#SelectedFlashFiction – May

Eds. Elizabeth Kemball and Lucy Aur

Welcome, literary enthusiasts! Today, we are thrilled to present a group of exceptionally talented writers whose craft will undoubtedly leave you captivated and hungry for more. These brilliant wordsmiths have crafted thought-provoking and engaging pieces of flash fiction, showcasing their creativity and storytelling prowess in just a few short paragraphs.

Kyla Houbolt

Kyla Houbolt’s online publications can be found here where you can also find ordering info for her chapbook, Tuned. Chapbooks Surviving Death and But Then I Thought, are forthcoming from The Broken Spine and Above/ground Press, respectively. Kyla can be found on Twitter.

They Depart

Jung said myth is forever the root of all human creation. This is a failure of the imagination, says Diana, as she restrings her bow. Oh my yes, agrees Venus.

There was so much our Jung did not know. He served beautifully for a time, but entirely missed the era of the artificial. Diana raises an eyebrow at that. Oh, he missed a lot more than that, sister. He was caught in the web of Arachne, as are we all! But look you, up there, and over there, and just here under my hound’s large foot. The web is tearing as it must, as all things in creation do change, even the great things we think are eternal. Venus bows her gold-tressed head. You know, Diana, your hunting skills have surely improved. See our Jung down there now, an arrow through his brilliant heart, he’s fallen from his loft indeed! And I must say! There is Pan over there, reading a book! Well, I never. Here, help me lift my skirts over this sudden stream, Diana, it reeks of poison. 

And so the two make their way out of what had seemed timeless. Pan looks up, watches them lift off, puts his book under an Oak, and follows along. Things had indeed gotten boring and he felt a good strong wind beginning to stir. He blows out his breath to strengthen the wind, but that has no effect. Yep, he mutters, time to move along. We’ve been Changed already. And Pan, not made of atoms at all, begins to dissolve, to morph into a cloud-like Pan shape, and then that wind he failed to call up most gently scatters his image into unrecognizable mist.

Eve Chancellor

Eve Chancellor is an English Teacher in Manchester. Her poetry is published online and in multiple literary magazines, including: Dream Catcher, Hyacinth Review, Ink, Sweat and Tears and Seaside Gothic. Her short stories are featured and forthcoming with East of the Web, Reflex Press, Between These Shores and The Ghastling.

Human Waste

He found a hand in the recycling. It was a human hand. It had been cut off at the wrist, leaving a rancid bloody mess. It got blood all over the cereal boxes and bits of old packaging. It had started to smell.

He went back inside. He vomited once, sharply, into the sink. He knew that he needed to call the police. Did this count as an emergency, finding a hand in your recycling? He dialled 999. Emergency, which service? He told them all about the hand, how he didn’t know whose hand it was, how it had been lying there, dead, in his recycling.

He was moved to a safe house. His real house had been taken over by forensic teams and police tape: people wanting to dig up his garden and go through his bins. He lived alone.

He looked out of the window in the safe house. When I die, I want to be cremated, he thought. He didn’t want to end up in the ground, under some cold headstone.

A body, wasted; waste.

Daniel Addercouth

Daniel Addercouth grew up on a remote farm in the north of Scotland but now lives in Berlin, Germany. His stories have appeared in Seaborne Magazine, National Flash Fiction Day’s FlashFlood, Duck Duck Mongoose, and Mid-Level Management, among other places. Find him on Twitter.

Origami

That was the day you took me to the deserted shopping mall which was closing the following week, with all the stores shuttered and signs in the windows saying where the businesses had moved to, if they’d moved at all and not just given up after the gleaming marble dream of the mall had evaporated, the symbol of boomer prosperity steamrollered by the convenience of ordering hoodies online at 2am after a few White Claws, and we’re walking around in the sticky heat, with the air conditioning either broken or switched off, the management not even pretending that business is continuing as usual, because for this place business will never be usual again, and I feel like getting an iced coffee but nowhere’s open, and you need the restroom and fortunately that’s still open, and as I wait for you I notice someone’s left a cardboard box outside this abandoned craft store, and amid the ceramic pumpkins and artificial flowers there’s this perfect origami fox folded out of stiff orange paper, and I take it and hold it lightly in my cupped hand, and when you come back you lead me down a side passage and I demand to know where we’re going and you refuse to tell me, and by this stage I’m irritated and keep saying can we just go home and you keep saying in a minute, in a minute, I just need to do one thing, then we’re in front of this one store that’s still open, the last oasis of commerce in this retail desert, and I can’t even tell what it is because the sign’s already been removed but it doesn’t look like anything special or even the kind of place you’d want to enter, but you insist we go in and I’m thinking now he’s really gone crazy and feeling a bit scared, and inside there’s a counter with this decrepit old man and he greets you by name and I’m like how does this dude know my boyfriend and he hands you this little box and gives me a twinkly look and I turn back to you and you’re down on one knee with the box open and inside is this ring and even though the diamond’s small I know how much it means because it must have cost you a month’s salary, if not two, and afterwards I hug you and start crying, right in front of the old jeweler, and I smell the sour milk of your sweat and feel the dampness of your back through your t-shirt, and the cold metal of the ring feels strange but just right on my finger, and I hold you as tight as I can, and I’m still cradling the origami fox in my hand, feeling the sharp corners of the folds and making sure to keep my grip loose because at that moment it feels like the most precious thing in the world.