From the editors:

I’m not generally a fan of stories from a child’s POVs. I find a lot of stories with young narrators take the tack of making the prose almost overly simplistic (short sentences, and simple words), in order perhaps to make it clear this is a child speaking.

For me, the best stories featuring children aren’t simple at all. They take the wonderful, open imagination of children and spin it into new possibilities.

But all that imagination can have a dark side.

That’s what “Hungry” does. It’s a child’s slight misunderstanding that shifts tragedy to horror. And Tree Riesener makes the child’s conclusion so terrifyingly logical. She makes it feel possible. And really, how sure are you that when your day comes, your children won’t decide to be cruel to be kind. How can we ever be sure?

Eat up.

Sabrina West

Managing Editor

Quiet. You sit quiet as a mouse in the corner. Push a little doll around and hum la-la-la so they forget you’re there while they have the cocktail hour.

That’s how you find out they’re killing Grandma.

Not a single bite to eat or a swallow of water. Your mother is killing her mother.

That’s their favorite punishment for you, too. Go to your room without any supper. They can do it to their daughter and they can do it to their mother.

You feel like a balloon somebody’s lost the string of and you’re helplessly blowing in the wind.

You didn’t realize they were that powerful that they could just kill somebody, especially their own mother. You wonder if someday you’ll have to kill them by not giving them anything to eat or drink and you decide you’ll never do it, never.

Dead dead dead forever, all skinny and dried out like an old sponge and nothing in her tummy. That’s what Grandma will be.

Grandma that you visited in her little house of lace and cookies with real green plants hanging at all the windows and a bird feeder in the garden. Grandma who put a little bed right in her room for you when you visited so nothing could get you and never said don’t be silly when you worried about vampires under the bed and while you were drying the dishes for her, said you didn’t have to tell mommy and daddy.

Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind. That’s what they keep saying while they pour each other drinks. They’re the grown-ups and they should know. But they say everybody at your new school really likes you, they’re just teasing the new kid, when you know everybody hates you to hell and it won’t ever stop until you’re dead.

You know what they’re telling you about Grandma is true because Mother sneaks you in, whispers something to the nurses so they look the other way, and takes you in to say goodbye so with your own eyes you see Grandma in the bed with sides like prison bars, her skinny arms that look like tissue paper with black and blue blotches stretched out and tied down and stabbed with silver needles.

You think they’ll do something, but they just stand there looking down at her and Mother holds your hand in a tight grip so you can’t get away.

Grandma can’t say anything because of the tube in her mouth but her eyes finally leave Mother and Daddy and roll really scared at you, like she’s saying please, you’ll help me, won’t you? Remember what good times we had that week you stayed with me, baking cookies and sitting on the porch, filling the bird feeder? We can do that again, if you’ll help me.

Well, of course you start to cry and a nurse comes running in, looking mad like teachers look when you’ve done something wrong. Mother shakes your arm and says shhhh but you don’t care and just keep on wailing. Your father hisses at Mother that he told her this wasn’t a good idea and she hisses back at him.

Then they take you out into the hall to a little place with hard plastic chairs you keep sliding off of and say in those sweet voices they use when you fall down or get hurt that Grandma doesn’t know anything anymore, it’s just her old body there, she isn’t hurting, is just waiting for Jesus to come and get her.

Jesus? Who’s Jesus? The only time you’ve ever heard his name is when somebody gets mad and says oh, Jesus Christ!

You ask if Jesus is a doctor and will he help Grandma and they look at each other and smile that way people do when little kids say something so stupid it’s cute. How are you supposed to know about Jesus when they never told you, never let you know he’s also God in Heaven and flies down like Superman to get you when you die and takes you back with him? They tell you now.

That evening they go out and stay for a long time. When they come back, they pay the hotel sitter, then ask you to sit down and tell you in their nice voices that Jesus has come and Grandma is gone.

Since you don’t know what you’re supposed to say, you just say okay and while you’re brushing your teeth, you hear them talking about adding this to the list of stuff Dr. Samuels is supposed to help you with. Your throat and chest are bursting with pain but for some reason you don’t think you should let them know.

