Issue 54 March 2018 Flash Fiction Online March 2018

Dad still comes into my room at night, even though he’s dead. I don’t know why he bothers, but he does. First time it happened, I thought I imagined him. But I can hear his breathing, can feel the mattress shift when he sits down on my bed next to Winston, who purrs and tucks his paws in neatly beneath his ginger-tabby chest.

“Tell me about your day, Angelica,” he’d say when I was little, and I’d tell him about school and Mom and all the stuff no one else wanted to hear. Sometimes I still do, but not tonight. Tonight, I slip my hand under the pillow, grasping the moulded grip of the gun.

In the other room, mom is screaming in her sleep—wordless with rage or pain or something that is maybe both, impossible to tell apart. I don’t know if Dad is listening. Mom used to call him a loser and a fucking disgrace. Maybe that’s why he left, but it was my fault, too. He worried about me, even when he should have worried about himself.

The day he left, Dad asked me who I’d be if I weren’t scared. I didn’t answer. I was only ten, and what kind of question is that anyway?

* * *

At breakfast, I ask Mom what she dreamt last night.

“Can’t remember,” she answers, but I know it’s a lie.

“You’ll feel better if you talk about it,” I say, trying to be funny, all pop-psych and teenage sass.

“But you won’t,” she says, pouring herself another coffee.

I wish I could tell Mom about Dad, but since she never mentions him, I don’t either. Besides, she hasn’t been drinking lately, and I don’t want to set her off.

* * *

I don’t go to school after breakfast. Instead, I end up at the park with the gun in my backpack. No one’s there except the crows picking through the garbage.

In the daylight, the gun doesn’t even look real. It’s a prop, a toy. But holding it makes me feel like there’s a way out, after all.

Bridges and Emmaline find me later in the grass. They’re holding hands, and Emmaline pretends she’s my friend today. Some days, she pretends she isn’t. Bridges is OK, I guess, with a smile so pure you barely notice the acne scars tugging at his face. He’s almost seventeen, but too stupid to know he shouldn’t hang with me or Emmaline.

Emmaline grabs my backpack, as if she somehow knows I put the gun in there. She pulls it out, teeth and metal glinting.

“It’s your dad’s, right?”

“Did your mom let you have it?” Bridges asks, in a hush.

When I hesitate, Emmaline says, “Of course. Everyone knows Angelica’s mom doesn’t give a shit.”

Emmaline aims at one of the crows, fingering the trigger and safety. There’s a bang, so loud we holler, and the crow turns to blood and feathers, the air sharp with gunpowder and hot metal.

“Angelica, you psycho! It’s loaded!”

We’re still laughing when Emmaline spots him: ginger-tabby, softly-treading paws. Winston.

Emmaline takes aim again, giving me a sidelong glance, eyes challenging me to stop her. I think of Winston purring beneath my hand. I think of punching Emmaline until her nose breaks. Then she laughs and dumps the gun into my backpack, smile sharp like broken glass.

* * *

Mom comes into the bathroom when I’m brushing my teeth that night. At first, I think she’s going to rip into me for not going to school. Then I realize she’s been crying. Drinking, too.

“You all right?” she asks, tousling my hair, awkward, like she’s not quite sure how to do it.

“Yeah. Fine.”

She nods, pretending she believes me.

* * *

“Who would you be if you weren’t scared, Angelica?”

It’s the first time Dad speaks to me since he died.

In the dark, he’s just a silhouette, but I know if I turned on the light, he’d be sitting there with half his head blown off, just like I found him in the shed.

The sound of my heart, of blood through veins, is loud and inescapable, and I wish my heart and the whole damn world would go silent. I think of Emmaline and Bridges holding hands, of gunpowder and feathers, and I sink into the mire of before-before-before. I want to scream at Dad, as loud as Mom, but there are only shadows of unspoken words left on my tongue.

Why’d you do it in the shed, Dad? Didn’t you realize I’d come looking for you? That I’d notice the missing key, the padlock hanging open? That I’d pull open the door?

I close my eyes, and my pain tastes like salt and steel.

Was it like this for you, Dad? Gun barrel scraping teeth, trigger-finger trembling. Was this what you felt when you decided to leave me?

Dad grasps my arm, pulling the gun away from my face. His touch is cold and dry—bone and whispers, silence and absence.

Who would you be if you weren’t scared, Dad?

Would you still be alive?

He lets go of me. I let go of the gun.

