Flash Showcase: Telescope by Joe Howsin

Eyes open, fists clenched; teeth grinding, limbs limp; a shape, a shift; a whimper, a cry; a scream. This is how I wake up each morning. With routine, the terror I feel towards the shadow in the corner has dulled. No longer sharp, it is merely an ache. Yet still, each morning, I scream.

These days I don’t know why I get up at all. There is no job to go to, no friends to see. Maybe it’s for the coffee, or to escape the shadow.

Have you ever sat completely still because to move would be to hurl yourself into a rage? My blood thickens, lapping in viscus waves against straining eardrums. Electricity arcs across my muscles and burns me from the inside out. I twitch and jitter, shaking the cupboards, rattling plates, smashing a mug. I sink to my knees and collect the shattered rabbits lying in pieces on the kitchen floor. Their blood is thin and watery: a light brown fluid smelling faintly of earth and milk. I cry in shuddering tides over ceramic wildlife as the electricity continues to burn.

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January 2, 2022 0

Flash Showcase: After this period, screaming should be minimal by Leonie Rowland

Cracked, I think, from the moment it starts: one foot on the pavement & one in the canal, saying, I could get used to this. My feet, speaking, conscious; considering you, twisting away, walking with strange inflections. That photo I sent, where I am in a bathroom, and they are almost on their side. The buckles on my shoes touching the floor. Get used to it. Get used to being half here and half there; go for dinner with someone I love (not you (not you)); listen when they say, you are always gone after speaking to her; nod and know that I was gone already, eating somewhere else, fading into vacancy and viciousness, expressed somehow as compassion (towards the distance, which pulls us together and keeps us apart). I am shoulders and shockwaves, limbs I don’t want, texts floating to you across the sea. Cups of water between us, flooding everything, all we talk about: look at the body, watch it yawn and take me whole. My feet shouting synergies, my hands scratching the shore. Fingers holding you.

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December 19, 2021 0

Flash Showcase: Thief by Lindz McLeod

Crooked trees beckon you like fingers. Bark wrinkles like elderly hands in motion. You walk on the path, lemon sherberts crunching under your boots. Yellow shards, coating your soles. Cherry drops coo from high above; their young are barely more than red dots, hiding behind their parent’s wrappers. Foil coins hang from branches as long as school rulers. You fill your pockets with strawberry bonbons until your blazer weighs as much as a lie. Cram mint humbugs into your mouth, between gum and cheek. Class hamster-cute.

On the beach, a pink piggy bank—twice the size of a truck—naps, half-buried, in the sand. It is labelled. This is not your name. You drop to your knees and scrape away the wet sludge. The coin slot is exposed. You fit your arm inside. You grope around. It is empty.

Twenty yards out from the shore, another pink piggy bank is drowning. You wade into the creamy waves. The cola water fizzes around your calves. You dive down. You pick starfish off the sides, peeling them back limb by limb. This piggy bank is labelled too. This is not your name. Nothing rattles inside. No sunken treasure. No chest of dark jewels or gold coins stamped with different kings or strings of milky pearls or silver goblets or gem-encrusted daggers. Nothing you can sell or trade. Breaking the surface of the waves, you stumble to your feet. Your face dripping with carbonated shame.

You glance back at the shoreline, wondering if it’s not too late. It is too late. The trees have lurched onto the beach to watch. Faces made of nested leaves. Each expression shucked from the last like dead skin. Scabbed wounds, which have never really healed. Too dense to understand your drive. Too compact to understand your need.

You were greedy, once. You were greedy. Weren’t you?

Lindz McLeod is a queer, working-class, Scottish writer who dabbles in the surreal. Her prose has been published by/is forthcoming in Hobart, Flash Fiction Online, the New Guard, Cossmass Infinities, and more. She is a member of the SFWA and is represented by Headwater Literary Management.

To submit your own flash piece to our Showcase, visit our Submissions page.

December 12, 2021 0

Flash Showcase: Houseplants (Love Spores) by Eric Farrell

Kathy Harrison bursts through the Green Lovelies entrance. Cocobolo beads rattle against the glass door. The steely-eyed clerk is dressed head to toe in selvedge denim. She stares Kathy down, inhaling imperceptibly. She knows what’s coming. The woman’s going to start yelling.

“Everyone just stop!” Kathy hollers once fully inside the plant shop’s showroom floor. A few Green Lovelies shoppers freeze in their tracks. The clerk eyes her from beyond the small forest of hanging macramé plants in the middle of the retail space. She’s got everyone’s attention. Part one of her mission successful. Now for part two…

“Citizens of Long Beach, I am warning you as a fellow neighbor, not to buy any of these plants! None of the succulents! None of the pathos! No tropical dwarfs at all! Because you know why?!”

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October 31, 2021 0

Flash Showcase: Vertical Time by Jesse Hilson

Doxological bells form sonic latticework your soul is meant to climb. Ropes of incense rise around the mercy seat, no one smells the right day, no one allowed inside the tent. Toxic mistletoe dangles like a surveillance camera hung by a corrupt king. A child’s balloon has a much longer string, so there’s more time to catch it should it slip away. A vertical dream of Herod redirects a horizontal flowchart of Magi, one of a series of dams raised inside synoptic valleys. Strategically dropped dream-bombs sprout walls to shape the future Ascension. How do you avoid influencing the sequence of life events penetrated at hidden points by the dream? How do you clean the dust off the dream button without pushing it? The time traveler has to fall asleep staring at the picture of his target day the day of. He goes to give a gift to Neanderthals, a pre- historic spoiler about gold. He goes back to buy the time travel book but someone had beat him to climb the bookstore ladder and had bought it already. Himself. The book of myrrh perfume can’t be taken from the bottom of the stack. It needs patience, till it comes of its own accord to the top of the pile.