They take advantage of being in the city to do some shopping and hire the sitter to stay with you while they go to the funeral, that they say isn’t for little girls.

At least Jesus has come for Grandma. You learned long ago that they tell you a whole bunch of lies but that much is probably true. You sort of remember her singing, that time you got to stay with her, that she had a friend in Jesus, and if Jesus can float in air and carry people back with him like a lifesaver, he’ll know about her needing a snack and by now she’ll have had time to eat several times, with Jesus.

You say you’re not hungry, but they order you a fancy sandwich held together with toothpicks and ginger ale with a little paper parasol stuck in a cherry. You have to eat, darling, they say and you know you’d better do it because there’s no way in the world you ever want to make them mad at you again.

Previously published in Flash Fiction Online, February 2015. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

From the editors:

My favourite story since beginning my time at Flash Fiction Online, the one that I recall most often, is “Portrait of my Wife as a Boat,” by Samantha Murray.

Time and again I return to the image of the coracle sitting on the tides edge with the sun sinking into the horizon.

In this story the conflict between the two women is strong, but so also is the tenderness and the intimacy. This story is about the point in time when, although you love someone, you know you must let them go. The main character’s voice is like the wind blowing her wife away towards the white tipped waves. She, in response, is silent, instead showing through action her departure to her lover.

The description is beautiful. The imagery is potent. I love the feeling this story leaves me with – the sad romance, the salted sense of freedom.

Jo Winters

Managing Editor

She comes home later and later even though the nights are starting earlier than they were.

I feel cross and wronged, and pretend not to see her as she hesitates briefly on the doorstep. I bow my head to my stitching. A new quilt this one–with gold, russet, and red, colors for the Fall that is coming.

I do not look at her directly, but I notice that her hair is stiff with salt and spray. She is barefoot and leaves little curved dark marks on the floorboards as she crosses. I cave and tell her, “There is rice on the stove.”

“I am not hungry,” she says, and her voice creaks like old old wood, “I am tired, I’m going to bed.” She rests her hand for a moment on my shoulder, but lightly, so lightly.
That night she tosses and writhes like she is caught on the tides. The bed-sheets are twisted asunder, and I wake and sit up in bed. I touch her arm and whisper soothingly, but she will not be soothed.

* * *

She smells of linseed, of citrus, the oil that she rubs into all of the tiny little cracks in her face. When she leaves, she kisses me, and I taste the sea.

* * *

Then comes two days and two wild gusty nights she is gone. Most of my stitching I have to unpick again and again. When she comes in, I swell up to her. “Where have you been?” I cry, and my voice rises high and wails at her like a spiteful wind, “Where have you been?”

She opens her mouth, but she does not seem to have any words left. She holds her palms out towards me, and stands there squelching.

She looks both harder and smoother, and deeper brown. I can see that she has come back just for me. I can see too that four walls are four too many, and that the hooked rug and the narrow bed heaped with pillows just make her obscurely miserable. She has come back for me, and I am not the sea.

* * *

The next time she leaves I sit with my stitching and stare at it. Then I put it down. I follow her across the old reserve where you can smell the big, old peppermint trees, down over the dune and across the sand. The sun has baked the sand hot, and I feel the heat under my feet, but I do not hasten my steps. Some things are meant to hurt.

She stands at the shoreline, and I see she is already curving, curving, stretching, turning, curving. Till she lies, half in the water, rocking.

She is the shape of two open cupped hands pressed together. The shape of a coracle, in welsh cwrwgl, the light little boats from the place I was born. She has a mast though, as they did not, standing proud against the sky. Her hull is heartwood with swirling shades of gray, like ilmenite in wet sand. She is a thing of beauty, but that doesn’t surprise me at all because I knew that already, I knew that always.

I lift my leg over the side of her. There is room, just for one. She rocks back and forth, and her sail unfurls and billows out. I think she is pleased.

