Breath & Shadow

Ability Maine is a nonprofit organization which advocates for the rights and inclusion of people with disabilities. They also produce a blogzine called Breath & Shadow, which spotlights writing by many of the people they support. Each issue brings some excellent poetry, nonfiction, flash fiction, short stories, essays and reviews. The Spring 2013 issue features hard-hitting piece of flash fiction by William Ward called "The Jungle." Check it out today. You won't be disappointed. You might even see things from a new perspective.

Where’d I Put Those Finnish-Language Instructional Tapes?

Juri Nummelin reports that the third issue of his flash fiction magazine Ässä is about to be unleashed upon the Finnish-speaking world. This time around, Ässä features translations of short-shorts by Joe R. Lansdale, Sandra Scoppettone, James McGowan, Patti Abbott, Paul “Braz Knuckles” Brazill and yours truly in addition to new writing by Tapani Bagge and Juri himself.

Cool thing #1: “One More Mess” is the first of my stories ever to be translated into another language. I'm still riding the buzz from that.

Cool thing #2: I have a story in the same magazine as Joe R. Lansdale, author of the "Hap and Leonard" series and Bubba Ho-Tep. That's not to say any of the other featured writers are slouches. They're all damn good. But I've admired Lansdale's work for at least twenty years and it's a treat to share literary space with him, even though I can't read a word of Finnish.

Flush That Flash

I’ll just come right out and say it. Most flash fiction is crap. I see you out there, your mouth hanging open, your head shaking. Did Bagley mean that? Yeah. I did. I’ll say it again. Most flash fiction is crap. Ca-ca. Excrement. Shit (or shite, for my friends across the pond). And for those of you ready to point a finger at me and say, But you write it too, you hypocritical prick, I’m including all but a couple of my own pathetic attempts.*

Here’s the problem: flash fiction (or a short-short or whatever term you prefer) is passed off as a legitimate form of short fiction. That means "short story." The keyword here is story. If a piece of flash fiction is to be accepted as a short story, then it must satisfy the requirements of story. It needs round characters, a vivid setting, convincing dialogue, a plot, rising tension, a climax and resolution that brings about some sort of change in the protagonist. Fiction Writing 101.

That’s a tall order for “stories” of 2,000 words or less, and it’s why I say most examples of flash fiction cannot be considered short stories. At best, they are only scenes; at worst, they’re nothing more than literary masturbation. In our genre, flash writers tend to go for shock over substance. That will only take you and your readers so far. I rarely write or read flash anymore. I’m tired of all these empty little sketches.

Look. If you want your flash fiction to be taken seriously, you had better put in the proportionate amount of time and effort as you would for a 10,000 word story. Too many beginning writers think that shorts are mere practice for the “real” work of writing novels. So it’s okay if their flash fiction fails to deliver the basic elements of story because it is, after all, only a warm-up for the real thing.

Bullshit. Writing good short fiction is tough. There are successful novelists who could not write a decent short if their lives depended on it. As in a poem, every phrase—every word—of a short story has to pull its own weight. I just don’t see that attention to craft reflected in the majority of flash fiction appearing on the web. I wish to hell I did. Instead, so much of the stuff out there reads like the author chugged a twelve-pack before cranking out 800 words and sending their masterpiece off to some flash forum where editorial input is either weak or nonexistent.

Now bring on the angry villagers with their pitchforks and torches…



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*There were a few good stories posted on the old Flashing in the Gutters, but mine were lousy and I’m glad they’re gone. I wrote more than my share of shitty flash fiction. Only “Bank Job” and “One More Mess” work as stories. I’m not saying they’re perfect, just that they work.

Messing with Finland

A Finnish translation of "One More Mess" will appear in an upcoming issue of Juri Nummelin's magazine Ässä. It's my first publication in a foreign language, so I'm excited. Many thanks to Juri and Keith Rawson.

