I MISSED THE FIRST APPEARANCE of the wish-dragons, so I had to hear about them second-hand from my friend Boomer. He’d been feeling pretty mellow and not fit to drive, so he’d wandered down to the docks and started singing. The moon hung low and full. Boomer said the sky filled up with streaks of […]
When that Cratch am watchin’, you better do right. Suck a corncob if them striped birds go over. Cranes pass on high, you best bury you some young mouse teeth. Wear radishes round you neck. You see leaves blowin’, best get gone quick. If it a odd number day, stay away from metal. Don’t move […]
CHAPTER ONE: The Last Man Watches Blazing Saddles It’s his favorite scene. The cowboys rise and fart, rise and fart, and he thinks of his wife farting in the night. He never laughed when she did. Most of the time he was asleep when she started and half asleep when she finished. He realizes now […]
Wheee. The death baby goes, wheee. It also gurgles something awful. We have a problem with them in the town, not the town proper but right outside. The death babies have gotten brave in recent years, crawling right up to the gardens and even to the homes. Nobody knows where they come from, only that […]
The smell of wet ash slicked her throat. Jo felt the new skin stretching on her thighs and stomach as she stumbled past pools of plastic that might have been patio furniture. Blackened beams poked out of the rubble and the dead lawn crunched under her slippers. Nothing had survived that heat. Only Jo herself, […]
This essay details the writing of Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous poem, “The Raven”. Although flash fiction isn’t poetry, it strives for the same “unity of effect” that Poe tries to obtain in his work. Some have said that Poe must have written this as satire, since it’s a little too precise and methodical in […]
I can pretty much find anything. It’s my superpower. It was always below the surface, in the backwaters of my brain, just waiting. I’m dead certain it was my kids and husband that finally forced it into the open. “Hon, have you seen my garpledeybip?” Like I knew what that was. “How should I know? […]
We perch next to the glass, where window shoppers can press their flushed faces against the panes and ooh and aah at us. It is shopping season. We know because they cover their hands in cloth, and the sky falls white and fluffy around their feet. They hurry by in twos and threes, carrying bags […]
This story is used as an exemplar for Bruce’s column, “Write Rites: The Ritual Story”. You may want to see all of Bruce’s writing columns; you can find them listed here. On that last morning, anyone who came to visit me could see that I was dying. I knew it myself. As if I had […]
We hit the spikes on Interstate 40 East in Texas, soon after the second-largest freestanding cross in the Western hemisphere dropped over the horizon and disappeared from our rearview mirror, along with the giant thing crucified on it. (All the faded tourist-trap signs claim that cross is the largest, but I look into these things, […]