365 tomorrows

Author : Kathy Kachelries, Staff Writer

They’d followed the grishna since the beginning of time. Their elders described uncountable days and night, each lasting several lifetimes, since the first keeper had been formed from hard-packed snow and melted by the grishna’s breath. They had never neglected their duty. They hibernated with the large creature, curled up in a vast pile of limbs between the grishna’s tusks, and when they woke they gathered food to care for the endless being. It never spoke. It was a god, so it never had to. When they spoke it was in whispers and gestures, mimicking the silent movement of the grishna’s several mouths with the one tongue they possessed, and this was what fascinated the linguists.

The first outsider came during night, while they slept. Before they awoke a half-dozen had arrived, with boxes that trapped voices and forced them to perform at will and other boxes that clicked and whirred, frightening the grishna. Once, it tore through the outsiders’ enclave, reducing their boxes to brightly colored shards, but everything was quickly replaced.

With time, they learned to live with the newcomers. The grishna adjusted to their presence, and the keepers followed suit. They accepted that the new beings must have been charged to follow them in the same way they were charged to follow the grishna, so they did not interfere.

The first word the linguists learned indicated the most solid snow, the kind that could best hold the grishna’s weight. The kind they’d been carved from, at the dawn of time. The second word was the word for heat, particularly the heat of the grishna, though they believed it also applied to fire. After that, the words came quickly, and although the outsiders lacked the limb used to indicate the passage of time, they could communicate their origin.

And the keepers communicated theirs.

More arrived. Too many to count. Again, the grishna was frightened. Again, the grishna adjusted. The linguists offered food in exchange for words spoken into the box, and the keepers no longer foraged. The grishna was fed as well, food that it seemed to prefer to what the keepers had always gathered. The outsiders were no longer outsiders. They became a part of life. Some of the keepers learned the methods of the boxes, some even learned the second language. They were told about the light, how it came from far away, and how the stars did not mark the days of the grishna’s life. New words were created, to describe new ideas and new objects. When the first one was taken away to be studied, he returned with stories that terrified and thrilled the others.

All of them wanted to see the lights and feel the nauseating movement. Many of them did. The elders waited for this to pass, knowing that all things passed, but some of the younger ones never returned. If they did, they wore coverings over their fur in shades no keeper had seen. They no longer hibernated. They spoke words no keeper’s tongue should be able to form. The grishna grew restless. Nobody studied the grishna.

When the elders left, the linguists noted it with interest. The smaller footsteps of the oldest keepers made small indentations in the larger footsteps of the grishna as they walked away from the lights and boxes just before another uncounted nightfall. They’d followed the grishna since the beginning of time. They had never neglected their duty.

Author : Brian Armitage

“He’s up. Turn it on,” someone says. The doctor.

As I open my eyes, the whiteness hits. It’s like I’m having an idea, but it’s too much for my brain to hold. I squeeze my eyes shut and gasp, trying to…

…where am I? The doctor is looking at me, smiling. Confidently. Behind him, the other doctor, holding an implant control. “What’s going on?”

“Always the first thing they forget,” Dr. Meyers says, the one in the back. Like I’m not even in the room. How do I know his name?

Dr. Canton pats me on the knee. I can barely feel it. I’m strapped to the bed at the knees. “Watch the wallscreen, Mr. Daughtry. This video should explain everything. Screen one, play.” The white idea is alight again, and it’s burning… and I can’t remember where my house is. The video starts, and a face pops onto the screen. I jump, and the bed slides against the wall.

It’s me.

“Hey, Mike. It’s me. You. Well, yeah,” the recording says. Chuckles. “But man, soon we’re not gonna be anyone anymore. We’re getting the Parson Treatment.” The recording grins. “It’s all getting erased.”

Another pulse. What’s my last name? What’s my dad’s name? And the recording just grins at me. It starts talking again, and I just gawk. I grip my hair, eyes vibrating. “No, no, no… you dumb bastard. What did you do?”

