Category: FLASH!

Ecology of the absurd, Featured blogs, sites & lit works, FLASH!, Popular & established authors, USA

Jeanine Didn’t Want to Add One More Sound to The World

!Epic Tomorrows

By Nina Hart: This story originally appeared in the book of short stories, Somewhere in a Town You Never Knew Existed Somewhere

Out stepped Jeanine. Out into the street after slamming her car door shut. Jeanine. Her upper back jumping from the sound of the slam. Jeanine’s right thumb reaching for the lock button on the car’s keyless device. Jeanine’s sharply manicured thumb about to press down to emit the piercing beep sound that signaled the locking of the doors. She paused though. She could not hit the button. She could not press that button. Because she didn’t want to add one more sound to the world. She wondered What will the birds think? She did this for the birds. She didn’t want to hurt their ears or obstruct their songs. Obstruct their signals to one another. So Jeanine left her car doors unlocked. She even left the doors of her red Pontiac Bonneville wide open on their hinges and all the baby bird chirps came in. Like waves she loved the chirping sounds of no sound no sound no sound coming through like a whale in the wilderness of junkyard love. No sound no sound no sound she said no sound.
Ecology of the absurd, Featured blogs, sites & lit works, FLASH!, Popular & established authors, USA

Butterfly Farm

!Epic Tomorrows

By Nina Hart: This story originally appeared in the book of short stories, Somewhere in a Town You Never Knew Existed Somewhere

It had been years since she’d been to the butterfly farm. She had to stop going because the butterflies were too beautiful. She would sit and weep as their soft wings skimmed overhead and grazed her tiny ears. Their grand wings veering wide in flight and showing her prints like African batik.
       She didn’t like being the one who always cried, sitting on the bench and looking down and over to the side. She was trying to hide the tears that rolled out like curling butterfly tongues. The butterflies didn’t know she was crying for them. They were too busy landing on velvety flowers and sucking sweet liquids out of squeaky golden stems.
       The last day she spent at the butterfly farm was the day she cried the most. She was sitting on a bench and she was talking to them. She told them they were “sweet and gentle” in a very loud voice, which surprised even her. Suddenly a slow-moving man wearing dirty beige cover-alls and holding a heavy glass jar began to walk toward her. He came and took her four favorite butterflies. She didn’t know how he knew. He stuffed them with his rough hands through the top of the jar and quickly screwed on the lid, their tiny wings wilting. Dogs barked and birds screeched and the sky turned grey with sadness. Some big bowl of hunger grew up in her and puffed her size up to the clouds. Swollen hands moving like giant wings. Her love was that big. She took the man’s bulbous arm and threw it behind his back and arrested him and took him back to the pork farm and the butterflies now sit on his shoulder and eat from dog bowls for all the rest of their days.
FLASH!, Many feminisms, Popular & established authors, USA

Bonanza keep digging

!Epic Tomorrows

By Nina Hart: This story originally appeared in the book of short stories, Somewhere in a Town You Never Knew Existed Somewhere

Bonanza was a scary girl, all backwards in her thinking. Five years old and she didn’t like anyone. No-one liked her either. She often wondered which came first, did she like no-one and then did no-one like her, or was it the other way around?
       “Shut up and keep digging,” cried her mother, while Bonanza was busy burying the bony remains of her ten last, best and only friends. “Shut up and keep digging,” mouthed Bonanza in a sour, mocking voice, hoping her mother didn’t hear but secretly wishing she would. Bonanza was digging and stacking, digging and stacking, and burying her little toy dolls, one on top of another, digging and stacking and burying them all in the backyard.
       “There goes Frances,” she said, one by one patting them on the soft tops of their heads. “Little Limp Suzette, Astrid, Lingafore, Penitence, Rye Bread, Amber Ocean with the Amazing Marble Brown Eyes, Lori Fred the Beast, Marmalade.” And then there was The Ancient One, who kept bobbing her loose plastic head back and forth, stacked flat on her back on top of Marmalade, in the ruddy brown dirt. “Stay still,” said Bonanza through stinging tears.
       These were the days of no return. Her mother was right. If she couldn’t be a friendly, polite girl, then she would be liked by no-one. And so it was that her mother, with resounding voice, descended heavily down the porch stairs, thick ankled, to the backyard to supervise Bonanza’s burial of the word F-r-i-e-n-d-s-h-i-p.
       All the summer light grew dim, darker, until Bonanza was just a small speck of dust beating away at the backyard air, then, her self, buried. Fell in with the rest of them. Fell right flat on top of The Ancient One.
Ecology of the absurd, FLASH!, Popular & established authors, USA

Chipper Dale

!Epic Tomorrows

By Nina Hart: This story originally appeared in the book of short stories, Somewhere in a Town You Never Knew Existed Somewhere

