Flash 10/2008, #1: Amy Treadwell
Spinnerbait
Chance Johnson peered between the bushes at the hand-flapping mob of snot-green extraterrestrials pillaging his tackle box. While he’d gone to relieve his bladder on his favorite sumac, the little suckers from who-knows-where had claimed his stuff. They held up his jigs and lures like outsized earrings. One of them dropped his bobber on the ground and poked it with a stick. Two others had stink bait smeared on like war paint. Read more: HTML PDF
Flash 10/2008, #2: Gay Degani
Dani-Girl’s Guide to Getting Everything Right
The minute the nose of my Honda Civic points north on the 5, my hands begin to sweat, my breath goes shallow, and somewhere down in my lower intestinal tract I feel a rumbling similar to distant thunder, just not as pleasant. Don’t Go Home is the first cardinal rule in Dani-Girl’s Guide to Getting Everything Right, and after a lifetime in Lomita with my German-Irish father, Rule 1 is easy to follow. Read more: HTML PDF
Short-Short Sighted #5: Bruce Holland Rogers
Take a Letter...
or a Fire Extinguisher
The latest installment of Bruce Holland Rogers’s “Short-Short Sighted” column discusses fixed forms found “in the wild,” in letters and travel guides and even fire extinguishers. His short-short story What to Expect is about pregnancy — and a little bit more. Read more: HTML
Classic Flash #11: Virginia Woolf
A Haunted House
Whatever hour you woke there was a door shunting. From room to room they went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there, making sure — a ghostly couple.
“Here we left it,” she said. And he added, “Oh, but here too!” “It’s upstairs,” she murmured. “And in the garden,” he whispered. “Quietly,” they said, “or we shall wake them.” Read more: HTML PDF
Flash 10/2008, #3: Ripley Patton
Traveling by Petroglyph
My beach is quiet. It is just me and the eagle’s screech, the limpet’s sip, the suck of the ocean upon the rocks. Behind me sits a fisherman’s boat on its side. There’s a gash in the hull that curves up, like a smile. I am utterly alone. It is Friday afternoon and the locals are either preparing their restaurants, shops, and art galleries for the onslaught, or they are hiding. Read more: HTML PDF
