Winners of our Flash Fiction Contest

Important Update for 2020: Following the October-December 2019 contest (winners published in Issue 173 on April 1, 2020), the Prime Number Magazine Flash Fiction Contest will operate on an annual basis. Submissions for the annual Flash Fiction Contest will be open from July 1 to August 31. Winning flash fictions will be published in our yearly awards issue on October 1.

First Prize: Alan Sincic / Second Prize: Danielle Gillespie / Third Prize: Christopher Notarnicola

Alan Sincic

Followed by Author Bio

Cooper

Alan Sincic

Duffy was the key, Duffy the Undertaker, see, knew a guy name of Cooper, rancher back in the day with a spread that just so happened to border this lumpy little county road about to be, any day now, goosed up into a four-laner. You know, one of them feeder roads up onto the Interstate? Okay, okay—a cowtrail, sure, but about to acquire, and about time already, a cloverleaf to call its own, cloverleaf with all the accoutrements: the gas, the food, the lodging. The perfect parcel, and there for the picking, and Cooper there ripe in the saddle, not but a breeze away from that final, stiff-of-the-finger topple into the plowable turf.

All that morning he rode and we walked, out round the border of the land he owned, and all that morning the crunch of the boot sang to us, and the thump of the rain, and the burble of fungi and beetle and grub, where the carpet of cow patties and dragonflies and raggedy shag laps at the curb, licks its way into the cracks, figures forth a vision of a new heaven and a new earth. Hello highway. Hello billboard. Hello diner with the blue blink of the neon Eats/Eats, and the Dino Station with the red balloon bobbing upside the snout of the Brontosaurus, and the tar-paper kiosk with the orange blossom honey and the nudie cocktail shaker and the salt-water taffy and the gator jerky and, cobbled up out of a conch shell, the nativity (two bits) with the coquina virgin and the starfish angel and the clamshell cradle inside of which rattles a itty-bitty little whittle of pinkish coral: the Baby Jesus.

Hello, hello, but most of all, best of all, hello to the quarter-mile stretch of clear-cut, pave-able, zone-able, own-able primo lots on the cutting-edge of the commercial frontier, and all of it, every inch of it belonging—talk about a lucky bastard—to Cooper.

Coughed his way into the grave, this Cooper, but just before he got there, at the point of purchase so to speak, as he flipped through the Bunkerman Catalogue of Perpetual Repose and pictured himself in a box with a lid (a cedar chest) or a humidor (double-walled against the gurgle of the earth) or a steamer trunk (poplar with a double latch) or an oaken keg (double-stoppered and sealed with pitch), he got to thinking about the disposition of that tender flesh of his he’d so lovingly shepherded through the prickle and the scrub, got to thinking, as he fingered the glossy pages, and as he pictured himself, in the dark, and all around him, and not but a breath away, the rustable iron and the meltable felt, the blistery leather and the fermentable batting and the timber in a marinate of mold spore and dung beetle and ravenous bacteria said a prayer, and in the prayer he heard a voice, and in the voice he heard the word he heard as a child but could never—until that very moment—have uttered. What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world? 

Yea. Verily. The land was a transient thing, and naught would it avail him in the afterlife, and store up your treasure, but not, said the word, where thieves break in and steal. A chigger shimmied up to prick him on the shin, pricked again and again as it worked its way up under the cuff of the trouser. Store up your treasure, but where?

It was Duffy had the answer. Duffy who wheedled his way in to score the sale, the swapper-roo, the special-order-from-Chicago/automatic transmission/Ark of the Covenant/top-of-the-line sarcophagus. Double-plush. Vacu-packed. Lozenge of steel with the rivets all countersunk and the gunwales burnished to a supersonic sheen, like one of them interstellar escape pods you see in the movies.

Property for property, the swap of a lifetime, the pasture for the casket! Cooper gets the residential, we get the commercial, and the Good Lord, the god of gravity, having gathered unto his own—in the last days, at the sound of the trump—the all of it, and all of us, every mother’s son of us to boot, will look down upon the fat of the land, the sweat of the brow, the fruit of our labor, and smile.

~ ~ ~

A teacher at Valencia College, Alan Sincic’s fiction has appeared in New Ohio Review, The Greensboro Review, Hunger Mountain, Big Fiction Magazine, A-3 Press, The Gateway Review, Cobalt, and elsewhere. Short stories of his recently won contests sponsored by The Texas Observer, Driftwood Press, The Prism Review, Westchester Review, and American Writer’s Review. He earned his MFA at Western New England University and Columbia and—back in the day—published a children’s chapter book, Edward Is Only A Fish (Henry Holt) that was reviewed in the New York Times, translated into German, and recently issued in a Kindle edition. For more info, visit alansincic.com.

Cracked

Danielle Gillespie

The first time I broke, it was clean in two. The left half of my body cracking against the wooden floor with a sound that was softer than expected—a thud more than a clatter. But the pain was exquisite. A line of agony from crown to pelvis.

Father was the one who found me. Scooped both halves of my body into his warm hands, and brought me to the kitchen where Mother, hearing the fall, had already started stoking the fire. “I know,” Father said. “I know.”

