In This Issue: Jake Freivald

In This Issue

We have two excellent stories this month by published (and oft-published!) writers: Beth Cato’ light fantasy about “213 Myrtle Street,” and Bruce Holland Rogers’s story of “How We Met.”

Yes, that Bruce Holland Rogers. He’s re-starting his column shortly, maybe in May.

Our Classic Flash is an odd one with a long title from none other than Charles Dickens. Read more: HTML

Flash 4/2012, #1: Beth Cato

213 Myrtle Street

The house at 213 Myrtle Street wore an enchantment that could obscure it when it so desired. This was a handy skill, particularly when salesmen roved the streets or teenagers skulked about after dark, eggs in hand.

Now there was a realtor at the gate. The smell of dozens of strange, foreign houses clung to her clothes.

The house ached in its abandonment. Mrs. Leech was gone. A stranger had to lock the door behind Mrs. Leech when she last left the house, still asleep as she was rolled along on a strange wheeled bed.... Read more: HTML

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Flash 4/2012 #2: Bruce Holland Rogers

How We Met

Now come dessert and coffee and each couple telling the story of how they met. From across the table, you send a hint of a smile that is for me alone. We know how these stories go, and these couples keep to the conventions. “She was working at the bank, I knew from the first time I saw her that this was the woman I would marry.” “My car broke down, and when I called my brother to ask him to come get me, his roommate answered. My brother wasn’t there, and I started to cry, and I hadn’t even met Jerry then, but he told me to stop crying because he would come get me.” Read more: HTML

Classic Flash #56: Charles Dickens

Familiar Epistle from a Parent to a Child Aged Two Years and Two Months

MY CHILD,

To recount with what trouble I have brought you up — with what an anxious eye I have regarded your progress, — how late and how often I have sat up at night working for you, — and how many thousand letters I have received from, and written to your various relations and friends, many of whom have been of a querulous and irritable turn,... Read more: HTML