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    Best Microfiction 2022: Best Microfiction, #4
    Best Microfiction 2022: Best Microfiction, #4
    Best Microfiction 2022: Best Microfiction, #4
    Ebook328 pages2 hours

    Best Microfiction 2022: Best Microfiction, #4

    By Meg Pokrass, Gary Fincke and Tania Hershman

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    About this ebook

    The Best Microfiction anthology series provides recognition for outstanding literary stories of 400 words or fewer. Co-edited by award-winning microfiction writer/editor Meg Pokrass, and Flannery O'Connor Prize-winning author Gary Fincke, the anthology features Tania Hershman serving as final judge, three essays on craft, two interviews with the year's top microfiction magazines, and eighty of the world's best very short short stories.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPelekinesis
    Release dateJul 10, 2022
    ISBN9781949790627
    Best Microfiction 2022: Best Microfiction, #4

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    Reviews for Best Microfiction 2022

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    • 5/5
      I have not read an anthology of micro fiction before and I am so glad I chose this one! Obviously, some of them resonated more than others like “Ten Amazing Facts About the Human Body” by Joanna Theiss. The stories are riveting and I throughly enjoyed it!

    Book preview

    Best Microfiction 2022 - Meg Pokrass

    Other Shit Rumpelstiltskin Did

    Angela Readman

    Teach his soldiers to fly, DIY parachutes drifting off a bridge. Steal his sister’s doll and ask what’s wrong with it? Learn to pronounce his name, make R’s sound less like W and S’s less like snakes. Lay a palm on the speech therapist’s belly, fluttering fingers a blinking star. Ask his mother if boys can have babies. Why not? Bury his sister’s scissors, liberate the doll that gave her a dirty look, cradle the shaved head to his chest. Wish on a breastbone. Write to Santa for a brother, a deerhound, a goldfish to love. Ruin another jumper. Learn to spell his name. Burn his alphabet blocks, the letters never enough. Scribble lines on a blackboard. I must not… steal… drill holes in lips… stuff pudding, honey, bread into dolls, no matter how hungry they look. Invent a game called BAM! Plot the death for his father in a half-arsed fashion: stampeding cows, possessed ploughs, a fatal allergy to the silver stuff on scratch cards (preferably winners). Experiment with nicknames: Stilts, Skin. Join a band. Quit. Get a tattoo. Date a woman who thought he’d be taller. Date another who calls him Rump. Babysit her son, buy a globe & spin it. Make Egg Fried Rice a geography lesson. Eat day-old prawn crackers with David Attenborough. Pick up the phone to show the kid where the geese go. Hang up on the guy who sounds like he knows. Attend the aquarium with a lady who thought he’d be skinnier. Learn about seahorses, unfasten his belt flashing the seahorse inked to his hip. Laugh at the joke the kid next door told in the park. Take the long way around avoiding the park altogether, facts about octopus and The Beatles shielded by mothers. Put the Lucky House on speed dial, fill out forms, ask about adoption prospects for guys living alone. Snap the world off its stand, push the globe under a sweater and stroke it in front of the mirror like a beachball, a melon baby kicking inside him, bursting to be born.

    Angela Readman’s stories have won the Costa Short Story Award, the Mslexia competition, the National Flash Fiction Day competition and the New Flash Fiction Review competition. Her second story collection The Girls are Pretty Crocodiles was published in 2022. Nine Arches are publishing her poetry collection Bunny Girls later this year.

    from The Birdseed

    She Has Lost Something Again

    Melissa Llanes Brownlee

    She’s prone to losing things. A shoe here. A ring there. Fish find them in their bellies. Trees grow roots around them. She has a whole lake full of treasure filled fish boxes. A whole forest floor embedded with her wayward shoes, lost when she decided it was best to run from the prince than stay for the party. So many princes. So many parties. If the princes only knew that they wouldn’t need her dowry if they just went fishing in the lake instead of fishing for her with their mango breasts and betel lips compliments as if being compared to food or spices was appealing at all. She would gladly lose a million bangles sliding down her arms into the gaping mouths of fish than wait for a prince to catch her.

    Melissa Llanes Brownlee, a native Hawaiian writer in Japan, has work in Booth, Pleiades, The Citron Review, Milk Candy Review, Necessary Fiction, trampset, jmww, Superstition Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Best Small Fictions 2021. Read Hard Skin, her short story collection with Juventud Press. She tweets @lumchanmfa. Talks story at www.melissallanesbrownlee.com.

    from Atticus Review

    Romance in the lower and upper atmosphere

    Frankie McMillan

    Him

    Me with my girl in the grass gazing up at what looks like pinpricks in the great blanket of sky. It’s getting cold. Well, have you had enough?

    Back inside, she goes around the house, lighting candles. I don’t know what she’s got against electricity. Swarms are drawn to the flame and there’s an awful burning smell.

    Later she tells me we’re like identical stars but moving in opposite directions.

    That’s just today, I say, Just today you feel that way.

    That whole lunar month we orbit each other. My naked eye observes all her comings and goings, all her little divergences. She dyes her hair pink. She takes up running. Each day she runs further and further. When she gets up to speeds of 100 kms an hour I know I’ve got trouble. When a bright light streaks across the sky, followed by a trail of hot gas something inside me breaks.

    I climb the roof. I square my jaw. Go on, shoot me. Shoot me, lady star.

    Her

    I don’t go on about Pluto because lying beside me in the grass is my twin star who complains the grass is getting damp, it’s the dew and, have I had enough yet, have I had enough of being out here because inside could be a lot warmer so we go inside and I light candles, white votive candles, one over there, one over there until the whole house glows but I can see he’s worried about swarms coming in and he looks at the windows as if by looking at them I’ll know what he wants me to do and then he starts on about electricity, how it saves lives, and I say it’s not about saving anything but he keeps on about how we should support the electric companies, and he’s like a dog with a bone, he won’t let go until I’m forced to say that maybe he’s right and he comes over and tells me I’m awfully pretty and he leans over and blows on my face and says his only wish is that we keep moving in the same direction and I can’t help it but right there in the back of my mind, despite my love, the achy love I have for him that rises, tugs me into his gravitational field, despite all that I see something sick and wounded I need to outrun.

    from Flash Boulevard

    Taking Turns

    Frankie McMillan

    Because the Ferris wheel wouldn’t start until all the seats were full we called out to Doreen to come join us and she looked up from her candyfloss and came running all doggish and eager until we told her she had to sit in her own seat, because she could be radioactive and even though it was long ago her father got an X-ray machine for his shoe shop; a black box you put your foot in and could see where the bone of your big toe met the tip of the shoe and your heel the back, the stories kept going round and round and each time we heard someone from our town had gotten cancer it was because they must have been to Clarke’s shoe shop, even just walking past, the invisible rays could go right through you and when the Ferris wheel music finally started, the cogs and gears cranking and us swaying up to the very top, Doreen was always below, her eyes shut tight and then as we circled down we flung back our heads urging the Ferris wheel upward again.

    Laugh, Doreen, we cried, laugh.

    And then for a brief time Doreen was up and we were down and she had a long-haired boyfriend who operated the go-karts and she’d look at us as if she knew something we didn’t and once her boyfriend came up behind her and put his long tattooed arms around her waist and Doreen laid her glowing face against his shoulder, but all the time looking at us in a funny sort of way. You don’t know what you’re missing, she said and we felt the sort of emptiness where the big ride fills fast and we’re left behind the fence with tired legs, clutching out tickets that shred to pieces in our hot sticky palms before our turn eventually comes round

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