The image was particularly nice: a yellow and black weaverbird caught in the act of building one of their hanging, gourd-shaped nests on his anti-tank cannon mount. It was a keeper; Akili just had to decide which picture to give up in exchange. He had plenty of power left in his superconductor ring — enough […]
This story collection is an exemplar for Short-short Sighted #20, “Consolidated Flash and the Collective Narrator”. From the beginning, they’ve made us pay. For saying that the king was not a god, they cut out our tongues. For reading the holy books for ourselves, they cut out our eyes. We have been starved in dungeons. […]
Read Bruce’s previous column here, or visit his author page to see them all. In this month’s column, I want to address two things at once. The first follows naturally on the previous topic of how short flash fiction can be: How long can we make flash fiction? And because my answer to that question […]
Very elliptical years, the 57th Century, or “Years of the Cat.” Practically nobody uses sentences. Anymore. Very eccentric. Tell story. Am Time Bum. Name of ZigZag, honorable family, agent, sex-linkages. Manipulator and explorer of paraHistory via the Leonardo. Journey to the Age of Styrofoam, the Coke Bottle Century, my favorite time, the 20th, when Giants […]
Every morning Bobby visits Chuck. He goes down to the basement and rattles Chuck’s cage with his cane. Chuck only snarls and spits, and grinds the rotten stubs of his teeth — gnish, gnash, gnish, gnash. He’s a real codger, Chuck is. Should have seen him back in the day, though. World ain’t got zombies […]
5:00 PM (one day ago)I can Twitter on my phone! No idea why I would, but it’s cool. Gives me something to do in the new house. 1:00 AMFound mysterious hole in new house today. In floor. No basement. Calling my realtor after my sister and her kids leave. 7:00 AMBuilding plans show no basement. […]
Read Bruce’s previous column here, or visit his author page to see them all. These columns are about writing flash fiction, but this month I want to peer over the border to examine flash fiction’s sister genre, the prose poem. At least some flash fictions and prose poems are similar enough that it can be […]
For two days the quiet of the Rising Sun Tavern, in the quaint little town of Shearsville, Ohio, was disturbed by a drunken Democratic member of the Pennsylvania Legislature, who visited the town in order to address what he hoped would turn out to be the assembled multitude of copperheads, but which proved after all […]
It was not abduction. I volunteered to go. I trampled out the crop circle in the north field of the Suttlebys’ ranch, at night, just with a board of plywood and a long rope. I did not know what the signs mean, but I copied them. Took me all night, and the sky was pink […]
The free carnival pass dropped through Penny’s mail slot on Wednesday, exactly ten months after her mother died, three weeks after her son was born, and seven days before she planned to drive her car off Myrtle Pier. Penny had shoved the stack of letters behind the door, along with other bills piling up since […]