Category: Flash Fiction

Flash Fiction: Potential

Competition

I used to love to take part in the flash fiction competitions held on the Escape Artists Forums. I think I have mentioned that before. I would read and re-read every entry, and vote in each round. The work of writing the actual flash fiction stories was instrumental in my development as a writer but reading and critiquing literally hundreds of flash stories over the years also helped me understand what to avoid and what to emulate. If you are an aspiring writer, you could do a lot worse than to take part in contests like this. It looks like the last one they held was a couple of years ago so they are about due for another one soon. Also, if you win, they reproduce it on one of their podcasts! Check them out at the link above.

Anyway, this is one of my more successful efforts. “Potential” got to the semi-finals of the contest for Escape Pod in 2018. I hope you enjoy it, dear reader.

Potential

by Ronan McNamee

“Do you remember the Earth, Momma?” Kevin bounced between ceiling and floor. Liberty couldn’t watch without nausea nibbling. She stood before their darkened porthole, preparing silver-packed lunches.

She sighed. “How many times, Kev? Why keep asking this question?”

Kevin’s reflection shrugged in the porthole.

Liberty knew why: he didn’t believe her answer. To her son, Earth was Heaven, the Happy Hunting Grounds, Valhalla; but he believed in it utterly. Of course he didn’t believe her.

“Did you ever see a bison, Momma?” Kevin performed his final dismount from the ceiling, not with a flourish but with a fart.

“Kevin!”

“I couldn’t help it!”

Shaking her head, suppressing giggles, Liberty rhymed off her standard response: “The bisons are all gone, my love, just like the pandas, turtles, codfishes. That Earth is dying, but we’re still here, L’il Kev. Our future is out there.”

Kevin shook his head and smiled wide. Wink! And he pushed off to the back of their cozy capsule. He began boxing a teddy in the face.

She would never convince him.

No need, she thought, in two more years, we’ll be out of here and escaping this graveyard. He’ll have to believe it. Or will he? Even then? Is there anything I can show him, or anything those scientists can say to make him understand the truth.

“It’s my own fault,” said Liberty softly into her panini. “I shouldn’t have told you this was a spaceship. But you’re my only company: had to console you somehow.” Louder, “Come and eat your lunch, L’il Kev.”

Kevin looked upon his defeated enemy, nodded once and floated over to her.

She handed him his panini, “I’m sorry, my love. I’m sorry I got us into this but it’ll be worth it in the end.” He gave her a cocked head and a scrunched-up puzzled face, grabbed the package and flew off again, laughing, waving his lunch at the porthole. Globs of mayonnaise and molten emmental exploded from it. Liberty winced. She knew the equipment was delicate but Kevin’s potential energy was often released in damaging ways; he was a bored six-year-old. Knuckling her eyes, she began her mantra, “It’ll be worth it in the end, it’ll be worth it in the end, it’ll b-“ Liberty’s nostrils twitched: smoke…

Kevin had abandoned his sandwich mid-capsule while he pretended to shoot her with a defunct thermoglue gun. “Pchew! Pchew!” He noticed nothing.

Liberty floated around, sniffing. She strained to listen but Kevin was too loud. Pleading was futile.

Liberty retrieved the extinguisher and flew about, blindly. The cabin filled with smoke. She began to panic when she heard, “Simulation ended.” Her son bawled. She looked around at him in the next booth.

A white coat loomed above her, “The trial is over, Liberty.” She shook her head, tears stinging.

“You were unable to maintain your capsule… your ticket off world is revoked.”

“No,” she whispered.

“You’ll be staying here on Earth. We thank you for your time.”

Eyes Open

“You see over yonder, Ollie?” Ollie’s father roughly jabbed him with his bony elbow. the man’s digit described the glowing tree-line at the foot of the hill. “That’s where they are. Should’ve burned it down years ago.”
His dad shook his head. “Never should’ve let them in in the first place!”
“Someone has to act, and it’s going to be us, boy!” Ollie stepped back as his father stepped forward, lighting a torch and holding it aloft in the night air. It illuminated the burning shield tattooed on his neck.
Like moths Ollie’s eyes were drawn to the flame. Its white-hot heart drew a memory on his retinas:

The Folk were caught off-guard by the attack of their allies, the people of the Kingdom. The Folk had cured their poxes and healed their wounds. They had promised they always would in return for peace. But the King’s subjects feared the Folk more than they valued peace. The Folk and their woods burned as the people howled and chopped and marshalled the inferno.

Ollie followed his father a few yards behind out of fear.
“They’re an infection, son! We have to burn them out of our community!”
Ollie stepped in a puddle near the foot of the hill. The water’s dark mirror reflected another memory:

A woman of the Folk, aglow with forest magic, laid hands on the ruined leg of a warrior. A woman of the Kingdom loomed behind her. As the knight’s limb was made whole the woman shoved the healer back into the city’s dirt where they had found her, spat and laughed.

