If you go out into the garden late at night, just watch out for the gnomes warns Daniel Lamb in our latest flash fiction story. Daniel Lamb is a twenty three year old writer from the North West of England. He used to make up stories in the playground as a child and make his friends play all the different characters whether they liked it or not. Now, he just writes the stories down in an attempt to avoid the possibility of characters getting bored and walking off half way through. Although this still happens from time to time. He has a pet hedgehog called Madame Prickles. He keeps a blog which can be found at https://horizoscopesandintrospectacles.wordpress.com/ 


Gnomes
by Daniel Lamb


You may ask why I am hiding in the bushes. It is a good question to ask. I’m not a peeping tom or anything, let me just assure you of that, right off the bat. I’m hiding in the bushes for perfectly legitimate reasons. 
     
I’m hiding from my wife’s gnomes. 
     
I’m not really into gnomes myself. I can take them or leave them. I usually leave them. My wife loves them though. She’s gnome mad. Loves garden gnomes of all varieties. Every time we go down to the garden centre, she seems to come back with a gnome. Sometimes it’s a small gnome, perhaps sitting on a toadstool looking all cheerful. Other times, it’s quite a large gnome, perhaps holding a fishing rod or with an oversized pipe in its mouth. The point is, she loves gnomes and our garden is full of them and has been ever since we moved here. I’d say we’ve got about fifty gnomes all in all. There’s so many that I’d started to barely notice them anymore, they’d just become part of the scenery, as nondescript as, say, the pavestones or the outside tap. It didn’t really matter how large or colourful or odd looking they were, I’d just stopped noticing them. 
        
Then a couple of days ago one of them turned to me and said ‘Alright, Davey? You couldn’t move me into the shade, could you? Can feel myself starting to crack in this heat.’ 
      
I blinked at the gnome. Then I stuck a finger in my ear and twisted it. 
      
‘Go on, be a pal, Davey boy! I’d do the same for you,’ the gnome said. There was no question about it. It was definitely the gnome speaking.
       
I blinked at the gnome.
     
‘Can’t you move yourself?’ I asked, completely dumbstruck.  
     
‘Move? Whoever heard of a garden gnome that could move of its own accord? I think you’re cracking up, Davey.’ 
     
I walked over to the gnome, picked it up and popped it down in the shade cast by the neighbour’s apple tree. 
     
‘Cheers, Davey. Much obliged,’ said the gnome, which had been fashioned with a lute in its hands. 
      
I went inside and made a cup of tea. 
      
I considered broaching the subject with my wife that night in bed, but I thought she might think I was taking the piss. Later that night, as I was lying awake, I heard a crackling noise coming from outside the bedroom window. I couldn’t sleep as it was. I was playing the whole gnome incident over in my head and trying to decide whether I should go and see a doctor in the morning. The last thing I needed was this crackling noise adding to my insomnia. I got up and pulled back the curtain ever so slightly to investigate. I peered down into the garden. 
     
There was a fire roaring in the middle of the garden. A pile of twigs had been placed in a dustbin lid and set alight. Black smoke was curling up past the window and into the night air. I ran downstairs and out into the garden, barefoot and in a panic. I grabbed the garden hose and turned it to full power and doused the flames until there was nothing but the blackened and burned remnants of kindling. And a gnome. The cracked and melting vestiges of a garden gnome. It looked like it might once have held something resembling a lute. I gazed around at other gnomes, each of them silent and still. Each of them watching me with their hollow, staring eyes. Each of them smiling. But I could find no mirth in those smiles. Not then.       
      

We've two new flash fiction stories for you now, from Margaret Killjoy with A Reasonable Place if You're Careful – an alarming excursion into urban, well at least rural, fantasy, and Heartache by Sarah Goldman taking us into the realms of magical realism.


​A Reasonable Place if You're Careful
by Margaret Killjoy

Review of Stony Fork Campground in the Jefferson National Forest – Five out of Five

It's only twelve dollars a night. The mountains are beautiful, the trees are beautiful. A handsome little creek runs right through the campground.

I used to look forward to dying, back before I'd met the dead. The thought of death had been a comforting one. Death had felt like sleep, like oblivion. Oblivion is the place where forgotten things go. I've long wanted to forget, so I've always wanted to be forgotten.

I used to envy the mayfly its fleeting, flitting life. I envied the mouse, consumed whole by the snake. I envied my mother, dead these long years.

But there's a certain type of pine that only grows at the base of these Appalachian hills, recognizable by its silver needles, black bark, and deep red shelf mushrooms that grow along it. A few grow along the creek in the campground. Its inner bark is neither poisonous nor edible, and, as other reviewers have recommended, I ate a sliver of it while I was here. Now I have nothing, no one, left to envy.

I've learned there's no escape in death, no rest, no sleep. There's no peaceful island on the far side of some river of fire, no boatman. No heavenly gates, no reincarnation. I saw the dead. They're pitiful spirits, transformed by trauma, who wander helpless and bored. They sit under trees and gaze up at Godless skies. They wade in creeks and streams, un-cleansed and un-cleanable.

