In This Issue: Suzanne Vincent

How Did I Get Here September?

Our August/September issue has a very-little something for everyone: humor, romance, fantasy, horror.

Stefanie Freele gives us the sense that our friend Bruce Holland Rogers may not be as mild-mannered as we like to think in How Did I Get Here Bruce. Abigail Shaw gives us Outside the Chase, a love triangle of sorts, involving a man, a woman, and Death. Katherine Clardy’s Vet takes social work to a whole new level. Shane Rhinewald’s horror/fantasy, Good As New, gives us a grim and visceral view of bullying.

Our Classic Flash is the excellent The Lie by Holloway Horn: A true classic. Read more: HTML

Flash 8/2012, #1: Stefanie Freele

How Did I Get Here Bruce

On each floor, across from the elevator, is a chute where we plummet garbage down to the basement incinerator. There is no excuse for a cluttered room, messy hallway, overflowing waste can. When you open the metal door, much like an enormous mailbox, the hot breath of rotting and burning blasts in your face, so we learn to stand to the side and dump quickly. This is a novelty that doesn’t wear off. Anytime we go past, we toss small bits of trash. The chute eats everything.

On the eleventh floor is a man named Bruce. On each floor, the coveted rooms are the four corners, the only rooms with two windows. Read more: HTML

Your ad could be here, right now.

Flash 8/2012, #2: Abigail Shaw

Outside The Chase

It starts with a heavy pinpoint, sharp, deep in the middle of Aaron’s heart. As he reads Megan’s letter, it swells and blooms, licks like fire through his veins.

This feeling should be love. It is love underneath, but it’s wrapped in something hard and cold and perpetual.

Death.

Death’s followed Aaron for twenty years.

Death came for Aaron’s father first, a cruel illness that halved his body (no more walks in the woods), laid him flat (no more car journeys to nowhere), muted him utterly (no more wise words), and finally sputtered him out like a spent candle.

Aaron was seven, and he didn’t understand. Read more: HTML

Flash 9/2012, #1: Katherine Clardy

Vet

The nightmare drifted at the girl’s shoulder as a dark, sinuous coil of mist. As I crossed the room, its eyes followed me, as red and changeable as coals glowing in a grate, and the sharp sting of its malice raked over my skin.

“He won’t hurt you,” said the girl. She sat cross-legged at the head of her bed, unicorn plush cradled in her lap, eyes wide and earnest. “He’s nice.”

The nightmare’s tail lashed, and it curled around the girl’s shoulders. Resting its jaw atop her curls, it bared fangs that dripped with ectoplasmic venom. She giggled, swatting it away.

“No tickling!”

This was not what I had expected. Read more: HTML

Flash 9/2012, #2: Shane Rhinewald

Good As New

When his daughter came home with her first hole, Martin plugged it with gauze and said, “School can be cruel sometimes, darling.” After, they shared a pizza and watched Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, which had long been her favorite.

The next day Lauren came home with two more holes — one above her collarbone, another in her upper thigh. Martin tended to them with peroxide and slathered them with antibiotic ointment while she vented about the girls at school. When he finished, he stuffed both holes with cotton because he’d run out of gauze and patted her cheek.

“There, all better. Good as new,” he said, standing. He kissed her on the forehead, and she looked at him with her mother’s faded blue eyes. Read more: HTML

Classic Flash #61: Holloway Horn

The Lie

The hours had passed with the miraculous rapidity which tinctures time when one is on the river, and now overhead the moon was a gorgeous yellow lantern in a greyish purple sky.

The punt was moored at the lower end of Glover’s Island on the Middlesex side, and rose and fell gently on the ebbing tide.

A girl was lying back amidst the cushions, her hands behind her head, looking up through the vague tracery of leaves to the soft moonlight. Even in the garish day she was pretty, but in that enchanting dimness she was wildly beautiful. The hint of strength around her mouth was not quite so evident perhaps. Her hair was the colour of oaten straw in autumn and her deep blue eyes were dark in the gathering night. Read more: HTML