The doctor in the back of the room laughs aloud. The doctor by the bed shushes him, but he’s trying not to laugh himself.

“…done, you’re not gonna remember anything! Nothing! Not Kiera leaving, not…”

“Kiera left me?” When? I start crying. The white idea roars. Why am I crying?

“…won’t hurt. They say they need you to be awake for the procedure, because of the brain chemistry. It’ll be weird, but… we’ll finally be done.”

What procedure? I can’t remember any… no. Not a Parson Implant. No.

“People say it’s suicide, but it’s not. They’re wrong.” The man in the video clenches his jaw, looks like he’s going to point a finger at the camera, but he doesn’t. Who is he? “We’re finally going to be useful for someone. They’ll use our body, but we won’t have to deal with it anymore.” He tries to smile. “Finally done.”

“85 percent,” says the doctor with the device in his hand.

“Good enough. Go ahead,” says the other.

The doctor’s finger taps the device. What is it-

A white idea rushes at me. It burns, but… it burns, but… A white idea. A white. I try speak. I try stop. Wall man say okay. Is okay? No! Not wanting!

Not wanting.

White.

* * *

“And, done,” said Dr. Meyers. Flatline on all three scales. Nice and clean.

Dr. Canton patted what was Mike Daughtry on the knee again. The patient started, then squinted at his own knee. “Screen one, pause recording.” He waited for the confirmation chime, then burst into laughter. “Oh, man! We’re watching that one again tonight. Did you see that? He forgot his wife left him! Perfect timing.”

“Perfect timing,” Meyers repeated, shaking his head. “Classic. We should probably think of a better excuse to wake them up first, though. Someone’s not gonna buy it. But thank you, Mr. Daughtry, for totally buying it.”

The patient had turned toward Meyers. His jaw moved slightly, once.

Author : Tim Hatton

The hull was a likely prospect. Nothing much else caught his eye. The inside seemed neglected - full of potential indeed, but sorely neglected. There were also certain crucial updates missing from the internal computer system. The map array was as recent as his salesman’s overcoat. Jack noted with slight surprise that even his home world was uncharted.

“And you said this craft was used for freight delivery – “

“Yes, yes,” the unsavory salesman injected, cutting Jack off in mid-sentence, “not a sturdier hull anywhere, sir. Max load exceeds 23 tons.”

Jack moved a short distance to the left in order to avoid the spittle shower that erupted every time the sleaze-bag spoke.

“It doesn’t seem to have made very many deliveries, though,” muttered Jack, “the map entries only cover the nearest seven systems…”

Despite his tone, Jack rather appreciated the virgin nature of this particular Trellis Shipyards Courier Class. He had always admired the smooth curves and easy movement of the Trellis ships. Imagining his first craft to be from that elite stock brought a slight tremble to his hand.

The trouble with Jack was his own virgin nature. He had never piloted his own ship into space and the uncertainty ripped his confidence apart. He had never seen a terrible accident or been in any firefight. No, there were no terrible memories. As of yet, there were no memories at all. He was simply too insecure. Nothing else brought so much wonder and so much terror to him like the thought of striking out on his first voyage. His life was not exactly fulfilling there on Phams, but at least it was safe and steady.

“I’m sorry Mr. Gantry, I just don’t think today’s the day…” Jack began to make for the exit. He cast a sorrowed glance back at the Courier and tried to block out the nagging protestations of Gantry, the salesman. He reached the gate and looked down briefly at the cluster of signs on its grate. A yellow and blue ad caught his attention. It flashed a message at him; “Meet you’re true love today! You only get one chance at life, don’t let this opportunity slip…” Jack stood dazed.

Sure life was safe, secure and easy on Phams, but to hell with Phams! The universe was out there. Just a few miles away, adventure, uncertainty, thrill and peril was resting, staring at him with a thousand bright eyes cast against a never-ending onyx sheet. What a waste he was!