When I open my eyes, Dad’s gone, but Mom’s there. First, I think I’m imagining her, but I can hear her laboured breathing, feel the mattress shift when she moves, her body so loaded with booze and pain she can neither cry nor sleep. She exhales my name, and in the silent presence of everything she doesn’t say next, I realize she’s as scared as I am.

I lie very still as Winston curls up between us—keeping me warm, keeping me here, even when nothing else does—and I wait for Mom to leave. She doesn’t.

Maybe she stays because we’re the same, Mom and me: two ghosts, haunting what’s left of this world, this hollow space of grief and anger, of regret and love unspoken. I wonder, who might we be, who might we become, if we’re not scared when we get up tomorrow?

My dragon, Rolly, died. It’s all right—I’m not sad about it, whatever anyone says. I’m tougher than that. She was old and grumpy. Her time had come.

The good thing is, one dead dragon makes a shed-load of dragon meat and that is impressive in the right circles.

As soon as Rolly passed, our nearest butcher, Mrs. Gaveffel, threw herself on our doorstep.

“I’ll give you half of any takings from the meat and you’ll get no blood on your hands,” she said bluntly.

My mum and I stood side-by-side and looked at one another. Mum had a saying she was fond of: “In tricky moments, Dyna, ’tis better to talk with your eyes than your cakehole.” On this occasion, the short eyeball exchange said that Rolly had cost us a fortune in livestock over the years, and we needed to make the money back if I was ever going to get an education.

“We want two thirds, or we go to Wright over in Haverstock,” my mum eventually replied, though she hated Wright.

“Aye, aye,” Gaveffel said after some muttering to herself. “Two thirds will go your way.”

* * *

They came to haul Rolly away later that afternoon. Ten men and women came along with three carts they had rigged together and some horses to pull it all.

The hardest bit would be getting Rolly onto the carts. They asked me to help and suggested I take up position near the head for the old heave-ho, so I could be a part of the farewell.

Whatever. It also meant I didn’t have to clean out the chickens.

So there I was, when someone near the back haunches stumbled. Rolly’s body slipped forward. Instead of carefully sliding her onto the carts, we dropped her with a thud. She whacked my shoulder on the way down.

Tears came to my eyes. And once they’d checked Rolly had landed all right, everyone started up with, “Poor Dyna, so hard for you, you must miss her so much,” and I just thought, Shut up! They didn’t know the first thing about us, about the way she growled at me when I sent her off scouting or how I’d wake Rolly when she overslept, with a quick poke from the hay fork. Anyway, my shoulder just stung from the impact—that was all.

When the cart was ready to go, I went as well, to see the damn thing through.

* * *

Mrs Gaveffel had a large wooden shed at the front of her homestead where she did her butchery, but it was barely big enough for pigs, never mind dragons.

The team pulled Rolly down and left her by the door. Her skin was rough and callused; it almost looked too heavy for her frame, as if it would slough off without much effort.

I followed Mrs Gaveffel into the shed without thinking. It was clean, but smelled bloody, like musty old coins. Hooks dangled down from the ceiling. Blades were set out neatly on the side.

“Will the meat be any good?” I asked without thinking.

The first answer was a shrug. Then, “She’s old and thin so it’s likely to be on the stringy side, but dragon meat is expensive, if that’s what you mean.”

I had no idea what I meant.

“Will it be hard work?” I asked.

“I haven’t butchered a dragon before,” came the reply, “but I never met an animal I couldn’t take apart before, either.”

That’s when I started throwing up.

My mum said Mrs Gaveffel was angrier than a dog who’d swallowed a bee. I just remember sawdust being thrown on top of the mess I’d made, being dragged out by the arm shortly afterwards, shame and embarrassment coursing through me, burning my cheeks.

* * *

Five weeks later, Mrs Gaveffel brought the meat over and showed my mother how to store it.

There wasn’t much. We got a small piece for the sake of it almost, to say we had eaten dragon, that we had owned one, that we were nearly somebodies. It didn’t make a lot of sense if you said it out loud. But that’s what my mum and I thought, glancing at each other now and then as we prepared the joint and placed it in our oven. Roast Rolly.

We served her up with sweet potato and plum sauce, and at first Rolly tasted great. And then I missed her so much that every bite was bitter. Suddenly I was crying and I didn’t know why.

“No shame in tears,” my mum commented, though I hadn’t said a thing about it. “You didn’t always rub along so well, but she was a faithful companion to the end.”

