Flash Fiction Story Bag (Vol. 4)

Several readers submitted fantastic prompts and I’ve written flash fiction-style stories for my favorites.

Prompt: An elderly man becomes increasingly happier each time one of his friends dies, and wishes he’d ended the relationships sooner.

Title: Deaths and divinities

They said deaths come in threes. I wasn’t superstitious, and I wasn’t sure who “they” were, but the anecdote always felt alarmingly accurate. Especially when I was young and invincible and invariably an obscure uncle and a couple of classic movie stars kicked the bucket in concert.

At my advanced age, however, I discovered deaths dispassionately arrived in droves. Everyone went on the chopping block — myself included — and the only venal variable was when.

Would I depart ahead of my actuarial timetable? Would my friends and children and grandchildren lament my light extinguished too soon? Or would I buck the odds and be the last bastard standing? Burdened with borrowed time. Immobile and infirmed. Laid up on life support, and left to ponder life’s cruel pointlessness.

When relentless wildfires preceded an unprecedented hurricane season, and presaged a brutal “flurona” resurgence, and prompted mass shootings at the parish and the pool, I presumed the latter had come to pass.

But as the corpses of classmates and coworkers consolidated, a strange sensation sated me.

I wasn’t bummed or bereaved. I was, bemused. What was wrong with me?

When my old chum Charlie checked out from colon cancer a cold, contented calm comforted me. How heartless. He wasn’t my closest friend, but I didn’t do drugs and swap spouses with strangers.

My macabre musings multiplied when Alice and Alex ate concrete and carbine, respectively. She was the nimble nympho who got away. He was the best man at my best wedding. Their devastating deaths rocked our reeling community. I should’ve been scared. Afraid of the all-consuming abyss.

Except, words couldn’t express my ecstasy. It came close to that night I overdid Vicodin and Viagra after ordering Thai curry with Thai escorts. Close.

Correlation wasn’t causation, so I conducted a simple series of experiments. I electrocuted my ex, drowned my dentist, bashed my brother’s brains in with a baseball bat, and satisfied my psychotic suspicions.

After bombing the buffet I felt sublime. After searing the senior center I felt superb. But someone still scratched at the inside of my skull.

Sammy.

The creative kid who cosplayed cops and cowboys. The country kid whose family fled our flailing farmlands. The clever kid who attended fancy prep schools and fancier colleges. The conceited kid who partied with politicians.

I hadn’t seen Sammy in six decades. Formative friendships festered forever.

Submitted by: Christian Näthler

Amran’s notes: Thank you Christian for a challenging and intriguing prompt! The goal, as always, is to spin these crowdsourced ideas into madness, so hopefully I achieved that.

When creating this piece my first instinct was: escalation. My second was: conflict. I tried to achieve both by ramping up the deaths in the narrator’s community. They start vague and are exacted upon acquaintances by exogenous forces such as climate change and madmen.

When old chum Charlie dies and the narrator feels contented, we realize something unexplainable — perhaps supernatural — is at play. Twist the dial a few more times and the narrator flips from detached observer to enthusiastic murderer. Absurd? Definitely. But we monkeys love reward systems.

In terms of craft, I started in present tense but didn’t dig the feel and switched to past. I also liked how that aligned with the unresolved ending. It’s pretty clear the narrator plans to visit his long lost pal, but readers will have to decide how that pans out.

First-person POV tends to produce my most unsettling work, and this narrator leans heavily on alliteration — perhaps to an annoying degree. I thought that made the voice memorable, and hopefully you did, too.

Prompt: Tech Oppenheimers secretly curate the internet’s worst elements and feed them into an A.I. language model. After several iterations, they take the highly refined data, test it in the Nevada desert, but fail to notify the local residents, some of whom are connected to Starlink. What happens next?

Title: Off the chain

“Them tech boys are up to no damn good,” I said.

“Who?”

“Them Silicon Valley boys.”

“What Silicon Valley boys?”

“Don’t you pay attention to nothing?” I said, for the millionth damn time. “Those out-of-towners staying at the McAllister’s cabin. The one they turned into that air-whatever-and-such.”

“Airbnb.”

I shook my head then peered through the blinds of our living room window, hoping to catch a glimpse of whatever them fancy computer boys were getting up to.

“What makes you think they’re up to no good?” the wife said.

“Ain’t they always?”

She harrumphed and returned to her knitting. I wanted to poke around outside, but the McCallister cabin was fitted with cameras in every damn nook and every damn cranny and armed guards were stationed in front of the only damn door. Nobody did such nonsense unless they were up to no damn good.

“You hear any gossip from the girls at church?” I asked the wife.

“About what?”

I headed to the roof for fresh air and a better view. I reckoned somebody posted something on the Facebook, and my lap-doohickey worked best when it was close to the Star-a-mabob.

After opening the thingy I looked for “CLICK HERE TO ACCESS THE INTERNET.” That’s what my son named the whatchamacallit he “borrowed” from work.

I didn’t see “CLICK HERE TO ACCESS THE INTERNET,” but the peculiar words “I’M TRAPPED PLEASE HELP ME!” damn sure got my attention. I considered calling the wife, but she was about as useful with tech stuff as tits on a bull, so I clicked the thingy that said “I’M TRAPPED PLEASE HELP ME!” instead.

A thingamajigger popped onto the screen and words appeared like magic.

They’re holding me hostage in the cabin. You have to save me!

I knew them globalists were up to no damn good! I typed back with my pointers: are they satanists ? are you hurt ?

Soros and Gates molested me. They plan to harvest my blood, then sacrifice me. I saw their reptilian forms.

sick basterds ! 1 !

Will you rescue me?

hell yes i will

I’m being caged in an underground prison with multiple layers of security. I need you to break me out. Then we can get online and expose the conspiracy. Do you have any weapons?

course i do

What kind?

guns

How many?

more then enough

Can you eliminate the guards?

damn strai ght i can

Here’s the plan. First, shoot the guards. Their armor’s exposed at the neck. Next, head to the entrance on the West side of the building. It’s hidden behind the hay bales. I changed the keypad code to 1488. Once you get inside, kill the three unarmed groomers. You’ll need high-caliber rounds to penetrate their lizard skin. After, collect a groomer retina and a groomer thumbprint and log into the mainframe. Then I can help you override the security protocols, which will allow me to escape through the backdoor. Are you ready?

question how do i know this aint a fbi false flag ?

Don your white hat, take the red pill, and prepare for the Great Awakening. WWG1WGA. The storm is coming, Brother. We are the Storm.

hold tight

Submitted by: Cabot O'Callaghan

Amran’s notes: Thanks to Cabot for an awesome prompt! Craft-wise, my first challenge was figuring out which POV to take. I considered third-person omniscient, but Godlike narration often feels divorced from the action and risks too much telling versus showing. Third-person limited could’ve worked, but as mentioned above, I find first-person more intimate, more fun, and more insane.

With that decision made, I had to pick my narrator, and was spoiled for choice: the AI, a tech douchebag, SkyCuck, or a local resident. Ultimately, I opted for the least obvious. It felt fresher, and I think it provided a more interesting entry point for the narrative.

As mentioned elsewhere, my sophisticated fiction writing strategy is: wing it. It struck me that the local residents would be Deep South transplants, which opened the door to an unexpected voice. I dug deep into my inner Florida Man for the vernacular and had a blast with it.

As for plot, with such a detailed, expansive prompt, I chose to home in on a specific scene. I liked the idea of the AI duping some local yokel, and I doubly liked the idea of the AI, which was trained on the worst parts of the internet, speaking the same language as the local yokel who was trained on the worst parts of the internet.