. He had its speed, but it was keeping low in the grass and gaining on the blue flutter at the edge of his view. Closer. Now too close.
He had a clear shot. But only one. She would be caught, screaming. Screaming across the valley in the cool morning air. The big cat doing as big cats do. Or she could drop quietly in a soft gingham heap, the wide spring sky overhead. Peaceful.
Calvin squeezed the trigger. A steady, purposeful movement.
Andrew O’Kelley uses an old laptop to arrange words in the best order he can manage. Having tried similar feats with photography, wood working and guitar, his results may vary. He does all this in Minnesota. His stories have appeared in Emerge Literary Journal and Eastern Iowa Review.
-
Urban – by Lila Dunlap
Smiling Whalecourtesy of © Carol Trammel | Dreamstime And then Urban plopped down in the seat next to me, filled it up with her rolls and rolls, tight in her tight T-shirt and tight black tights. I couldn’t see much of her then—I only dared to look out the corner of my eye at her rustling figure, and the theater was so dark… a few lights and colors flashed onto the crowd. Some blue sheen slid over her big face, over her cheeks, her wide chin, over her round lips and the head of a drip dripping juicy sucker that went entering, exiting, entering, exiting, glassy red in that strange dimness full of silent people breathing and clapping and eating and all staring.
Out of my left eye, I suddenly glimpsed a thick mahogany whale surface her mouth—and then disappear. Almost instantly, my throat jumped and hardened, closed up, and my hairline got hot hotter and damp. My attentions were now completely absent from the performance. I sweated and sweated and sweated; my eyes darted back and forth from the irrelevant stage to my new neighbor, whence I noticed a squash of a hand with long hard nails clutching a shiny plastic purse, like a dead animal in her lap—its teal waves were spotted with rough studs glittering and rhinestones writhing but Urban paid no mind!—just every once and a while during a squirm, readjusted the bag, but no, never looked down.
By then my throat was very tight indeed, and I was in dire straits to sit still. My legs and arms executed over/under weaving maneuvers but I pretended to not notice and assumed a nonchalant expression. I wanted so badly to appease the restless snakes, to stand up and stretch (I could have run a marathon), or at least stand and touch my toes, but, God, I couldn’t let my new friend notice me.
I closed my eyes (just for a moment; had to remain alert) and took a deep breath. I re-opened, looking straight ahead, limbs still calm, controlled, behaved. I even thought for a moment about the show and was able to catch a whiff of plotline or clever social commentary, but, oh, my thoughts weren’t to be reigned in so easily: had she seen me acting silly? Making such a goddamn dirty fool of myself? No, goodness I must stay still. All at once, one of the performers must have made a joke—she burst a harsh laugh (deep, too!). Wet beads flew; the whale emerged.
-
The Perfect Strawberry – by Tamsin Hopkins
It’s the late spring when the plants perk up. You clear away the detritus of winter, give them a feed, begin to mulch. They lift up their heads, raise those perfect white and yellow flowers to look at the sky, those tiny heralds of the summer to come. School fetes, a lovers’ picnic, June breakfast on the doorstep, jam and buttered toast.Soon, speckled green nubs appear, noses that push through pixie hat leaves. They arch over and turn down, swelling, widening at the base. They blush when they get big enough, if they can see the sun. The color enters through the umbilical stem, collects in the cone. That’s when the strawberries start to weigh the plant down, will touch the soil and bruise, soft brown patches spoiling their flesh. That’s when you’d better get some straw down, make a dry pillow to cushion the maturing fruit.
Mice and birds nibble little shallow hollows out, but their spit doesn’t spoil the flavour.
Each berry has its own perfect day, balanced on a fulcrum before tipping over, and it’s too late.
Some people say they don’t taste as good as they used to, that the berries are pampered, bloated, bred to produce a heavy crop. You can get the wild forest strawberries if you think that.
Longer, tighter, sharper colours and definitely sweeter, each berry is a highly charged thrill.
They make good ground cover as well, supressing weeds, doing your work for you. Their slim tendrils supplant anything. A word of warning, however: being essentially wild, unbiddable, they are apt to take over the border. They do not need the gardener.
They do not produce their fruit for you.
Tamsin Hopkins lives and writes in London. Her work has appeared in various anthologies, most recently Fiction Desk Ghost Stories II. Her story collection Sand Tranny and Other River Stories is due out in February of 2016 from Cinnamon Press. She tweets @TamsinHopkins and is working on a poetry collection.