February Flash

It’s time to post my contribution to Patti Abbott’s latest flash fiction challenge. The deal was simple: write an opening paragraph and send it to Patti; she shuffled them all and dealt one paragraph to every player; we then had to finish the story begun in the paragraph we received. None of us know who wrote our opening.

This thing was a hell of a lot of fun. Check out Patti’s blog for links to the other stories.

And here’s what I did with my assigned opening…


One More Mess
By Patrick Shawn Bagley (opening paragraph by Keith Rawson)

The bath water is near freezing by the time I get out of the tub. I barely noticed the temperature when I first lowered myself into it. I vaguely remember it being close to boiling; my skin turning bright red, my pores opening wide and yawning; dripping sweet, cutting small rivers through the grit and blood that covered me from head to toe. I recall vomiting over the side of the tub, a thin yellow acidic drool that filled my nostrils and burned my gums. I only remember that because my first step out of the tub is into a slick puddle of it.

I go down, slamming my knee against the cracked and pitted linoleum. One more pain among a dozen others, it helps jar me into full wakefulness. I grab two towels from a shelf above the old claw-footed tub: one to wipe the puke off my leg, one to dry myself. Knowing I shouldn’t, I take a look in the mirror. My lips and nipples are blue from the cold. No surprise there. But the sight of my face makes me want to turn away and puke all over again.

J.P. had gone upside my head with a stick of cedar kindling. Then, when I was kneeling on the floor and holding a hand to my bloody ear, he’d started in with the belt. “Let’s see how many men want you after this,” J.P. said. He grabbed a fistful of my hair to keep me from running off. If I tried to pry his fingers loose, it left my face exposed to the belt; if I tried to cover my face, he yanked my head back and forth while lashing my breasts, back and belly.

Now my face is cross-hatched with purple welts and stipples of dried blood. I wrap the towel around myself, walk into the bedroom. My breath hovers in the air. The woodstove downstairs must have gone out hours ago. Dropping the towel, I open my bureau drawers and try not to look at the mess on the bed. It doesn’t matter. That’s a picture I’ll never get out of my head…Tom Moody grunting away on top of me, telling me to hold still and stop my fucking crying…then his face erupting in a red shower, followed a heartbeat later by the roar of J.P.’s 20-gauge.

It takes me a few minutes to pull on clean underwear, a pair of jeans and my red sweater. God, I move like an arthritic old woman. My face feels like I got stung by a hundred wasps. My ribs ache so much that it hurts to raise my arms or take a deep breath. There’s a knot on the side of my head where J.P. smacked me with that piece of cedar. I hobble down the stairs, my knuckles white as I grip the banister.

Once at the bottom, I stand there with my eyes closed and wait for my breathing to slow. I could keep walking, go right out the front door, get in the truck and drive away. But somebody would come by looking for J.P., not tonight but probably in a day or two. They’d see the bodies and call the cops. Sooner or later, I’d get picked up. So I sit on the bottom step, right where J.P. left me after he dragged me down the stairs, and try coming up with a plan.

“Bastard got what was coming to him.”

I jump at the sound before realizing it’s my own voice. That’s it. I can’t sit here waiting to get busted. There’s blood to clean up, corpses to dump. I’ll roll my husband and Tom Moody into a couple of tarps. If I weigh them down with J.P.’s skidder chains, I can sink them in the bog down at the far end of the old pasture.

Yeah, that’ll work. It has to work. I’ll get the house cleaned and try to cover my welts and bruises with make-up. Anybody comes by the house, I’ll just tell them J.P.’s gone down to visit his mother in Solon…which everybody knows means he’s really whoring over to Millinocket. That gives me a couple days to heal up and decide where to go, maybe find some of the money J.P.’s got stashed here or out in that old falling-down barn.

First thing is heat. I have to start a fire in the stove, so I get up and walk into the living room. J.P. lies there on the floor in front of the couch, his belly a ragged red mess where I emptied both barrels of the 20-gauge into him. He had been whipping me so hard and fast that the belt flew out of his hand. When he let me go to pick it up, I grabbed the shotgun. He even stood there laughing while I loaded it, was still laughing when I thumbed back both hammers.

