If you’ve been following along, you’ll already know we ran a flash fiction contest recently. We invited writers to send in <1,500 word micro-stories based on a reference image, and we got some gems.
Without further ado, here are the picks from the judges for 1st, 2nd, 3rd and runner-up, which also receive prizes in $CLOUT. Here is the reference image used for the contest – but the beauty of micro-fiction is you can go off in any direction you want. Your imagination is the limit.
1st place: @thedoctor
Nobody had taken over the lease. Why would they? It was becoming impossible to start a business in this country – least of all this town. It’s almost as though they had designed it that way. Still, she had known a time when things were different.
He had taken the foreclosure harder than she had realised. Hell, that was the understatement of the year. The anger she felt toward him was still mixed with the bitter, bitter grief in a way that she couldn’t reconcile. There wasn’t a word for that emotion.
“He didn’t give up, he just gave in!” she had screamed at her mother, though she didn’t believe it. Truth be told, she didn’t even know what that meant. Had she heard the line in a song? Damn you Herschell. Why wasn’t I enough?
Why the hell did she keep coming back here? “This has to stop now,” she told herself. “This has to stop now.”
But as she paused to leave, something written on one of the yellowed scraps of newspaper caught her eye. She had performed this ritual countless times before, but she had never actually looked at the papers. In fact, she had only ever tried to peek between them, through the window, back to the time when things were different. It was a piece taken from the personals ads – right next to the funeral notices – of all things. She felt a different emotion forming as she stared at the blurry, faded title…
“Still Haven’t Lost Hope”
2nd place: @thissorryspacesuit
One Will Always be a Nurse
Five is the maximum number of people that will be in the room when you die.
Any more than that and they would be bumping into each other and tripping over the cords, and the intermittent shrill beep that usually makes them all look at the monitor would be too hard to hear.
Unfortunately, it will never be like the old paintings; candlelit and chiarascuroed with a composed group of people on the far side of the bed and you in a humble brown robe. Reclining with slightly parted lips like you’re going to whisper dryly to that servant or pageboy leaning on a lance or anguished Roman war buddy some single word; perfectly describing the purpose of your life.
Instead they will push you back and forth on some used plastic-covered mattress with machines under it while they tear at the shoulder snaps on the blue open-backed dress they require you to wear. One will evaporate for medicine and another will swoop down out of the sky and into her place, like cars merging on a freeway, a choreographed dance of five or less. And thankfully you will be miles away. Neither here nor there, but in a purgatory where dignity now seems like some regrettable human idiosyncrasy. Your slack jaw sinking into your neck with each compressor pump of the blood pressure cuff.
And when you get real close, two out of the five or less will be doctors who step back to watch and give up with a detached authority which is usually reserved for people who poke carcasses under a porch. Their eyes glued to the monitor above your head because all the medicine is up your arm and coursing, so it’s your turn to dance. You’re in Lucky’s Net, wriggling like a fish.
But those nurses will talk to you. They think that you can hear them, so they’ll call you “Sweetie” and “Hon” like some fry cook’s wife that lives out on the route and is tired of looking at the dirt road – the kind that wears a loose sundress on the weekends and just wants her old man to take her into town so she can paint it a deep red. And she’s calling you, her tan, elegant arm caught between a purple rubber glove and the bright splash of her scrubs. Rubbing a shoulder that used to be yours – it appears to you in that moment like a childhood home – and she’s saying “C’mon, Hon. Come back now.” Like a siren shipwrecked on an island of beige tile, the bleach and water lapping at her black clogs, she’ll call you in.
It’s the promise of love that brings you back. She’ll go home after her shift and tell the fry cook about how they almost lost one today, she’ll smile deep at wedding receptions. And, in the mirror when no one is looking, she will stick out her tongue and wag her dangerous head like Kali. But back then – when you’re deciding whether or not to move back into your childhood home – her promise is to love you in a way that makes the flowers bloom fast and bold right out of the surgery lights, and that makes the nest of colored wires stuck to your chest collect like the medals on a soldier’s dress blues.
When you hit bottom there will be five people or less. But thankfully one will always be a nurse.
3rd place: @robklurfield
The Ballad of Patty & Ev
Chapter 17
Koko Taylor and Apple Pancakes
“Ev, slow down. Remember that $237 ticket last time we drove through the invisible empire of the Kluless Klan? The Ku Klux kop in the souped up unmarked Camaro? Honestly, lightfoot, ease up on the gas. I’m not paying bail.” Ev barrelling through Indiana cornfields, Patty urging some restraint, as they make a pilgrimage to Chicago at her suggestion “to see your parents before they croak.”