Charles Chipper Dale stood dressed in the full regalia of an eight-year-old on his front lawn in Xenia, Ohio. The air was hot, and black, and sweet. Charlie jumped nervously from one foot to the other, nostrils flaring like a hunting dog’s. “The tornado will hit without warning!” prophesized Chipper to his audience of six children, one dirty sparrow, and a beat-up red Tonka Truck. “We will all be dead, taken up into the wormlike mass, cold faces pressed against one another in the brutal raging wind!” The children all sighed and began to shake and cry. “I have to go home and get my Snoopy Roo-Roo.” cried Ellen, who looked like a ringing bell in her oversized green dress. “Well the clouds will suck you up like a milkshake into the sky if you do, Ellen! I forbid you to go anywhere, Ellen.” said Charlie. “Where are the parents? Where are the parents?” asked Jake Lacky, who had a wide chest just like his pot-smoking dad. “My teacher said I’m a latchkey kid. What’s a latchkey kid?” No one knew. In the distance the raw smell of rain drew closer. The children could taste the mist as it slipped on their lips like hard candy. They could feel a rumble in the earth under their hot tennis shoes. “What do we do, Charlie?” asked Rainbow, one of Jake Lacky’s three siblings, latchkey kid and daughter of the pot smoker. “Look to the wind.” said Charles Chipper Dale, fingers twitching, eyes veering off into the far distance. “It’s here, it’s coming, and it won’t be long. We won’t wait for the sirens to go off. We’re children. We can feel things. Let’s head on down to the root cellar, one at a time. Single file.” “I love you all so much,” whispered Rainbow, as she held her brother Jake’s hand and followed him down the stone staircase. Cars and their drivers drove past the children on the street. Faces and heads and necks propelled forward on their way back to work after lunch break. All of them ignoring the twisting sky in the distance and the staunch smell of darkness. The tornado would hit without warning. The latchkey kids would be safe in Charlie Dale’s root cellar, listening to the roaring sounds of the King of Winds. All of them holding hands and Rainbow mouthing I love you I love you and I love you all into the dark green landscape.

Exclusive to COTW, FLASH!

Marabella, Hot and Cold

!Epic Tomorrows

By Dan Nawaz

Chauncy Clemens was leaping through the bonfire when his dress went up. We were untouchable ‘til then. 

We, the Marabella Sarcophagi, danced and took bolt filtre in the ash-fed southern forest every week. Most of us were the children of second generation Pelivosi —so there was never a shortage of cash for our elaborate homemade robes, or for our filtre and booze, and I never felt guilty about taking it. 

As Chauncy burned nobody was screaming. We were grieving the end of a lovely time alone, ending before our eyes. He was ever strange to me. Stubborn —could never take no for an answer, that boy, and in truth I was glad of him going even as I watched in that moment. 

Bolt filtre made you optimistic though. Like fire blossoming inside you. So when I started hacking him apart the rest became relieved, even enthusiastic to join in. We took parts of Chauncy home and hid him in our bedrooms away from adult eyes. Others —who knows who— fed him to the dog and buried him in the park and ate him and pickled him and asked him what it was like being dead and being everywhere at once. He was only ever taken to the reaches of ourselves, barely out of school mostly, but knowing he had made it out of reach to some secret place beyond sight, many of them began to nurture a sickly envy for the dead boy. I knew it from their look, coming back to the forest parties. From their hushed conversation and red eyed stare.  

I learned some weeks later that some of the Sarcophagi had begun bringing their scraps of Chauncy to the dances. I caught Annie Gorbale talking into her hands and yanked her to the treeline. 

“Fuck’re you doing Annie?”

“Doing nothing.”

I slapped her curd of a cheek and she dropped him, a blackened thing like tree bark. 

“He said he wants to dance.”

“Quit your nonsense, you’re scaring the new kids.” 

“But it’s you he wants to dance with,” Annie said with her wet eyes and her butterfly gown, and picked up the charred lump I saw was wrapped in dark, stained gingham like a bridal favour. The air was thick and I felt behind me the dance had slowed. I felt bodies breathing at my back, a whole crowd swaying together. Their presence thrummed as a group of many but more keenly as a single glaring and grave-sour scorn. They felt hot. Smelled like him too, like sour chocolate milk. Not my Sarcophagi anymore. Chauncy’s.

So, we danced. And when Chauncy wanted to kiss we kissed, and I tasted him distilled. And after, when I could breathe again and I was allowed to be scared properly I found myself carrying him still, even in my room, still kissing him when we were alone like he’d always wanted of me.

And it was like playing. Guessing how I might die each time, and when I guessed right at last, just laughing. It was the funniest thing. Laughing together because even Chauncy, even now, he didn’t know himself how it all happened or whatever was coming next. 

Outside the streets were dark and cold but dinner was waiting downstairs.