Issue 100 January 2022

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Flash Fiction Online January 2022

Editorial: Issue 100

by Emma Munro

December 31, 2021

This January, Flash Fiction Online is celebrating its 100th issue!

Fifteen years and 100 issues are two outstanding achievements in the ephemeral world of digital publishing. The ingredients for our longevity? Outstanding stories distilled to their critical essence by authors from all over the globe, an international team of dedicated volunteers, and our amazing publisher, Anna Yeatts, who doesn’t get enough recognition for keeping Flash Fiction Online up and running. Anna’s commitment and support since becoming publisher in 2013 means everyone can read any (or all) of the approximately 700 flash stories in our archives.

To mark our 100th issue, outgoing Editor-in-Chief, Wendy Nikel, organised an impressive retrospective celebration and a subscription drive including over two dozen interviews with FFO authors and a video series of author readings. Those are available by becoming either a Super Subscriber or a Patron of Flash Fiction Online.

Since we’re talking numbers, in 2021, Wendy Nikel selected and published 48 stories—33 originals and 15 reprints. Twenty-three were authors new to FFO and 4 were authors making their first professional sale. Those excellent stories plus bonus interviews with the authors are available in the Flash Fiction Online 2021 Anthology, available to purchase here.

Speaking of which, we’ve got something else to celebrate. FFO has achieved Semiprozine status. The skill to compress a complete plot and resolved arc in under 1000 words is one thing; including coherent worldbuilding such as an invented biology, alternate universes, ancient, far, or near future scenarios takes those skills to another level! Just a little hint for the next round of Hugo and Nebula nominations.

How did I become Editor-in-Chief? Well, my passion for flash started with FFO where I devoured story after story, amazed that so much can be said in so few words. Linguistic compression appealed to my introvert nature and to my plodding pace as a writer. I decided “short” equalled “fast.”

Yep.

Years later, Anna invited me to read slush. I’d read for other flash fiction magazines, but it was at FFO that I became addicted to discovering stories in the slush queue, editing them (sometimes), and finally seeing them reach publication—the excitement is there every single time. I adore figuring out how stories work, and I love engaging with the brave authors who write and submit. Finally, I have the best job ever!

Enough about me, here are the stories.

We’ll start with Carol Scheina’s “The Hundred Hidden Kisses.” How’s that for a romantic title? This is a poignant account of the deep bond between a wife and husband that survives the unthinkable. To find out what that is you’ll have to read the story. (Available January 7)

Next up, Beth Cato returns to FFO with “The Recipe Keeper.” In this tension-filled story, the forbidden is a way to connect with others and to remember. (Available January 14)

The first day at a new job most of us are thinking about how to navigate the workplace without spilling their coffee or offending anyone. But what happens when history and reality intertwine, and how do you cope? Wen-yi Lee’s “The Lighthouse Keepers Guide to Pulau Belakang Mati,” is probably the most unexpected and unforgettable first day you’ll ever read. (Available January 21)

Our reprint is “Hundreds” by Mari Ness. If you’ve wondered what happened to all the princes who visited Sleeping Beauty, read this beautifully written story. (Available January 28)

Thanks for reading and listening! Thanks for showing us what is possible through your ongoing support.

Emma Munro

Editor-in-Chief; Flash Fiction Online

The Hundred Hidden Kisses

by Carol Scheina

January 7, 2022

It was Elroy who first proposed hiding a kiss just off the trail, under a butter-yellow stone whose warmth contrasted with the grays and browns of that wintry day. “Say in 20 years, we’ll come back for the kiss and remember this perfect day.”

Petra wondered how much could change: the trail, the rock, even their relationship. They’d be in their 60s then.

Elroy always anticipated her worries. “Me with a potbelly, you still gorgeous. Will you still want to kiss me?”

She laughed as she blew a kiss for Elroy into her hand and secured it under the rock. Elroy, mischievous as always, blew his toward her lips. The invisible kiss fluttered through the air like a butterfly’s wings until it brushed Petra’s lips with the taste of salty sweat and sweet energy bar.

“Oops, missed the rock.” Elroy grinned, then blew another kiss into his hand and secured it next to hers. His eyes lit up with a new idea. “What if we hid kisses everywhere we go? When we’re old and gray, we’ll go adventuring to find them all.” It was just like Elroy to dream up such a challenge.

“I can keep track of them all, like in a notebook,” Petra suggested.

“Always thinking of the practical things. What would I do without you?” Elroy kissed her lips directly this time, salty and sweet with each gentle tongue stroke.