Ollie stumbled in his father’s wake.
“Come along, boy! We took them into our civilisation when they had nowhere else to go. What did we get for our troubles? Knives in the back! Why wouldn’t they want our great Kingdom leading them, protecting them, showing them the right path? Eh?”
Ollie no longer heard. He rose and peered into the clouds above. Their wisps revealed a new memory:

A man of the Folk, all but invisible in black, dropped from ornate rafters onto the King’s throne. He roared in pent-up rage as he sucked the life from the monarch. The man’s body, pustulating and poxy, tumbled to the floor beside the King’s, just as dead.
The Kingdom drowned all the Folks’ children.

Ollie’s father approached the trees.
“The last of them live in this fairy-ring, Ollie. We’ll be heroes when we cure this infection!”
Ollie ran to the first great ash. His eyes peered into the swirl of an ancient knot:

A slender hand reached through a window to enact a terrible trade, one tiny boy of the kingdom for another identical one. The be-glamoured and bundled cuckoo screamed and a man came to attend. He held the child tenderly to his face, right by the flaming buckler emblazoned below his ear.

“No, Dad. We’ll cure you instead.” Ollie began to glow with forest light.

Flash Fiction – Finnabar’s Relative Reconciliation

500 Words

For a while there, I was a part of a small writing group. We used to come up with random prompts or a selection of nouns and verbs and make flash fiction story out of them. They generally had to be 500 words long andinclude those randomly selcted words. It was a fun and interesting challenge and the results were always fascinating because each of us would end up with such different and idiosyncratic pieces. This was good practice for a series of flash fiction contests I entered on the Escape Artists forums. Escape Artists produce such long-running and luminary genre fiction podcasts as Podcastle, Escape Pod and Pseudopod. You should check them out. Anyway, if you were a contest winner, the prize was usually to be published and read on one of the shows. I also just really enjoyed reading all the submissions in the contests and voting on them too. I never did that great in the contests, I think the best I got was a quarter-final place, but taking part taught me a lot. The main lesson was editing. In 500 words, there is nowhere to hide. You have to choose every word deliberately and you must be brutal towards your own work. I also discovered that originality of story and format proved popular among the voters on the forums.

So this work is an attempt at both. But it is also one that I never submitted to a contest. I don’t precisely remember why. But anyway, maybe you will be able to enjoy it here, dear reader.

Finnabar’s Relative Reconciliation: A spell used to bring accord between two riven kin.

Material Components

  1. The two subjects of the spell. They must be present in the same room as the performer of the spell. (Convincing both parties to do this may be the single thorniest aspect of this spell. I suggest deception. If that is not your forte recruit the aid of one more suited to the task. If all else fails, refer to a spell of my own composition, Finnabar’s Enchanting Eyebrows, also published in this compendium. I used this method to draw my siblings together against their wills. I reiterate that it should be used only as a last resort.)
  2. Three hairs, two feet long, plucked from the human heads of three were-creatures, a fox representing deception and adaptability, a rat to represent betrayal and creativity and a wolf as a symbol of both fear and path-finding. Please note that these must be given with consent. You will find a sample consent form overleaf. It is wise to expect to pay a price for these components. I was not so wise and now dread the inevitable waxing of the moon.
  3. An article of significance to the family as a focus. The painting of a respected ancestor, a piece of jewellery belonging to a beloved relation or an ancient heirloom. Personally, I chose a bust of our esteemed father. A poor choice. I was previously unaware of one sibling’s true feelings regarding our patriarch so it served to disrupt the spell rather than focus it.

Performance

  1. The first step of the performance rests in the hands of the subjects, rather than the performer. They begin by standing eighteen inches apart and greeting each other. Their resistance to this may be strong. In my case it was strong enough to break the suggestion caused by my eyebrows when the greetings were uttered. Once that had occurred, however, they both remained close enough that I was able to proceed with the next step.
  2. Tie the fox hair around the wrists of one subject and the rat hair around the wrists of the other. Join the two together with the wolf hair. I had great difficulty in completing this step while both siblings stood over me, shoving fingers in my face and yelling. I was forced to use another spell, Finnabar’s Restrictive Rope, from my first grimoire.
  3. Finally, perform a simple Shanahan’s shuffle and produce an eldritch flame from the focus object to engulf the binding hairs. There will be peace between your subjects. In my case, I assume the use of the wrong focus caused a rift between my siblings and I, for should they not have appreciated my help?

NB – I cannot over-emphasise that you should heed the warnings I have peppered in the text of this spell. If you do not, the consequences can be monstrous. Also, if a fellow mage wishes to practice the performance of the spell a couple of times while assisting me, please contact me with urgency.