Her rocking motion edges us forward off the sand-bank and into the deeper water. Light and delicate she whips along towards the white-tipped waves. I do not speak to her again, but I run my fingers over the sun-warmed wood of her gunwale. What are words but an anchor that drags behind her, slowing her down, making her stop, binding her to the land. You don’t say I love you to a boat, you don’t, you don’t.

* * *

The wind has picked up and is blowing my hair back from my face. She will take me to shore now I know. I will stand on the sand and watch her as she heads out towards the sun that is drowning itself at the horizon. I will go back to my hearth and sit and wait although I know she will not come. I will start a new quilt, one for winter this time. One with pelagic hues–cerulean and cyan, with flecks at the edges white as the tips of the waves.

Previously published in Flash Fiction Online, July 2015. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

This column begins its fourth year of existence this September. A column I didn’t mean to create, yet that kept growing. A column that has made me a few enemies, a handful of fans, and even a book of the same name. What goals I had were general: challenge conventional wisdom about careers in writing, offer alternatives, and explore how other kinds of artists face similar challenges. These themes dominated year one.

Year two was THE GUTTERS, an often-interrupted series of essays on how I took almost twenty years to publish my first novel with a professional publisher. In unpacking that ride, I also wrote about depression, imposter syndrome, the challenge of being smart in a world that thinks you’re stupid, and how I often got in my own way.

This past year, in the wake of the 2016 election, the tone shifted to themes of oppression and resistance on the one hand, and what to do once you’re a “published” author on the other. Among the more poignant revelations from that run was how easily we are fooled by success into thinking somehow, some way, the system is now fair. The alternative is just as important but often harder to sustain in the wake of daydreams: the system is rigged, so how do we game it to get what we want while making the art only we can make?

Someone asked me if I had a greatest hits package of FXXK WRITING. Of course! It’s FXXK WRITING: A GUIDE FOR FRUSTRATED ARTISTS!

But of the past three years, there have been less discussed pieces that spoke deeper to me.

THE WORKAHOLICS CREED, which I was informed was a favorite of a rockstar (can’t divulge) and remains a warning to myself that WORKING YOURSELF TO DEATH IS NOT A RETIREMENT PLAN, DESPITE WHAT AMERICAN LATE STAGE CAPITALISM WILL TELL YOU.

ON STUPIDITY AND SILENCE, a short series about how my perception of being a mental defective drove me to do great and stupid things.

BIG TIME vs. MAKING IT delves into the challenge of success and what it means, and how it can manipulate your thinking about art and life.

And that mission continues in year four. But the tone will be a little different. The goal is to do pieces that are like a knife fight in a phone booth: short, sharp, and deadly. I’ve largely been a machine gun spewing ideas and comparisons until the ammo went dry. This year I’ll be more like a sniper. Less talk, more bull’s eyes.

That said, I’ve enjoyed the freedom to scream at all of you for three years. For this I’d like to shout out to Anna Yeatts, who continues to champion both the attitude and content of a very strange corner of Flash Fiction Online.  To Samantha Sabovitch for being the latest great addition to the team and making me sound even better than I am! To other writers who keep inspiring me like Carrie Vaughn, Nick Mamatas, Spencer Ellsworth, Molly Tanzer, and more. People who put in the work and keep navigate the maze of arts and commerce to fight another day.

And to you, the readers. Some of you are friends, others students, and a very small cadre are strangers and regulars who like what I have to say, even if you don’t agree. I want to say thanks to you for your support. I get a fistful of hate mail from people who think I am unsupportive, that I shit on the dreams of others, that I dare to call out people whose conduct and work I find abhorrent.

I largely write it for you. Because I am you. I’m a frustrated artist who dreams big and works hard and realizes that these two thing may not mean grizzly shit in achieving our goals. But we keep trying. We keep making. We keep getting in the ring for just one more round. Because we still have something to say before the dirt drops on our coffin box, and all our fires snuff out.

See you in September for the  latest evolutionary stage of FXXK WRITING.

In the meantime, support Jay’s continued need for food by buying a book!