* * *

Nine years later, she still remembered the creases of smile around his stubble of beard, the gentle shine of his skin in the winter’s muted light. Just like that yellow rock, Elroy had a brightness that pulled you into his orbit.

She still had the notebook, like a treasure map leading her to the location where they had hidden kiss number one.

When she shifted the yellow rock, Elroy’s kiss fluttered to her lips, tasting of summer rains and metallic earth and salty-sweetness.

Her kiss fluttered into the sky. How far could a kiss travel? People talked about feeling their faint impressions from half a world away. If you loved truly, then maybe there were no boundaries.

She hoped her kiss would reach him, twenty-ish miles away in the Oakwood Memory Care Home. Back when he still had good days, he’d have said it tasted of dewdrops and roses, even if she had dry mouth and bad breath.

She didn’t want to think about his bad days.

* * *

They’d nestled in bed the night after he’d received his diagnosis, Elroy’s body fitting around her like a puzzle piece as they wrapped their minds around the words: early onset Alzheimer’s.

He brought up the kiss challenge. “What number are we on?”

“Forty-three.”

“Let’s make it to one hundred.”

She couldn’t see Elroy’s face in the night’s blackness, but she knew what he was thinking. Would they have enough time?

“Let’s make it forever,” she whispered.

* * *

Kiss twenty-two was the hardest to retrieve. Elroy had hung a small padlock high on a bridge’s support beam, and Petra didn’t have his height. She balanced on the railing, the water below dancing with whirls and foam. She managed to slip in the key (safely taped inside the notebook all these years), and open the lock’s small compartment where they’d blown their love all those years ago. This kiss tasted of rust and river-grit and salt and sweetness.

She’d never have found that bridge on her own. Discovering new places to explore had been Elroy’s strength. She was the one who remembered to bring the water and energy bars. Like puzzle pieces, they fit together.

* * *

Kiss eighty-eight was Elroy’s last, hidden beneath the iron bench in the Oakwood Memory Care garden. It had been a rare good day, just five months ago, his memory’s edges paper-sharp.

“Someone’s got to keep on adventuring,” he had said.

Petra had taken his hand, rough and bent like unfinished pottery. “Where am I going without you?”

“Everywhere.”

She no longer thought about twenty years in the future. Why bother with the dream of a hundred kisses? But he’d wanted to hide just one more, so she slipped her kiss next to his alongside a gentle drop of wet from her cheeks.

* * *

Kiss eighty-eight tasted the freshest of all, flavors of dry mouth and sweet seasonings of nuts. Hers probably tasted salty.

She went inside to see Elroy, as she always visited after releasing a hidden kiss. The stubble around his face didn’t crease with smiles anymore. His eyes didn’t look at her.

“Your kiss was lovely. I remember when we hid it.” Petra always told him the same thing: I remember.

He walked away. She followed.

Petra already knew what she was going to say next, now that all eighty-eight kisses had been found. “I’m going to keep going to a hundred.”

No response. How could Elroy still be here with her, and yet be so far away?

There was no more imagined future where they turned old and gray and remembered their kisses together, but she couldn’t let this be all that was left of their lives.

* * *

Finding new trails and bridges wasn’t her strong point, but she’d managed to track down locations to hide her kisses for Elroy. The numbers ticked up in her notebook.

Petra hid her hundredth kiss under a yellowish rock near a mountaintop, where an outcropping protected her from the wind. She closed her eyes. What next?

Maybe she’d make it to 200. Explore new places, carrying two waters, two energy bars, and all those memories, new and old. New kisses to hide, lasting until…

How long did a kiss last? She didn’t really know. Some said it depended on love, which couldn’t really be measured. Some claimed the Earth’s winds were just kisses still looking for lips after untold years or centuries.

Elroy, roughly 40 miles away, felt so close to her as a breeze brushed her face. When Petra licked her lips, she could taste a familiar salt and sweetness.

PATREON EXCLUSIVE: BEHIND THE SCENES INTERVIEW WITH CAROL SCHEINA

FFO: What’s the most difficult part of writing a flash-themed story?

CS: I don’t generally set out to write themed stories. My first priority is to come up with a good story. I don’t want to force a theme if it doesn’t seem like it will be a good fit.

For this story, I came up with the idea of the hidden kisses first. As I was plotting the story arc, I had a little reminder going off in my brain about Flash Fiction Online’s call for “one hundred” themed stories, and the theme fit flawlessly with this story. There were always going to be so many kisses, so I made it one hundred…

The Recipe Keeper

by Beth Cato

January 14, 2022

Brooka bowed over the engine of the ranch’s lander, her back aching from hours of contortion, and thought of recipes.