All true. But then I recalled the time she scorched a hillside of sheep before I could shout, “Whoa there!” and I was pretty sure she’d hate all this wailing.

I wiped my tears away, picked up my fork, and decided to remember Rolly the best I could, in life and in death.

It was what she would have wanted.

Spencer Ellsworth is, first and foremost, a fan of FXXK WRITING but is also the author of the Starfire Trilogy from Tor.com, beginning with A Red Peace and Shadow Sun Seven, released in 2017, and concluding on February 27th with Memory’s Blade. You can read up on him and subscribe to his newsletter on his site, spencerellsworth.com.

JSR: Let’s destroy the myths of the writing life… Where are you right now and what are you wearing????

SGE: I can tell you neither of these things! Okay, I’m actually… at work. On lunch. Wearing a sensible pullover from Costco.

JSR: Fancy! And a writer who has a day job. What are the odds? Tell the good people what you do to afford the lifestyle that allows you to write space fantasy?

SGE: Buy clothes at Costco, for starters. I work at a small college. I am the one-man, Distance Learning department. And I teach a lot.

JSR: Pretty sure my socks are Costco. Now, most interviews will tell tales of salad days and always wanting to be a writer, but here we will be doing something different. We will be trading blows via questions and answers to cut to the heart of being working writers who have ten courses or great kids to take care of. First! Spencer, what’s the WORST part of being a debut writer?

SGE: I started out as a short story writer, and as a short story writer, one has a lot of ups and downs—Yay! My story is out!—Boo! No one cares about short stories!—Yay! Someone, anyone read it!—Boo! They didn’t like it.

A novel release from a major publisher is all the above dialed WAY, WAY UP. There are way more reviews and way more readers, and there are way more chances to feel like you’ve utterly failed and will never publish anything again.

So when a Publisher’s Weekly reviewer disliked my book enough to get the main characters’ genders wrong, I couldn’t defend it by thinking, “Well, no one reads that.” People definitely read PW reviews. Someone simply copy-pasted the PW review into Goodreads, actually. At the same time, it was much more encouraging to see the good reviews in places that people did read—Tor.com, Barnes & Noble, and writers I actually admire, like Kameron Hurley & Tobias Buckell, randomly tweeting that they liked it.

But the WORST part is different for everyone—what’s the worst part of being a debut writer for Jay?

JSR: The worst part gets funnier as we push away from the launch (which proves comedy is tragedy plus time). I am hated and loved for the same reasons. For some, a novel with sex in it made it unacceptable… despite the title, the plot, and the clear indication in the blurb that sexy things would happen. At the same time, I’m hated most for being “progressive” in pulp. My hero isn’t racist or sexist! Between these poles is MY fave review, from Kirkus, which accused me of BEING the main character Brimstone (i.e. he has a leering eye, which means so does the author!). Sigh.

SGE: That’s annoying especially because I liked how Brimstone unabashedly embraced that pulpy voice. It’s a particular kind of thing, and I like how it sets us up for a certain set of expectations that don’t necessarily pay off in the way we expect. But of course, when a book signals clearly what kind of book it’ll be, some people immediately see it as every other book in that category. And of course, authorial intent is usually what readers tell us it is.

JSR: Har! As if my intent matters! So as a teacher with a full course load, leading a department, and being a husband and father, do you still have daydreams of being ONLY a writer? And if so, knock it off!

SGE: Yep, of course. The first time I read FXXK WRITING I printed off the “Kill your porn dreams” quote and stuck it to my wall. But it would be nice just to be able to do this shit full time, eh?

JSR: It would be… until you see how many people burn out and collapse and hate themselves because they could, and then could not, do it. I had to shake off the BE RICH AND ONLY WRITE bullshit because it was killing me. I replaced it with MAKE THE FUCKING MOST OUT OF IT AS YOU CAN… and things got better, psychology- and career-wise.

Which begs the question: what’s the biggest fail you’ve had as a writer, and what did you do in the wake of the HOLYFUCKINGSHIT moment when it happened? Short story or novel or craft-wise? Ever send Gordon Van Gelder hate mail???

SGE: My novels are only a few months old, so in a year I might say that my first trilogy was a major fail! Ain’t that fun?

Professionally, my first should-have-been-high-profile, short story sale ended up being a weird rejection. I won a contest that was supposed to lead to publication in an anthology. Mine was the only story the judges loved that the anthology editor ever rejected.

