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Playing Dice With The Issue Jake Freivald
Chance also plays a role in “The Numbers Game” by Michael Aaron. This starts off like stereotypical sword-and-sorcery, but there’s an unusual reason that everything seems to fall into place just so.
Even our Classic Flash starts off with a bet, and although that’s not the point of the story, the ending left me saying, “Figure the odds.” It was written by turn-of-the-20th-century novelist and short story writer Elliott Flower. Never heard of him? Me, neither, but he was quite well known in his day, and I enjoyed this story — first published no later than 1916 — quite a bit. It’s a great example of an ending that makes you think it’s a twist, and then takes the twist just a little bit farther.
Bruce Holland Rogers is back this month, with two related fixed forms that he calls “prose sonnets”. He has two exemplars, “The Invisible Man” — I really like the ending of that one — and “Renaissance”.
As always, please comment (comments are like gold to an author). And a special thank-you to R.W. Ware for his original artwork for “The Numbers Game”!
© Jake Freivald
Meet the Author
Jake Freivald
Flash Fiction Online’s Founding Editor Jake Freivald lives in New Jersey in a house teeming with life: a wife, nine kids (yes, all from said wife, no twins), two dogs, two cats, and twenty fish.
Lack of qualifications never stopped Jake from taking a job, so when he saw the need for a professional flash-only ‘zine he created Flash Fiction Online. He was astounded when a team of volunteers rallied around the project, and he would like to shut up now so you can read about them.
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