New flash fiction publications by yours truly

I'm glad to say that my short-short story, "Break," appeared on National Flash Fiction Day's FlashFlood blog, while "The Visit," in a slightly southern American voice, is in the new issue of Flash: An International Short-Short Story Magazine. Here's hoping that these publications prove a sign of what's to come!

 

National Flash Fiction Day is here

It's National Flash Fiction Day, and my increased attention to my fiction is manifesting in two ways. My story, "Break," appears in FlashFlood (here's the link), an online flood of flashes just for today, and tonight I'll read at The Lansdown in Bristol with a host of other flash fiction writers, including Tania Hershman and my Bath Spa colleague Lucy English. The reading begins at 7 p.m. and is free, so come along if you're near!

Sudden Prose Student Success!

The 2013-14 Sudden Prose module has had its first publication success! Congratulations go to Collette Lord, whose short-short story from the module, "The New Dog," will appear on the National Flash Fiction Day's FlashFlood website, http://flashfloodjournal.blogspot.co.uk/, between one and two a.m. on National Flash Fiction Day (the 21st).

Sudden Prose Reprints: Andrea Scarpino's "With Lines from Nâzım Hikmet"

With Lines from Nâzım Hikmet

The poplar with its silver leaves as if a welcome light: come here, follow me. You did as you were told, took a flower from his casket's face. How long, this Earth? A star among stars / and one of the smallest. How long this silver light? Once there was a girl, a father, basil plants, chickadees, mourning doves. Even opossum. Even deer. Then there was a grave, sunflower cut, pressed hard to metal, mahogany. Turned from light. This earth will grow cold, Hikmet said. Will roll along / in pitch-black space. Once there was a father, daughter, ground for silver leaves, air for sparrow flight. Flowers opened recklessly. Then there was a grave.

Andrea Scarpino
Once, Then (Red Hen Press, 2014)


In the UK you can purchase Once, Then online at Foyle's, and in the US, directly from Red Hen Press.

Sudden Prose Reprints: J.R. Fenn's "After the Natatorium"

After the Natatorium

The first time they saw the natatorium they changed into their bathing costumes, pulled their rubber caps over their heads, and rushed into the water without a thought for the ice crystals that floated, cold and perfect, on the surface. As they somersaulted, chicken-fought, and cannonballed from the edges, an Indiana marching band played the young upstart Sousa’s Liberty Bell, conducted by a gesticulating barber from Mishawaka. The pool washed their skin clean of Chicago grime—soot from the chimneys, brick dust from fingernails, mortar packed and matted in their hair—and they crawled out of the natatorium as pink and fat as they had from the baptismal font, before they could rightly remember their own names.

At night the natatorium’s locked doors and windows invited the jimmied entrance of gin-breathers and wounded boys who immersed themselves in the waters, where they bled through their bandages in a hush, leaving the pool’s liquid a clear lapping blue and their wounds salted, closed, and covered over with quick growths of scar tissue that shone whiter against the white bottom of the great basin—a basin so gigantic that none of the night gangs could have imagined it could hold them all together at once as they bobbed and spumed and sighed in the dark, the occasional laugh that bubbled up from their throats swallowed by the cavernous heights above.

As the water warmed over the course of the summer, swimmers arrived from all corners of the city: babies with cauls that clung wet in their mothers’ arms, dancers whose jewels spread from their hips in drifts of color, liberated minnows that darted in bright curtains though the depths, a dromedary with levers inside to propel its dives toward the bottom-most deeps where it dwindled smaller than the terriers that paddled belly down in the light-cracked shallows.

Soon the demand for water outpaced the supply from the spring fed aqueducts sourced in a village northwest of the city. The natatorium dried up into a hollow field of concrete that first housed an electrical exhibit, then a market, and then—before it finally fell into disrepair—a variety show. Hawkers lingered by the entrance to advertise big mamas, one-eyed dogs and penguin men, flippers downed in black and white fuzz. The waterless pool filled with a honeycomb of curtained compartments where hundreds of people disappeared, eyes open in wonder, in hopes that others might chart their futures.

JR Fenn's writing has appeared in Gulf Coast, PANK, Flash, and more. 'After the Natatorium' is reprinted from Versal. She teaches at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Oblong III

Oblong Magazine's third issue is out, and I'm delighted to have a story, "Insurance," therein. A mere £3 will also bring you a nicely printed magazine of flash fictions by Alan Beard, Ric Carter, Margaret Eaton, Rhoda Greaves, Chad Greene, B. J. Jones, Nicole Matos, J. J. Steinfeld and Jon Steinhagen, as well as my own contribution. Many thanks to editor Jo Beckett King.

Fellow Sudden Prose writers may be interested to know that Oblong has just reopened for flash fiction submissions for its website, as they take a short hiatus from print issues.

New magazine, The Irish Literary Review, seeking flash fiction

The Irish Literary Review is seeking flash fiction submissions of 300 to 1000 words. You can learn more here.