The Farmer and the Korrigan: A Flash Fic
A free flash fiction from my newsletter inspired by research I’ve been doing on fairy folklore in Brittany …
Tag: flash fiction
A quick interview with Kaaron Warren and Ellen Datlow: Unusual Objects Lead to a Unique Project
Today I interview speculative fiction writer, Kaaron Warren, and editor, Ellen Datlow about their collaboration on the Tool Tales chapbook
Autumn in New Orleans: A Flash Fic
How did I come to live in a forest looking like a freak with Betty McLean, leaving school, friends, and family behind?
Well for starters, the red-gold leaf was as big as my face. Which is why it was kind of bad it stuck to my forehead, nose, mouth, chin like glue. I wrestled with it, and you’d think I’d have won easy-peasy on account of it being a tender sugar maple versus a boy, but it wouldn’t budge. I think I had a panic attack – certainly, it was hard to breathe, and I soon hated the taste of crisp bitterness and dirt mixing with saliva. I bashed into other trees in the national park (I’d gone for a picnic and wandered off), seeing blue stars behind my lids, none of which helped either. Falling in a heap, crying and a-shivering seemed the only thing to do.
That’s when the coven found me.
I should have expected something of that nature, living in New Orleans and all, but usually they’re fake new agey types rather than, you know, actual witches. These ones prodded, the wood bristles of their broom poking into my arm and chest as they whispered.
That’s when one drew my hand in hers, kissed the inside of my palm (I later learnt that meant ownership, that she’d sealed me as personal property). “What’s your name, kid?”
“Troy,” I said, “and I’m thirteen, which is old enough to fight if I have to and young enough my parents will come find me if I’m not home by dark.”
“Why is there a leaf on your face, Troy,” she snickered. “I bet you’re no crash-hot fighter with that obstructing your vision and your parents won’t want a leaf-boy for a son neither.”
She had a point. “It won’t come off,” I said, looking at my feet.
“No,” she said, way too calmly. “We’re trying a new enchantment. Good to see it worked. It’s more interesting than rats, rabbits, or a pumpkin, don’t you think?”
“If it’s all the same to you, miss, I preferred being a boy, and I’m getting mighty dizzy and sick in this darkness. I’d be much obliged if you’d help a kid out.”
She placed a cool finger to my leaf, muttered an incantation, carefully ripped the waxy cells so I had eye and mouth holes. “Will that suffice?” The other witches cackled around her.
“As I said, miss, I was really hoping to get back to straight homo sapien.”
“But you see, I need a new familiar, and you crashed right into our circle.”
That’s how I came to live in a forest looking like a freak with Betty McLean, leaving school, friends and family behind.
The Lamplighter: A flash fic
Maureen’s Halloween inspired free October fiction. A lamplighter gets more than he bargains for when he comes face to face with a ghost …
Homeless in Paris: A flash fic
I wake up on the other side of the Arc de Triomphe, the world full of sun and the scent of peppermint and roses, which is weird given when I’d fallen asleep on my patch of cardboard it had been blanketing snow. I close my eyes, open them, blink, but the road is still overgrown and green and peaceful where I’m sitting.
A tall woman towers over me, her hair done in intricate ringlets like the statues they have in The Louvre, a shining pomegranate balancing on her head. When she smiles, crimson juice stains her teeth. “Welcome,” she says as she extends me her hand.
“I’m dead, aren’t I?” Maybe it’s for the best. I’d had nowhere to go and no plan for the future when I’d run away from Andre’s drunken punches, but I’d soon found homelessness every bit as lonely and soul-biting as the newspapers said.
“What a strange question,” the woman replies, and I can see she believes it, grey silk sliding about her arms as she pulls me to my feet. She extends me a black goblet. “You won’t die unless you drink.”
I hold onto the goblet, but I don’t do as she says. “Where am I? Who are you?”
“The Avenue des Champs-Élysées, silly. Where else? As to who I am? I’m a woman who’s lost her way.”
I glance behind me, through the Arc, at a world that’s white and full of magic from the fairy lights on the trees and laugh. “Join the club. Where are you trying to get then?”
“Aglea.”
“Never heard of it,” I say dismissively, leaning back into the Arc. It’s weird having no one crowding for snaps or yelling because you’re ruining the aesthetic of a national monument.
“Not it. Who.” She smiles. “You know I’m Persephone, right?”
“Sure, and I’m Hades.” Still, there is the fact I’m in some kind of second Paris so maybe it’s not as mad as all that.
“You’re not mad at all,” she laughs and I’m trying not to freak out that she’s somehow read my mind. “The world’s gotten everything wrong about me. They say I wanted the underworld to escape my mother, that Hades kidnapped me, and I made the best of it, that other Gods and heroes came to woo me. They say Hephaeastus was one of them.” She steps forward to grasp both my arms. “Bullshit. It was you, Aglea, I yearned for.”
“Come again?”
She tilts her head. “You truly don’t remember?” And before I can back away her honeyed lips are on mine and it’s intoxicating and frightening all at once.
“We walked through the Elysian Fields and we loved, but then you returned to Zeus and Olympus. You Charities were always too unselfish. I’ve waited so long for you to be reborn and to find me.”
My head feels like cotton candy as I let her take my hand and force the death goblet back to my lips. I’m thinking I’d rather stick with a goddess over Andre or begging and there’s the fact I remember someone who looked an awful lot like this Persephone in Algeria, when I’d bought my plane ticket to France. She’d given me money, told me some story about making a fortune in the city of love. Had it all been leading to this?
I’ll take the chance. I drink down to the bitter dregs.
Flash Fiction: The Hestia
This piece was originally published last year as part of IfBook Australia’s Open Changes project, but I thought my blog readers might enjoy reading my brief crime piece here. The Hestia My hips wedge against the boat rim. I can taste the roughness of knotted…