Category Archives: Shooter Flash

Shooter Flash: “The Torturer’s Dog” by Edward Barnfield

Posted on by Standard 1

“Look at him. Look at him.” 

Makis points a bony finger to the door, and we watch together as his dog, a dirty grey terrier, circumnavigates the sides of the room to reach us. 

“Going blind, you see. Old dogs, they stick to the walls.”

It takes about a minute for the animal to reach the sofa, and once it arrives it squats, pathetically, unable to summon the energy to jump to its master. Makis takes pity and lifts it to his lap. 

“Time beats us all in the end,” he says, scratching its raw pink belly.   

The apartment has high windows and art deco details, a sense of old-world expense, but most of the furniture is as raggedy as the dog. There are no curtains, and I’m distracted by movement on the balconies opposite. This neighbourhood has aggressively resisted the gentrification that has reshaped the rest of the city, and my eyes are drawn to a thin man in a red vest sunning himself. Makis points to my recorder, moves the moment along. 

“You have questions?” he says. 

“I’m interested in why you think you were recruited. What did they see in you?” 

He sighs and strokes the dog’s neck, and it makes a soft noise like a horse’s whicker. For a moment I think he’s going to go silent, or ask me to leave, and then –

“They picked good boys. Obedient. Families.”

“Middle class?” There’s a sneer in my voice I hope he doesn’t catch. 

“No, no. I don’t think there were three years of schooling between us. Just working boys who could swing a hammer. Who cried when they threatened our families.” 

“And did they?” 

He manoeuvres his pet onto a faded green cushion and rolls his sleeve up. There are five or six old scars on the back of his arm, thick as zebra stripes. 

“You want the communists to rape your sister, boy?” His voice is harsher, the memory of an old tormentor thickening his accent. “These were all in the first week. They heated a metal bar on a brasier, and you had to sit there and watch it glow.” 

I’d heard the stories, of course. The colonels wanted malleable young conscripts to help with interrogations. They sought out the illiterate and the apolitical, finding kids as young as fourteen and putting them in uniform. Of course, if your objective is brutality, you first need to brutalise. 

“Everything they wanted us to do, they did to us first,” he says. The scarred arm moves to pet the dog. 

“How long before they put you in the Special Interrogation Section?”

“A few months. They knew, you see, that I’d do what they ordered.” 

“How many men do you think you interrogated while you were there?” 

Makis sits back, stares out of the window. The man in red has moved inside, so I’m not sure what he is looking at. I wonder if I should repeat the question. 

“I wanted to be a painter when I was a child. Can you imagine? Six brothers, three sisters, yellow fever all over the countryside and I wanted to paint. Where could that idea have come from?” 

The anecdote hangs there, and for an uncomfortable moment I feel a swell of pity for the man, old and alone and unable to unravel his own mysteries. We always think of the lives of others as linear, but our own experience refutes that. Memories loom large, and the pain of long-ago wounds returns, until you’re left clinging to the walls because you can no longer see clearly.

Then I remember my purpose. 

“Makis, how many?” 

His gaze moves from the window and back to me. His voice drops to a whisper.

“Too many to count.” 

“Did you interrogate the politician, Konstantopoulos? The army major, Moustaklis? Did you know he never walked or spoke again after his release?” 

 “I don’t –”

“Do you remember the slogan on the walls, Makis? Do you remember what it said?” 

I’m conscious my tone is too angry now, and that my interviewee is staring at me with fresh eyes, wondering who this middle-aged woman in his armchair might really be and whether her journalistic credentials can be trusted. 

He shakes his head, silent. 

“Those who enter here, exit either as friends or as cripples. Do you remember that?” 

The dog picks up on the tension in the room and growls faintly without raising its head. 

“Miss, I’m sorry. I’m an old soldier on a pension who volunteers at an animal shelter. That’s all. I made a full account of my actions to the tribunal, and even that’s been forgotten. Who I was, before this… It’s all gone. Why are you interested?”  

“They said you were the worst, Makis. The ones who survived, they said you were the cruellest on the punishment block.” 

“But they are gone too, my dear. Prisoners and guards, colonels and radicals. What does pain matter a generation later?” 

On one level, he’s right. The building that housed the Special Interrogation Section is now a museum celebrating the life of a leader of the liberation movement. The park behind it, where they dumped the bodies of those who couldn’t take any more, has three branded coffee shops and a fitness area. 

But then I think of my own experience, a father’s face I only knew from photographs. I think of how my mother withdrew from the world and stayed hidden even after the junta fell, and how – when she died last month, just shy of her centennial – she told me she had never forgiven them. I think of the hammer in my handbag. 

The dog stretches and half-rolls, half-falls off the sofa. It trots to me, its nose cold against my bare legs. Despite myself, I pat behind its ears. 

*

Edward Barnfield is a writer and researcher living in the Middle East. His stories have appeared in Ellipsis Zine, Lunate, Strands, Twin Pies Literary, Janus Literary, Third Flatiron, The Molotov Cocktail, Roi Fainéant Press, Leicester Writes and Reflex Press, among others. He’s on Twitter at @edbarnfield and Instagram at barnfieldedward.

Shooter Flash: “Haunted” by Lucy Brighton

Posted on by Standard 2

I didn’t think I would be the kind of ghost that haunts people, but here I am. I still go to school every day like I did before. What else is there to do? I keep hoping I will meet some other ghosts to show me the ropes. No luck so far.

