DOGZPLOT FLASH FICTION

'gift horse' - barry graham

LAUGHTER - letisia cruz

Little masterpieces fell out of the sky. They were red and black and white. You were electric when you touched me. I was swimming in you. The room lit up like the sun, and I think we were glowing.

That’s how I remember it anyway. What about you?

It rained. The AC was broken and we fucked. I was sweating like a pig.

That’s lovely. Really.

I wasn’t finished. Your hair smelled like coconuts. I was drunk with you or in you or both. And when you kissed me, I prayed for tornados and hurricanes just so you wouldn’t leave.

What do you pray for now?

Thunder.

Do you think the grass is greener when the stars are all aligned? Because it looks greener.

I think the grass is greener when you’re here.

Even when it rains?

Especially when it rains.


Letisia Cruz
http://www.lesinfin.blogspot.com
The Angel's Game
Carlos Ruiz Zafon

FIRST - lauren becker

First, do not be beautiful. Men will turn heads briefly and look back for beauty. Challenge them with an elbow. Move away. They will smell perfume and feel you pass. Elbows and feet are not dead giveaways. Not even mouths. If you are not beautiful, you may speak. Even the truth. But then there are eyes. If they see them, they will know. If you want this, look up. Think hard about wanting. If you do not succeed entirely, if you are beautiful in some light, the man who needs to be seen always will move around you, hit your foot, dangling from your crossed leg. Uncross it. He will wait for you to see, to do. Do not look, as he would not otherwise. Upset his custom. Make it yours. Make him make you beautiful.



Lauren Becker
www.lauren-graysheep.blogspot.com
The Progress of Love
Alice Munro

SCENE OF THE ACCIDENT - howie good

1

A nurse in white clogs hurried along the corridor. She had to give the boy with the cuckoo clock heart a sedative. His family stood around the bed like awkward strangers. The doctor, a smoked-down cigarette between his fingers, had excused himself. He had been trained to observe the observable. The dusk was all old doors and blank windows, a memorial to lost sailors.

2

The crowded elevator disappeared between floors. Pedestrians stood weeping at the crosswalk. She still loves you, said the old man walking a dog on a rope. I smelled the salt of the nearby tears. It took two or three matches before the light would stay lit.

3

The light doesn’t last all that long, of course, but as long as it lasts, we become like souls with red-painted toenails, the fallen factory chimneys along the Merrimack, dancing peasants scantily clad amid the snow of a Russian prison camp.

Howie Good
http://apocalypsemambo.blogspot.com/
Human Smoke
Nicholson Baker

COSMONAUT - j. bradley

The house is a pulmonary system of pocket universes. We lose ourselves in the vacuum of Auto-Tune, drift toward the outer rims of conversations and plastic Dixie cups. Bottles of Banker's Gin collapse like white dwarfs in our throats. In the morning, we will smack our lips, ruin the cotton in our cheeks; our heads are capsules with cracks in the seams.



J. Bradley
http://iheartfailure.net
Grease Stains, Kismet, and Maternal Wisdom
Mel Bosworth

IN THE FALL, A NEW UNKNOWN - david peak

The Poisoned Well stains the street two doors up from us—a constantly re-piling black cloud—and can’t stop having babies every few months or so, adjusting the straps of gas masks over their faces, straps slapping to their skulls, and shoving them off to the street corner so they can mill about, dead-eyed, slack-jawed, waiting for the horrible school bus to crank open its doors and spirit them off to the death camps.

“Thank God,” she says. When they’ve gone, she says, “Thank God.”

The Toxic Flakes is the worst kind of knotted-up fibrous tumor, a rain-swollen blackhead, clicky with static and that clinging kind of co-dependency, hot and suffocating like polyester pants hot out the dryer. His kids are totally afraid of him, largely avoiding consuming meals in his company, those complex conspiracies of restrained farts and burnt tongues. They avoid helping out in the yard as he scrapes heaps of wet leaves off the gristly stump-field, lumpy—a throat full of misgivings.

It’s always raining in their horrible house, damp and rambling with homework assignments half-flushed down the toilet, the yellowed skeletons of forgotten housecats, needled jaws dried open in anticipation of the meal that might’ve saved.