He turned around and resolutely strode back to Gantry. Without a word, he transferred in the required funds and firmly, wonderfully, pressed his thumb on the scammer and felt the lasers probe his pupils. A green light confirmed his identity, and Gantry, now smiling genuinely, passed Jack the slot disk that belonged to the Courier.

“She’s all yours Jack,” said Gantry.

With a smile and a thrill of fear, he climbed the hatch into the heart of his mistress and resolved to express his undying love for the universe to which he belonged with every new journey he endeavored upon.

Author : Amy Monroe

By way of introduction: Sweit was the one who kissed like a file cabinet and she was the one who kissed like a plate of raw liver. Rays of light came through the subway ruins, skating through the upper Bronx and into Westchester, and they caught Mardi blinking, stretching, falling asleep. The sun was always out; the sun wasn’t special, but the way it lit in her hair—it seemed like a reason to wait till Poughkeepsie to wake her.

“I think it’s beautiful to us because we know it’s never going to change,” Mardi said, hitching her skirt, talking about the sun.

Walking, they saw a man turning a “CLOSED” sign, the old sign, the “CLOSED after dusk” sign.

“Do you think anyone would even know dusk, now?”

“What, baby?” Her eyes were closed, face tipped up.

“That sign. Does anyone alive today remember dusk?”

“It was when the sun went down. Come on.”

“You know that I’m never really complaining about you.”

“Of course not. Hey, there—that guy there—d’you see? He’s leaking.”

“Were you still little when they changed the sun? Did you hear all the adults complaining and not understand?”

“By the time I could remember it was like this. But leaking! It was sliding down his ankles and dripping.” She rubbed the toe of her shoes in the dust, frustrated.

“I’ve seen it before. They’re still fixing all the kinks with liquid. Not all of us are perfect.”

“But you missed it. That’s the kind of thing I mean. You miss so much with sim eyes. They’re not made for—” She scratched deeper, dug a trough. “They’re not made for living, really.”

“Does it bother you?”

“No, baby, no.”

“Because Jimsum has some techs. I could be in on Saturday and noticing malfunctions with you on Sunday.”

“I don’t want you to change what you don’t want to change.”

She said this, but her eyes, the real eyes, her secret real eyes, they dripped all night.

Sweit went home and read about Anastasia, the other fakes, and he thought about his secret real girl, his girl who was not a file cabinet or made in any sense. He held his sim-fingers over his face, flickered them in front of his eyes and stared dimly at the blur they created.

Sweit called a number in the morning. Excited Korean on the other end—Jimsum’s girls waiting for the old country to call.

“Jimsum. I need to talk to Jimsum.”

More Korean, this time angry.

“Sorry, hon. Jimsum, please.”

Jimsum came on all laconic, “Techs.”

“Why haven’t you told your girls that Korea is underwater?”

“I can’t fucking speak Korean.”

Jimsum’s excuse for an excuse.

“I wanted to talk about some eye tech.”

“We got blue, green, zoom lens, yellow cat-eye.”

“You’re joking. I could get better from the hookers on Canal Street, man.”

“It’s what we’ve got.”

“Fuck it. I’m going to Canal. I’ll see you.”

Sweit fast-sim-thinking, he ran there. He knew Jimsum’d heard about Canal’s recent cleanouts and the hookers having fled to the subway tunnels; he knew before he saw Jimsum’s girl at the Korean grocery.

“Eyes? Jimsum say Saturday for eyes?”

She articulated, hating the English words in every syllable. “He say no-ow.”

“They’re on your communications?” Sweit asked instead of saying hello.

“Just the in-and-outs. I guess you want the meat eyes.”

Jimsum was laughing while he put him under.

Mardi almost screamed when he came rolling up to her in the alley, with those horrible wet-bloody eyes.

“What color are they?” she said, and started to cry.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

Being a temporal border guard is an okay job. It pays the bills.