When I first rose from the spot where I’d fallen, I looked at the scene. A noose swung from a bare tree branch. I imagined people gathered around professing a love for me in death that they never showed in life. I imagined my mother, dressed in black of course, wailing at the senseless loss of it all. And I was sure there’d be a memorial Facebook page; there’d been one a few years ago when April, three years older than me, had died in a car crash. 

I waited three hours before I realised that nobody was coming. So, I went home. I walked past my mum, sitting on the sofa with her coffee cup full of whisky and fooling nobody. She said nothing. Obviously. 

When I woke the next morning, I logged onto Facebook, eager to see if my memorial page was up. It wasn’t. They probably haven’t found me yet, I thought. 

That was three days ago. I walk the quiet corridors of my school, almost empty now that everyone else is in lessons. Sometimes I go to class; sometimes I don’t. There doesn’t seem much point in learning anything. I can’t imagine ghosts have to take GCSEs. I think again how much I wish there was someone else like me I could talk to, who I could ask about these changes, maybe someone to hug me.

Nobody hugged me before the rope on the tree. Nobody raced to my rescue to talk me down, like they do on TV. It was a quiet affair; the only sound was the rustle of autumn leaves in the wind. 

“Watch out,” I shout as someone ploughs into me, almost knocking me over. Then I remember my situation and feel ridiculous. They can’t see or hear me, so what’s to stop them even walking straight through me? 

I don’t stay in school long today; it’s too hard watching the others at break time. Their laughter and togetherness wrenches at whatever constitutes a heart for a ghost. 

I don’t go home either. The last two nights have been insufferable. I sat on the same chair as always; Mum, saying nothing, drank her whisky and watched the soaps. She never even cries. Maybe it’s her way of coping, I tell myself. 

I head to the graveyard. I mean, seems apt for a ghost, right? I count the rows: twelve rows down, fifth grave along. I sit beside the grave and touch the headstone, surprised that it feels cold to my touch. 

“It’s me, Dad,” I say, then look around to see if he’s there. He would make the perfect ghost guide. We could be together again at last.

“It’s Sophie, Dad. I’m dead now too so you can show yourself.”

Nothing. 

I think it will probably take time for him to get to me from wherever he is. I didn’t notice any passage of time, personally: one minute I was climbing the tree with the noose around my neck and the next I was a ghost. Maybe Dad goes to work, like I go to school, out of habit, for something to do. I wouldn’t even know how to get there – which bus would I catch? No, I better wait here. 

I sit for a long time. There’s a brief flurry of activity around sunset when people seem to walk their dogs. Then silence. I shuffle around on the cold grass. 

I feel certain he will return here when it gets really late. I let the excitement fizz inside me like popping candy. I picture his strong arms and his curly rust hair. And mostly, I think of his smile. It’s been almost a year and the picture of him in my mind is fading a little but the smile is burned into my mind’s eye. I know he will look the same, not like some ghoul from a horror film, because I still do. I haven’t changed a bit.

There’s a rustle. I listen, desperate for the tread of his heavy boots. The sound grows, definitely movement. Panic seizes me for a second. Maybe it’s a bear or a fox. So what if it is, I think, what harm can it do me now. I puff out my chest. 

Human steps. I could burst with anticipation, like a thousand Christmas mornings. I’m finally going to see Dad again.

Instead, in the moonlight, the person reveals itself as Mum. 

“Sophie,” she says, her voice heavy with tears.

Maybe she comes here to talk to us both.

“Sophie,” she says again, moving closer.

She can’t actually see me, so I stay put. 

“I’ve been worried, Sophie,” she says and crouches down beside me.

I look around the empty graveyard. 

“It’s time to come home, sweetheart,” she says and puts her arm around me. I can feel it – the weight of her arm and the warmth of her breath. 

“It’s time to come home, Sophie,” she says again, standing and pulling me up with her.

“I just wanted to see him again, Mum,” I say, following her toward the gate. 

“I know,” she says. “I know.”

*

Lucy Brighton is a Northern-based writer who has completed an MA in Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University (Distinction). Her work has been published in Writers Forum, Journeys: A Space for Words, and Henshaw Press’s second anthology, as well as various websites and online magazines.

Shooter Flash: “Meta-metamorphosis” by Andreas Smith

Posted on by Standard 3

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from awful dreams he discovered that he had changed in his squalid corner into a little man. He stood on his two pale legs, stretched out his two pale arms, stifled a scream, and nearly fainted.

This was no dream.

In the opposite corner his parents were fast asleep, head to head, their antennae lovingly entwined and their hard brown backs glinting in the first rays of the sun. Nearby his young sister, half sunk in the soggy green morsel of bread she had been sucking on for the whole of the previous day, looked almost angelic as that same sunlight crept towards her under the kitchen cabinet. All three slept on contented, engorged and satiated with life’s bounteous harvest, as if nothing at all could go wrong in this, surely the best of all possible worlds. It was, then, a typical morning in the life of a normal, happy family of cockroaches.

But something had gone wrong – something terrible. Gregor shivered, pulled a piece of foil from an old ball of dust and hair, and wrapped the foil round his shameful nakedness. A rusty pin, for months lying barely noticed in the den, he now took up and thrust through the foil to secure it.

