ISSN: 1946-1712

Flash 7/2010, #1: Polenth Blake

Through Amber Eyes

I paint whiskers on my face with bath water. The water doesn’t stay, but the whiskers remain. I prowl around the house in my bathrobe.

The cat is washing herself on the rug. I kneel down to show her my fresh whiskers. “Meow,” I say. She flicks her tail in disdain, as though I’m any other human.

Dad looks up from his newspaper. “Eyra, stop that.” Read more: HTML 

In This Issue: Jake Freivald

In This Issue

This month’s stories are kind of past-perfect, as we grammar wonks might say; all of them involve things the main characters once had.

A girl gradually discovers who she is; a son revisits his parents’ sunken city; a woman and a robot reach for things they want and can’t have. Also another Classic Flash from Lord Dunsany, and in a work of criticism, Mark Twain is the Deerslayer-slayer. Enjoy! Read more: HTML 

Flash 7/2010, #2: Indrapramit Das

Kolkata Sea

I remember the time my mother took me to see the city where I was born. She was a young woman then. There were sea-birds rippling through the warm white sky high above her head, drifting like ashes on the summer breeze. I was in her lap, slightly nauseous from the motion of our vessel on the cresting waves.

“Look, sweetheart,” she said, her chin moving against my head as she spoke.... Read more: HTML 

Flash 7/2010, #3: Tom Crosshill

Sandra Plays for the Cast-Iron Man

“I’m Radok,” he said to her when everyone was gone, and steam hissed gently from his vents.

Sandra hadn’t noticed him in the audience. How could she have? They came every night and sat at their tables with rattles and creaks. Gray-blue visages bathed in the golden light from Outside. Here a steel leg crossed over a many-jointed knee, there a dozen long fingers laced together in a steeple. Read more: HTML 

Classic Flash #39: Lord Dunsany

The Watch-tower

I sat one April in Provence on a small hill above an ancient town that Goth and Vandal as yet have forborne to “bring up to date.”

On the hill was an old worn castle with a watch-tower, and a well with narrow steps and water in it still.

The watch-tower, staring South with neglected windows, faced a broad valley full of the pleasant twilight and the hum of evening things:... Read more: HTML 

For Writers: Mark Twain

Before Your Next Critique Group...

Have you writers ever been critiqued in such a scathing, vicious fashion that you don’t know whether you want to crawl into a hole or beat the critquer with a bat?

Can you imagine getting that kind of critique from Mark Twain?

That’s what happened to James Fenimore Cooper and his novel The Deerslayer. Just wow. And yet there are good lessons in there, too. Read more: HTML 

  
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