Jesse Hilson is a writer living in the Catskills in New York State. His writing has appeared in AZURE, Maudlin House, Pink Plastic House, ExPat Press, Windows Facing Windows Review, and elsewhere. His crime novel Blood Trip will be published by Close to the Bone in 2022. His poetry chapbook Handcuffing the Venus De Milo will be published by Sparrow’s Trombone in 2022. He can be reached on Twittter at @platelet60

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

October 10, 2021 0

Flash: Colour Bleeds Out/Only Birds by C.R. Dudley

Colour bleeds out, sounds wind down. Muffled, blind. Straight lines, thick and thin, washed in white and grey. It is winter here. Gentle snowflakes fall, though they strike as something sinister. Am I the only one conscious, the only one not a golem made of meat? Playing pieces for cruel gods. This pawn has slipped through the gaps, into the liminal. I call out, and I see my words, my breath, in emanating waves. Mirrored in the puddle surface a boot hovers above, paralysed by my downcast thoughts. Happily it would have splashed, a small pleasure on the way to work. But now all of that is tainted, and we see, the boot and I, what really lies beneath.

Whole buildings erased, replaced by sea. Wave after wave of attempted communication washes away the humanity stored in my flesh, strips me to my cartilage and cleans it thoroughly. Now I match the snow, barely seen at all and becoming flatter all the time. A whisper on a slate of white noise. No pavement below me, no sky above. Only birds, angry that they are suddenly no more than ink blots on a damaged canvas, furious that the screeches they thought they owned have been supplanted in an instant by silence. In the absence of direction, of anything else at all, they gather to peck at my bones, and I am glad.

C.R. Dudley is author of metaphysical science fiction collections Fragments of Perception and Mind in the Gap. She is also a visual artist and mind explorer, fascinated by the human condition and the inner worlds we create. She considers every project to be part of one continuous artwork. You can follow her blog here.

She is also owner and editor here at Orchid’s Lantern press.

September 9, 2021 0

Flash Showcase: Untitled Poster Poem by Rus Khomutoff

Poster Poem Image and Words Copyright Rus Khomutoff

My name is Rus Khomutoff and I am an experimental poet in Brooklyn, NY. I have published 3 collections of poetry: Immaculate Days (Alien Buddha Press), Radia (Void Front Press) and Color Poems (Orbis Tertius Press). My poetry has appeared in Triplov, X-Peri, Problematique, Grody mag, Proprose, Isacoustic and Ink Pantry.

Details on how to submit your own flash pieces for our Showcase can be found on the Submissions page.

August 29, 2021 0

Flash Showcase: Fritter by David Lawrie

The story only ever goes one way.

The fragment reads:

“…and I leave you now as you left me, with nothing but wretched words and bleeding ink. I do not understand your letters anymore, Hombre. They may loop from your pen with indubitable grace but I receive them with a senseless mediocrity. I will not accept the blame of you. I will always be behind you, Hombre. I am all over you. It is senseless imprisonment, and I, who have never wronged you, who saw nothing beyond the kindness in your heart, I am the one serving my sentence in your shadow.

I am watching your progress with the control that I have yearned for.

It is in my pain that I will haunt you so. And it is with lustful violence that I shall one day rise up, a malevolent presence over you. As my ink stains the purity of this parchment now, so shall I stain the fabric of your immortality. You will not be able to shake my ghost. You will not be able to claw the words of my testament from…”

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August 22, 2021 0

Flash Showcase: Earthbound Nebula by Ava Kelly

Image Credit: Ava Kelly

When it approached, it was slow. Passive enough to get close, unencumbered by human worry, graceful enough that its scarlet brilliance had exalted awe instead of fear.

I remember Pops, sitting on the back porch in that old squeaky chair, scratching his forehead, saying, “It’s gotta be something else. Aurora my ass, look at it.”

I remember Kiddo blinking at me, a couple of decades later, asking, “Why’s it so pretty, Daddy?” and, “Do you think we can touch it someday?”

I’d answer the same—nothing at all—because any words tasted like ash on my tongue. There had been one action to take, and one action only; even my twelve-year-old self knew. Study the earthbound nebula, comprehend it at all costs.

***

When it hugged the Earth, we didn’t notice, too preoccupied with measurements and suppositions and models. Too close to see. Kiddo used to tell me, when he got tall and broad-shouldered and voice-thick, that it governed my life. It had dragged me through school, through the long hours in the lab, through loss and pain, through stolen tenderness. I sigh, even now, at the memory of his angry frustration.

“We must understand,” I used to say. “Maybe it’s sentient. Maybe it also wants to understand.”

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August 14, 2021 0

Flash Showcase: The Memory Within by Aaron E. Lee

“What happened?” Yun asked the two scientists standing in front of her.

“The Memory War was almost fifty years ago now, I think.” Dr. Reyes raised her eyebrow, but Dr. O’Quin neither confirmed nor denied.

Instead, Dr. O’Quin said, “Genetic testing revealed the true form of memory in biology, and while the processing of those memories indeed took place in the brain, they were stored throughout the body in our DNA.” Yun nodded. It was a theory she had heard, but it seemed a confirmation of this would be pretty big news.

“Once we figured out how the body stored and processed this information, people started to get creative with that knowledge. Medication came out to improve memory, restore lost memories, and even to help people forget.” Dr. Reyes started unbuckling the clasps that held Yun down on the table.

Dr. O’Quin proceeded, “The medication was only half of the delivery system. After eight hours the patients had to be exposed to a low dosage of radiation, which triggered the Mnemonic Molecules. The medication was cheap to make. We didn’t go to war over the profits of the Memory industry. We went to war over the memories themselves.”

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August 8, 2021 0