She most always recited her recipes in a silent mantra. Sometimes she started with the first one and proceeded straight through; other times, she chose a number at random—like thirty-three, the last one collected by her grandmother. This recipe told how to make butter by agitating cream until it solidified. That went well with forty-nine, the recipe for a bread loaf, though that was trickier to make on most worlds as wheat flour and rising agents could be hard to come by. Jurans, as they ruled over humanity, kept all the good stuff for themselves and controlled people in every possible way. All writing had to be in Juran. That’s why Brooka memorized her recipes. She could read and write only a few words from Old Earth, and she refused to preserve something so precious in the conqueror’s language.

“There!” Brooka declared, closing the lander’s hatch. “Try starting it up.”

A resident from the outpost revved up the lander. The engine worked with a smooth purr. Brooka packed her tools, her thoughts shifting to the best route to her next repair jobs in a city over the mountains. Jurans had supplemented brains that downloaded maps and utilized retinal overlays. People had to get by with rudimentary tech and skills.

“Hey,” a child whispered to Brooka. “Are you the recipe keeper?”

Her heart beat a little faster. It was always dangerous to admit what she did to strangers, but it was the only way to accumulate recipes. She had promised Grandmother that she would collect a hundred. She was at ninety-nine. Once her goal was met, she would stop gathering more She didn’t want to be executed like the dozen people Jurans had publicly exhibited on a neighboring continent the previous week. They had been accused of performing songs from Old Earth. To preserve the ancient ways was to foment rebellion.

“Yes,” she whispered back.

“My mama has one for you.” The child guided her across a courtyard, the manure stench strong from the massive cow dairy nearby. The milk and fuel byproducts of this operation would be for Juran use alone.

As soon as Brooka entered the family hut, the child’s mother greeted her with, “I have a recipe for quick cheese I can give you.”

“I know two other cheeses. Tell me yours,” said Brooka.

The family used stolen cow milk, heating it with some lemon juice and salt. Once that formed chunks—curds, she called them—they were gathered in a cloth and pressed to form a soft, solid mass. The leftover liquid watered nearby trees.

“I wish I had some to share with you,” murmured the woman, “but we always eat it right away.”

“Of course,” said Brooka. The longer contraband food was stored, the more likely it was someone would be caught with it. She repeated the recipe back to make sure she had it right; she did. “In turn, I’ll give you one for—”

“Mama!” the child burst into the room. “Auditor!”

Had Brooka been betrayed? She looked to the mother to find she looked terrified, too. “Oh, no!” she wailed.

Brooka hadn’t collected the whole 100 to be caught now. “This is what we’ll say,” she said, a plan forming in her mind.

When the Juran auditor entered a minute later, he found the two women seated, chewing their midday nutriloaves. Human adults were allotted three loaves each day, the brown bricks a perfect blend of nutrients to sustain an average person for six hours. Taste and texture were not taken into account.

“Resident.” The gangly humanoid Juran nodded to the woman, his accent indicating an off-planet origin. “Who are you, stranger?” He motioned to Brooka with his zap-stick.

“An itinerant mechanic. My itinerary was approved by the governor’s office,” Brooka replied in Juran. She leaned her head so he could scan the identification brand on her neck. “I just fixed the ranch’s lander. This woman,” she motioned to the cheesemaker, “was kind enough to invite me to share midday loaves.”

The auditor still held out his stick. If he declared Brooka was shirking her responsibilities, she would lose her job and freedom to travel. If he knew what she was really doing in the hut, she would lose her life.

He considered her with broad black eyes. “Eat, then, but your malingering ways have been noted in your file. Next time, you will not be treated with such generosity.” He sheathed his weapon, backing through the doorway.

“There won’t be a next time,” Brooka vowed.

The two women finished their loaves quickly and in silence. Brooka only spoke up again as she stood to depart.

“Thank you.” She still felt the need to whisper. The encounter left her feeling shaken, but triumphant. She had her hundred recipes, a perfect even number. She was done. “Do you know how to make butter?”

The woman leaned forward, eager. “I had it once.”

“You’ll need heavy cream from the dairy,” Brooka murmured, and told her recipe thirty-three.

Brooka experienced a profound sense of relief as she walked back to her lander—until she saw a man idling in the shadow of her transport.

“Hey,” he called softly. “I heard about you. If I give you a recipe, you give me one, too, right?”