Their features and faces bear the weight of entropy, and they go from recognizable to shapeless over the course of centuries. Some must have walked across or under oceans, because I saw a samurai without a sword or words or love. I saw soldiers and peasants and runaway slaves and I saw the best people and the worst people. They're all dead and they're all undying.

The vision passed by morning, but it's been months and I still can't shake what I saw. I know what awaits us and I'll never sleep well again. Please ignore the other reviews that encourage you to eat the inner bark of those trees.

It's not safe.

But the bathrooms are clean and there's hot water for the showers. All the living people were amiable enough. I recommend this campground to anyone passing through southwest Virginia.


* Margaret Killjoy says her short fiction has been published by Stranger Horizons and Vice’s Terraform and is forthcoming from Tor.com. She is a 2015 graduate of Clarion West and can be found on Twitter at
@magpiekilljoy and at http://www.birdsbeforethestorm.net


Heartache
by Sarah Goldman

Silva keeps her heart in a box, buried beneath the underbrush in her back garden. I know this because I saw her put it there, the night we both turned thirteen. 
    
I asked her then how she got her heart out of her chest, and she said: What do you think, Anya? I used a knife. 
    
Silva is not my sister, though our parents like to joke that she is. She was born a scant few minutes before me, five rooms down in the same hospital. Our fathers met while pacing and drinking vending machine coffee, and ever since, we might as well have been twins for all the time we spend together.
    
The night we turned thirteen, I sat on the edge of the fence that divided our yards. I watched Silva bury the box with her heart, and I rolled my eyes because I thought it was very like her: overdramatic and ostentatious and pointless. 
    
I asked her then why she had cut her heart from her chest, and she said: What do you think, Anya? Now I will never be beholden to anyone.
    
At thirteen this seemed silly to me, and I told Silva so. She looked at me with her flat grey eyes, and told me I would not always think this. 
    
Now I am eighteen, and I will never tell her that she was right. 
  
 I thought for years that what I felt was envy, and I suppose I do envy Silva. I envy that she does not feel as I do. I envy that her heart, locked in its box and not beneath her ribs, cannot attempt to beat its way inconveniently out of her chest in the way that mine does, whenever she is near. 
    
The night we both turned sixteen, we sat on the fence between our homes, drinking the whiskey my father kept in the highest cabinet in the house.
    
I asked her then whether she would ever dig her heart out from where she had buried it, and she said: What do you think, Anya? Do I look like I will ever want to give my heart to anyone?
    
The spot is marked with an oak tree that I helped her plant, years ago. It is young still. Now, two weeks before we will turn nineteen, I steal a trowel from the shed in Silva's garden, and while the moon looks on I dig up the box in which she buried her heart. 
    
The wood is cool against my fingers. Her heart is not so shocking a sight as it might be, next to dissecting cats in biology class. It is at least bloodless, and does not smell of ammonia. Her heart just beats, soft and reassuring. 
    
I did not only steal a trowel from the shed in Silva's garden. I also stole a knife. It's clean, and gleams silver in the moonlight. Cutting open my chest is simple enough. It isn't so different from dissecting the cats, save a change in perspective. My ribs part easily, splayed like piano keys: long white bars with dark spaces in between. 
    
When I cut it out, my heart is beating as steadily as Silva's.
    
At first it's hard to notice the difference, as I push my ribs back into place, one by one. But soon enough, my breathing comes easier and my chest feels immeasurably lighter, without the burden of a heart to weigh it down. 
    
When I lay my heart in the box beside Silva's, nothing about it strikes me as poignant, or as anything other than necessary. Once I dreamed that Silva would give me this box, her heart still in it, or that perhaps I would steal it away. But now, I think she was always right, to hide her heart where no one can see it or touch it or grasp it. 
    
Standing alone in her back garden, I bury the box again. I no longer envy Silva anything.


* Sarah Goldman a sociology student at Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia, and sometimes she write things. she can be found online at http://www.sarahmgoldman.tumblr.com

We've a fascinating mix of poetry for you now – from John Grey, Jenny Blackford, and Deborah L. Davitt ​– covering everything from vampires and gnomes to new shades of paint we'd all like to see. Yes, we'll paint the bathroom ceiling in Squashed Lizard mart emulsion...


Dawn Curse
by John Grey

Cursed with the glare
of all this outside brightness,
I risk losing everything
from my flesh, my bone,
to the fear I've invoked in others
for the past four hundred years.

The sun is up,
air is warm,
birds are singing,
colorful flower petals open.
Can it get any worse?


* John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in New Plains Review, South Carolina Review, Gargoyle and Silkworm with work upcoming in Big Muddy Review, Cape Rock and Spoon River Poetry Review.   
 

