Flash 12/2007, #1: Bruce Holland Rogers

Reconstruction Work

Next to the casket, I leaned on my cane and admired the work my brother practitioners had done on Elizabeth Fordham Roth. She had died at 80, but she did not look a day over 60 and might have only been sleeping. Physical reconstruction. Cosmetics. Those are the easier mortuary arts. It is the work of an afternoon to sew eyelids shut with invisible stitches, to close a slack jaw, to smooth out wrinkles and rouge pallid cheeks back to seeming life. My branch of the discipline is far more subtle and is never finished in a single afternoon. Read more: HTML PDF MP3 

Flash 12/2007, #2: Suzanne Vincent

I Speak the Master’s Will

I’m in Hell. That must be what this is. I can’t fathom a god who would possibly interpret this as heaven, crammed in this damned steamer trunk; me and twenty three other Wayang Kulit shadow puppets, entombed with the smell of ox hide and musty bamboo.

I dream of a life before this one. A life in which I spoke a language other than the one the Master speaks for me. A life in which I could move my own vulgar arms, speak my own profane will, make my own damning decisions. I’ve been here so long I can’t remember what I did to deserve damnation, but a shadow of that life tells me I do. Read more: HTML PDF 

Classic Flash #1: H. P. Lovecraft

What The Moon Brings

I hate the moon — I am afraid of it — for when it shines on certain scenes familiar and loved it sometimes makes them unfamiliar and hideous.

It was in the spectral summer when the moon shone down on the old garden where I wandered; the spectral summer of narcotic flowers and humid seas of foliage. . . Read more: HTML PDF MP3