She stopped. She didn’t need more! And yet, she recognized her fear and eagerness in his eyes. He trusted in her, a stranger. He hungered not only for a new, delicious recipe, but for a fragment of humanity’s past to carry into the future.

“Yes,” she said with a new sense of determination. “Tell me your recipe.”

One-hundred was indeed a nice and even number, but there were many more numbers just as nice.

The Lighthouse Keeper’s Guide to Pulau Belakang Mati

by Wen-yi Lee

January 21, 2022

Welcome. Your first day; your first tilting steps off the crooked jetty. It was nearly trampled by the Dawn, but like the island, it still stands. 

You seem disconcerted, checking your watch and looking upward. No, you’re not imagining it, the sun is now behind you. In retribution for the occupation, the jinn turned the sky around, so the sun no longer rose on their backs. You’ll become accustomed to it. 

This way: up to the lighthouse. It has stood since before the war. In my earliest days, I kept the lamp burning with everlasting imbiah oil, drawing in the merchant ships that kept the island fed. The seas here are treacherous, as you surely noticed. The lighthouse groans against the curve of the coconut trees, and its white paint has worn to grey, but its light leads boats through the naga’s beating whirlpools. 

I never failed to bring ships to shore. That was my set, to guide them past death.

Place your bags by the door, but do not touch the lock. You cannot enter until you’ve paid your tithe to the martyrs.

* * *

In their mainland campaigns, they hoisted black sails, emblazoned with red sigils like sectioned suns. But that one sunrise, they flew the blue flags of cotton traders.

I did not know what I was leading in. I realised too late that they carried the guns of conquerors. 

* * *

There is only one place to get your tithe. Near the quay, see the brickwork moneychanger with a faded green awning that drips fetid rainwater onto the sidewalk. The money you get from Old Long is the luckiest on the island.

Old Long and I grew up together. His hairline now recedes like the shore and leaves ripples on the pale beach of his forehead. He’s worn the same shirt since the war, with a tissue packet and bills clipped together in his pocket, slotted behind the cigarettes. He takes smoke breaks every two hours, and sometimes when you leave your cash will smell like nicotine.

Ask for the dollar coin, which has the Eight Trigrams etched into its surface. Yin and yang, perfectly balanced. Old Long says that if you always keep at least one dollar coin with you, then you will never go unlucky. Come back again, after this; he will tell you how the Army of the Dawn tried to take him to the beach, but he bribed them to leave him behind. The coins were lucky at least once.

* * *

Belakang Mati does not have much, but our imbiah trees produce sap that burns better than any oil. It was our treasure, until they arrived.

They started off razing the plantations, but when they realised their value, they corralled the islanders and forced them back to work. When some resisted, they rounded up every man they suspected of treason and marched them down to the eastern beach, where turtles lay eggs in the wet season. One hundred men were lined up in the surf and gunned down. They speared the bodies still twitching.

I heard the shots from the lighthouse. I saw the low tides turn red. The skulls would later dome the sand like eggs.

Meanwhile I knelt before their commander, kowtowing in my own house, and they thanked me for guiding their ships to shore. They left me alive, whole. They said I was too important.

Old Long alone still spoke to me after the occupation ended, perhaps because we had both cheated death, and needed someone else with whom to live with it.

* * *

Now, with your coin in hand, head to the eastern shore, toward the setting sun. Stop here at Aunty Choo’s, on the way, for two bags of black kopi. One to place on the shrine, to thank the jinn for their hospitality. The other will help the tithe go down.

In the hazy moments before the onset of evening, the bayoneted islanders sit on the sand and search the horizon for the ships that once came with the eastern sun. They still wear their coarse pants from the imbiah field. Do not look on them with pity! Show sorrow, or anger, whichever comes easier. Rearrange your face. Set it like a soldier. You are here for duty, as I am. This is my set, to guide them past death.

Make your way to the centre of them. Kneel respectfully, like at an altar. Untie the bag of coffee and pour it into the sand. Let it suffuse and turn the earth dark once more. Do not look up—it is disrespectful, but know that the islanders have turned their heads. They smell the coffee, the stirring scent of breakfasts from when they lived, the newspaper in one hand and their families by the other. They are drawing nearer. Do not be afraid, but work efficiently:

Dig a small hole into the centre of the soaked sand. Take out your coin and press it in deep, as far as you can bury it. Fill it back in with earth. Say, the sun has set.

The sun has set.

There. One hundred lucky cents for one hundred unlucky souls. Now the dead know you mean no harm. They will let you go unbothered, and even allow you to join them to watch the naga coil around Dragon Tooth Rock on the solstices. They died too soon, but they’ve found their comfort since—like most old men, they are content to simply sit and wonder.