His sister stirred first and, seeing the thing her brother had become, emitted a deranged clicking noise as she frantically pursued herself in circles. Not that the parents were much calmer: they scrambled out of the den onto the kitchen floor at the sight of their son’s transformation, their beloved handsome son, now this… this monster. The father, recalling his position as master of the den and realising, as cockroach patriarchs always have, the danger presented by the vast desert of a recently mopped kitchen floor, forced his wife back under the cabinet to the safety of the den, with its moist, fetid air, rotting fragments of food, and years of dirt drifted into random heaps. The three huddled together and, afraid even to blink, gawped at Gregor. He stretched out an arm, friendly or threatening, it mattered not: his father, drawing on his old reserves of cockroach courage, dashed at his son, butted him in the groin, and knocked him flat. Never was a snout put to better use than this! Meanwhile, wife and daughter, instinct conquering fear, rolled everything roundabout towards Gregor’s corner – dust balls, breadcrumbs, meat and cheese pellets, spent matchsticks, mucus-encrusted tissues – till Gregor was imprisoned behind a barricade of rubbish. He got up, brushed himself down, once again secured his modesty with the rusty pin, and peered through a gap in the barricade. “Father, mother, dear sister – it’s me, Gregor, your beloved son and brother!” At the awful noise, incomprehensible and unearthly, the family backed off. Certainly it was a Gregor, but of what sort?

Mother’s tears seeped.

But time moves on. Gregor’s sister, hunger again gnawing at her belly, crawled over to her putrid soggy green breakfast and sank her face in it. Mother poked her wet snout through the gap and, despite everything, gazed lovingly at her son. He was busy tidying up his corner, as if disgusted by the lovely filth in which he had been fortunate enough to be hatched. It pained her to see how ungrateful he now was as he gracelessly paced back and forth on his thick and ugly white legs, his once comely face now an ugly mask of disgust and disapproval. Father, dining on a dainty morsel of rotten bacon and occasionally glancing through the gap, suddenly brought up the contents of his stomach and, no doubt stirred by fatherly obligation, vomited them towards Gregor (his only son, after all). But Gregor, even more disgusted than before, ignored his father’s offering. Let him starve then, like the countless ungrateful wretches before him!

As the days passed and the old normality became a faded dream, the family learned to bear their affliction. It was unfortunate that Gregor’s mad repugnance at filth and squalor had led to his living quarters deteriorating into a state of the utmost cleanliness (his poor house-proud mother could hardly bear to look), but even more disturbing was his rejection of any food at all, even the splendid lump of cat vomit his sister, at immense effort, had barged all the way across the kitchen to the den and then through the gap – only for her beloved brother to turn his back on her! So, while they gorged themselves on the fruits of the earth, Gregor, whose share of these fruits was his by right, became thin and weak, and was soon just a bag of bones, whining and wheezing and muttering gibberish to himself in his corner, the food that he once relished no longer the equal of his fastidiousness. No one now bothered to shore up the crumbling barricade: only a fantasist would look upon its pathetic prisoner as some dangerous monster, plotting evil against the world as he lurked in infernal cleanliness.

It was the mother’s mournful scrabbling which announced Gregor’s final end. There was much moistness in their eyes that morning, though it soon dried up. Life goes on, after all. They considered eating Gregor, but an old taboo, its origins lost in the mists of time, held them back. His parents dragged the corpse to the cat bowl at the far end of the kitchen. On returning to the den, they were pleasantly surprised to see that their daughter, stretching her many legs and tucking into a tasty titbit of something or other, was on the verge of becoming a fully grown cockroach in her own right, indeed a great beauty.

*

Thus did Hermann Kafka, canny businessman and father of Franz, an obscure author, strive to outdo his son, whose literary ambitions he scorned. But the son was more cunning than the father imagined: he stole his father’s crude fairy-tale, turned it on its head, and wrote a Metamorphosis of his own.

* * *

Andreas Smith has published stories in several UK literary magazines, including Monk and Storgy. He has also written several novels and is now represented by the David Grossman Literary Agency in London. He lives in County Durham and works as a freelance editor, though he sometimes travels to India for several months at a time to write in cafes while drinking chai and watching cows pass by.

Shooter Flash: Child’s Play by Sarah Masters

Posted on by Standard 1

Eight-year-old Becky is sowing seeds in yoghurt pots. She has sat on the garden step and laid out newspaper to keep her dress clean. She is using a dessert spoon to transfer compost from a sack. Unfortunately, the sack is rather deep, so Becky has to put her whole sleeve inside. She frowns, thinking that in six weeks these tubs will be brimming with salad. She imagines Dad putting dinner on the plate, and Becky saying wait, we need some greens, and then cutting the leaves which fill the plates with more to spare for the next day and the day after that. Becky knows from the news, which Mum watches all the time with the curtains drawn, that prices are rocketing, and she, Becky, is going to help. She’s going to save the family. She empties the seeds into her hand and makes her face serene, in case anyone above is watching. 

The back door opens and Becky closes her hand into a fist.

“What doing, Beck,” comes the piping voice of brother Billy.

“Stay inside,” Becky orders. Then she remembers that she’s going to save the family. “Okay. You can watch.”

Billy doesn’t want to watch. He wants to do. He plumps down beside Becky and this nudges her arm. Becky is no longer serene.  

*

Becky is examining a seed pot. Six hairy white commas are poking through the soil. Becky gives them a sprinkle from her child’s watering can. She hears a noise from the drive on the other side of the house and recognises her dad’s car. She hasn’t seen him for a few days and wants to tell him something, so she drops the watering can and runs inside.