It seemed like a cool perk when the position was first created after the The Great Restart of 205?. You’d get to work, do your eight hours, and then get put back into the time stream a millisecond after you’d left.

You would be tired, though, and end up sleeping the day away and then you’d be up all night. Unless you were single or married to another Temp Guard, it sucked. Plus, it aged you a little quicker. Those eight hours didn’t pass for others. After a while, you would be ahead of everyone else in physical decrepitude.

So now, it’s just like all the other jobs. You work eight hours, they put you back into the time stream eight hours after you come to work. It gives the illusion of normalcy that most humans need to cope and survive.

It’s head-bending, really.

There’s a political movement afoot that doesn’t respect the temporal borders. They think it’s all just a nefarious plan by the temporal government to restrict people’s ability to research the past and investigate what they call ‘The Truth’. They use guerilla time sliders to flit about all over the place.

To their credit, these ‘tempests’ generally do seem to leave the time line somewhat intact, keeping interference to a minimum, not a lot of fuss, but it’s the principle, really. If they were to do something in a non-interference time zone accidentally, the consequences could be retroactively catastrophic.

Not that we’d know that difference. That’s why the Temp Guard doesn’t hire thinkers. Me, I don’t get bored easy. I’m great and doing nothing, filling out forms, following orders, or just staring at the wall.

It’s the ones that start to really try to figure out how it all works, what it all means, and whether or not this reality is really the real reality that start to slide off the rails eventually.

It’s actually a rogue Temp Guard that’s leading the Tempests right now. Alazariah Hackson. Reputedly insane but if you ask me, a guy would have to pretty smart to wage a careful non-interference war of attrition with the government.

Myself, I actually take comfort in the fact that I’d never have any idea about retroactive changes.

Like if I woke up tomorrow with one eye and no children, I wouldn’t even know that there had been a difference.

I’m happy enough sipping on my sugarwater and wanding my tachyon detector over the folks coming through the borders and filling out the forms. I’m not even tempted to think about the changes that could be happening around me every day.

Author : Patrica Stewart, Staff Writer

“It’s not a great analogy, Professor, but think of it this way,” explained the chronotechnician, “time flows like a river. Something we call a ‘world line,’ which is the sequential path of an object through space-time. I can select any object, say you, and follow your ‘world line’ back through time, and project the image on the Chronoloviewer screen. Would you like a demonstration?”

“Absolutely. Show me what I was doing yesterday, at exactly this time.”

The chronotechnician spent five minutes entering the appropriate data into the control panel, and then activated the Chronoloviewer. Although there was some noise in the image, the Professor saw himself at the lectern in front of his 10:00 Paleontology class. The notes on the computer screen at the front of the class were clearly from yesterday’s lecture. “Wow, that’s incredible. Do you have sound?”

“Sorry, Professor, not yet. Would you like to go further back? Maybe see if O. J. killed Nicole?”

“Hardly necessary,” he replied with a trace of disgust. “Can you go back 65 million years, to the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction, and show me what killed the dinosaurs?”

“Huh, I guess so. I believe I can follow Earth’s world line.” This time the data entry took about an hour, and the image was slightly noisier, but the dinosaurs on the screen revealed they were viewing the correct time. However, the scene was right out of a sci-fi B movie. Streamlined aircraft, firing energy weapons, were hunting the dinosaurs. The forests were being set ablaze, and all the animals were being driven into large nets and transported up to gigantic hovering saucers. The Professor didn’t know what to make of these images. Why were space aliens hunting the dinosaurs? Was it for food, or sport? Did the aliens cause the mass extinctions? Maybe the Chicxulub impact was a big coincidence, and had nothing to do with the actual extinction of the dinosaurs. The fires the aliens were setting could explain some of the contradictory soot evidence found by Paleontologists. “Quick,” he said, “go to the Triassic mass extinction, around 195 million years ago.”