David Peak
www.davidpeak.blogspot.com
the orange eats creeps
grace krilanovich

DAUGHTER - len kuntz

I drove to LA to find her. A few times I thought I saw her on the 405 sporting new hair color and different clothes, adjusting the lay of her bangs in the rearview. But when I finally found her she was naked except for a pair of stilettos and a g string. I should have looked away from the stage. I tried. She slid across the spot lit floor. Her eyes were sharp and focused. In them I saw myself and every sin. She arched her back like an acrobat, her spine as pliant as rubber. She wanted me to see the bills stuck inside her waistband, none under twenty, two or three Franklins. When she flipped forward I expected—I don’t know what I expected actually—but I didn’t anticipate her looking so much like her mother all those years ago, a virgin then, us unwed and me unraveled. I didn’t expect that. She grabbed my neck tie, twisted it, “What now, old man?”



Len Kuntz
www.lenkuntz.blogspot.com
Naughty, Naughty
Meg Pokrass and Jack Swenson

THE ART OF ADULTERY - angela rydell

Jenny sat three tables from her lover’s wife, idly sketching the woman’s face, amused by the natural narrowness of her eyes, how far apart they were. As if this made it harder to see, distance a feature of her being. She drew the high, broad brow, unfurrowed. Not the kind of woman who holds onto worries. She would let go. Move on. Jenny fleshed out the angular cheekbones, weak chin, wondering if she chose Dean partly because his wife made him an easy choice. Small, petite, barely an obstacle. Though not without beauty. Jenny sometimes wished she too had eyebrows as shapely. Lips as full, held in a mild, faultless smile. Jenny set her pencil down, couldn’t bring herself to edit slight exaggerations—a hardening of the jawline, an uneven complexion—or finish the lines pulling at the corners of the woman’s mouth and eyes. But could she leave it like this? She had the urge to get closer, take a long and careful look. Drop a spoon, roughly scrape her chair back, force Dean’s wife to look up, stare her right in the eye. Then Jenny would decide what changes she needed to make.



Angela Rydell
https://sites.google.com/site/angelarydell/
The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen

DOGZPLOT FLASH FICTION

"pelican one" - bl pawelek

I PLACE MYSELF UNRESERVEDLY AT YOUR DISPOSAL - paul griner

We store the illegals here by the dam, so thick we can walk on their heads. Sometimes we do. Not kids, not grandmothers, not if we can help it the women. We photograph them with facial recognition cameras, and once they’ve been digitized, computerized, and disseminated, we ship them out. Then we gather before the dam, all of us standing where they were, awaiting the next batch, facing that concrete concave rising fan.

It takes a long time for them to come, squeezing us up and out, but eventually it happens, more of them than us, and us, lighter and whiter, standing on top of that sea of bobbing brown heads. No matter how light your touch is, how swiftly you move, you feel them sink beneath you when you step, and you wonder, How can they stand it? Strong necks, I suppose, and the weight of those around them, holding them up.

Good thing for them there’s a lot of them; it would be too much to bear alone. But the brown river fills up and moves on and is gone.
p
p
p
Paul Griner
Cloud Atlas
David Mitchell

FOLK - michelle reale

We tried to be fascinated by one another in the car on the way to the folk festival. We’d met over e-mail. He wrote with dashes like Emily Dickinson and I fell for it. He picked me up at a Denny’s on the highway, asked me not to smoke when I slid one from the pack. We had things to say, like the fact that he petrifies citrus fruits on windowsills and has a lime back from the summer of ’87. I told him about my fascination with the two drums of Ireland, the Lambeg and Bodhran and how my loyalties can become easily divided. The air-conditioning was full blast. My eyes went dry. We ran out of things to say. At the festival we saw each other but he just looked straight ahead like he didn’t know me after all we shared. On the way home we passed by a ramshackle house with a statue of a big wooden bear, his claws out. On one side was “Welcome”. On the other side, “Go Away.” I lit my cigarette and didn’t care. “Imagine that,” I laughed. He rolled down the window and looked the other way.

BLASPHEMY OF THE HOLY SPIRIT - kyle minor

He unjesused himself on his twenty-ninth birthday by saying so: I was, I'm not, I don't, I can't, I won't, etc. No lightning scorched him, no thunder scolded him, no tractor-trailer ran him over, no assailant shot him in the chest, no earth reached up to capture and bury him alive. In his kitchen, he made his children peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. They ate them pleasantly while watching television.