Patty detests her viperous hypochondriacal mother-in-law, marvelling that no one has ever managed to remove Dina’s venom sacs or defang her. She is alternately enthralled and disturbed by her father-in-law, the notorious and charming kleptomaniacal Ike with his suspiciously high-octane octogenarian Fred Astaire Nicholas Brothers dance moves. Though Ev rarely displays any particular affection for them, Patty worries that floodgates might open when they pass. A family whose history is written in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a book on which her own clan might be based as well.
Ev slows as they pass through the last of the Indiana Toll Road Ez-Pass stations, punches a radio button to the station from Northwestern and on come the Wailers. Bob Marley sings the Beatles, “She gives me everything, and tenderly…. Oh, yessiree…. Bright as the stars that shine….” Bob sells the song. You want her, too.
Ev starts to tell Patty of longing, his for her, on a long ago night on another visit to the Hog Butcher of the World, City of Big Shoulders, when they had only been a sometime couple for half a year. He had travelled alone and was missing her terribly, yessiree. His friend Hank invited him to come along with Hank’s girlfriend Nancy Kipple (“rhymes with nipple” Hank liked to say) to hear some live music. (Later in life, Hank would inexplicably fall in thrall to Springstein, forsaking his proper muddied water Chicago roots.)
Deciding to turn the drive up to the Northshore into a guided tour, Ev pulls off the world’s busiest road, exiting the Dangerous Dan Ryan Express still on the far Southside. He takes her past the modest duplex in the Manor, which was always anything but, then heads towards 2128½ S. Indiana, the former Velvet Lounge.
Shocked, he finds the Velvet’s glass block façade replaced with nondescript plate glass. Patron of the jazz arts and a latter day Lester Young, tenor Fred Anderson’s fabled dive nightclub, the window covered with yellowed pages from the Tribune, Reader and Sun-Times, now as vacant as the depressed expression that comes over Ev’s face. He remembers that Fred moved a bit north to Cermak Road (named for 44TH Chitown Mayor Anton Cermak, who was felled by an assassin’s bullet while shaking Franklin Roosevelt’s hand in Miami) but that iteration of the Velvet Lounge is also long defunct. He hears Saxsoon in his head, Hamid Drake polyrhythming behind Fred Hopkin’s bass, Billy Brimfield’s trumpet and Anderson Fred’s saxophone. Fred stooping low to the ground. The meter slowing then accelerating like Ev’s driving.
“You know how I say that all narrators are unreliable, you and me, too, well, I want to show you how and where a night of aching longing for you 40 years ago began and ended and how I did not fall out of a car drunk on the highway and die because I missed you too much. Then you will know the truth.”
Hank and KippleNipple had picked Ev up at Ike and Dina’s, the house along frontage road on I-94 (where, once, in the early 60s a driver lost control, traversed the wide, wide grass shoulder, collapsed the chain link fence and crashed into the house). They went to Pepper’s Hideout on Ada and Wabansia Streets.
“Koko Taylor was performing. Maybe even Willie Dixon sat in. I had about two dollars to my name, what with the tuition I never paid, but Hank was running a bar tab, I was a lonesome cowboy and so I began tipping back longneck Buds as fast as I could, budding drunk that I was, gripping the bottles Cool Hand Luke style between my index and middle fingers. If I tell you I had a dozen or more, my narration is unreliable, but it might as well have been a case or two à la W.C. Fields’ Egbert Sousè or was it Kaiser Soze? Anyway, you know the only thing I like about those Buds are the long necks.”
Patty knows that, like Ike, Ev does not lie, but he is prone to extravagant embellishments. She also knows in his day he could be quite a drunk when he put his mind to it.
“Prophetically, Koko started the set with Etta James’s ‘I’d Rather Go Blind.’ By the time she sang Wang Dang Doodle all night long was looking a long way off and I was shitfaced and blackout blind. ‘Tonight we need no rest, we really gonna throw a mess,’ which I would do later.”
Ev drives to the proximate scene of the crime. Points out the club. “Next thing I remember, we went to a taqueria under the El tracks that was shockingly well lit for 2am. Roaches wholly unafraid of the light, not bothering to scurry for cover. After stuffing my face with who knows what kind of tacos, coulda been cow heads or goat entrails, and drinking some sort of mutinous cane-sugared Mexican soda, Hank stuffed my wobbly inebriated ass into the backseat of his father’s Montego for the ride home.”
