MICROFLASH WINNERS
Bare Oranges
by Sue Williams
It was the scent that did it. Honestly, it was.
He was slouched against the worktop, skinning the fruit, skewing me a smile. He stared, as I walked over. The peel fell in bits. He splayed his fingers, held them up — and everywhere, that smell. "It'd hurt," he said, "if I touched you now." I knew where he meant. Exactly.
I leaned in. Our mouths sank together. At last, I pulled away, and said, "I've come to get my things." But when I glanced down, I saw them there: a plate of bare oranges — a trap of scent.
Sue Williams's work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in flashquake, Blue Earth Review, Tears in the Fence, and The Green Muse, among others. One of her short stories is also soon to be published in a British erotic anthology.
Fish
by Vanessa Gebbie
Recently, Ed's wife became a fish. He filled the bath; she lay there, mouthing thank you. No hair. He missed her hair.
Ed fixed up a tank outside. He wrapped her carefully in a blanket and carried her to a bedroom window.
"Trust me, OK? There's air, then water." She did a beautiful dive.
The tank's worked out fine. Mostly she swims round, but sometimes she hides behind the weeds and Ed worries in case she's died.
Sometimes, she comes to the side and mouths, "Oh, oh, oh."
When she does, he presses his lips to the glass and kisses.
Vanessa Gebbie is a journalist and a prize-winning short fiction writer. Her work has appeared in The Fish Anthology 2006, Absinthe Literary Review, Eclectica, Aesthetica, Cadenza, among others, and has been broadcast by BBC radio. She teaches creative writing to disadvantaged adults.
The Photographer
by Andrea Fitzpatrick
"The laws are simple," he says to me as he stubs his cigarette. "As long as you're not naked, it's not child pornography. Just keep your shoes on." He makes sense even though he doesn't make sense, so I laugh and grind at the fucked up parking lot gravel beneath my foot, checking over the hill to see if the sun is around yet, because this is the way you flirt when you're sixteen.
Andrea Fitzpatrick has no plans for the future.
My Treat
by Helen Davies
"You don't need your purse," I tell her. "I'm paying tonight."
"But I never go out without my purse," she protests. "What if we have a fight and I want to go home?"
So we had the fight at home instead.
Helen Davies is a freelance journalist, based in London. Her web site, featuring more micro-flashes as well as some longer short stories, is under construction at www.helendavies.com . In her spare time, she enjoys sudoku, reality TV and having babies.
When She Remembers
by Susan Ourada
She fingered the lavender thread, remembering to take the pills. The idea came from Saturday morning cartoons, that loopy memory string tied around a character's finger. Jake liked it better when she forgot. The pills stole her sex drive while they slowly killed the spongy tumor lurking near her optic nerve.
"You're shrinking," he tells her in bed that night.
"The tumor ... I'm shrinking the tumor."
"No, you're shrinking me," turning his smooth back to her.
She thinks of Yogi Bear. The knot pulses on her wrist as she struggles to remember what had been so important to him.
Susan Ourada is a writing facilitator at a primary school in Phoenix, Arizona. Although she spends her day encouraging young authors to write more, she loves the idea and craft of writing short pieces.
Soup
by Mike Kloeck
I made soup.
Other people I know, including myself, would drink themselves into a coma. This time, I made soup.
Portobellos, Shiitakes, and Morels sautéed in dry sherry with roasted shallots and garlic folded into a rich stock of veal and montepulciano, finished with fresh chopped herbs and a goat cheese brioche.
She never really appreciated my food, not nearly as much as she appreciated my sous chef.
Now they are, well, to be honest I have no idea where they are. I am here, sitting at the end of my bar enjoying a perfect bowl of soup.
Mike Kloeck is a freelance writer liveing in San Jose, California.
What Happens When You Stop Fighting Gravity
by Kathy Briccetti
At first I resisted, but then tried leaning with him and felt the ease with which we turned, the way we felt connected to the road, the way the rumble of the motorcycle engine vibrated in my bones. For a moment, we were in sync. And for once, I was not the scared little girl, afraid of being pulled over by the police, or tipping over and scraping flesh against pavement. Inside the roar, I clutched my father's waist, braced the helmet against his shoulder, and let the speed take us away.
Kathy Briccetti earned an MFA in creative writing from Stonecoast. Her work has appeared in national publications as well as in anthologies and on public radio. She is at work on a memoir about three generations of absent fathers and adoption. Visit her website at http://kathybriccetti.serrahost.com
Mengele, I Dance on Your Grave
by Naomi Benaron
shouts Hannah, forgetting the meat burning on the stove, flame smoldering like old love, then no longer remembering Mengele or all the graves she had to dance on to live. Now everyone is just another pretty face. Hannah twirls, housedress ballooning, lifted high. She remembers only dancing all these years to live. She sleeps on the couch, dreams of fire, a face with bituminous eyes. Who? Someone carries her aloft; her eyes open in cool rain, face against his shoulder, house ablaze. Yes! Once before he carried her away, the oily heft of a lover's ash still on her skin.
Naomi Benaron's fiction has appeared in CALYX, Red Rock Review, Prism International Journal, Green Mountains Review as well as other in print and online journals. Her collection of short stories, Love Letters from a Fat Man, is the winner of the 2006 G.S. Sharat Prize for fiction, and is forthcoming from BkMk Press in summer 2007.
Critique Night
by Roger Poppen
Monthly meeting of the Writers Guild. My satiric poem on God's silence is sure to amuse. We move our chairs into a circle, facing one another.
Adele leads off with another variation on an abusive husband who meets a violent end. We know the story and offer supportive comments. Harold, usually silent, provides an account of a firefight in Vietnam. Very authentic, we agree. A newcomer, whose name I miss, reads a tale of a newborn's death. Though twenty years past, it brings tearful quavers to her voice.
My turn. I shrug, admitting I brought nothing tonight.
Roger Poppen began writing fiction after retiring as a professor of behavior analysis. He has completed a novel, for which he is seeking publication, and has published short pieces on-line in flashquake, Long Story Short, and Insolent Rudder.
Haze
by Erica Kennedy
Katie glanced behind her, then across the street where traffic raged, honking, screeching, billowing her skirt with exhaust filled wind. Ice cream, or the bus station? Buses were irrevocable. Scoops of strawberry, however, topped with sprinkles glittering like stars, left her sated, briefly content, thirsty. She pulled out the schedule, dirty, ragged, folded and refolded. Just nine minutes until the next bus left. Katie turned to the cool parlor, following the cold sticky sweet scent, allowed exhaust to catch the schedule out of her hands, lifting it towards dirty, fast moving clouds.
Erica Kennedy has lived in Baton Rouge all her life. She has a degree in Secondary Education with a concentration in English from LSU and was briefly in the field of education. She now works in document control and lives in a condo she affectionately calls her tree house with cats Calvin and Coco.