Billy comes out and crouches down. He strokes the commas with his finger. He lifts the watering can, but it’s heavier than he expects and water pours out of the opening, flooding the plants. This isn’t right. There’s some gravel next to the house, so he stuffs a fistful into the pot. That’s better.

*

Becky and Billy are sitting outside. Becky has on her best dress because they’re staying at Nana’s tonight. Her eyes are pink. She’s holding a single pot containing a thatch of seedlings. This was meant to save the family. Becky isn’t going to save anyone now. 

Billy spots an empty yoghurt pot in the grass. There’s something else, which he pockets. Becky is staring into space when he returns. Billy puts the pot on his head and makes his face very solemn. He pokes her knee. She sniffs. Billy removes the pot from his head and hands it to her. She looks at it, then puts it on her own head. Billy giggles. Becky giggles too. Billy puts his hand in his pocket and shows Becky what he’s found: a brown snail. He offers it to Becky. She thinks a minute, then puts the seedling pot on the ground and the snail on top. They watch the snail slowly poke its head out of its shell.

Becky holds out her hand to Billy. “Shall we find it a friend?”  

*

Sarah Masters has had stories published in Slush, the National Flash Fiction Day Anthology 2022, FlashFlood 2022, Little Ms, and Serious Flash Fiction. She lives in York.

Shooter Flash: “Greed” by James Hancock

Posted on by Standard 1

At night, a child’s bedroom is a grey gloom of pretty things shrouded in shadow: an assortment of daytime toys waiting quietly as children sleep in the half-light. Maisie and Martin’s room was no different. Normal in every way, except for the faint glow of silver-pink light that floated in from between their bedroom curtains. A soft aura of minuscule powder sparkles and the shape of something small and magical within the light. A fairy.

Butterfly wings worked to a blur, carrying the visitor over to Maisie, where it hovered, and without a sound, gently lifted the girl’s pillow to exchange tooth for coin.

But it was interrupted.

Maisie’s eyes opened and she smiled. The menacing smile of a six-year-old missing her two front teeth.

“Gotcha!” Martin shouted with delight, and as the tooth fairy turned to face the boy in the next bed, he blasted her with a jet of fly spray. The tooth fairy coughed, covered her face with tiny hands, and flew away in retreat. Straight into a box, which Maisie instantly lidded shut. Captured!

“It worked,” Maisie chuckled, and gave the box a shake.

Martin wrung his hands together and grinned. “How much money do you think a tooth fairy carries?” He took the box from his sister and put his ear against it.

Maisie reached under her bed and produced a zip bag of wicked things. “Let’s find out,” she said, pulling a penknife from the bag and passing it to her brother.

Cutting a slit in the lid, Martin brought his lips close. “Listen here, little fairy. Post your coins through that gap. All of them. Or else!”

“Or else we’ll throw the box, and you, on the fire,” Maisie added.

“Please,” came a soft whimper from within.

“Do it!” Martin snapped, then gave the box another shake. “If you want to go free, you better do as you’re told.”

“And hurry up about it,” Maisie added.

A moment of quiet as the dazed prisoner recovered her bearings, then a small gold coin slid out through the gap. Cackling with glee, Maisie snatched it up and examined it. Another coin followed the first. Then another. And another. Coins continued to emerge through the slit in the box lid, instantly grabbed by greedy fingers.

Then the tiny voice came again: “There are no more.”

“You sure?” Martin growled in a threatening tone. “We don’t like tricksters.”

As Martin began counting their stolen treasure, Maisie leaned in to whisper, “We punish them.”

“I promise.” A sniff followed the timid voice. “Please let me go.”

Maisie picked up her penknife and tested the sharpness of its point with a finger. “Well?”

“Thirty-five,” said Martin. “Good enough?”

Maisie thought about it for a moment, clicked the penknife shut, and gave a nod.

Once again, Martin pushed his lips to the lid. “No funny business or we’ll clip your wings. Okay?”

A frightened murmur: “Yes.”

Martin lifted the lid, and the fairy darted out in a flash. A silver-pink blur, then darkness as the fairy disappeared behind the curtains and was gone.

Maisie and Martin laughed triumphantly. They scooped coins, penknife, and fly spray into the bag of wicked things and climbed back into their beds, their fiendish plan a great success.

Come morning, the twins awoke from a night of vivid dreams and peeled their faces from blood-caked pillows. Screams rang out as fingers pawed at deep holes in raw toothless gums.

Another visit had concluded matters, and the greedy children had paid their debt in full.

*

James Hancock is a writer/screenwriter of comedy, thriller, horror, sci-fi, and twisted fairy tales. A few of his short screenplays have been made into films, and he has been published in print magazines, online, and in anthologies. He lives in England with his wife and two daughters. And a bunch of pets he insisted his girls could NOT have.

Shooter Flash: “For Heaven’s Bakes” by Chris Cottom

Posted on by Standard Reply

Launch Day Latte: Pumpkin Spice

On the first morning of her new cake and coffee shop Suzette takes pictures of Kezia in a crisp white tunic, holding a rhubarb and custard roulade. Kezia is five foot ten, pencil-slim, and Ophelia-pale, with a wilderness of carroty hair and rosebud lips that she paints as red as Christmas. 

‘I’ll show these to Barry tonight,’ Suzette says.

