April 2024
April 2024
Editorial: Trust Fall
My first trust fall was in the summer after ninth grade. It was 1995. It was the summer of Alanis’s Jagged Little Pill, of Jim Carrey as the Riddler, of “if it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” For me, summer of ‘95 was also the summer of the Ulster Project.
At that point in my academic career, I had not joined my high school debate team, so I wasn’t quite up to speed on recent history. I needed to get the debrief from my parents, who told me that Ulster is Northern Ireland. And in Northern Ireland, Catholics and Protestants “don’t get along.” But never fear, there was a plan: the Ulster Project organization found twelve teenagers – half Catholic, half Protestant – and paired them with equivalent American host teens. All twenty-four of us kids then went forth and did activities all summer, thus realizing we’re all the same. Let the hijinks ensue!
To emphasize how clueless I and the other Americans were, we didn’t understand why they wanted to call us Protestants. In Georgia, a “Protestant” was definitely a Southern Baptist. All the “Protestants” in the Ulster Project that summer were Episcopalians (or Anglicans if they came from across the pond), and seeing as we were basically all watered down Catholics, none of the Troubles made much sense. But no one offered any explanation, probably because explaining sectarian bombings and centuries of strife to a bunch of kids wasn’t going to get anyone very far. What was going to go the distance?
Definitely trust falls!
Ours was the non-brain-injury variety in which you stand close together and take turns catching the person in the middle. No one was in any real danger, yet supposedly we were building familial bonds.
The trust falls were part of a one-day youth group seminar that included leadership challenges, collective puzzle solving, and overly enthusiastic attempts to get us to perform skits. A pair of former circus performers, who had not retired their clown outfits, ushered us from one exercise to the next, seemingly oblivious to the deadpan stares and snarky chuckles from the lot of us. They even juggled.
I maintain that it was our ruthless mocking of this couple that built more trust. We parodied them for the rest of the summer, mostly at the numerous sleepovers we participated in. Late at night, the chaperones left us to our own devices, and we felt free to curse, listen to shitty music, and…well, I mentioned hijinks, didn’t I? The Northern Irish kids taught us how to drink and how to “snog.” We were adolescents after all, and young love is its own kind of trust fall.
As I gathered stories for this issue, I felt a need to represent that very specific kind of rush. The abandon, the leap of faith, the hand-holding that we knew wouldn’t last, the vertigo of pairing off with the boy I fancied in the sacristy of a church hosting a “lock-in.” There really was love between Catholics and Protestants that summer. Perhaps not the diplomatic kind that led to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, but who knows – maybe those kids are sitting at their desks to this day feeling the same level of nostalgia for a night by the campfire, for the roller coasters we rode, and for those damn clowns that made us catch each other over and over again.
The February 2024 edition of Flash Fiction Online is an all-literary issue dedicated to the patron saints of love – whether canonized or not, whether working to diplomatically end strife or merely turning a blind eye to the teens they should be chaperoning.
We have scrappy, unexpected love in our reprint story of the month – Christine Hanolsy’s “Afterimage.” We have a neurodivergent meet-cute in Eric Witchey’s “Flirting Implicature in Cooperative Discourse.” We have tentative, wounded love after heartbreak in Marilyn Hope’s “Somebody Lonely.” And in honor of Leap Year, we have a celebration of self-discovery in Melissa Fitzpatrick’s “Leap Day.”
Thank you for reading! If you love visuals, I post issue-specific mood boards and other random jokes on FFO’s Instagram account. If you love music, you can check out our Spotify playlist for this issue. If you just love reading and like what we do, consider becoming a Patreon patron, or subscribing via our independent distributor Weightless Books.
Editorial: A Bittersweet October
It’s become something of an FFO tradition that our October issue is horror-themed. This year, we went in a slightly different direction. Horror stories are most effective when they tap into universal fears like bodily mutilation or loss of autonomy. Our stories this month contain elements of emotional horror—sadness, anxiety, unmet needs, and most of […]
Flash Fiction Flashback: How the 576th Annual Pollen Festival Blossomed My Budding Career by Samantha L. Strong
In April 2017, English computer scientist Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee was awarded the A.M Turning Award for inventing the World Wide Web. Ten colorful sarcophagi and numerous figurines were discovered in a 3,500-year-old tomb near the Valley of the Kings, and Sodimejo, an Indonesian man who claimed to have been born in 1870, which would […]
The Greenhouse Bargain
He sent my mother’s ghost to deliver the terms of the bargain. I accepted; there was no choice. When I asked what to expect, she said, Ten good years. The Whipstitch Man had visited me twice, once to take my sister and once to collect my mother. The second time, he caught me tucking my […]
Everything You Once Were
You are four when you decide to swim to the barnacle-covered rock where your brother likes to squat, peeling snails up in between waves. You wade and wade until your toes can’t find sand anymore. Until your eyes can’t find sun. Pink floaties slip from your too-thin arms, and you sink for the first time. […]
Words from the Whispering Woods
A curl of bark, stained meticulously with sapWe listened and watched, root and leaf and stem and bark, and learned the marks and the sounds. We are neighbors. The witch says you are too new to be trusted, but we like the way your sprouts laugh and run, like large squirrels. Welcome. We hope we […]
Editorial: Green and Growing Things
Let me start this editorial by saying that I can’t grow a damned thing other than a weed or two—and those only by accident. My ability to kill plants isn’t one to be underestimated. I come from a long line of farmers and gardeners who have tried to teach me which plants should be planted […]
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