American novelist, Chuck Palahniuk, once said, “People don’t want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.“

That’s true of life, isn’t it?  I mean, we all dream of a time when we won’t have any more troubles, no more work to do, no more bills to pay, a point at which we’re done.

But what next?

We’ve all heard of the Christian idea of heaven in which we sit around on clouds playing harps, right?

How does that sound to you?

To me, it sounds deadly boring.  I, as a non-traditional Christian, hope heaven has a heck of a big library and a computer so I can keep learning and working.  Give me a couple of millennia in a heavenly library (which would, obviously, include every detail of every scrap of knowledge ever known by human or alien), and I’d have just gotten through the history section.  Not to mention that I expect to be assigned to watch over my grandchildren–if I ever get any!

So, no, I don’t think, at our core, that we do want our lives resolved.  

But, by gum, an author had better resolve a story.

Why the contradiction?

Because our very humanness craves that too.  We crave a sense of completeness, of our ability to finish what we start.

That’s one of my many issues.  I tend to get grumpy when someone interrupts me in the middle of a project.  But one reason I want to finish that project is so I can go on to the next project.  Resolved yet unfinished.

We love resolved stories at Flash Fiction Online.  We’ve rejected hundreds of well-written stories in our eight years that just didn’t resolve.

Our four stories this month do.  The question is, do they resolve in a way that satisfies you?  Only one way to find out.  Read!  Go.  Do it now. 

Our first story is our quirkiest this month.  I’m not going to type the entire title here.  You can see it for yourself.  I’m just going to call it “I Am Graalnak” by Laura Pearlman.

Next up we give you “The Kiss” by K.C. Norton, a sweet story just right for a generation of kids (listen to me sounding like an old lady) frightened of commitment.

Third, a terrifying story of a mother with, well, issues. “Face Time” by Matthew Amati.   Remember Mommie, Dearest?  Yeah.  That woman had nothing on this Mommy.  

And again this month we bring you a resurrected story.  In the Biz, we call them ‘Reprints.’  Stories that have been printed before in another venue that we liked well enough to want to give them and their authors a second chance at finding a new readership.  So, from author Marina Lostetter we offer “Comet Man,” originally published in 2013 at Penumbra eMag.

Enjoy!