Kyle Minor
mailkylem@aol.com
AM/PM
Amelia Gray

QUESTION - gary percesepe

The eagerness of objects to be what we are afraid to do cannot help but move us.
—Frank O’Hara

Aren’t we acting terribly pre-9/11? Someone has to smile as she comes back from the bathroom. I can’t say I’m sorry. Does she think everything stays the bloody same?

Oh, you’re here.

When you smile airplanes go off course. Thundering windows of hell will you forever speak Rudy Giuliani noun verb 9/11? Or pocket your carpenter’s pencil? Clear the room of smoke? Shit, the soup is on fire. My father is at the back door with the roses. The strange hills are still warm from the feet of worn travelers. And still the manna falls. If you were an enormous bullet you could lodge here in my open shirt. Downstairs, we scream and wash our hair.

THREE FICTIONS - mary hamilton

ME AND CAROLINE PICARD LEFT OUR HOOK HANDS STUCK TO THE TOP OF YOUR CAR BECAUSE WE WANTED AN EXCUSE TO CALL YOU

Having waited for the hour that was just after dinner, but before bed, Caroline braided her hair into two ropes falling over her shoulders and down to her ankles. She pushed spoons and forks into the braids so they would form a sailor’s ladder up the mast of her body to her skull where the blond hair pulled and the scalp turned red. Caroline walked in the muddy sunset light to the middle of a nearby field where sometimes kids played soccer and sometimes they flew kites and sometimes they would lie in the grass and make sense of the clouds. Caroline stood in the middle of the field and invited the buzzing bugs and spastic flies to climb these ladders. She invited them to make a home in her hair. To nest and cuddle. Her only hope, that when it turned dark, their bodies would light up and she would have made for herself a crown on fire.


ME AND JILL SUMMERS LOVE WHEN SILLY LITTLE CHILDREN WITH JELLY ON THEIR FINGERS AND AROUND THEIR LIPS ASK US IF WE KNOW HOW TO GET TO SESAME STREET BECAUSE YES, WE DO KNOW, WE ARE NOT SHARING AS THAT IS PRIVILEDGED INFORMATION THAT YOU HAVE TO EARN

Jill stood akimbo considering the cardboard box of 12 adorable kittens that had seemingly been abandoned next to this here dumpster. She counted them three times to make sure that it was an even dozen and not a baker’s dozen with one extra kitten thrown in for fun. She counted her hands, she had two. She counted her pockets, she had five. That added up to seven and still left five kittens meowing and pawing and the walls of cardboard and turning their noses at that sour garbage smell. Jill hunched down so it looked as though she was sitting in an invisible chair and she set one kitten on each thigh and one on each shoulder and one on top of her head. And she walked home like this. Delightfully weighted down by 12 adorable, cuddly and fuzzy cutie pie little kittens.


ME AND NATALIE EDWARDS ARE GOING TO KNOCK YOU OUT BECAUSE OUR MOTHERS REQUESTED THAT WE KNOCK YOU OUT

Natalie held the taco in her right and a 32 oz Coca Cola in her left. The taco quickly losing it’s battle for existence in the fury of Natalie’s bites and intermittent nibbles to catch any stray thread of avocado or onion or cheese or bean juice or sour cream or tomato or onion or cilantro or salsa or jalapeƱo or grease. She held the straw of the Coca Cola close enough so that any coughing or wrong tube emergency would be easily remedied by the ready availability of carbonated delight. Natalie was sitting in this corner booth celebrating the end of a raw and red sunburn that had lived and died on her shoulders. The resulting sepia tones of her skin showed no sign of the peeling, the shedding of skin that seemed to last weeks. Now her shoulders were smooth and soft and just aching to be touched by fabric. She was celebrating the morning, when she pulled her cardigan over her shoulders and slipped it off again, the grinding pain noticeably absent. She repeated the action. Cardigan on, cardigan off. She felt every little fiber of the cotton move over her skin. She repeated the action to feel it again. And again.


Mary Hamilton
www.inspirationalsportsmovies.blogspot.com
Handle With Care
The Traveling Wilburys