Like history written like a novel? Check out MAVERICKS OF WAR! Want pulptastic fun with a secret message? Buy HEX-RATED and BLACK LOTUS KISS! His future hungry gut thanks you!

From the editors:

Over the past ten and a half years with Flash Fiction Online, we’ve seen hundreds of great stories. But for every editor, there are those few that keep coming back, that are never forgotten, whose titles pop up every time someone asks for your favorites.

Stefanie Freele’s “James Brown Is Alive and Doing Laundry in South Lake Tahoe” (first appearing in Flash Fiction Online’s second issue, January 2008) is one of those for me.

For anyone who teaches workshops on writing flash, “James Brown…” is a perfect example of what not to do. Four point of view characters with the point of view shifting almost paragraph by paragraph, with one point of view being an infant, another a dog. But Freele does so effortlessly. The result is at once humorous, tense, and touching, with every sentence perfectly crafted, every word chosen with care. Ten and half years later, I still keenly feel Stu’s angst, Megan’s uncertainty, Beebop’s hopefulness. Oh, and Philip’s fist in the eye.

Suzanne W. Vincent

Editor-in-Chief

Stu is driving to South Lake Tahoe to take his postpartum-strained woman to the snow, to take his nine-week-old infant through a storm, to take his neglected dog in a five-hour car ride, and to take himself into his woman’s good graces. And he’s hungry. Even though Stu has considered, more than once, stopping the car on the whitened highway and plunging himself over a cliff so he could plop into a cozy pile of snow and hide until his wife is logical again or the baby is able to tend to itself, he’s not dressed warmly enough for months or years in a snowbank, he has no snacks in his jacket, and he must focus on The Family. The Family is of all four: the woman, Stu, their baby, the dog. It is almost blizzarding, the windshield-wiper fluid is frozen, the window is frosted, the dog is antsy, the baby is whimpering, the woman — who should be happy, she nagged for days to go to the snow — is intermittently admiring the snow and whining about cramped legs. Stu is trapped by the car, The Family, his own legs, and the snow, which is falling falling falling.

Megan’s legs are killing her, mostly because her shoes don’t fit. Her man thinks that her feet will go back to a previous size after she loses the last eleven pounds. No shoes fit and she just knows her three-hundred-dollar ski boots will be terrible. She removes her shoes — she should have done this miles ago — and feels instant relief. She is also relieved that the baby is calm. The baby coos and says “eh” and “oooh” and wiggles his little fists. The dog lies with her head on the baby’s car seat. Megan remarks that this is adorable. Her man grunts.

Phillip, who is nine weeks old and does not have control of his muscles just yet, sees the dog’s head and would like to touch her, especially the black circle around the dog’s eye; however, Phillip’s little fists go every which way, but not that way. He grunts little noises when his fists don’t do what he wants them to do.

Beebop, the dog, wishes she had a yellow squeaker toy. Like the one at home. The yellow one sitting on her roundy bed. If she had the yellow squeaker toy, she would squeak it and thrust it into the fist of the baby. Perhaps the baby would throw it for her, because her man and woman never throw anything anymore.

Stu is afraid to talk because his woman might cry again. She cries a lot lately, even though he is working harder than he ever has before, is bringing in a good paycheck, and is taking The Family on their first vacation. Instead, he is silent. The snow is falling, falling, falling, and he thinks he might just have to pull over, run out into the snow and scream into the darkening forest. But then he might get lost and have to eat his horse, like the Donner party. But he doesn’t have a horse, and the Donner party ate themselves and their horses in North Lake Tahoe, not South. They didn’t have cell phones.

Megan is trying not to cry. She is sick of being fat, sick of being a milk machine, sick of not having her own income, sick of being dependent on her man, and sick of not knowing what to do when the baby cries. It is her first baby and sometimes she doesn’t think she has any idea of what she is doing. She feels like an imposter and is terrified someone will catch on very soon and point at her, yell at her, and take her child away from her, because she is a crybaby. She knows this is stupid and feels even more like crying when she realizes the stupidity of her stupidity.