Looking at him now, all I can see is the mud on his work boots—it would never occur to J.P. to stomp his damn feet off outside. No, he’d come tromping right in and get mud all over the house, then yell at me for not keeping the place clean. I shake my head, tell myself to get busy. The woodstove door squeaks when I open it to lay in some crumpled newspaper.

“Carol…”

I jump again. Then I smile and tell myself to get a grip. The worst is over.

“Carol…”

Oh, Jesus. Still crouching in front of the stove, I pivot on my feet and look over at J.P. His eyes are open and he licks his lips. “Help,” he says.

If he’s still alive, then it’s not too late. I can get him to the hospital. They’ll fix him up. I won’t have to go to jail or on the run. I can tell the cops about Tom Moody coming here, saying he had to leave a chainsaw for J.P. to fix, but forcing his way into the house to attack me instead. They’ll believe me when I say my husband killed Tom. They’ll believe I only shot J.P. out of fear for my own life. J.P.’s a vicious son-of-a-whore. Everybody around here knows that.

They all know it.

They’ve always known it.

“Carol,” J.P. says again. The words come out wet and thick. “Call…help.” And there it is; that light in his eyes, the same light I see in them when he hits me or calls me a stupid cunt. How long will they keep him in prison for killing Tom? Eight years? Twelve? Maybe even twenty? That seems like a long time.

And yet, it doesn’t.

I pick up J.P.’s 20-guage and the box of shells I had dropped on the couch. He tries to move his head, tries to watch me. I step over to where he can see me loading the gun again.

“Carol…”

I shush him before pointing the barrel at his head. I’ve already spent fourteen years cleaning up his messes. I don’t mind one more.

The February Flash Challenge

On February 10, I will post a new piece of flash fiction here. It's to be part of a project cooked up by Patti Abbott, Aldo Calcagno and Gerald So—that triumvirate of twisted minds who brought us last year’s Valentine’s Day flash fiction challenge. This year’s challenge has nothing to with Valentine’s Day or love.

The rules for this new challenge were simple: all we had to do was write a strong opening paragraph and send it to Patti. She then shuffled the ‘graphs and dealt one to each of the participants. Our job was to write a flash piece from the assigned opening. I don’t know who got mine, nor do I have any idea who wrote the one I received—that’s part of the fun. It’s like one of those prompts you get at a writing workshop, only with extra helpings of violence, sex and general nastiness.

So be sure to check Patti’s blog on 2/10 for links to all the stories (and I think some of them are getting posted on Aldo’s flash fiction site). Just look at this list of writers. You know it’s going to be time well spent.

Sandra Seamans
Sandra Scoppettone
Paul Brazill
Kieran Shea
John McAuley
Scott Parker
Megan Powell
Patrick Shawn Bagley
John McFetridge
Stephen Blackmoore
Sophie Littlefield
“R2”
Keith Rawson
“Inkgrrl”
Steve Allan
Cormac Brown
Jerry Houser
“Ray”
Gerald So
“Welles Fan”
Thomas Miller
Pamila Payne
Aldo Calgagno
Jacob Weaver
Patti Abbott

Like a Cut Cat

I like revision. Always have.

I realize that makes me a weirdo, but there you go. Too many writers view the process as a necessary evil. It’s kind of like a root canal in that regard. You know you have to go through with it, but you also know it’s going to hurt like hell. That’s the wrong attitude.

I’m at the tail end of the revision phase with Bitter Water Blues right now. The trick is to tweak sentences, find words that work better than some you used, trim the fat and make sure the continuity is smooth without letting the novel feel too polished and slick. Raw, but not too raw.

Kill your darlings.

