Bite-Sized Stories: A Multi-Genre Flash Fiction Anthology

Part I

Science Fiction

1

I Shouldn’t Have Eaten the Space Crab

Phronk - Bizarro Fiction

My uncle is real smart , and he always says it. He says, You are what you eat. I just ate a cheeseburger and I been on the front lawn mooin’ at the top of my lungs for an hour.

Mooo! I holler, and the fella across the street slams his window closed.

Maybe I oughta be more hush-hush. I munch on some grass and think about what could’ve caused this. The wife says gluten is genitally engineered by Monsanto so it fucks you up real good, but I never heard about it doing this. My uncle says all the bees are dying and nobody knows why, but I don’t feel like I’m dying. I just feel like I’m a cow since I ate that burger.

Maybe it was the space crab.

Was just the other night I found it near the creek. Money been tight, so I ain’t above grilling some roadkill on the BBQ, and I don’t see no difference between something that died by the road and something that died by the creek. Its shell looked shimmery when I found it, but as I dragged it home it got brown like the dirt path. When I hefted it on the BBQ, I swear it turned skin-pink when I picked it up, then it got a perfect grill pattern on top before I even flipped it.

As I cooked it, it stopped going all Karma Chameleon, so I figured it was my imagination. But the wife refused to eat it 'cause she saw lights in the sky the night before, and the meat did taste real weird. So I called it my space crab. Maybe I shouldn't have eaten it.

I swallow a mouthful of grass and go inside. The baby is howlin', but the wife knows how to handle the fussy monster. Me, I get frustrated trying out every different baby formula until one of them shuts him up.

My reflection looks a bit green. From eating so much grass, I guess, though I also ain’t feeling all that good. Since the kid was born, I feel so old and tired. The wife screeches above the baby’s cries. We need more formula. If you’re done hollerin’ can you go down ’n get some?

I moo approval. But first I grab a slice of pizza from the fridge. Chicken and onions. Maybe it’ll settle my stomach.

I’m a chicken now. I’m flying across the land like them crazy birds do. The onions are having an effect on me too: my legs feel like roots, pressing deep down in the earth. Deep down, pushing on the gas pedal as I fly to the market.

A little turbulence. Gosh damn, was that a squirrel I just flittered on over? I’ll have to go back ’n shovel it up for the BBQ later. I remind myself to pick up some nuts at the store, too. I’ll need ‘em later if I’m gonna become a squirrel.

I stop at the hippy market instead of the usual deep discount grocery store. Here, there are more things to try out my newfound you-are-what-you-eat superpowers on, even though it’s expensive as shit. Plus, they got free samples!

A lady hands me a tiny paper cup full of broccoli salad. Almost immediately, I feel my face turn green, and the top of my head tingles with bumpiness.

I’m a broccoli tree! I say. The sample lady looks around like she forgot something. Still feeling the effects of the chicken, I flap my wings on over to the next free sample. I’m a tree and I can fly, I say.

Oookay, says an ugly teenager, who hands me a wad on a toothpick that she says is bacon-wrapped goat cheese. I eat it in one gulp.

Heeehaaaw! I scream. I guess that’s the sound a goat makes. My nose feels like it’s gettin’ big and squished flat, like a pig’s. From eating the bacon, see? Suddenly I can smell everything. The strongest smell is coming from the back of the fancy market.

I head back there to see what else I can eat. What else I can become. My stomach is grumblin', probably because I've become part goat, and goats will eat anything. Then I see it, there in the fish section. This is what I'm going to go home and BBQ.

The checkout lady looks all nervously at me as I pay. Probably thinks I can’t afford it, which is true. I won’t be able to pay rent now. I wish I was smart like my uncle. He makes good money using that fast-thinkin’ brain of his. Being a tired adult with all these bills and responsibilities is so stupid.

Back at home, the wife is natterin’ something about baby formula, but I'm a starving little goat. Straight to the back yard BBQ I go, along with my catch: a slab wrapped in butcher's paper labelled shark steak.

You're looking great! he says to me. He says, You been using some sort of skin cream? You look twenty years younger! He actually sounds confused.

I giggle, and my voice comes out real high-pitched. Just eating right, I say.