Phillip watches the dog blink and this is interesting. But a flailing fist pops up and punches Phillip in the eye and he lets out a cry.

Beebop curls into a ball away from the crying baby who has just punched himself in the eye. The cries are a lot like the sound of her squeaker toy and Beebop lets out a world-weary sigh.

Stu hears the dog sigh, the baby cry, and notices his woman’s discomfort. He is helpless and wants to say something, but knows if he says anything, anything at all, even something he thinks is nice, or helpful, or pleasant, or cheerful, his woman might weep. And then he’d have two criers and one sigher.

Megan squirms and through the snow reads the signs on the hotels and restaurants. The car stops at a red. In front of a laundromat, on the sidewalk, stands a dark man with black hair in a leather jacket. He wiggles thick eyebrows up and down and squints in the snow as he smokes a cigarette. Megan speaks. “Hey, look, James Brown.”

Phillip hears his mother’s voice — her happy voice — and pauses.

Beebop lets her tail wag once and sits up. Mom’s happy. Mom’s happy.

Stu catches sight of the man. His woman is correct: there stands a guy that looks just like a happy James Brown. “He’s alive and doing laundry,” Stu says.

The man’s eyebrows wiggle. He looks over toward The Family and opens up his jacket revealing a shirt that reads glittery, “Giving Up Food For Funk.”

Stu’s woman grins. “It is James Brown, downtown.”

The dog studies James Brown while whapping her tail on the baby’s car seat.

The baby says “oooo, oooo.”

“Right on, right on.” Stu presses the button, lowering the windows. Cold pine air drifts in.

His woman lets her arm out and brings back snowflakes on her sweater to show everyone.

Previously published in Flash Fiction Online, January 2008. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

From the editors:

When I’m approached by writers new to the craft or readers looking for an example of well-written flash fiction, time and again, “Beholder” by Sarah Grey is the story I recommend.

There are no world-ending catastrophes or serial killers lurking beneath the stairs. But some stories don’t need to jump up and down to get our attention. Sarah Grey’s “Beholder” is a small, quiet story – technically strong, beautiful in its prose, and focused on the smallest of details.

The resonance in this story never fails to knock me on my heels. “Beholder” works, not because our emotions are skillfully manipulated, leaving us feeling used and cheap, but because we recognize the genuineness of a mother’s love – a small, anonymous act of kindness to a stranger.

I dare you to read “Beholder” aloud and not be moved.

Anna Yeatts

Publisher

The girl behind the counter is a waif with mottled cheeks, swaddled in a blue barista’s apron.  Her nametag, scratched half-bare, tells me only that she is a trainee.  She offers me a timid smile, thin sparkle-glossed lips closed tight.  She wears augmentation lenses, red plastic frames that glitter, a cheap pair that clash with her yellow blouse and leave her looking like a deflated circus tent.  Through them, she squints at me, perhaps seeking common ground, but more likely gauging the level of customer service I’ll expect.

She can’t read my traits, though.  I am a private person; I do not relish the nagging chime of new comments added to my cloud.  I pay a generous sum to a restriction service each month.  In return, my data is viciously guarded, bolted and buried like sacred gold.  Beyond my physical appearance, all this girl can know is that my name is Maria, that I am fifty-six, that I am an equity partner in a local law firm.  She will also see a blink to my charity, founded and named in my daughter’s memory.

My own lenses are Italian—brushed platinum frames with comfort-molded earbuds and a soft rose tint that cools the cafe’s bright fluorescent lights.  I blink visuals on, hoping to learn the girl’s name, and an avalanche of words and images engulfs her.

Murmurs of impatience grow from the line behind me as I stand, wordless, struggling to absorb it all.  Her name, in pink glittering script, is Hannah.  She is a Cancer, she is sixteen, she has a dog named Christo.  She saw a romantic comedy at the multiplex downtown last night and rated it four of five stars.  Her latest blog post consists of clumsy poetry and dim lense-snapped photos of wilting trees.  She has revealed every soft cranny of her being, her heart and hopes and passing minutes of her day, like a flock of bleeding prey laid bare to the world’s sharpened teeth.