One small advantage
by Jenny Blackford

One small advantage
of owning a cat
is a live-in excuse
for steps along the corridor
at night

until you move your feet 
and find the cat curled on the bed
still fast asleep.


Mostly nameless colours
by Jenny Blackford

Mostly nameless colours, Colours you'd like to see
...Robert Graves, Welsh Incident

Colours I'd like to see in next year's car catalogue:
Cinnamon latte, baked pumpkin, varnished copper 
Violet crumble, tomato soup, smurf 
Azaleas in the snow 

Mashed banana, mango ice cream, squashed lizard
Daddylonglegs, huntsman, redback shiny black
The monster under the bed 

Big blue beetle, green bug, tree frog 
Crescent moon glinting from an ancient katana beside a crater lake 
Pond scum

Grey nurse, great white, hammerhead 
Seaweed, seawrack, seaserpent 
Mermaid belly

Dragon bone, dragon tooth, dragon scale 
Black hole
Supernova
Singularity


* Based in New South Wales (Australia) Jenny Blackford's poetry has appeared in august literary journals including Australian Poetry Journal and The Pedestal Magazine as well as Strange Horizons and Star*Line. Jenny also won the inaugural Connemara Mussel Festival poetry competition. She adds "Not spec-fic, but Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer references, so a bit scienc-ey." http://www.jennyblackford.com + https://www.twitter.com/dutiesofacat


The Door
by Deborah L. Davitt

I gave her the door as a joke, one foot
in height, sized to admit a gnome or sprite,
and nothing more.

She laughed, charmed, and set it against the wall,
but the next time I saw it? Some hand had
opened and left it ajar.

Little bloodstained footprints ran from kitchen
to the door, and when I looked inside it,
I found her on the floor.

They’d looked after her house, fetched her glasses,
mended her shoes, chased more mice than her cat,
all without her knowing.

But she’d failed to set out milk and wheat cakes,
and the ancestral wights behind our pixies
had taken it amiss.

They took payment in her blood, the oldest
Price. I bound her wounds, heard her words, and then
tossed the door in the gas fireplace.


* Houston-based Deborah L. Davitt says: I've been fortunate enough to have multiple poems accepted and published by Star*Line, and have had others published by The Tanka Review and Three-Line Poetry. I have a short story pending publication with IGMS, and three novels published to Kindle, the Saga of Edda-Earth.

Something old, something​ new. We've four poets for you today – two (Herb Kauderer & Ken Poyner) are regular Grievous Angel contributors, while the other two (Lauren McBride & Mary Soon Lee) make their Angel debut.


Mystery Guest
by Lauren McBride

Despite misshapen form and feet,
and zombie-colored skin,
Dracula reddened lips
frozen in a grin –
it's standing now beside us.
So who let the clown in?

note to future self:
by Lauren McBride

when the odiferous, oozing                                           
alien blob
asks to become blood brothers –
say yes
 

* Lauren McBride finds inspiration in faith, nature and science. She shares a love of laughter and the ocean with her husband and two grown children.


The Decisions of Robots
by Herb Kauderer 
 
I worked with industrial robots
which the company defined as
machines that made decisions
and acted on them
without human input.
 
One day in my industrial boredom
I wondered to myself:
If a robot makes a decision
and nobody cares
is he really a robot?
 
What would Heisenberg say?
 
And what of the corollary?
In twenty years in industry
nobody ever cared about a decision
I made. But I am not a robot.

I’m an escapee.


* Herb Kauderer is an associate professor of English at Hilbert College and holds an MFA in creative writing.  Details are available at www.HerbKauderer.com


New Planet Landscape 25
by Ken Poyner

We take their words literally,
Loading them into the bin that a week’s worth
Of dehydrated water used to be stored in.
They do not regard this as improper, and, in fact,
Consider it so much an honor
That they make more words.  They describe
Their culture and inter-relations, how
The various species of this place
Each makes a whole in the biosphere;
How all depend upon each other,
Except a few.  They tell us their individual
Stories and educate us on what it is
To be one of them, a part of the process,
A rise or fall in the great sounding wave
Of their ruinous future.  We nod and look
Appropriately down, our attention narrowed
To a point, our fingers ready
To catch each word as it forms.  We
Are going to need another bin.


* Of late Norfolk (VA)-based Ken Poyner has had poetry published in Analog, Asimov’s, Star*Line, Abyss and Apex, and several other places. His most recent collection is Constant Animals, 42 unruly fictionsavailable in paperback and ebook via www.kpoyner.com


Messengers
by Mary Soon Lee

No herald, no envoy, no messenger of state.
A girl of thirteen, her boots too small,
running and walking, walking and running
to the enemy's gate, shouting Open. Help.

A fisherman, the first back that night,
returning to where his town used to be,
then rowing for the border, for the enemy port,
shouting Help. Demon. Fire. Mercy. Help.


* Mary Soon Lee grew up in London but now lives in Pittsburgh. She won the 2014 Rhysling Award for best long poem for Interregnum.