‘Aren’t you posting them on Facebook?’ 

‘I’m no good at all that.’

Kezia takes Suzette’s phone and does it for her. Twenty minutes later six cyclists are queuing for pre-ride carb loading. 

I hit the jackpot with you, Suzette thinks. I’ll take the agency a complimentary box of cranberry cookies.

Day Two Traybake: Sticky Date Surprise

Kezia stands outside with a plate of bite-sized Black Forest mini-rolls.

‘Only one each, naughty boy!’ she tells a guy with a hipster beard, while Suzette takes pictures.

The man says he’s a teacher and asks about work experience for his Year Tens. 

‘There’s barely enough room in the kitchen for me and Kezia,’ Suzette says. ‘How about a cappuccino cupcake for your dinner?’

In the corner of the best photo is a bit of the boarded-up Indian restaurant next door.

‘We can crop that out,’ Kezia says, her fingers flashing over the screen.

The hipster teacher comes back in the afternoon. ‘Another gingerbread latte?’ Kezia asks, tracing a long black fingernail along the ice-blue neon letters behind the counter. ‘Fancy anything else?’ 

Day Five-a-Day Featured Fruit: Banana Bread

Suzette takes pictures while she bakes, and drips lemon drizzle on the lens of her phone.

‘You need an Instagram husband,’ Kezia says.

‘I’ve got an accounts husband. That’s enough.’ 

She takes a collapsed individual cherry cheesecake home for him. It doesn’t stop Barry wittering about cashflow forecasts and asset turnover. 

A certificate in Business Studies, Suzette thinks, and he reckons he’s Bill Gates. ‘The only turnovers we need,’ she says, ‘are apple and cinnamon.’

‘Excuse me! Whose redundancy money paid for your fit-out, all that wall-to-wall stainless steel?’

‘I know, I’m sorry.’

‘And I’m not even a sleeping partner.’

In more ways than one, thankfully, Suzette thinks. 

Day Seventh Heaven: Lemon Meringue Whoopie Cookies

‘I’m starting prepping at home in the evenings,’ Suzette says.

‘Either the mixer goes,’ Barry jokes an hour later, ‘or I do.’

‘Easy choice then,’ Suzette says with a laugh, putting her pecans on fast grind. 

Day Nine: Vanilla Cloud Cake 

A van parks on the pavement and spills builders into the former restaurant next door. The men pop in all the time for flat whites and flapjacks. The younger ones crack cakey jokes designed to make Kezia forget she’s dating a chemical engineer with a BMW. They wield their wrecking bars and soon there are more white vans than you can shake a spatula at: electricians and joiners, plumbers and shopfitters. 

Day Thirteen: Passionfruit Pavlova

‘All these guys are great for business,’ Suzette says, getting out another tray of salted caramel tarts. 

‘They’re not bad for my personal life either,’ Kezia says, yawning.

‘What’s it going to be next door?’ Suzette asks Afran, the foreman, who’s developing a serious brownie habit.

‘Maybe sandwich shop,’ he says, shrugging. ‘Maybe pizza.’

‘Either’s fine,’ Suzette tells Barry that evening. ‘People can step round to us for their puddings.’ 

Barry, who’s learning to live with food processing, nevertheless urges a tactical marketing uplift. ‘Enhanced customer loyalty programme, local radio advertising, door-to-door leafleting. You can call it Operation Dessert Storm.’ 

‘I can’t afford all that,’ Suzette says. ‘This is a start-up business, actually.’

‘I was going to suggest you use the last of my redundancy money.’

She rushes over and buries her face against Barry’s cardiganed chest and he slides his palms down her back to her hips. 

‘Might cost you…’

‘Don’t get any funny ideas,’ she says, slapping his hands away.

‘I’ll settle for a daily giant Jammie Dodger. With a bonus Bakewell blondie if I do the leaflet drop myself.’

‘You don’t have to do that.’

‘I need to lose an ounce or two. It’s not as if there’s much accounts work to do yet.’

Day Twenty: Rocky Road Slice

‘I see there’s a notice in the window next door,’ Suzette says, as she staggers in from the cash and carry with a fifteen-kilo multipack of Fairtrade demerara. 

‘They’re advertising for staff,’ Kezia says. 

‘Could you stay another hour on Monday? Barry’s insisting I go to the bank with him.’

‘They’re paying apprentices more than I’m getting.’ 

Never mind customer loyalty, Suzette thinks. What about staff loyalty? ‘What are they calling the place anyway?’ she asks, knowing it won’t be half as witty as For Heaven’s Bakes.

‘Starbucks.’

*

Chris Cottom won the 2021 Retreat West Flash Fiction Prize. He was the People’s Choice Winner of the LoveReading Very Short Story Award 2022, highly commended in the Bournemouth Short Story Writing Prize 2022, and shortlisted twice in the Parracombe Prize Short Story Competition 2022. He’s also had stories published by Cranked Anvil and Streetcake and broadcast on BBC Radio Leeds.

Shooter Flash: “Blue Girl’s Gift” by Donna L Greenwood

Posted on by Standard 2

Blue Girl is the blue of milk gone sour under moonlight. She pads towards her human and snuffles into the wet lap.

Sarah’s time has come. She strokes her Russian Blue and sucks in her cheeks, holding her breath, hoping to stop the birth pangs. She can’t. A ghost train of pain shrieks along the tracks of her veins, leaving her panting.