Personally, way back in 2012, I had sworn by blood and thunder to finish a novel in time to pitch to my now-editor during a summer workshop. Because 2011 was my “evil year,” I never finished it, kept on writing it long after it died on the page, and told my editor, “I was going to finish something for you, and it got so bad it made me sick.”

I did send her A Red Peace three years later, but it was tough to admit that, man. I bought into the cult of the tough guy, the glory of the deadline, the infallibility of my own production.

Have YOU ever sent GVG hate mail?

JSR: No, came close with some others. Never did it because it’s professionally stupid, so I’ve probably ranted in a journal about how cruel and unfair things are until I realized no one cares and this isn’t productive.

SGE: You’re a teacher, as am I. Have you ever experienced the issue that so many teachers (usually career creative writing profs) complain about, where teaching robs the well for writing?

JSR: Yes. Much of teaching is GIVING creative ideas and support to help others build something that requires expert guidance. It’s a similar well, at least for me. So when I was teaching sixty hours a week, six days a week, I gave up on writing. Didn’t give a shit. I only did it when that labor pulled back. And granted, giving up meant only writing two novels in two years because someone ELSE asked me for stuff. There is a different switch that flips when someone says I WILL PAY YOU FOR YOUR WORK as opposed to what we usually do, which is toil in obscurity and then hope someone might like it in five to ten years.

So there is a relationship. However, it manifests itself in weird ways. For instance, I wrote more kid-friendly pitches for comic books. I kinda got the teenage mind from dealing with them for 40 hours a week. When that was done, I started feeling more like my age and interests.

How about you? Does teaching keep your writing young or make you pine for more blood and guts in science fantasy?

SGE: I may be the only teacher who doesn’t feel that. I find that the more I’m in the classroom, the more ideas I get. I meet real people with real needs and real problems, and it’s all grist for the mill, man.

But as you point out, the time commitment, oy, the time commitment. Grading is the Devil’s Own Time Suck, prepping lessons takes a lot of time… and being a normal human being and a dad to my kids takes up time.

This weekend, I was camping with my kids and started to wander off, looking for a good place to write. I realized that my kids were about to make bows and arrows and slingshots, and that was actually HEY WHO KNEW way more fun than writing, and I was about to miss out on some of that Serious Actual Human Time. You know that feeling?

JSR: Not from being a parent, but yes. And frankly, as we’ll all be dead at the end of our four-score-and-ten, I think those moments are important. I am very tired of writers who write and read and never do anything else and think spending times with humans is the enemy of art. Fuck dat. And Stephen King ended his book with a great note. “Life is not a support system for art; art is a support system for life.” Think about it: the joy of watching bows and arrows with the pups is fuel for amazing stuff in life and fiction. You watched their imaginations get lit live. You spent times with humans you love. How can’t that give your work empathy and depth? If you ever write about the parent/child relationship, it won’t read like hackwork or the Brady Bunch.

For me, I take it from doing other arts and, well, surviving in America—which brings me into contact with zany groups of people. Improv. Punk rock. Theater. Magic. Wrestling. Reading about this stuff is awesome, but fuel for my writing also comes from experiencing it. I spent an afternoon with a slight-of-hand magician who knew Muay Thai and beat up abusive drunks at the local dance club in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Never would have got that story if I just stayed at home!

Can you think of other moments where life among the fam or school or work or church was a driver for awesome story stuff?

SGE: I want to meet the vigilante, sleight-of-hand guy now.

I’m agnostic these days, but I spent my younger days as a Mormon missionary in the backwoods of North Carolina. As much as I have mixed feelings about the whole organized religion thing, there’s a lot a writer can learn from wandering around with “Jesus” on their shirt. I met guys who had left their home county in the Appalachians just once or twice, and that included World War II. Met a whole lot of people in the projects and the trailer parks, and learned pretty quickly that you couldn’t sell religion the way we were supposed to sell it… although that didn’t stop me from trying for a couple of years.

I’ve noticed that those big, wrenching life changes tend to have dividends in creativity a few years down the line. After the aforementioned 2012, the Year of Sucking, I started my current job and had an outpouring of ideas in 2014.

JSR: And that’s sometimes how it happens. The dam breaks after a wall of stress. Then it’s an embarrassment of riches. Is this when your series was picked up?