It was the same scene, although the ships were visibly more primitive. But this time the aliens were using pulsating energy beams from orbiting space ships, concentrating most of their firepower in the centerline of Pangaea. The continent seemed to split in half as horrific lava flows were driving the animals toward large metal cages. Shuttlecraft were ferrying the trapped animals into space. The Professor realized that the lava trench could be the start of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. And, there was archeological evidence of extreme lava flows coincident with the Triassic mass extinction. This was extraordinary!

Over the next six hours, they viewed the Permian-Triassic extinction, the Late Devonian extinction, and the Ordovician-Silurian extinction. The scenarios were always the same; alien spaceships harvesting Earth’s animal population. “Nobody will believe this,” mumbled the Professor.

“Ah, sir, I don’t want to be an alarmist,” said the chronotechnician, “but this could be very bad news for us. I’ve done some quick back-of-the-envelope calculations; if you divide the dates of these mass extinctions by 32.5 million years, you get whole numbers: 2, 6, 8, 11, and 13. It’s like these aliens live on a planet or space station that approaches our solar system every 32.5 million years. I’ll bet there were minor-extinctions in between the major ones, say at 32.5, 98.5, 130, or 162.5 million years ago. If I’m right, it’s been 32.5 million years since their last visit. The hunting parties are due back at any time.”

Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer

“What is it that’s troubling you?” The doctor could clearly see the discomfort in the young mans face as he wrote ‘Anxiety’ on his steno pad.

“It’s getting harder and harder to go outside. It’s wide open spaces, they terrify me.” He clutched at the seat cushion beneath him, head down, eyes haggard beneath rough cut bangs, “I had to hide under an umbrella to get to the subway, and I picked you because you’re in a tower over the tube station, isn’t that weird?”

He noted the cloudless sky through the window. ‘Agoraphobia,’ he wrote on his pad, ‘possible Anablephobia’. “How long has this been affecting you?”

“All my life, but not like this. The older I get, the more debilitating it’s become.”

“How old are you exactly?” he asked, adding ‘Progressive’ to his notes.

“Nineteen.” He released the chair only briefly with one hand to rub at his nose, “Twenty on the twenty eighth of September.”

The doctor scribbled ‘Libra’ as he continued. “Born here in St.Louis?”

“I was. I moved to Phoenix when I was seven to live with my aunt, but I’ve been moving towards home for a while now. Trains mostly, buses. Not sure why exactly, I guess I just wanted to go home.”

“Come home,” the doctor corrected him. “So - you’re a blackout baby then?”

“Yeah, parents bored in the dark when the comet hit.” He shifted, uncomfortable. “I guess there were a lot of September babies in twenty nine.”

“Why not fly home? Surely that would have been faster?” ‘Possible aerophobia’ he noted.

“It’s not just being outside,” he hooked one sneaker behind the chair leg, “it’s hard to explain. I’m afraid of falling.”

“Ah, Philophobia,” he spoke out-loud as he added the word to his notes, “it’s the fear of falling. Not uncommon.”

“Well, not falling the way you think. If I look up, I’m quite sure I’ll fall into the sky.”

The doctor paused. “Falling up? That is unusual,” he clicked the pen against his lip, “anything else unusual? Strange dreams, other notable triggers?”

“Sometimes I dream that I’m alone in a field, and the sky closes around me and swallows me up. It get’s really dark, then really bright. I usually wake up soaked. I think I scream out-loud.”

“Are you staying with family here?” He struggled trying to find a word for ‘fear of falling into the sky’, finally giving up and writing that down instead.

“I’m staying with my mom, out by Forest Park.”

“Your father…?”

“I never knew my dad, never even seen a picture. Mom used to say the comet made me, before she stopped talking about it.”

“Hmm.” He wrote ‘abandonment issues’ before continuing. “You’ve talked about this with your mom?”