But Hannah herself, pets and poems and star charts, is a mere wisp behind by her trait cloud.  It swarms with the judgment of her peers, settles on the seams of her blouse, gnaws at her round cheeks.  Some call her shy, quiet, withdrawn.  Most have agreed, in ragged fonts and misspellings, that she is ugly, stupid, disgusting.  The consensus is that she is weird, and the word hovers like an imperious hive queen above her.

She is underage; her parents could shield her from this cruelty.  Perhaps they are too absorbed in responsibilities, in vital imperatives, and have forgotten, momentarily, that they have a child.  Perhaps she has succumbed to pressure-cooked youth and begged them not to interfere.  Either way, old cracks in my heart open wide.

I blink visuals off and her cloud vanishes.  Without it, she is just a girl, her lank hair framing a forced smile on a face paralyzed by hurt.

The line behind me hums, impatient.  I offer her my warmest tone.  “Large coffee, please.  Cream, no sugar.”

She nods, silent, and reaches for a cup high atop a stack to her left.  It sticks; she yanks with both hands.  The tower leans, slows, and finally collapses.  Cups shower the tile floor, bouncing toward polished tables and the feet of waiting customers.  The hum swells to an irritated grumble.

A wiry man in a pressed shirt with rolled cuffs races out from behind cappuccino machines and boxes.  His eyes are narrow and his jaw is clenched.  “Hannah, come here immediately,” he says.

Hannah’s lips tremble.  She follows him.

In moments I have my coffee, steaming and fresh and free of charge, with a shining gift card for a free sandwich.  “To compensate for your inconvenience,” the wiry man says.  His lenses have polished silver rims.  I blink on visuals and learn that he’s Martin, age twenty-seven.  His peers deem him thorough and efficient.  I can blink a review of his performance, if I’d like.

I don’t.  Instead, I thank him and leave.

Outside, the sky is dank and chill.  Hannah sits on a curb, nose red, eyes flooded beneath plastic lenses, green crocheted sweater pulled tight over her yellow blouse.  Her apron is gone.  She sees me step onto the sidewalk, flinches, and stands to leave.  A new word, a jagged bite of faceless corporate font, has settled on the fringes of her cloud: incompetent.

She hurries up the street, away from me, adjectives trailing.

I blink up comments and whisper a word beneath my breath.  It is one I have wished, so many times over so many cold years, that I had spoken to my little girl, when she was Hannah’s age, when hearing it might have saved her life.  I blink my choice of fonts, and send it away.

I pay a premium for designer lenses.  My comment data flies fast and anonymous.  She will hear the chime in a space of heartbeat, but she will never know its source.

Hannah stops short beneath a wilting oak tree at the corner.  She scans the intersection, squinting at tinted windshields and shop windows.  She turns my way, but her eyes move past me, seeking a more likely source.  Her expression is vexed, but her tears have stopped.

Several long moments pass before she gives up.  As she continues up the block, a smile peeks from the corners of her mouth, and she holds her chin a little higher.

Her cloud follows her, a long trail of patchworked fonts.  At the tail is a single word, tiny but present, in shimmering pink script that matches her name: beautiful.

Previously published in Flash Fiction Online, September 2013. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

From the editors:

Of the many forms of fiction, pure flash fiction is one of the most difficult to write well.

What is “pure” flash fiction, you ask? It is a story in a small package. A complete story, with character development, setting, plot, conflict, and a satisfying resolution. It requires careful management of each of these elements in order to rein in the complications brought on by a plethora of characters, or overcomplicated conflicts, or sweeping settings.

James Van Pelt’s “Just Before Recess” (first published at FFO in March 2008) is an example of each of these elements handled with the kind of mastery that happens less frequently than one might think. Flash is difficult to do well precisely because it is short.

Of the many stories I’ve seen cross these pages, this is the one I most frequently use when teaching flash fiction workshops, with the gracious permission of Mr. Van Pelt.

Every word is precisely chosen, every detail necessary, every character economically and completely drawn.

