Flash Fiction Online #128, May 2024

“Lord Mortedart’s Revenge” by Katie Kotulak

“The Chicken’s Just Fine” by J. Autumn Needles

“Darkness, Blanket of My Eyes” by Brandon Case

“Midnight Burritos with Zozrozir” by Rachael K. Jones (reprint not reviewed)

“Jelly” by Vicki Wilson (non-genre not reviewed)

Reviewed by Mike Bickerdike

In “Lord Mortedart’s Revenge” by Katie Kotulak, a teenage girl who is being bullied at school, and through social media, meets a quintessential fantasy Dark Lord in a back-alley. The Dark Lord has just returned to the land, after 100 years of banishment, and the two get to talking about the girl’s problem. It’s quite a neat little idea, told in an off-hand comic manner. Though it’s perhaps too light in tone to be perfect, it’s quite a satisfying little tale.

“The Chicken’s Just Fine” by J. Autumn Needles is an odd little story, in which two workers and a chicken get caught up in a strange mist and as a consequence are transported briefly to a land the men don’t recognise. While the tale concludes with a suggestion of mystery, the ideas here are not especially inventive, and the events and outcome depend too much (almost entirely) on the reader’s imagination.

“Darkness, Blanket of My Eyes” by Brandon Case takes some getting into, despite being flash fiction. It’s written in an ‘edgy’ style that’s becoming fairly common in genre fiction, with many incomplete sentences and other grammatical ‘innovations’. This is meant to make the tale gritty and earthy, but mostly detracts from its readability. A man is blindfolded and left in a Chevron gas station by his husband, who leaves him to investigate strange goings on. He hears many awful sounds nearby—there is something monstrous outside that his husband was trying to shield him from seeing. The story places imagery above all else; the motivation of the man to keep a blindfold on for many days doesn’t seem credible, and seems to take place, not for logical reasons, but simply to enable the gritty imagery and homoerotic conclusion.

More of Mike Bickerdike’s reviews and thoughts on science-fiction can be found at https://starfarersf.nicepage.io/