“My mom doesn’t talk. That’s why I went to live with my aunt. When I showed back up at my mom’s house she wrote ‘go home’ on the wall and hasn’t so much as looked at me since. She stays in her room, mostly, drawing pictures on the walls.”

“Pictures of what, exactly?” He stopped writing and looked up.

“I don’t know, planets and stars and stuff. She’s a bit of a nutter, but she is my mum, you know?”

“Well then,” putting down his pad, “we’re out of time, but come next week at the same time, and if you can get your mother to join you, I’ll see if I can’t block off two sessions.”

“Next week?” He met the doctors gaze for just a moment before looking back at the floor, slumping. “Somehow I think I might be gone by then.”

Author : J.R. Blackwell, Staff Writer

She fought me again yesterday. It made me feel like a monster. I tried the gentle approach but she refused, so I had to take her by force. It was, as usual, satisfying and depressing.

Afterwards, I hid in the forest and slept. I’m afraid she’ll try to kill me if I sleep out in the open. I tracked her and caught up quickly. If we don’t get back to the compound soon, the others, my people and hers, will assume we are dead. I imagine them dividing our meager possessions.

Today I brought her roast rabbit. Rabbits were rare for the first year after The Fallout, but now I’m finding more of them. Some of them are oddly mutated; missing a leg, or an extra ear, but they are still good for roasting. I left it next to her while she slept. Maybe it will help to mend things a little.

Later, I found her sitting cross-legged on a large rock. She was holding a stick she had chiseled to a point.

“Are you going to try to kill me again?” I asked her.

“I thought about it all day,” she said. “But no. I’m not. I just want to know why you’re doing this to me. Why won’t you let me go?”

She knows the answer, I’ve explained it over and over. “It’s because you’re young, fertile, unaffected by the radiation of the Fallout. It’s because my people have only found sixteen fertile women, and we can’t afford to lose a single one. I want to protect you and the children you’ll have.”

“You won’t protect them. You’ll eat them,” she said, angry, clutching her stick.

I shrugged. “I can’t stop you from seeing it that way.” Then I sat down next to her. I didn’t try to touch her. We were silent, watching the stars. They are clearer now that the city lights have gone out.

“Before all this,” she said, motioning to the diseased trees, “I was a chemist. Now you want me to be a baby factory. I need my life to be about more than that. You have forever. I only have sixty years - less now. Maybe there are other humans out here. Maybe I can find them.”

“I could help you,” I said suddenly. Even if I carried her back I don’t think she’d stay. She’d try to escape or kill herself.

I placed my cheek to the ground and listened. Her heartbeat was loud, little animals moved and the compound, weeks away, was on the horizon on my senses. But there was something else too, in the dessert. Movement. “I don’t know if it’s even human,” I said. “It could be dangerous.”

“Or it could be human,” she said. Her face softened. For the first time, I felt like she actually saw me as someone in need. “I can’t promise that I will ever accept you.”

“Just don’t fight me.”

“I can’t promise I won’t,” she said. “But I can try.” She moved close to me then, and put her arms around my shoulders. I kissed her cheek, her jaw. I was elated. When I bit her, she gasped, but she did not fight me. It was so quiet. I could hear her blood, her breath, the movement of flesh and bone. It was the sweetest drink I had since the Fallout.

It was recently asked of me to describe to an audience of writers what flash fiction was. When I read my first piece of flash, I couldn’t begin to answer that question, and now after writing almost nothing but flash for the past two years it’s still hard for me to define. I find that while I’ve developed a set of skills to create flash, I can only really define it by the process by which I create it. I start with a complete and fully formed short story, and then ruthlessly carve away most of it. I consider the editing rule I was given when I started down this path; ‘Cut all of what you don’t need and half of what you do.’ What remains is the essence of that whole story, with all it’s structure and key elements intact, but devoid of anything that doesn’t absolutely have to be there. That which remains, is flash. Looking for something more substantial in the way of a definition, I asked the person who’d given me that editing advice, Kathy Kachelries. It was Kathy who conceived of 365tomorrows, a web site singularly focused on short science and speculative flash fiction, and she had this to say:

