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Flash Fiction

Fiction

The Twelve Dying Princesses

This is one of those stories that just about wrote itself. Each princess had something to say, grief and rage straining through the veneer painted over their original tales. The end result is part obituary, part manifesto.

Fiction

Whatever Takes Us

I had two things in mind while writing this story: anti-trans legislature targeting trans, nonbinary, gender queer, and two-spirited people and all the moments I was bullied in the bathroom as a child for not looking girl enough. If this story can do anything beyond entertain, I hope it makes you speak up and act out against bigotry in all forms.

Fiction

Clown Town

I get up before dawn. Those pale-gray hours hold signs of unseen life: a trace of pungent spray, a flutter of wings, distant car doors slamming shut. Of course I attribute these to animals and early morning commuters. Sometimes I wonder if I’m wrong.

Fiction

Student Living

“Student Living” is something of a love letter to the makeshift nature of living on a budget as a student. It’s bleary-eyed mornings and caffeine fueled nights with our faces slammed against readings and lecture notes. I wanted to write something that encompassed my love of that experience.

Fiction

Five Things That Go Through Your Mind After the Masked Killer Decapitates You with an Axe and Your Still-Living Head Has a Few Seconds of Consciousness Left to Gaze at Your Twitching Body

ONE: I told them it was stupid to rent the same cabin in the woods where that other slaughter took place, twenty years ago. I said I knew of a perfectly good bed and breakfast where nobody had ever been slaughtered, not even once.

Fiction

Anatomy of a Haunted House

This story came from a writing prompt about how “kitchen spirits are the friendliest ghosts,” which of course made me think about the other, nastier spirits lurking within the household. I love writing about haunted places, and have always been interested in the parasitic nature of hungry spirits and their victims. After all, what’s the point of a haunted house if there’s no one within to be haunted?

Fiction

They Say

The first draft of this came out of my head in November 2016, for obvious contemporaneous reasons. As is often the way of stories, though, it took a while before I realised what I was really telling myself in the writing. I’ve been on a journey of self-acceptance for my neurodivergence these last couple of years, and part of that is trying to break myself of the cringing need for everyone to love and understand me: to learn, instead, that if I am to love myself, my true self, I have to accept that I will never be able to prove myself to some people.

Fiction

9 Lies You Tell Yourself About Ghost Hunting

This started with a prompt in a weekend flash writing contest: “True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen.” That weekend, my teenage daughter and a couple of her friends were talking about sidekicks in books that are more interesting than the main “chosen” one character—and it brought up my own conflicted feelings about the show Supernatural, which is littered with the bodies of the Winchester brothers’ female sidekicks.

Fiction

Delicate Webbing

My writing explores the darkness within myself and my past. In this case, I wanted to write about a frighteningly unhealthy relationship. I hope readers experience the uncomfortableness the narrator feels for participating in something profane and yet falling head-first into it.

Fiction

Terms of Service

Many EULAs take seventeen (or more!) hours to get through. I always feel like I’ve signed away a piece of my soul after agreeing to a super long one. Perhaps I have.

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