So I’ve got a couple of works of flash fiction lying around catching dust on my hard drive, and they’re not really long enough to bother putting with my other stories under the Short Fiction page (as tends to be the way with flash fiction) so I thought I’d post them here in the blog.
If you’re unfamiliar with what flash fiction is, it’s micro-fiction, sometimes called short short stories. They’re all under 1000 words long, usually being around 300 words, which makes it a rather interesting challenge to tell a story.
So anyway, a couple of years ago, on a summer day, I wrote this piece of flash fiction on my phone over the course of an hour or so, while waiting in a parking lot in Auckland. Go ahead and read it, and I’ll talk a bit more about it below.
Interval
I crashed my car. Screeching tires, cracking windscreen, and then free fall. My coffee a curtain in the air, I was jerked around in my seat like a ragdoll… And then time stopped.
Coffee sat frozen in midair, and my phone dangled from its charging cable in front of me. I jumped as it rang.
“Hello?” I answered hesitantly.
“Hey,” a deep voice calmly replied.
“Who is this?”
“Lucifer, but no time for that, you’re in an interval state right now, and it won’t stay like that forever, so if you don’t want to get smeared across the pavement then do exactly as I say,”
“Wait, what?”
“Shut up and do as I say, Jesus, it’s simple. Alright, so take your seatbelt off and get out of the car.”
I complied, dropping awkwardly out of the upside down car, which just so happened to be inches from flying off of a cliff; another second and I’d have been dead.
“Alright, so ignore all the crashing cars and walk over to the big truck.”
“Where are you? How is this even possible?”
“Grab the first box you see inside the truck.”
I did as the voice asked; it had saved me after all. “Now what?”
“Walk back to your car,” I did. “One step to the right,” I took a step. “Thanks, see you soon.”
Time unfroze and I saw my car flip off the cliff, a second before following it myself, pushed by the car behind me. A short fall later and I died. I was dead.
And then I was somewhere else.
“Hey,” that same deep voice said. “Thanks for the boxes of cereal, hard to get things shipped to hell these days, what a sin, right? Anyway, your eternal damnation awaits.”
It was then that I started to scream.
So there you have it, I don’t know how much of it was influenced by the fact that I was surrounded by cars, a truck, and was on the phone while writing it, but probably less than you’d think. It started out with the basic idea of how a lazy devil would do his grocery shopping, which I think turned into something quick and fun. And that’s really the fun of flash fiction, that it’s fast and that you don’t have to take it too seriously. It also gives you a chance to use settings and ideas that wouldn’t work in longer formats.
(bonus, possibly spurious, fact that I read somewhere about flash fiction, the Chinese term for it is Smoke Long, because the stories are only a smoke long. Cool eh?)
Alright, now for a quick update about what else is happening on the site at the moment, the Sandformer and Heat Stroke have moved up again, both nearing that fifty percent mark, but they won’t move much in the next couple of weeks, as I focus on editing The Last Echo. So if you’re a creep who checks the progress bars often, then keep an eye out this week as The Last Echo will jump up at the end of every day. If you’re not a creep then, you know, just keep on not caring or whatever.
I’ll have another blogpost out next weekend, so make sure to check back then.
Thanks for reading, and remember, don’t smoke kids. And don’t smoke tobacco products either.