Flash Fiction of the Month selected by Mary McLaughlin Slechta
Congratulations to winner Austin Alexis for “In An Emergency,” a story which builds suspense from the orderly nighttime exit of residents from a burning building. Austin brilliantly interrogates the surprising actions of Eddie and gets you thinking about all the Eddies in the world today. And congratulations to our honorable mentions. There's a sad, Twilight Zone element to Deborah Sorrentino's “Freak Show.” Here the protagonist wishes for entrance into the realm of the imagination only to discover loneliness. Julian Mithra's “Chalcedony's Lament” is written from the point of view of what we call “the healing stone.” With allies everywhere, Chalcedony tells a powerful and unexpected story of resistance.
Flash Fiction of the Month
Austin Alexis
In an Emergency
When fire broke out in his apartment building, when smoke insinuated through the hallway like damaging gossip, Eddie--bathrobe flying open--hoofed it down barely visible stairs toward the front door. Dimly he could see his neighbor with the melodious speaking voice skipping down the stairs a few feet in front of him. Only, now she wailed, a dissonant sound. Eddie heard another neighbor, who lived in the apartment next to him, coughing as he dashed past Eddie. Oh that: the guy’s familiar racket, a dry rhythmic belting out that Eddie had gotten used to. Eddie was surprised it didn’t sound different, considering the circumstances: a dark staircase, people in the way when you’re trying to save yourself.
Several of the residents, including Eddie, reached the ground floor. A kind of September the 11th desperation kicked in as people scrambled to the exit. Eddie felt a craving to gulp fresh air outside. Yet a vague something-or-other kept him from leaving. An arrogance. A sense he was entitled to defy nature, fate, whatever.
He sprang back up the three flights to his apartment, not to save his wallet, nor his passport, nor his flash drives, nor his framed photo of his dead mother, nor his purring calico. Instead, Eddie braved the taste of choking fumes and a floor of cauldron-hot tiles and the weight of leering catastrophe to locate, to grab, to secure…his new electric toothbrush. Standing in its cradle. Stewing in boiling air. Sweating plastic.
***
Austin Alexis is the author of Privacy Issues (Broadside Lotus Press, Madgett Poetry Award, 2014) and two chapbooks from Poets Wear Prada. His fiction, essays, poetry, drama and reviews have been published in Home Planet News Online, The Pedestal Magazine, Barrow Street, Poetica Review (UK), Poetry Pacific (Canada), and Suitcase of Chrysanthemums (great weather for MEDIA ) and elsewhere. He has worked at the NY Public Library and at SUNY, CUNY and private colleges.
Honorable Mention
Julian Mithra
Chalcedony’s Lament
I am trying to steal the slapdash crew, conniving raccoons who nibble at my proved vein, raucous me with two-pronged maundrils, who pry into my past mishaps. Even dusk doesn’t cancel their clatter. For they’ve invented carbide. They’ve tamped track. And channeled into my heart’s bloodstone.
I foment an inflight.
“Who’s been foxing waste rock into the weigh carts?”
“I stowed my pick by the shoot, D--n it. Who took it?”
They forgive though, like rain, and hammer on.
Somewhere, I’m a folded and stamped surveyor’s schematic, ceded to a man with four names. I don’t want to be a mine. A thine. So, I flirt with an aquifer, nuzzling her closer, pressing my forehead to her curls, her soft vowels. It’ll be an eon before she punches through the fourth stope and floods it faster than bo’s can bucket-bail. Have patience.
Then a bat advises to conspire with Flinder, who will flash a smile heard for miles, but he requires a cloud of anthracite dust (some call it pollen or September sagebrush) and I’ve no thumbs.
Endless muckmen itch like fleas and bite like ants. That isn’t the worst. Curse the dayless clamor that bangs More More More More.
A blind mule straggles to the wall. A pick bedevils the carborundum. A helmet slips. The winch.
***
Julian Mithra's current project, UNEARTHINGLY, assembles an imaginary archive from 1937's mining industry, from newspaper columns on repatriation to a tomboy's notes on underground spaces.
Honorable Mention
Deborah Sorrentino
Freak Show
I woke up one morning wishing for anonymity but saw my picture on the post office wall. So I asked for fame and woke up inside my own imagination. This can be lonely even if you think you want it.
I’m at the state fair in the center of a huge pulsing crowd. It’s August. Humid. I can’t breathe. I’m kind of short so I start to panic below the shoulder line of the moving mass. Snake Woman; A Phenomenon of Nature! a guy hawks. I pay fifty cents to step out of the fray. Inside the tent a woman’s head is poking through a hole in the stage floor. A sequined, stuffed snake body coils around her. I feel ripped off. In order to get my money’s worth, I stay, wanting conversation. Where are you from? I ask. Nowhere, she hisses. Do you like your job? It’s humiliating , she answers, flicking her tongue. I contemplate what series of events could lead a person to this point. So, we talk for a while. I smoke my last cigarette, occasionally reaching through the dark, holding it to the lips of the human face. She exhales through her mouth, sucking the smoke back up through her nostrils. It’s going to be a long night, I think. For both of us.
It’s suddenly very hot inside this makeshift pit, the air still and smoke-filled. She seems restless, agitated. I stand up, wanting to move on. Snake woman says, Wait. Come closer. She cuts her eyes in the dim light. Scrutinizes. Hey, don’t I know you? Then she grins at me showing her fake fangs.
***
Deborah Sorrentino is a writer, chef, jewelry designer, daughter, and wife living and creating in Syracuse, NY.
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