SGE: Kind of. It’s one of those stories that sounds Cinderella—I had written the first few chapters of a space opera, and I was going to a workshop with my now-editor and had nothing else to bring. My now-editor liked it, told me to write more, and I ran all the way home and took a week off work to finish the thing.

I also wrote a teen mainstream YA novel that summer that went nowhere, but it was nice to try something different, have a reason not to be an old fogy about the music I was listening to, and actually listen to current stuff.

JSR: Avoiding the present is the first sign of old age! And I hear more and more about these kinds of stories: connections through human contact, a cool idea that’s almost there, etc. Reminds me a little of Ken Scholes and how Jay Lake challenged him to write an entire novel in a couple of months so he could show his agent. Sometimes it’s helpful to know how different deals come about so you are not a slave to common anecdotes about slush piles, etc.

SGE: Exactly. Of course, if you know Ken, you also know that the next four books in his series were a bitch to write, and I found that as well about writing on commission. It’s awesome to get paid. It’s hard to produce something when it has to be as good as the first, the same length as the first, oh, and you’re writing during the election of Comrade Cheeto. With my third book soon out, I’ve been relieved to hear that people feel like it closed the deal and that the whole series works. But damn, there’s always another side to that exciting rush of the initial book. For every Star Wars where everything comes together, there’s Marcia Lucas divorcing George during Return of the Jedi.

But there’s also something I want to stay on for a minute. Most writers get better because… they have more confidence… because they’re on contract… because they feel wanted. I have a good friend, Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali, who’s an amazing writer. Just incredible, and she works at a slower pace than me but produces much better stuff. (Go look up her stories “Talking to Cancer” and “Concessions” from this year.)

She always asks how I’m so prolific, and the honest answer is “I got a book deal and suddenly I don’t wonder whether I’m cut out for this gig. I know that I can sell a book, and that goes a long way to putting ideas on the page.”

JSR: I’d agree. There is endless dialog, most of it empty, on traditional and independent publishing or self-publishing. I’ve done all of them, and each has trade-offs. But for all the talk of liberation and control, I’ve seen more good come out of working with publishers who know and like my work. If my Kindle novels had made me thousands of dollars, perhaps I’d feel different. But I have a different kind of professional cache because I have books in B&N without driving there and throwing them at the shelf. A group of people think you can do a job and get it done well enough to be paid.

Were you ever seduced to do ebooks before your Tor release?

SGE: Ha, no. Initially it was a pride thing—”Sniff, sniff, I shall be a REAAAAL writer”—but now that I have some perspective, I just think that trad publishing is a better place to start because you get exposed to a lot of readers. You make less money, but unless you can game the algorithm, it’s hard to find that audience through self-pub alone.

I often tell people, and I’m gonna get flack for this… do not self-publish your first novel. And by first, I definitely mean the first you ever write, but I also mean the first one in general. It’s better to see what a publisher does (and doesn’t do) and attract some readers through a moderately okay series at a major publisher and parlay that into a self-pub audience. Agree? Disagree? Tell me how I’m wrong and misleading the youth.

JSR: NOPE. Is the first chair you made worth sitting in? The third? The first meal you made was awesome? There are some writers who REALLY push the “get everything on Kindle” approach. Then you read one of their 100 “novels” (most about 30 pages long), and they are flaming garbage. And these are ones who have published legit novels for advances, and no one will touch now. They prey upon fear and desire and offer bad advice that amount to illusions of how publishing works. They are best known for advice, not art.

I wrote over ten novels before I got my deal. Glad that most of them are lost in the tomb of obscurity. How about you?

SGE: Oh yeah, I think A Red Peace was my eleventh novel. Someday they’ll use my 280,000-word, wannabe-Robert-Jordan opus from high school for aversion therapy.

JSR: HA! My “Writing Under the Influence” of Joe Lansdale novels are great to remind me I no longer suck a bag of rocks!

Okay, time to wrap this up. Ask me something, I ask you something, and we let the fans decide whose jabs got the TKO!

SGE: Who wrote the book of love, and why’d they go do a terrible thing like that?

JSR: Pretty sure it was Gilgamesh, who was far more literate than his epics would demonstrate, but sadly the editors of Game of Thrones turned it into torture porn!

If you had to erase one Golden Age of Science Fiction writer from history, who would it be and why?

SGE: Oh sheee-it… You know what, I never liked Heinlein. Also, if we erase him, we’ll get rid of at least a few Twitter trolls.

JSR: AMEN.