At the center of the story is schoolboy, Parker. And, as we learn in the very first line, “Parker kept a sun in his desk.”

I hope you enjoy discovering what comes of that intriguing first line as much as I did the first time I read this remarkable story.

Suzanne Vincent

Editor-in-Chief

Parker kept a sun in his desk. He fed it gravel and twigs, and once his gum when it lost its flavor. The warm varnished desktop felt good against his forearms, and the desk’s toasty metal bottom kept the chill off his legs.

Today Mr. Earl was grading papers at the front of the class, every once in a while glancing up at the 3rd graders to make sure none of them were talking or passing notes or looking out the window. Parker would quickly shift his gaze down to his textbook so Mr. Earl wouldn’t give him the glare, a sure sign that Parker’s name would soon go up on the board with the other kids who had lost their lunch privileges for the day. He could feel Mr. Earl’s attention pass over him like a search light.

Slipping a pebble out of his pocket, Parker carefully lifted his desktop a quarter of an inch and slipped the rock in. It made a tiny clink when it dropped to the bottom. He leaned the desk away from him until he heard the pebble roll toward the sun, followed by the tiny hiss that meant the rock had vanished into it.

Two days ago he’d opened his desk to put his lunch in, but instead of the pencil box and tissue box and books he expected to see, a cloud swirled in the space, at its center, a dull, pulsing red glow. He shut the desk and looked around to see if anyone else had noticed. An hour later, the dusty swirl in his desk had contracted to a bright spot in the middle. He cautiously moved his hand toward it. At first he felt only the heat, but when he got within a few inches, the skin on his palm began to sting, like the flesh was pulling away. He snatched his hand back, then tried a pencil. When the point moved close enough, the pencil tugged toward the sun, then snapped out of his fingers into the tiny light, brightening it slightly in the process.

Now the sun was as large as a golf ball. When Parker rolled a marble across his desk, its path would curve toward the sun within, sometimes circling several times before resting exactly above it.

“Parker,” Mr. Earl said. “Your reading group is waiting for you.” In the back of the class, his three reading partners sat on the mats, their books on their laps. Parker pushed away from his desk and joined them.

“Where’s your book?” Mr. Earl said, his eyebrows contracting into a single line above his eyes.

Parker shrugged. Mr. Earl growled. “You need to be more responsible, young man. Go get your book.”

The other students looked on, relieved that Mr. Earl’s attention was on Parker and not on them.

“I don’t have it, sir,” said Parker. It had disappeared into the sun along with everything else.

Mr. Earl’s hands clenched slightly. Parker cringed as his teacher pushed away from his desk. Mr. Earl almost never left his desk. Students came to him. He didn’t go to students unless the infraction was terribly, terribly bad.

“You, young man, are irresponsible. Remember our talk about responsibility on the first day of school?” He looked at each of his students who nodded in turn. “Isn’t your book in your desk where it belongs?”

“No, sir,” said Parker. How could he explain about the swirling dust, the pulsing red glow, the sun’s pinpoint of light?

“Of course it is. That is where your books should always be. Everything in its place. A place for everything. Isn’t that right?” His question sounded like an accusation.

Parker nodded. “But my book isn’t there, Mr. Earl.”

The teacher took two long strides and stood beside Parker’s desk. Before the boy could speak, Mr. Earl threw the desktop open. For a second, he stared into it. A white glow reflected off his face. “What is this?” he said, as he reached toward the brightness.

“Careful, Mr. Earl,” Parker started to say, but it was too late.

The teacher screeched before lurching against the desk. He went down quickly, his feet vanishing into the desk last.

A long silence filled the room. Parker stood, walked back to his desk. The sun within had grown, its heat baking like a tiny oven. He closed the top, which snapped down hard on its own at the last moment.

The other students hadn’t moved. Parker looked at them. They looked at him. Over the intercom, a bell softly chimed.

“Recess,” said Parker, and they all ran outside to play.

Previously published in Flash Fiction Online, March 2008. Reprinted here by permission of the author.