FLASH FICTION

Flash Fiction has a few disciplines, the three I know of are 100 words - popular with  The Spanishish Museum of Words which has a $US 20,000 prize every couple of years. the there is the more traditional 1000 word staple popular in anthologies, but my favourite is 150 words or less that I learned with many other talented folks on the Redbubble art site before it stopped being a community and became a place to buy pirated artwork. It was something I enjoyed and found that these short little stories with a start middle and end were great for transitioning into comic scripts, which is what I tend to do more of these days.
These stories below (and in the next couple of posts) are from those redbubble years and can be found in compilations HERE from blurb via Anne van Alkermade's murphywrite imprint.
So here we go. Short sharp stories or as Mister Khan called them once: Short stories with a punchline.



REMEBERANCE DAY

He’d been at the door for hours now. Just standing in the doorway with his “Army” hat he’d made so that it looked just like his dad’s. His mother was still lying on the bed sobbing uncontrollably clutching the official letter that arrived that afternoon. In a scene of subtle synchronicity, the boy saluted the sun as it set in the mid-winter sky just as his mother dropped the letter onto the floor. As of tonight the world as they knew it would take a whole new course, meanwhile, the cat went from room to room trying to get either’s attention so it could be fed.



AND THE WAY TO GO OUT.

 As he lay in the foxhole clutching it hard against his chest Corporal Todd felt a blinding chill pierce his very being when the cry went up.
“Banzai!”
He looked to his left at his comrade. It was like he was sleeping.
 He didn’t look to the right. He already made that mistake and only saw a body, no head. Both men he knew intimately through conversations he had but never considered either a good friend. It would be a lonely death. The charging Japanese were getting closer now, his last wish now as he lay shivering in fear was that the grenade he was holding would go off before he felt the oncoming bayonets.


ALL SOULS DAY

 Terry held his head in his hands as he sat on the steps leading up to the party. Tears fell from his face onto his shoeless feet and instantly disappeared. It had been two years now and nobody seemed to remember him anymore.
“I'll show them, they’ll miss me when I’m gone” he’d vainly cried. The accident had proved that. His funeral was massive and all the girls cried. Some even kept photos, for a while.
But now it was a different story. Beside his still grieving parents he never heard his name mentioned amongst his old crowd. He was stuck, he hadn’t been offered Heaven, he hadn’t been offered Hell. It was just him and his heavy head. Terry stood up and put his head under his arm and walked back through the yard to Cemetery He was wrong - popularity was fleeting. Death was eternal and lonely