What is better than one new flash fiction story? How about two new stories - although these are probably better described as micro fiction. Although by two separate authors, writing independently, they share the common theme of men having unfortunate - and terminal - relationships with women.

Our first story is by Jessica McHugh, who describes herself as an author of speculative fiction spanning the genre from horror and alternate history to young adult. A 2013 Pulp Ark nominee, she has devoted herself to novels, short stories, poetry and playwriting. Jessica has had sixteen books published in six years, including her bestselling thriller Rabbits in the Garden and the first book in her YA series The Darla Decker Diaries. More info on her speculations and publications can be found at A Barbaric Yawp.

Nailed
by Jessica McHugh

Clack. Clack. Clack.

She’s dead, but he can’t escape her damn fingernails. He found one stuck to his back this morning, splintered where it snapped off her right pinkie. He peeled it away, but it left a crescent indentation in his flesh that still feels sore. The bloody tuft of hair glued to the underside matches the patch she’d scraped from his scalp.

Clack. Clack. Clack.

It’s louder now. Closer. More desperate.

He shivers. The sound isn’t in his mind. Someone drums their nails on the front door—three clacks and one stubby thump. 

He didn’t bury her deep enough.

# # # # #

Our second contributor is Jack Hillman. In addition to the YA fantasy trilogy The Giants War, published by MUSA Books, Jack's published short fiction has appeared in Sorcerous Signals, Amazon Shorts, GateWay SF magazine, Jackhammer, Aberrations, Eternity Online, Gateways, Once Upon A World, Nuketown, the Kings of The Night III anthology, the Magistria: World of the Sorcerer anthology, and the Ruins Extraterrestrial anthology.

jackhillman.com
 
Don’t Say It!
by Jack Hillman

A blinding flash and a deafening report filled the room and his senses.

He reached over to take her hand as she lay next to him after the event that changed his life.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” she answered, with a languid smile.  She stretched her nude form slowly crossing her legs with his.

He hesitated not wanting to spoil the moment but feeling a need.  “I love you,” he said.

“I know,” she answered, and dissolved into a puddle of nanites, flowing off the bed and into her container.

The label on the container read: No Commitment.

The Fairies Were Dying
by Lisamarie Lamb

The fairies were dying. Delicate little bodies littered the streets, their wings fluttering in the slight breeze before turning to dust. The ones who had died first were skeletons now, and soon they would crumble to nothing, and, for all it mattered, never would have been. 

Only the children could see them. The children and those called special by the adults who didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t understand. The young ones and the chosen ones picked up the once beautiful corpses, held them gently, gave them burials whenever they could, but there were too many of them, and the number was growing by the hour. There were so many of them that on some days those who could see were afraid to go outside for fear of getting caught in a downpour of death. 

But the adults saw only what they wanted to see, saw only what was obvious. At first, they believed it was simply a make believe game, but as it went on they grew curious. They asked the children why they were burying stones and pebbles that they had found along the path or in the garden. They wondered why their sons and daughters were afraid to go out amongst the swirling, twirling leaves that tumbled from autumn caught trees. They questioned the tenderness with which each child would kneel and hold fallen feathers, weeping over them with such grief-filled, heart broken cries that it scared their parents. 

Over time the tiny bodies began to rot and began to stink. As they decayed, as muscle melted from miniscule bones and the worms came to feast, the air was choked with the mouldy sweet smell of decomposing flesh. The children and the special ones gagged when they stepped outside, and held gloved hands across their noses and mouths to dilute the stench. It had a way of seeping through, through, a way of trickling down their young throats and filling them with the scent of eternity.

It gave them an early taste of what death was like.

The adults said it was the change of the season. Bonfire remnants and composting leaves. The threat of rain or snow. Winter on its way. It was normal, it was quite all right.  

But the children knew what it was. They could see what it was. 

Walks that once might have been exhilarating, fun in an outdoors sort of way, were now terrifying, each step forward another body broken, bones crunching underfoot. Parents and teachers and all the rest of them said it was the leaves on the ground, brittle and fragile. It was nature’s way of starting again. 

It was, they explained, always like this. Every year the same. Things died. And in the spring they would come back again, resurrected, living once more. 

This scared the children even more. What about the buried ones? The shattered ones? The ones eaten by foxes or left to turn to dust on their own in a ditch?

What about them? They wouldn’t come back. They couldn’t. They were lost forever now. Or, worse, they could come back, and they would, screaming, reaching up through the earth, bones rattling as they shook toward one another trying to gain purchase, to knit together again. And some others would rip themselves out of the stomachs of the creatures that had devoured their corpses so readily, spewing forth amongst blood and guts, wings unfolding even as their skin sloughed away.   

The adults saw the concern scarred across the little faces that looked up at them, beseeching, asking for a different answer to the one given to their silent question, asking for the earth to stop turning and the winter to remain here always.  

Those clever grown ups who new best, who always did, told the children not to worry. 

But the children had to worry. 

The fairies were dying.  

Today's contributor is Mark Mills who reports on an interesting botanical phenomenon that can be observed in Arizona. When not collecting plants, Mark is an English Instructor at Northern Kentucky University and has been published in Tor.com, Short Story America, Pill Hill Press, RuneWright, Aurora Wolf Press, Bards and Sages Quarterly and other publications.

Mafia Flowers
by Mark Mills

Scientific name: Utricularia puzo
Water: Once every two weeks
Soil: Extremely dry
Flowers/Fruit: See below
Range: Western Arizona with occasional sprinklings in southern Nevada and eastern California

The Sunda plant is similar to the Utricularia sandersonii, a bladderwort native of South Africa, but each spring it sprouts the source of its popular name: Mafia flowers. 

In late February to mid March, the buds  appear as pinkish blobs framed by jet-black fibers but within a few weeks are identifiable as human faces. As soon as their tongues develop they bellow, cajole, and snort in Italian, English, or a combination of the two, usually demanding upmost respect and thin slices of proscuttio. Instead of a larynx, the buds speak by an internal mechanism that rubs rough fiber against a thorn-like growth, amplified by opening of the leaf rosette. As of this writing, it’s recognized as a unique characteristic within the plant kingdom.

It’s entirely possible to name individual buds and they will respond to “Vito,” “Tony,” or “Michael” but this can be heartbreaking the latter days of August when the buds begin to droop. Although they show no sign of mental deterioration (if such a pulpy mass can be described as “mental), no amount of splicing or fertilizer can maintain the flowers beyond early autumn.

Although the folklore of the Hohokam Indians contains multiple references to talking plants, it seems clear the Sundra plant is a joke of mad scientists or God. To quote one of my more articulate buds: “You want I should rub you out? Enough with the pruning!” 

Are these the words of random evolution? I have my suspicions.

As a young man, on the way to Yuma, I once stopped at a roadside florist and observed a Sunda  variation that developed yellowish buds and faces of the Japanese Yukuza. Like a fool, I left it, intending to purchase it on the way home but I was delayed in my visit and on the return trip, I could find no trace of the shop. Yukuza flowers seem extinct after my briefest of sightings.

Almost certainly it was a separate species and, as the first to scientifically describe it, I would have had the honor of giving it a name. Alas, after nearly forty years of searching, I have never had another such opportunity and my chances of immortality dwindle until, like a wondrous species of plant, it too fades into the darkness.