There’s the hardest part. One scene in particular was a favorite of mine, but it did not fit the novel. Bitter Water Blues is told in close third-person, with three major and a couple of minor P.O.V. characters. The scene that ended up going featured the husband of one of the main characters, and it was his only P.O.V. scene in the entire manuscript. Also, the wife had already been changed so much as the book took shape that the scene no longer fit their relationship. As much as I loved the scene, I knew it was a drag on the novel. So I deleted it with no regrets.

The man called Tribe was kind enough to run a version of this scene (under the title “Cat Crimes”) on Flashing in the Gutters back in September 2006. I found the file this morning and opened it. Rereading the piece, I have to say I still like it but I know cutting it from BWB was the right decision. No harm in posting it here, though. Some of you will recognize this, but hey, it’s summer: time for reruns.

***

After fifteen minutes of careful scrubbing with damp paper towels, Jim Philbrick gave up trying to clean all the cat shit off his brand-new Kameleon 8-in-1 Universal Remote Control. It came off the housing easily, but the mushy ochre mess oozed into the tiny spaces around each button and there was no way in hell it was coming out. Jim slid open the door and chucked the remote out into the backyard. It hit the chain link fence around the basketball court but didn’t break. Jim threw the dirty paper towel, too, but it just fluttered onto the deck.

“Cocksuckingmotherfuckingnogoodgoddamnsonofabitchingcat.”

Jim stomped back inside. The doily was still on the coffee table. He’d set the remote’s signal to match his TV, VCR, DVD player and cable box and left it on the doily. Now the remote was lying out on the grass and the doily was caked with cat shit. At least the cat got something of Laurie’s this time. Forget the eighty-five bucks the remote cost him. The money didn’t matter so much. It was the goddamn principle of the thing.

He’d bought the remote on his way home from the office because he was tired of using four different devices. It took him half the morning to get the damned thing programmed right. When he’d finished, he’d set it down on the coffee table just long enough to get himself a sandwich and a glass of iced tea before settling down on the couch for serious channel-surfing. Just long enough for Jasmine to stroll in and squat on the new toy.

Laurie’s stack of Cat Fancy magazines sat on one side of the doily and a couple of her mystery novels were on the other. Laurie’s favorite things in life were cats and mysteries. Most of all, she loved cat mysteries. She had all of Rita Mae Brown’s books, “co-written” with a cat named Sneaky-Pie. She had all of Lillian Jackson Braun’s The Cat Who… series, books with asinine titles like The Cat Who Knew Shakespeare or The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern. In hardcover.

Jim had an idea for a new book in the series: The Cat Who Took a Dump on the Brand-New Universal Remote that Cost Me $79.99 Plus Tax at the Radio Shack. It wouldn’t be a whodunit. Laurie only had one cat –and she’d settled for only one because Jim was allergic—a fat Persian named Jasmine.

Jasmine. Even the name pissed him off. Jim believed that all animals, for better or worse, had personalities. Like some people Jim knew, Jasmine was a sneaky, rotten little asshole. When Laurie was home, the cat walked around like it owned the place, giving Jim the look. She had a flat, arrogant face and her eyes showed contempt for every living thing except Jim’s wife. The cat would sit purring in Laurie’s lap and look across the room to Jim as if saying, “You got a problem?”

Times like now, when Laurie was at some committee luncheon or off banging her realtor boyfriend at one of his empty listings, Jasmine slunk from room to room, avoiding Jim and shitting on any of his possessions left lying about. Laurie refused to believe her precious Persian would do it, even when confronted with the reeking evidence. She always said, “It’s your own fault, Jim. You upset Jasmine so.”

His hatred of her gave Jasmine some kind of feline anxiety disorder and disturbed her bowels? Jim wanted to disturb her bowels with a baseball bat. He looked for the cat now, getting down on the floor to peek under the sofa, the chairs, end tables. Nothing. The boys kept their bedroom doors closed, so she wouldn’t be upstairs. He tore through his and Laurie’s room. There she was, hiding in the closet on a stack of spare blankets. Even when he had her cornered, Jasmine gave him that look, the I-can-shit-on-your-stuff look, the I-don’t-care-who-knows-I’m-fucking-around-on-you look.