Help Jay and Spencer kill their porn dreams by only buying ONE of their fine books! Check out Spencer’s new series and Jay’s debut, and we’ll see you next time!

“Duck, duck, duck,” says Maddy, touching each head in the circle with a perfunctory authority. “Duck, duck,” she pauses almost imperceptibly at the curly, blonde head in front of her, “alien.”

The owner of the curls, Rebecca, scrambles to her feet as Maddy tears off round the circle.

“Go, Maddy; go, Maddy; go, Maddy,” the other children screech, their voices getting higher and more feverish as Maddy passes the empty space and starts on her second lap around. No one cheers for the little blonde girl. No one wants the alien to win.

“Go, Maddy,” yells Candice, along with the others, feeling the tightness in her chest, her hands making little crescent moon marks in her palms. The alien is gaining on Maddy, despite her head-start. Its arms look longer than they should stretching out, stretching out… as Maddy skids into the vacant spot and fills it with her warm, panting body. The circle is complete again.

Rebecca stops. Her face is red, and there is a little bit of spit at the corner of her mouth. Then she smiles and starts walking, a slow measured gait.

“Duck,” she says. “Duck, duck, duck.”

The teachers don’t like this game, Candice knows, but they don’t cross over the expanse of bitumen to the grassed area that skirts the oval where the kids play it at recess time. Everyone plays it now. The climbing frames are desolate in the sun, and the skipping ropes and footballs are left in the sports cupboards.

The teachers don’t like the game, probably because they don’t like to talk about the aliens at all. Candice’s mother doesn’t talk about them either. Her eyes went all shifty, and she got a worried crease in her forehead the one and only time Candice brought it up. She switches off the news when Candice is around, but Candice knows anyway. The kids all know.

The first sign of turning into an alien is that your eyes start to look like glass, all reflective and shiny and hard. And you are cold, cold, cold, because something different is happening to your blood. The last, and final, sign is that you start to go transparent, so that you can see your veins and bones and intestines and gross things through your skin. Candice doesn’t know what happens after that. She knows that they quarantine you and stick you with needles and probably try and get you to tell them where the other aliens are and what plans they have for invading the earth.

Candice looks toward the teacher-on-duty, standing near the classroom under the shade of a large box tree, every green leaf glinting. Candice doesn’t wear a watch, but all of the kids know by some kind of internal instinct that recess time is nearly over. The game has picked up an added urgency. A dark-haired girl from the grade below Candice trips on her way round the circle and only just avoids the alien. She looks like she is going to cry.

When the siren goes, all of the kids will scatter like ash to the wind, helter-skeltering back to the school buildings. If you are stuck being the alien at that point, you will have to be the alien all day. No one will want to sit next to the alien or pass notes to it or walk home with it. Even the teachers, it seems, somehow can detect the stench of alien and will respond to it with a distaste that is almost, almost, but not quite, concealed.

Candice knows that the aliens have an “R nought” of exactly one. She doesn’t know where she heard that, but she knows what it means. It means an alien will always pass it on to just one person. An alien might have contact with many people, but it will only go “duck” and “duck” and “duck,” until it finds the one person who is exactly and only right.

You didn’t show that you were an alien immediately. There would be a time when you were still yourself, but you were really an alien, but you didn’t know it. Maybe you just felt colder inside, cold, cold like her Dad’s hands when he’d clutched her when he picked her up on Friday because it was his weekend with her.

He’d been cold, and his eyes had been glinty and distracted all weekend, and when he dropped her at school Candice had felt all sad and lost although she didn’t usually–usually it was fine.

Maybe you would feel cold, and maybe everything would look sharper like the leaves on the box tree even from so far away, and maybe your blood wouldn’t go in hot spurts anymore but instead be cool and steady like cooled lava–dark and intricate, swirled and ropey.

“Duck,” says Gracie, who used to be Candice’s best friend last year.

Candice looks back to see the teacher looking at her wrist. She can see the little lines cross-hatched in the skin below her eyes and the beads of sweat to the side of her nose, even though the teacher is all the way over near the classroom.

“Duck,” says Gracie, her footsteps approaching, and were they slowing, just a little?

I don’t want to be the alien, thinks Candice. I don’t want to be the alien. I don’t want to be the alien.

“Duck,” says Gracie.

Previously published in Nature Magazine: Futures, February 2016. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

“Are you the Queen of Faerie?”