“The most concise and widely-cited example of flash fiction is the story Ernest Hemingway penned, allegedly to settle a bar bet: “For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.” Despite the limitations of its length, this story, framed as an advertisement, satisfies all of the requirements of a short story: protagonist, conflict, and resolution. A reader imagines the person who wrote the ad: a parent torn apart by the loss of a stillborn or miscarried child. The reader senses the conflict: an incomprehensible feeling of loss, made all the more poignant by the fact that it is not directly addressed. Even the resolution is contained within that six-word masterpiece. By framing it as an advertisement, Hemingway allows us to see the protagonist’s coping mechanism: an attempt to distance him or herself from the loss by selling the only physical evidence that such a loss exists.
Not all short prose is flash fiction. Unlike the vignette or the prose poem, flash fiction adheres to the same conventions as a short story or novel. As demonstrated above, flash fiction gives readers a protagonist and a central conflict, and directs them to a resolution. Due to the constraints of the form, some elements can be implied rather than expressly stated, but a story that begins in media res still holds the shape of its unwritten beginning.

This is the acid test of art. Imagine a beautifully eloquent story, and imagine a vat of hydrochloric acid. The hiss, the sound of destruction as everything you wrote is submerged. The disintegration, chemical reactions and bubbles as air returns to air. What remains, when everything superfluous has burned away? Flash fiction. The fewer words used, the greater the impact of each one.

Flash fiction is not the future of literature, nor is it the past, though it carries elements of both. As writers, we have learned to make things beautiful, to shield them in enclaves of eloquence, but in its barest form art is guerilla warfare. In this modern, digitized world the gap between readers and those who can’t allow time for such a luxury continues to grow. Someone who believes they cannot read for pleasure will not pick up a full length novel, no matter how highly their favorite newspaper recommends it. Most likely, they can’t even find a moment to stop at a bookstore between meetings. What they can do, however, is click on a link offered by a friend, coworker, or website. This is why flash fiction, one of the most ancient forms of prose, has found new life in the digital era.

Length requirements for flash fiction vary widely, and none are universally accepted. James Thomas, in his introduction to Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories (the first published anthology of its kind) defines flash fiction as under 750 words, though other compilations and literary journals vary in their requirements. Some people draw a distinction between flash fiction and sudden fiction, which can be up to five pages in length according to Robert Shapard, an editor of Sudden Fiction: American Short Stories. The best definition of flash fiction might be a reappropriation of Edgar Allen Poe’s definition of the short story, set forth in his 1846 essay The Philosophy of Composition. Poe believed that all literary works, with the exception of the novel, should be read in one sitting. In Poe’s time, a sitting could consist of a half hour or more, but now most of us find our sittings confined to coffee breaks, the time between bus stops, and other moments stolen from the sprinting pace of daily life. The needs of readers are changing, and if writers don’t adapt to those needs, we risk losing thousands—even millions—of potential audience members.

Flash fiction is fiction with its teeth bared and its claws extended, lithe and muscular with no extra fat. It pounces in the first paragraph, and if those claws aren’t embedded in the reader by the start of the second, the story began a paragraph too soon. There is no margin for error. Every word must be essential, and if it isn’t essential, it must be eliminated.

A busy reader may resist a lengthy story and return to their budgets and spreadsheets, but at 600 words or less, flash fiction requires less time than a trip to the water cooler. The writing has been acid-scorched and only the essential remains: without the inconvenience of length, the reader will follow a story to the final paragraph.

Although a vignette would have offered a thought-provoking snapshot, a reader hungers more than a thought exercise. For longer than written language has existed, the human psyche has ached for narrative. Storytellers were once considered indispensable members of society. The art hasn’t changed. The need hasn’t changed. Why have we allowed ourselves to become a luxury? The answer is simple: we’ve been satisfied to have an audience, regardless of whether or not that audience needs us. For the last decade, we’ve been preaching to the choir.