They don’t tell you what to expect. At least Mother and Father never did. From my left eye, I could take in the full scope of my split. See the smooth, open cavity of my stomach. Shadows gathering around the opening to my right leg. Everything inside me white and velvet- soft and hallowed out.

Mother pressed at the seam between my eyes. Ran her fingers down the fissure in my nose. I’d like to think there wasn’t jealousy in her touch.

When the pot was ready, lacquer hot and glistening, they lay me out on the kitchen table.

“Be still,” Father said.

“Be strong,” Mother said.

I was neither. There was heat and more heat, and I was burning. When I twisted away, the metal slid down my face, and I could feel it searing down my lips, hardening.

Father moved to wipe it away, but Mother stopped him.

“If she wants to speak, she’ll learn how.”

It is slow going, this I will tell you.

The next morning, I stepped out with my friends. They pressed eager hands to my cracked places. “So pretty,” they whispered. They wondered when they’d get their own. 

“Maybe I’ll trip down the stairs,” said one.

“Maybe my brother will push me,” said the other.

The metal on my mouth warmed in the sun, turned hot. I sucked in my cheeks, tried to pry open my lips, but they wouldn’t budge. Funny, how they didn’t notice my silence. How they stretched out their arms, drew lines along their collarbones, saying “I want to break here and here.”

I go to school. Try to fold my body into a desk, but I am too rigid now to do so. I stand in the back of the classroom next to another girl. She is wearing a skirt that shows off the golden veining on her knee-caps. When she walks, the metal on the inside of her knees touch and clink. The teacher watches us with hooded eyes, but she makes sure to never call on us.

That night, Mother finds me in my bedroom with a dull blade lodged between my lips. I have managed to break through the pretty gold. I prod the tip of the blade with my tongue; taste metal. I grip the handle and wrench it free. A scream whistles through the newly formed hole.

Mother crouches in front of me, eyes flashing with pride. “Good girl,” she says. “Good girl.” 

~ ~ ~

Danielle Gillespie is a recent MFA graduate from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Her work has appeared in Big Muddy, The Evansville Review, Pithead Chapel, and Quiddity. Her short story 'Flightless' was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2017. She currently lives in Alton, Illinois, with her husband, three dogs, and a cat.

Natural as a Sigh

Christopher Notarnicola

It is difficult for you, when they call it a theater of operations or, more dramatically, a theater of war, to see yourself as more than a player. These orders are your stage directions, and this base and that town and the roads between and the trucks that carry you along, your stage. Places, everyone. Heavy machine gunner, your supporting role, a practiced performance at once coveted and reviled—some say cursed—cast, adapted, and produced over and again and played variously since the humble beginnings of theater itself. Line. Your getup doesn’t help. Line.

Your driver tells you his mother stabbed herself six times in the chest with a flat-tip screwdriver while he was home on pre-deployment leave. She’d never been very good, he says, at sobriety, and the littlest things would send her off the wagon, so to speak. He had just finished changing a bulb in the domed fixture above the dining table, and they were discussing the logistics of shipping an ice-cream cake over for his birthday. That’s when she picked up the flat-tip, he says, with two hands and started punching it into her chest and tearing these big red holes in her t-shirt. He grabbed her wrists and shook her to the floor, and she lost consciousness. You react with muted physicality. He had been drinking too, but he picked her up and laid her across the back seat of her sedan. She doesn’t weigh much and we only live, he says, a few blocks from the hospital. This is where you break the monologue with vague sympathies. Your driver tells you his mother didn’t die, but it was quite the traumatic experience. I saw her nipples, he says. He had only told that story one other time, and Staff Sergeant asked if he needed to see someone and talk it out and take a psychological evaluation and maybe stay back with another platoon and not deploy to Iraq or if he could tighten up and take his pack and board the plane like the rest. The show must go on. I’ve been having nightmares, he says, I think because my birthday is coming up. This is where you come in again, sympathetic, with a question about the kinds of nightmares he’s been having. He spent that night in a hospital chair, his mother’s blood browning his jeans. The following morning, he slept in her bed. His leave ended before his mother regained consciousness. She was still in the hospital, he says, when we got on the plane in Kuwait, but Staff Sergeant told me word came down that she was all right, though I still don’t know what that means, word came down or all right, and I still haven’t received a letter from her, and I keep dreaming about this package that arrives on my birthday. This is where you finish the scene dripping with empathy, and the lights go down on the word melted.

The production enjoys an extended run, and your part evolves beyond the act. You no longer recite your lines but exhale them, natural as a sigh, and you find it difficult to imagine your next role or to recall who it was you’d been looking for, what else you saw in yourself before rehearsals began. The public will begin to see a character in your face. The theater is dimly lit, and it is difficult for you to track your position by the movement of their eyes. When the houselights come up, step forward and take your bows and be grateful the roses and the poppies are not falling for you.

~ ~ ~

Christopher Notarnicola served four years with the United States Marine Corps before receiving his MFA in creative writing from Florida Atlantic University. His work has appeared in Best American Essays, Hotel Amerika, Image Journal, North American Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Southampton Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Pompano Beach, Florida.