Ev retraces the path, WNUR plays the Holy Modal Rounders’ Boobs a Lot, as they approach the Edens Expressway. “Must we listen to this,” Patty protests.
“It’s about here that I decided I could not live without you and that the best way to express my sentiments would be to shout your name to the night and to NippleKipple and Hank. Since the night didn’t respond with proper encouragement, I decided I needed to make myself heard better and louder. So, I opened the rear passenger door, dangled my floppy intoxicated torso out of the car and screamed at the top of my lungs, ‘Patty, Patty, Patty.’ Hank told me the next day that it was lucky I was seat-belted into the Mercury since he was going at least 75 when I attempted my Flying Wallenda. He told me he would forgive the $25 to get the puke cleaned from the tan corduroy upholstery of the dentist mobile and that Dr. Schultz would forgive me, too, since he wrongly thought I was a good influence on Hank. Walter Schultz’s taste in cars was as bad as his judgment of Hank’s friends.”
Patty digests this. WNUR plays the Fuggs, Tulie Kupferberg’s nasal Brooklynese intoning about the “fucking-A, C-I-A Man . . . outing all the hitmen of Chicag-ua.” She decides to out Ev.
“Husband of mine, I believe every word of that story except the Koko Taylor part. Willie Dixon did not sit in. Or at least not last time you told this story.” She looks at Skokie giving way to Wilmette out the rushing-by window scenery of the highway.
“Was there ever a time that the most risk-averse man I’ve ever known wasn’t also the fucking stupidest reckless-est Chicag-uan risk taker in history? Dangling by your whatis out of Hank’s father’s car sounds exactly like you. Is it genetic? Is Ike going to try to capsize us on his boat this weekend? To kill us for life insurance? Will he steal anything?”
“Patrician Height-Smythe, you stole his heart, boarding school girl.”
Paul Butterfield and band come on the college radio. “I was born in Chicago in nineteen and forty-one…. Oh, my first friend went down when I was seventeen years old….”
Patty asks, “What year was Ike born? I can hear him telling you ‘Son, you had better get a gun.’ Evinrude, dearest, you have no fucking idea how much I am looking forward to this fucking fuck loco parentis, parentes rabidus visit. Don’t miss the exit, you idiot. I want you to take me to Walker Brothers for that apple pancake thing before I have to see Dina the bad witch with her DSM-5 code 300.7 and her Merck Manual of Made Up Aliments. And I want vanilla ice cream on the fucking pancake. Why couldn’t we have stopped at Ann Sather’s for a Swedish waffle, dear Everett of the Windy City?”
Ev retorts, “My Patty Play Pal, I will take you for real pizza later and then I can show you where the Arkestra and El Saturn Records were located. Amazing that you have memorized my mother’s diagnosis codes.”
“Maybe Ike shipwrecking us would be better. Tell you what. If you can manage that I don’t to see your mother, we can screw in the parking lot at Walker Brothers.”
“That won’t work, but we can try the IHOP. The pancakes are cheaper and no one will notice us in their parking lot.”
Runner-Up: @travelogue.of.fantasy
It was our first night in Bali. Hot, perfumed and humid. Unlike ‘our’ sun that seems to linger, the sun here sank, displayed a brief sunset and plunged us into darkness. The odd street light, silhouetted the tangled wires and flying insects above the potholes. “The taxi is here” I stood while the last of the primping was done. “No, go on, I’ll meet you down there.” The taxi driver, perspiring in the floodlight looked polished. We both leaned against the car watching Sally walk down the stairs lit by lights behind leafy plants. On the last step she crumpled and fell with a crunch. I ran.
“My whole weight has landed on my ankle” came out in sobs. Helpless in these situations and not knowing the severity, I asked “are we going to the hospital or the restaurant?” more tears, stroking and calming. “The hospital”
The hospital looked like a 50’s movie, dated by its design and the nurses uniforms. Every ligament that could be torn, was. A wheelchair and blow up cast were issued.
Forced to move, Ray, a butler came with our new five-star hotel room. Sally enjoyed the circular covered beach bed, dressed in a robe with Ray bringing bottomless gin and tonics. He was summoned with a bell. Very colonial, demeaning and the sound grated.
Toileting on flight home was tortuous. How people join the mile high club is beyond me.
Worst of all Ray “came home with us.” I am now Ray; subservient, obedient and agreeable. The bell, however, mysteriously disappeared.
Write Your Own Micro-Stories!
Interested in trying this short fiction/micro-stories genre? You can read more about what flash fiction is so you can write your own tiny tales!
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Featured photo: Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash
