Prose choice
Previous prose
Paul Goodman
Stanage
They approach in hungry morning light, treading the path to the ridge and the row of giant’s teeth grown crooked with the ages. Scanning the plantation below she breathes, inhaling the cold and is lifted by a curlew’s call. This is not her dying time.
Rummaging in the rucksack for her gear she says something to him, laughs then cracks on, making the opening move on the rough gritstone wall. Unimpressed, it sizes her up and they meet cheek to cheek. She pushes on, up the crack to the crosshair, and now the crux: a shimmy right below the healed fracture, as her fingers wrap round the cool lipped fissure.
Blood and chalk mingle in a rose hued wash over grazed white taped finger tips and grit rash flaring with the route’s rough turns. Sweat patches shade her back and pits, while she peers at what is to come. A glance down at him, keeping the slack as she ascends and feels for the hardware that chimes on her harness. Put the nut in the crack and give it a yank for some certainty. Inhaling deep, relaxing into the hold, she recites the script and rehearses the next move in her mind. Arms ache, straining for purchase on the sheer, unframed, abstract stone. Sectioned, blocked and geometric.
Dappled grey in every hue up here and lit by vanes of sunlight, the stone tricks her slick rubber soles as they pester for fragments of words punctuated by lichen, while the cadence changes and the vertical dance goes on. Her body is transfixed, spoked and splayed upon the weathered Edge.
Pause. Keep poised. Breathe deep and slow. Take stock for the final push. A mortifying haul up, belly squashed on to the sandwiched slabs. She tops out with the expanse ahead and lies flat on her back, gasping for air.
Paul Goodman is from Hemel Hempstead and lives and writes in Bristol. He has had poetry published in Pennine Platform and a piece flash fiction selected for The Broken Spine.
Tom Cardew
I pat its head until its face starts to flatten. Its body meets the floor, legs buckle under the weight of my enthusiasm . . .
Scott C. Holstad
Fifteen hours of processing time later, I was in my cell block and already two confrontations with Six Shooter, a massive Crip from the Compton/North Long Beach area, with a ‘tude. Early on he and his set surrounded me, two of them 187s like him. They made sure I knew if I stepped out of line, I wouldn’t be leaving while breathing. That didn’t go down with me very well. Some have said I have an attitude problem.
Rebecca Klassen
1) Liana vines are rooted in the earth and use trees to climb towards the canopy.
Mum sews in her armchair, the embroidery hoop in one hand like a tambourine as she plays it with cotton, the needle’s tempo remaining steady when Dad gets home from the pub again. I notice the root sprouting next to me from the carpet, curling around Mum’s ankles.
Luke Reilly on National Flash Fiction Day
The man is a master. Through livestreams and televisions and retinas, through a giant screen in the city centre, sixty million people have been watching his furrowed brows. Waiting for his fingernails to pick up a piece of clamshell or slate and place it on a gridded board.
Kayleigh Cassidy
Before I knew it, I was crying in front of my entire dance class. Thirty women and two men in neon active wear, staring at me as I tried to explain why I was late.
Meg Pokrass and Jeff Friedman (collaboration)
His guest from Scotland dawdled getting to the shower and by the time she arrived, it wasn’t there. Instead, there was a hologram of a shower, one that didn’t leak.
Hattie Logan
. . . There I was alone in the porters lodge, halfway through my morning coffee, black no sugar, when my walkie-talkie crackled into life.
It’s Bruce, the gardener “Mike, are you there? Stella’s just left her hideaway and is heading towards you” . . .
Cheryl Snell
Follow your room-mate and her boyfriend, but not so close that either one notices. Think shadow. Think Pink Panther. Plop down in the middle seat of three in the theater. Pretend you don’t hear your room-mate say “Do you mind?” Back at the apartment tell her you want to switch bedrooms. “I need the room with the door.” Because migraines.
Tom Ball
I, Shelly, said to Amos, “We live in a nightmare amusement park World, here on Moon Miranda!” He replied, “How did we ever come to this?” I said, “In my case, I was lured by the potential thrills of continuous action.” He said, “Me, too. And it’s a new World, so there were no ratings to go by.” I said, “There must be some way we can escape!” He said