Smiling at Jasmine, Jim reached for the strongbox on the top shelf. He’d come up with a new title for his book: The Cat Who Ate a Fucking Bullet.

©2004 by Patrick Shawn Bagley

My Spine Is All Tingly

The summer issue of Spinetingler Magazine is now online for your reading pleasure. In addition to my story "Bank Job," you also get great stuff from Amra Pajalic, John McFetridge, Steve Mosby, Patti Abbott*, Steve Allan, Stephen D. Rogers, Sandra Seamans, Allan Guthrie, Tony Black and others, plus interviews and reviews.

PDF version.
HTML version.



*Is it just me, or is Patti out of control? She makes the rest of us look like slackers.
Discuss.

The Abbott Crime Family

Patti Abbott has won a 2008 Derringer Award (in the flash fiction category) for her story "My Hero."

Megan Abbott's novel Queenpin won the 2008 Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original.

How cool is that?

Leaving Rachel: The Love Hurts Blog Event

Patti Abbott, Aldo Calcagno and Gerald So decided to give you all a big, bloody Valentine this year. They asked a bunch of crime writers to post love-themed flash fiction this morning. They call it Love Hurts. You will find links to these bits of Valentine’s nastiness on Gerald’s blog and Aldo’s Powder Burn Flash. My own contribution originally appeared on the late, great Flashing in the Gutters in May 2006.

Leaving Rachel
By Patrick Shawn Bagley

The night before graduation, we drove out to her father’s camp on Embden Lake with my acoustic guitar and two fifths of Smirnoff. The place was like something out of an L.L. Bean catalog, with deer heads and a togue mounted on the walls. No one had been there since before ice-out, and the cabin smelled of pine and mothballs. Fishing rods and a single-shot twelve gauge stood propped in a corner by the door.

I laid my guitar on the couch and broke the seal on the first vodka bottle. Rachel opened the bedroom windows to let the fog creep in while we sat on the bed and drank. We didn’t talk, just passed the bottle back and forth, listening to the loons call to each other across the water. Later, Rachel lit an oil lamp and we made love in the dim yellow light. She climbed on top of me. “It’s not too late,” I said. “We can still get you a ticket.”

She moved slowly above me, bearing down with her hips, whispering, “Not now.” Her tears broke cold against my skin. “Not now.”

We woke early and sat naked under a blanket on the porch. The morning was gray and damp. The loons were still at it. My head hurt, a dull and muzzy sort of ache. I didn’t look at Rachel. “So are you coming with me or not?”

Her hair brushed my shoulder as she shook her head. “I can’t.”

“Can’t or don’t want to? You’re twenty-two years old, for Christ’s sake. Don’t tell me you can’t.”

“You aren’t from here. It’s easy for you to just go, but everything I love is right here.”

“Except me.”

“Except you.”

“I guess you’ll get over me,” I said.

“Don’t be like that.”

“Like what?”

“You know what I mean. That way you get.”

I kicked off the blanket and went inside to dress. Through the windows, I saw her walk down to the lake. There were other camps nearby, but it was too early in the year for most of the owners to be around. I heard a light splash when she dove in. I hurried to get everything ready, then went out to wait for her. The water was freezing and she wouldn’t stay in long.

Rachel surfaced right where her father would put in the dock once he opened up the camp for summer. She walked out of the dark water, pushing her hair back away from her face. I waited until she opened her eyes. I wanted her to see me when it happened.

The shotgun blast rolled across the lake. In its wake, everything was quiet. I put the gun back in the cabin and came down to the shore with my guitar and what was left of the vodka. I sat on a rock and played her a song, then. The loons sang their own tune, but it wasn’t for her. The rain came slowly, like a dingy gray hangover.