The human child, wearing nothing but his nightshirt, can’t have seen more than six summers. Wide brown eyes beneath a mop of straw-blond hair ignore the wonders of my court, staring only at me.

“You’ve found me out.” I slip a nightshade berry between my lips. The sharp poison bursts over my tongue.

The boy steps closer.

My bodyguard moves to intercept him, but I motion him back with a flick of my hand.

I beckon the boy forward. I see freckles now, standing out beneath purple-shadowed eyes. A tremor shakes his thin frame.

I trace a finger over his cheek. “What do you want of me?” I say.

“Eyes of wood.”

I lower my hand.

“I don’t—” His voice hitches. “I don’t want to see anymore. Mama’s told me the tales about you. I know you can do it.”

Mama. My chest constricts around an unwelcome ache.

An icy wind blows, ringing through the silver leaves. The weather in my court reflects my moods. It’s been long since anything beyond a mild zephyr touched the glen.

I lean back. My throne’s woven vines embrace me, and the wind recedes.

“Eyes of wood don’t stop the memory of what’s already been seen.”

The boy’s shoulders slump, and he bunches the tails of his nightshirt in a fist, then takes a fortifying breath, and straightens. “Then please, Majesty, will you give me a heart of stone?”

The gale returns, laced now with stinging flecks of frost. My subjects huddle together in the lee of the silver-leafed trees.

I rise and conjure a sable cloak around my shoulders. The boy takes an involuntary step back.

I press my hand to his chest. His heart of flesh thumps wildly under my palm. “Why would you wish this away? Fear. Love. These are the things that make you human.”

“When he hurts her,” he whispers, “it hurts me too.”

Wind whips around us, whitening his already pale skin.

“A heart of stone cannot love. Not even your mama.” It is cruel to use his mother in such a way, but I’m not known for kindness. Not even to myself. “Do you think she won’t know the difference? That it won’t cause her pain?”

Snow settles in his hair and melts into the cambric nightshirt. “But what else can I do?” he asks.

We are interrupted by the sound of cracking twigs. “Eamon?” a voice calls, “where are you?”

The boy spins around. “Mama?”

I grab his arm and pull him close, wrapping him inside the sable cloak. His eyes widen and he struggles in my grasp. “Mama! I’m here!”

She staggers past the sentinel trees, bare feet red in the new-drifted snow. When her sunken eyes rest on the boy, she stops dead and lifts her gaze to meet mine. “Let him go,” she says.

I intensify my shell of glamour, making myself appear taller. Stronger. More radiant. But the air betrays me, turning chill and still as a frozen stream.

“The boy came to me of his own accord.” I rest one hand atop his head. “I’ve taken a liking to him.”

The woman comes closer, reaching toward her child. “He’s young,” she says. “He doesn’t understand who you are. What you are.”

“He understands exactly who I am,” I reply.

“Please. Give him back to me. He’s my life.”

I try neither to see the bruises on her outstretched arms nor the phantom bruises that stretch across my own memory, trapped in amber. “You would challenge the Faerie Queen for him?”

She looks down at the boy, and determination slides over her face like a knight’s visor. “Name your challenge.”

“Mama, no. A faerie challenge is never fair.”

He’s learned his tales well, this boy.

“Come closer,” I say.

She approaches me with her chin held high.

I pluck a nightshade berry and hold it in my cupped palm. “Do you know what this is?”

“Poison.” Her gaze never flinches from my own. “You’d have me trade my life for his? It’s yours.”

The boy whimpers.

I smile. “That would be too easy.” I touch the long bruise along her forearm, and for the first time, she flinches. “Give it to the man who hurt you.”

“I—” She hesitates. “He’s Eamon’s father.”

“You’d sacrifice your own life for the boy. Is it not a father’s calling to do the same?”

The boy twists free and scurries to his mother’s side. “I don’t want anyone to die. I just want Mama to be safe.”

A seismic shift shocks my core. The wind rises to a shriek, and icy shards sting my skin. The heart of stone buried deep within me threatens to shatter. I turn away from the pair. The gleaming bond of their love, and the boy’s innocence, are too powerful to endure.

His soft voice calls out over the raging blizzard. “Couldn’t we stay here with you?”

Here where time runs in its own river? I couldn’t bear it. Not when the boy is so much stronger than the desperate child I had once been.

I snap a twig bearing silver leaves from a tree and turn back to them. “This will fetch enough gold to see you free.” I kneel and offer it to the boy. “Take it.”