Blue Girl has birthed many a mewling bag of fur and bones. She feels the claws of the litter twist her insides. She’ll drop them soon and then she can eat. She nestles further into the stink of her owner’s lap and is rocked to sleep by her human’s birth shudders. Blue Girl is unconcerned; her kits will slide out easily. It’s her fourth litter.

Sarah bites the insides of her cheeks. She should be in hospital. He shouldn’t have left her lying at the bottom of the stairs. There is a sloshing inside her womb. She imagines the baby has disassembled somehow, his body parts floating towards her heart.

The kits are coming. Blue Girl lifts her head and jumps onto the carpet. The human is dripping water and blood. Blue Girl daintily picks her way across the mess and curls herself into a ball away from the human’s moans. She feels the kits find their way. Their slug-wet heads slip through her fur and find her teats. A full, warm feeling settles upon her and her throat rumbles. 

Sarah howls. There is no baby, only blood. The alabaster walls of the echoing home she has lived in for years loom above her like tombstones. His house, not hers. They never married. She strokes her stomach and lets her hand flop into the seeping blood. Hopefully, she’ll bleed to death on the floor before he arrives with the doctors. He has told them she is mad, that she threw herself down the stairs.

Blue Girl smells her human’s distress. She nudges her kits away and stands.

Sarah watches the cat slink towards her. Blue Girl bumps her head against Sarah’s face. The cat moves down her body and licks away the blood caked on the inside of Sarah’s legs. The soft rhythm of her tongue calms Sarah and she lets out a soft breath. When the licking stops, she wonders whether the cat has abandoned her, then she feels something small and warm drop onto her stomach. She opens her eyes and Blue Girl is standing over her, green eyes blazing. When she pads away, the small warmth on Sarah’s stomach remains.

When she looks down, she sees a squirming, blue-furred baby about the size of an apple. She reaches down and pulls it onto her chest, feeling the tiny heartbeat patter against her own. The kitten isn’t a purebred Russian Blue – he will drown them if he finds them here when he returns. But for now, it’s all she needs. Holding Blue Girl’s baby with care, she prepares to stand.

*

Donna L Greenwood writes flash fiction, short stories and poetry. Her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and Best Microfiction. Her debut novelette-in-flash The Impossibility of Wings has recently been published by Retreat West. Twitter: @DonnaLouise67

Shooter Flash: “The Cleaner” by Sam Szanto

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Carys attacks the master bedroom with a Henry hoover, tucks the sheets – ‘hospital corners’, her mother whispers from beyond the grave – and changes the pillowcases, one of which is streaked with what appears to be spray-tan. She also picks up a pair of frilly knickers and worries a stain on the carpet until two pairs of latex gloves are ruined. Then she takes two white towels from the ensuite and folds them into swans to go on the bed; she saw it done in a film about Japan and regards it as her special touch. It eats into her limited time but makes her clients feel special. 

The kitchen is next. Deflating helium balloons bob, including an ‘18’. It must be for the daughter, Isla. She was 13 when Carys first came here. Carys was employed by an agency then called Mrs Mop.

Carys is blitzing the work-surfaces as the client, Morgana, appears. It’s the first time she’s seen her today: Carys was given a key after two years’ weekly service. Morgana is wearing purple Lycra and carrying her iPhone in its glittery purple case. She looks tired, yellow skin under her eyes.

‘I’m making coffee if you’d like one?’ she asks.

Carys has a rule not to accept hot drinks from clients, so declines as she always does. Morgana turns on the coffee machine. Carys brushes away food scraps, takes the plastic and glass recycling to the bins outside, sweeps and bleaches the floor. Morgana drinks her cappuccino and talks about Isla’s party at the weekend. Carys makes appropriate noises in response. Morgana is one of only a few clients who talk to her while she’s working; she suspects the others hide, or pretend to be very busy at their laptops; but she has seen games of solitaire on the screens. Once, at the end of a shift, she passed a café and saw the client whose house she had been cleaning sitting in front of their laptop.  

Kitchen finished, Carys takes her cleaning supplies to the family bathroom. Morgana follows to the threshold.

‘Hey,’ she says, ‘you’re married?’

Carys starts; had she talked about her husband? She had a dream about him the night before and its cobwebs have clung to her all day. Then she follows Morgana’s gaze to her ring finger; her hands are usually concealed by latex gloves but she’d just run out.

‘Yes,’ Carys says, ‘married for fifteen years.’ 

Morgana doesn’t need to know that her husband died three years ago, after the black tentacles of cancer latched onto him.

‘Ahh, quite the stretch.’ 

Morgana wants to hear more; Carys doesn’t want to say more.

After a pause, Morgana starts talking about her husband. Now that the lockdown rules have been lifted, he is in the office almost every day and out a lot in the evenings.

‘It’s like he doesn’t want to spend time with us,’ Morgana moans. ‘I’m sure people aren’t meant to go back to work full-time in offices even now.’

‘I’m sure he’s very busy,’ Carys says meaninglessly.

She removes the plastic bag from the bin, stuffing the tissues that were on the floor into it. Her hands brush against a plastic stick. She shouldn’t look, but she does. There are two pink lines on the stick. It could be a Covid test, but the ones she has used have C and T on them. Morgana is looking at her phone, so hasn’t noticed. Carys wonders whether to tell her about what might be a pregnancy test, but what if it is Morgana’s rather than Isla’s? Despite the amount of time she has spent listening to her client, she doesn’t know how old she is: she could be anywhere between 35 and 45. 