He comes ‘round back and I show him my BBQ. My eyes are wide and bulging like I'm seeing everything for the first time. So I notice him sweating, looking around all nervous-like. His nose twitches as he sniffs the funny meat that’s on the grill. His mouth curves into a frown when he looks at the splotch of red across my chest. My stained, triangular teeth. The knife in my hand.

He’s figured out that something ain't right. My uncle is real smart. I always wanted to be smart.

Phronk’s stories involve things that don't exist, things that might exist, and things that shouldn't exist. He got a PhD in psychology after writing a dissertation about what makes horror films frightening. So yeah, he wrote the book on horror, and continues to write horrific things by cover of night. Phronk is also the creator of Putting Weird Things in Coffee, which is a blog about putting weird things in coffee. He lives in London, Ontario, and has an unhealthy relationship with chocolate. Find his books and get on his mailing list at ForestCityPulp.com.

2

The Price

Adan Ramie - Dystopian

The last year the river ran red with the blood of children, I was seven years old, fearless, and the child of a mother whose only concern was that we be seen, not heard. My mother saw children as little more than mouths to feed that only kept growing and multiplying; she was as glad to see us leave as she was to give birth to a child not breathing.

You can’t judge my mother too harshly, though, for she was alone in a world that saw her as a blight and us as her punishment. She was only a child when the ban started, with no way of knowing that the law would set the course of her life on a track without rails or handlebars.

Before she was aware of what was happening, she had been sold by my grandparents into the employ of a woman who promised to keep her safe: she would feed, clothe, house, and hide my child mother in exchange for help on her farm. My grandparents considered this a blessing, and in a way, it was.

After all, when the troopers came to take away my infant uncle, as per the ban, my grandmother fought with her claws and teeth. She was struck, or so the story is told, and my grandfather defended the honor of his wife. In the tussle, most of my family was killed. They left only my six-year-old uncle, who remembers hiding in his mother’s ripped open belly for warmth as a nightmare of a blizzard raged outside the doors the troopers kicked off their hinges.

How do you remember something from so long ago? I asked him once.

He looked at me like I had opened up my mouth and puked on him rather than ask a stupid question. You don’t forget being the only one left alive in a house of six.

My uncle died not long after his confession, but I kept his words with me like a comforting blanket. No matter what happened, my mother wouldn’t have to fight the troopers. She would hand over the new baby, dead or alive, like it was a carton of spoiled eggs. Then she would go on about her business and welcome in the next customer.

I knew my mother’s customers were men who engaged in practices that played fast and loose with the rules of the baby ban, as it was called, but it was her livelihood. It kept food on our table just as it had for years before she had been taken in by the woman known only as Venus.

Venus was a rebel. She hated the ban, hated the men who chose it over better options, and hated herself for playing into the system like a pawn. Venus drank hard, bought girls from all over the country, and ran her farm like a gentle but firm taskmaster. She was, my mother said, a wonderful woman with hair like wheat, eyes like copper, and a mouth that could as easily talk herself out of trouble as it could yell herself into it.

For her credit, she didn’t put my mother to work on the front lines until she was ten. For those first five years, she was a student. She changed sheets, ran baths, prepared appetizers, and helped Venus and the front line girls into and out of their clothes.

Their customers could look at my mother in her frock that hung low in the front but was cut high in the back, could slobber over her smooth, exposed skin, but were never permitted to touch her. Anyone who tried was shown the door by a couple of women who had graduated from the front line to what Venus called taking out the trash.

When it was time for my mother to move on to the front line, Venus guided her gently. She taught her the ways of seduction, how to give the most pleasure with the least touch, and how to keep herself calm while the customers plucked the innocence from her piece by piece.

My mother was strong. She saw the animal lust in the customers’ eyes as they watched her slip the bodices from the bodies of girls with glazed eyes and bruises dappling their flesh like spots on a banana, but when it was time for her to work, she consoled herself that she was relieving an older girl of her duty and leaving a spot open for a younger girl to be safe from the front line.

Go out and play while I work, my mother always told me when a man showed up on her doorstep with a wad of money and a lump in his pants.

She would guide his face to her body and away from those of my sister and I, and wave us off with her free hand. Our brother would already be at the river, throwing rocks at the bodies, trying to weigh them down so they would sink to the bottom. He hated seeing them. He knew that we were only safe from the same fate as long as our mother