Fiction is both needed and desired in our modern society, though the people who need it the most don’t have the time to flip through a handful of novels per month. With flash fiction, we can fit a story into that small, stolen moment. As the creator of the flash fiction site 365tomorrows.com, I’ve received dozens of emails from people thankful to have something to read on their PDAs in the quiet moments before meetings begin. I’ve communicated with waitresses who print out our stories to flip through in the lulls before their first tables arrive. I’ve spoken with tow truck drivers, emergency room interns, and dozens of other people who consider themselves too busy to undertake a novel, and the message is universal: people want to read. Our job, as artists and storytellers, is to make reading as accessible as possible.”

If Kathy had been left alone with those words a little longer, she may have edited them down to ‘protagonist, conflict, resolution. 600 words.’ I might edit it further to one. ‘Essential.’

Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer

Kate was lucky. Or so she kept telling herself.

Out of the whole world, she was the only one who had both the right kind of sight and the right kind of mind. It was a self-made mantra, one that rolled across her thoughts, looped back on itself and changed, mutated and grew with each iteration. The words spilled out of her, and made themselves real.

Right sight. Right mind. Luck. Lucky. Chance alignment. Good fortune. Fate. Destiny. Consistently high random numbers. Roll of a die. Roll of eighty dice. Kate be nimble, Kate be quick. Kate got to save the world. They can’t see them so you have to save them from themselves. The knife works. Save them. Kate be nimble, Kate’s got luck.

She was walking fast down a commercial street, trying not to attract too much attention to herself. There was an infestation nearby. The knowledge of it compressed her thoughts like a cast-iron circlet. It was impossible to ignore, an itch that desperately needed scratching.

A restaurant had spilled out onto the street: people sat at small tables, drinking coffee. She stopped by the establishment’s window, and saw her quarry.

The window made a satisfying crash when she threw the table through it. She jumped through the gap, and quickly scanned the room. Diners at tables. Twenty-two horrors and twice as many of the doglike terrors stared at her from all around the room. They growled, sensing the danger that she represented.

She launched herself out into the room, dodging between the evenly-spaced tables, and around the serving staff. She drew the long knife that had been hidden under her jacket. It was a rudimentary weapon at best, but special. She’d spent two long weeks working on it, changing the knife on a fundamental level so that it would damage the beasts.

She pinwheeled, the knives catching and breaking the terrors as they flung themselves at her. The diners stared at her with wide eyes, forks halfway to their mouths. Horrors roared their hate and menace, gnashing their too-many-teeth. Kate fought with reckless abandon, trusting the mantra, her luck.

Her circuit of the room finished by the door to the kitchen. All around, the broken bodies of the horrors lay on the carpet, slowly beginning to disintegrate. The evidence would be gone in a couple of minutes.

Andrew straightened his tie, and minutely adjusted the tiny enamel badge on his lapel. He stepped through the wreckage of the window, saw the shocked diners, and the damage.

“Did a woman come through here? She would have been acting quite oddly.”

A waiter close to him nodded dumbly.

“Thankyou.” Andrew stepped further into the restaurant, the broken glass crunching under his immaculate shoes.

“In case you’re interested,” Andrew spoke slowly, looking around the room at the silent diners, “her name is Kate. And none of this is her fault. There was an accident, a long time ago. An experiment went badly wrong, and her conscious mind began to drift out of control. Her mind extrapolates up from tiny clues in the way people speak and act: she sees terrible things, embodied as monsters.”

A murmur circulated around the room as people began to unfreeze. A few returned to their meals. There was a sudden crash from the kitchen: it sounded like a meat freezer exploding.

“If you’ll excuse me,” Andrew smiled at the stunned faces, “duty calls.”