Carys ties the handles of the bag and places it outside the bathroom. She washes her hands for twenty seconds, singing ‘Happy Birthday’ twice in her head. Then she sweeps up the hair on the floor, sluices water, scrubs sink-grime and tackles shower-mould. Morgana’s phone rings, and she walks away to answer it.

In the hall, Carys feather-dusts photos of Isla at various ages. She sprays glass cleaner on the wedding photo of Morgana and her husband Al. In the photo, Morgana is wearing a surgical-white gown with a sweetheart neckline, which Carys knows was handmade in London, and clutches a bouquet of deep-red roses; Al wears a matching red tie and button-hole rose. Carys and her husband don’t look like that in their one wedding photo. They married on a trip to Scotland, witnessed by two registry office staff, one of whom had taken the photo. She wore a pale blue dress, her husband a checked shirt. Their daughter was born nine months to the day later. Has she ever told Morgana she has a daughter? Clemmie is the same age as Isla; Carys cannot imagine her daughter with a baby.

Carys’s final task is the living room. They have a cat the colour of Morgana’s wedding dress, and Carys lint-rolls its hair off the sofa. She feels a pang as she does it – her fingers are a bit arthritic now.

The four hours (plus ten minutes, which she won’t be paid for) are up. Carys calls to Morgana that she is leaving; Morgana shouts goodbye from upstairs. The cat gives a sad-sounding miaow.

Carys wipes her sweaty face with a piece of kitchen roll, lugs her bucket and brushes to her car, and drives away. One more client to go, and then she can clean her own home. 

As she drives down Morgana’s road, she passes a car parked at the far end. She recognises the man on the driver’s side from the wedding photo she has just dusted, but not the woman. They do not see her.

*

Sam Szanto lives in Durham. Almost 40 of her stories and poems have been published or listed in competitions. In March, she won second prize in the Writer’s Mastermind Story Contest. She was a winner in the Literary Taxidermy awards, won second prize in the Doris Gooderson Competition 2019, and third prize in the Erewash Open Competition 2021. She won the 2020 Charroux Prize for Poetry and the First Writers International Poetry Competition.

Shooter Flash: “Love in Transit” by Isabelle Spurway

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I am on a train going from Saint Petersburg to Helsinki, reading a novel about an American infiltrator in Russia. Every now and then I look out of the window, wishing to see something interesting. We are driving along the edge of a forest and birch trees stand bunched up together, tall and thin, their narrow tops piercing through grey clouds. I scan the flashes of wilderness for a wolf, or a Siberian tiger, but instead there’s just trees and grass. Across the aisle is an old woman and opposite her a young man. She is about sixty and he is about twenty-five. They have struck up a conversation. He is in love. She is wary. It is going like this:

‘We walked around Petersburg all night then got breakfast in the morning. We spoke about everything.’

‘How did you meet her?’

‘In a bar. We got to talking about our situations.’

‘And what was her situation?’

‘She lived there.’

‘And you?’

‘I live in Helsinki, used to live in Russia. I am Russian.’

‘Why did you move?’

‘My mother died when I was young. I left for university in Finland.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It was tough for a while, but the universe looked after me.’

He sounds earnest. As if all he’s ever done is put his trust into something bigger than himself.

‘And led you to this girl, I presume.’

‘Yes.’

‘When will you see her again?’

‘I’m going back to Petersburg in two months’ time.’

‘And you’re sure it’s love?’

‘Yes. Yes, I’m sure it’s love.’

A good place to fall in love, Saint Petersburg. I imagine him declaring his feelings on Nevsky Prospekt, in the middle of the busy pavement, perhaps on Anichkov Bridge. Behind him beautiful buildings, pastel-coloured palaces. He says the words during the white night, tinged by the electric blue of dusk. 

I peek at the man. He has lovely brown hair and chiseled cheeks. He looks like the kind of person to fall in love during the night. More mysterious, more passionate. Falling in love during the daytime seems almost pathetic in comparison.

‘Be careful,’ the woman says.

I learnt earlier that she is from Israel. I wonder if anyone her age believes in falling in love after one night. Maybe she has fallen in love before, during night-time, and maybe her heart was broken. It is harder to see the old woman’s face; she is facing the same direction I am. I catch a glimpse of red hair, wispy and frail.

‘I’ve never been careful,’ says the man. 

Someone once told me that most Russians are careful, but maybe he has never been so when it comes to love. Maybe when love is real, nobody is careful.

He asks her about Israel now. She is travelling alone. She has always wanted to see Russia. She has read about it all her life. Israel is beautiful. Saint Petersburg is beautiful. Yes, I hope Finland is beautiful too. It’s a beautiful world, isn’t it? All these places, all these beautiful places…

The train rolls on and the old woman gets up to retrieve something from her bag, stored in the hold. I turn my head slightly, so that she’s in my periphery. I catch a glimpse of her face. She has a long, ragged scar that runs from her right eye to the bottom of her cheek.

It has started raining outside. We pass a lake and the water pounds down through the surface, making it ripple. We’ve just made it across the border. Every now and then a little wooden cabin appears in the middle of the trees. I spot one with a red front door and a pile of logs out front. As soon as we pass it the rain stops and the clouds begin to part slowly, waiting for the sun to shine through.  

