We have submitted our nominations for possible inclusion in the 2018 Best of the Net anthology, which honors literary work that originally appeared on the internet between 7/1/2017 & 6/30/2018, and they are:
“DROUGHT” – flash prose by Kim Coleman Foote ( from FLAPPERHOUSE #15 – Fall 2017)
The Best Small Fictions honors fiction of 6 to 1,000 words published in a calendar year. As we are eligible to nominate up to 5 pieces for inclusion in their 2018 anthology, we have selected:
“Picnic” by A. E. Weisgerber (560 words), from our Spring 2017 issue.
“Mission Concept” by Peter H.Z. Hsu (716 words), from our Summer 2017 issue.
“Left Behind” by Kaj Tanaka (512 words), from our Summer 2017 issue.
“Drought” by Kim Coleman Foote (390 words), from our Fall 2017 issue.
and “X-Ray”by Rosie Adams (474 words), from our Winter 2018 issue.
Best of luck to all our nominees, and thanks as ever for contributing your extraordinary small fictions to our weird little zine!
Our Fall 2017 issue, FLAPPERHOUSE #15, won’t fly until Friday, 9/22, but today we’re offering a taste of all the menacing weirdness we have in store with “Drought,” an eerily surreal & fable-like work of flash prose by Kim Coleman Foote.
THIS YEAR, BEFORE NIGHT RUSHES IN, WE AWAIT THE RIGHT MOMENT. When sky turns cyan and a breeze chants in the air, against our ears. When sky turns grey, erasing sun rays and hinting at rain, which hasn’t appeared in months.
Everyone in the area tenses upon their chairs, hoping to be agents in a new rite, begging Mother Nature to grant us those liquid grains from her atmosphere. We cant and cry, hoping she’ll hear us, when a gay gent strolls amongst us, stroking the cat on his shoulder. He lifts his thin legs like a crane then breaks into a canter. Some gather their young in fright. He tears off his hat, exposing a halo of hair, rants about how in this age, it is our hate that keeps Her from cooperating.
When an old hag jumps from her seat, we grit our teeth. She rages at the man, spittle staining her chin like tinea, her breath stinking of gin. She claims that the gates of the moon shall open to anyone who hasn’t tired of life’s mysteries.
The man grins the whole time. The cat has changed to a hare eating hay (some say it never was a pet but a rat disguised in rags).
Aside: don’t attempt to tag this as fiction; reality, in actuality, is fraught with much more strangeness.
FLAPPERHOUSE 