He eyes it warily. “What’s the price?”

I wrap his fingers around the twig. “Tell your children tales of me.”

He nods wordlessly, and his mother shepherds him swiftly away. From me, and the glen where my father’s corpse rests beneath the loam, dead from the nightshade I’d fed him after turning my own heart to stone. Too late to save my own mother.

Snow becomes rain, trailing rivulets from my eyes of wood, in place of the sticky sap now long congealed.

It’s too late for regret. My subjects are watching me.

Once more my heart hardens and I sit upon my throne.

Once more a placid zephyr blows.

This month’s issue of Flash Fiction Online features four very talented women and four very stellar fantasy/science fiction stories.

Three of the authors have published at least one other story in Flash Fiction Online.

You can find their bios with lists of their FFO stories here:

Samantha Murray “Duck, Duck, Duck”

Rebecca Birch “Eyes of Wood, Heart of Stone”

Maria Haskins “The Ghost in Angelica’s Room”

Our FFO Newbie is UK author, Helen French. We think you’ll love her story, “Dragon Meat,” and we think you might find her fascinating, too, because I decided to interview her for this month’s introduction.

Interview with Helen French:

QUESTION: Tell us 5 intriguing things about yourself.

ANSWER: 1) I sneeze a LOT (being allergic to dust, pollen, fur and feather, and probably many things I don’t know about).
2) My idea of a great night is sitting down with a glass of wine and crying at some really good television (Call the Midwife anyone? I challenge you NOT to cry at it). I’m partial to a spot of book-weeping too, of course.
3) I briefly worked for Harlequin’s UK office and discovered Maria V Snyder in the slush pile with her manuscript Poison Study. She went on to be a NYT bestseller and I’m still thrilled when I see her books on shelves.
4) My main new year’s resolution every year is ‘be nicer’, which doesn’t come naturally to me (in fact I think I’m slightly suspicious of genuinely nice people). It’s so easy to slip into thinking the worst of others. It’s also easy to brighten someone’s day with small kindnesses that don’t cost anything. I lean toward dark and twisty, but I think ‘nice’ is a healthy goal.
5) My husband and I took a holiday to Vancouver in the days before we had kids primarily so we could find all the locations of various geeky TV shows that we love (Battlestar Galactica, Supernatural, etc). Worth every penny.

QUESTION: What’s your day job? How did you come to choose that as a career?

ANSWER: My career has followed a rather winding path. I started off in book-selling, then book publishing, spending a couple of years at Harlequin Mills & Boon (long before it got swallowed up), where I read a lot of slush (a fantastic experience). But when I had to move house due to changing circumstances I ended up in magazine publishing, being a sub-editor for a number of years. Eventually, I moved over into ‘digital’. Now I build websites and other digital products. While I sometimes miss the more bookish start of my career, I have a lot more mental energy for creative writing these days.

QUESTION: How do your surroundings–the people, places, culture around you–influence your stories?

ANSWER: I grew up in the northwest of England, in a coastal town with amazing sand dunes and pinewoods, next to the sea. I’m often drawn back to it for my fiction. If not the physical location itself, that feeling of openness and big expanses of sky. Since then I’ve lived in Bath, London and Hertfordshire and each place has made its own imprint on my heart. Take London – I studied in London and it’s where I first made a home with my husband. It’s bustling and creative, with dark alleyways and gorgeous vistas. I’ve lived North and South (anyone from the UK can tell you about the so-called ‘divide’ between the two) and I can tell you that, vowel sounds aside, the people are pretty much the same all over.

QUESTION: Which author would you say is your greatest exemplar as far as your development as a writer, and why?

ANSWER: It may sound rather cliched now, but my answer has always been Ursula Le Guin. The Earthsea series and The Lathe of Heaven will stay with me forever. I discovered her fantasy first – Ged stood out amongst a sea of would-be mages – and came to her science fiction much later, but enjoy both hugely. Le Guin makes you think and care, which is much harder than it sounds. I aspire to do both one day! Her material on writing itself has been tremendously useful on a personal level too. She is missed.

QUESTION: Tell me about the genesis of “Dragon Meat.”

ANSWER: I wanted to write a dragon story, if only to tick it off a sort of bucket list, and I started with the idea that my character would be someone who didn’t even like dragons all that much. It began with her voice, and she took over. Normally I’m much more of a planner, but I let the voice lead this time. !

Thank you, Helen!

And Happy Reading to you all!