With your tithe, and the tithes of those that came before, and the tithes of those still to come, the trapped spirits will pass on eventually. They are simply brave tragedies of an unexpected war. But peace is not my fate. There is no fraction in that coin for me: I, the hundredth and first, the once-lighthouse keeper of Pulau Belakang Mati. I will pay my own price. 

Go set your fire, lighthouse keeper. You need not worry yourself with me.

Hundreds

by Mari Ness

January 28, 2022

The ghosts of dead princes hover around her bed.

Sometimes they argue about this. Some of them suggest that they might be disturbing her rest. Others think, under the circumstances, that disturbing her rest is just fine, thanks; indeed, her rest could use a little more disturbance. Others, less concerned about her, merely think that they should head elsewhere, do other things, see a bit of the world and what’s happening to it. After all, they might be ghosts, but they aren’t quite dead. It is an old, old argument, but one that never seems quite silenced.

In the end, none of them ever leave. At least, no further than the castle walls.

They number seven, or twelve, or fourteen by now, possibly more. They used to keep track, in the old days, when the bower held only two or three of them, when they still half remembered their names and memories, still knew which stories were theirs, and which another’s. As it is, none of them can really remember who once dined with a talking cat, and who had been the seventh son of a seventh son, the unlikeliest prince, and who had grown up in distant jungles, never to see the snow until his journey here. (Although sometimes, a few of them still watch the snow fall in utter wonder, and think, yes, yes, I was the one in the jungles… only to find that memory, too, falling into mist.) Their memories merge, and when they speak to each other, they hear only their own voices whispering back, each voice indistinguishable from the next. And they have long stopped trying to count.

Still, they feel almost lucky, considering. They, at least, are awake, aware of the passage of the seasons and the years, able to move around the castle and its many towers, unlike the people they drift past on their wanderings, the ones who remain solidly asleep. The sleepers might dream–indeed, the princes think it quite probable that they do–but they do not move, do not stir other than to breathe, long, slow soft breaths that can only be seen by intent observers. Their hair and nails have grown long and tangled; their bodies continue to waste away, little by little, each year. The ghosts do not think the sleepers can survive much longer, but then they have thought that before, and still, the sleepers live, dwindling.

Except one.

She is the one that called them here, of course, the one sleeping softly on the gold and silken bed. Called is a strong word, perhaps; she does not speak, has not spoken for many years. For how many years, the ghosts cannot tell. On her, and her alone, the years sit lightly. She looks as soft, as fresh, as young as the morning dew. Quite young. Some of the ghosts have admitted, privately to themselves, or more generally to one another, that she is perhaps a little too young. They were expecting someone–well, someone they would not feel vaguely wrong about. They wonder, sometimes, if unlike the rest of the castle, she is growing younger, younger, retreating into infancy, retreating into the nothingness before birth, where, perhaps, in darkness, she can find her prince.

It was supposed to be one hundred years.

The ghosts are not good with time, but they know they have walked about the castle for longer than that. If it can still be called a castle at all. Indeed, one tower is now only vines and brambles, and an elm tree is close to toppling another tower. The dust is more than vast, so thick that the ghosts cannot remember, sometimes, what the original colors were. (Not that many of them actually made it inside still living, though a twisted skeleton of one of them still lies crumpled on the stairs, its ribcage still filled with thorns. They try to float around it, or avoid it entirely by slipping through the floors. Easy enough in ghost form, although moving through stone still makes one or two of them uncomfortable.) The vines have made it into the castle now.

They watch time crumble around them.

She smiles a little, in her sleep. They think she may be dreaming of a prince.

The last prince–some small scion of some small house forced to sell off its lands–has told them of new things: of the great steam engines that pulsed across the land, of clattering printing presses, of the new weapons that could slay dragons with the touch of a trigger. (If only, groaned one ghost, although he got little sympathy: if he had not survived the dragon, he would not have made it here, and in any case, who was to say he was the ghost who had faced the dragon?) No one in this world knows of dragons, and they have put metal armor aside long ago. It is not a world for princes, the last prince explains, even as he fades into the other ghosts, and watches the dust strengthen against the windows. He does not think the world will have princes much longer. If indeed, the world ever had true princes at all.

Hush, the other ghosts say, looking at her nervously. But if she can hear them, she gives no sign. They are, after all, only ghosts.

In the distance, they hear the low growls of the flying machines they have heard of. And they settle, a little further, into the dust.

Originally published in Daily Science Fiction, December 2016. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

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