*

Isabelle Spurway has a master’s degree in Creative Writing from the University of Kent and currently lives just outside London. She writes many of her stories during her commutes to and from the city and finds most of her inspiration in travel. 

Shooter Flash: “Where the Sun Doesn’t Shine” by Claire Schön

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‘They’re at it again, sir?’

‘I do wish you’d call me Dick, old chum.’ I wince; it just doesn’t seem fitting for a prime minister, although often it does. As his press secretary, I spend a lot of time in the prime minister’s company. I am very much in the background, but what I do is essential, especially for this prime minister. I still pinch myself every now and then, to remind me sometimes of my luck and other times to bite my tongue.

‘Mary, can you bring me a knife for the butter, please,’ he shouts to Mary, a former lawyer and now his long-suffering personal assistant. ‘Always hovering around, that one, but never brings me the required utensils to eat these silly little breakfasts that she serves up.’

In front of him is a feast fit for a large family; he likes his food. 

Dick came in on a campaign for green and healthy England: more walking, less talking. To think that swayed the electorate. I suppose there wasn’t a great deal of competition after the last lot crashed and burned in a quiver of catastrophic contradictions. It seems everyone just wanted something simple and straight. Dick is simple alright, and we think he is straight. At least, his wife does.

‘Dick, the northern electorate are complaining that the promised infrastructure and development programmes are not being delivered. I’ve had an endless round of journalists requesting an update at today’s press conference.’

We are at the prestigious opening of the UK’s largest solar power station in Kent, another southern project. I’d told him we should time it better, but he needed to cover up the latest husband-swapping scandal involving the Minister for Children and Families and the Minister for Women and Equalities. Personally, I think the latter took it all a bit far, and the former had only been married five minutes and had no idea about children or families. However, they were ‘old chums’ of Dick’s from Oxford.

‘What do you think of this wallpaper, Sally? Jemima is in raptures about them both but can’t decide which. I’ll be buggered if I can see a difference, can you?’

I sometimes wonder if Dick might be colour blind. The press has been lenient on him up until now, describing his dress sense as ‘flamboyant’, but I can understand that Jemima must despair at times. 

I pick one of the wallpaper samples to move things along. We are running late for the power station.

‘Definitely this one, sir, um, Dick.’

‘Thanks, Sal. What would I do without you?’ I don’t feel important.

‘Getting back to the complaint from–’ 

‘The miserable northerners. Yes, yes. Well, what am I supposed to do if it is dull and dreary up there and the sun never shines? It’s a solar power station. That’s it! I’ll announce, at today’s press conference, that if they sort out their weather, they can have their own power station. Ball back in their court. We have to think of the environment, you know.’

I can just see the headlines now: Prime Minister tells north of England to stick their complaints where the sun doesn’t shine. I’ve just recovered from the last pounding from the women’s rights lot, after he tweeted that ‘some things are gender-specific, like mini skirts, you wouldn’t want men’s big, hairy legs peeping out of those, now, would you?’

‘I take your point, Dick. You are the voice of reason. But we do need to keep them happy.’

‘Then let’s build another bridge for a high-speed train. The northerners can come and work down here, get a bit of sun and earn some money before they make their drab way back.’

He seems to have forgotten that I come from up north, although he persuaded me to lay the accent on thick for PR purposes.

‘The last bridge was very expensive, Dick, and we can’t stretch to a high-speed train.’

‘Then they will all have to drive.’ I am about to remind him of the environmental factor, which has slipped his mind again, but he ploughs on, enamoured by his own wisdom. ‘We will have to observe them closely; the universities up there aren’t as good as ours. Not sure what they learn in those neglected institutions.’

I went to one of those neglected institutions.

‘Mary, where is my butter knife?’ he screeches. ‘Honestly, it is a wonder that I can come up with such cracking ideas with this lack of competence from the waiting staff,’ he says in a lower, though not much lower, tone. Mary is in the same room, fussing with something or other in the corner. She leaves quickly. ‘She’s a northerner, you know.’ Mary is also not part of the waiting staff, but they refuse to travel with him after the cream cake incident.

‘Just put something together for me to read out, good girl.’

Mary joins us as we walk through the power station. She lags behind looking frazzled. 

The station is quite spectacular and in line with our environmental policy; I breathe a sigh of relief.

‘What’s with the sheep, gents?’

‘They provide natural vegetation control, and they are very cost-effective.’

‘Messy bleeders, though. Look at all this poop. And we need to think of the northerners. We’ll have to get rid of the sheep and replace them with northerners and petrol lawnmowers.’

I die inside. The head engineer leading us around is from my neck of the woods and an environmental expert. He looks livid, and I fear another press leak. My carefully scripted speech for Dick at the upcoming press conference might not cover this one.

‘Mary, I need a snack,’ Dick shouts, without turning. At that moment, my day is saved. The headlines I am dreading never materialise. They are replaced by events I could never have imagined:

              Prime Minister stabbed in buttocks with butter knife by PA

Thank you, Mary.

*

Originally from the UK, Claire Schön now lives in Austria. She studied German and Spanish and is now fluent in the former but useless in the latter. Claire started writing in her mother tongue in 2020 and has short stories, flash and micros published or upcoming in a number of anthologies including Funny Pearls, Fudoki Magazine, Blinkpot, Grindstone Literary and Reflex Fiction. She has been shortlisted and longlisted in various international competitions. Twitter: @SchonClaire.