Flash Fiction Online #136, January 2025
“A Promise of Persimmons” by Allison Pang
“The Heartbreaker’s Apprentice” by Catherine George
“The Northerner’s Tale” by Jason P. Burnham
“Spoon, Fork, Knife” by Daniel Roop
“The Hag of Beinn Nibheis” by M. R. Robinson
“Moist Breath of a Cold Stranger” by KT Wagner
“The Ice Cutter’s Daughter and Her Looking Glass” by Nadia Born
Reviewed by C. D. Lewis
This issue of Flash Fiction Online provides seven works of flash fiction, all in the theme described in the opening editorial: winter folklore not only about winter, but best told in winter. They’re all flash fiction, a thousand words or less. Bite-sized bits. Four of the seven are dark fantasy, delivering readers a bleak outlook in a bleak season. A couple are more hopeful, and in the context of their dark companions this comes as a surprise and a delight. If you’re not into dark fantasy, this may not be for you: the recommendations aren’t based on making the reader feel good, but on being effective dark fantasy. If you are into dark fantasy, you want to read this issue. This reviewer has previously suggested that if one third of a volume’s stories are worth recommending, the collection is worth a consumer’s consideration. That math easily makes this volume a winner.
Allison Pang opens “A Promise of Persimmons” on a snowy mountain where the narrator plucks a persimmon, touching off an avalanche. This work is dark fantasy, and makes no effort to conceal how badly this goes for the narrator. Numerous role reversals distinguish “A Promise of Persimmons” from yuki-onna stories this reviewer has encountered from Japan: the protagonist is the yuki-onna herself, not some man who encounters (and does or doesn’t survive) the snow-woman. She doesn’t lure men to a frozen death by asking them to hold her child, she returns home and is denied her infant. She doesn’t push the unwary or helpless into a snowy valley but escapes to freedom melting through the floorboards when she delivers her husband his requested persimmon. She isn’t a treacherous killer. Facts suggest freedom from her husband is a real win; and an escape into death is a solid resolution for dark fantasy.
Catherine George makes the unusual choice to narrate “The Heartbreaker’s Apprentice” in the first person plural, which interestingly feels like it includes the reader within the us and we who hear and relate the tale, and who bear the history of grievance that fuels our sympathy. This urban fantasy is pointedly not about romantic wrongdoers or the targets of their offenses; it’s about the woman who applied for the job to break wrongdoers’ hearts, and the price she paid for her power. In a glorious triumph of dark fantasy “The Heartbreaker’s Apprentice” comes a hair’s breadth from concluding in a glorious emotionally uplifting renewal, only to stick the landing as a brutal dark fantasy. Ouch, but yes: that was indeed the way to end it.
Jason P. Burnham‘s fantasy “The Northerner’s Tale” makes a story out of the interchanging roles: hunter and hunted, protector and protected, and follower and followed. Although it depicts characters in frightening situations, it’s not horror; it’s got a kindness and warmth of feeling that comes as a balm amidst the dark fantasy of the surrounding works.
Another tale featuring persimmons, Daniel Roop‘s “Spoon, Fork, Knife” opens on a weather-prognostication ritual the narrator describes as having no impact on her family’s actual preparation for winter. Built on a traditional fairytale structure in which an event repeats until it’s resolved in its third trial, “Spoon, Fork, Knife” connects the climactic resolution back to the fortune-telling ritual in the opening paragraphs, giving it a feeling of resolution. The climactic twist would spoil the work to describe, but “Spoon, Fork, Knife” is a just-desserts revenge fantasy worth reading.
M. R. Robinson opens the fantasy “The Hag of Beinn Nibheis” on a septugenarian’s journey up a mountain to rein in a terrible winter or die in the effort. The titular “hag” has an appearance that evokes the Gaelic goddess of Winter and dwells on a mountain that in the real world is the tallest in Great Britain. The protagonist Brigid is named after a Celtic goddess, in some myths a partner of Mother Winter who exchanges dominion with her over the course of the year. “The Hag of Beinn Nibheis” seems to invite interpretation as a tired Spring seeking, at the nadir of her own power in the depth of Winter, to make peace with her compatriot to ensure Spring returns. As written, there’s no assertion that the protagonist is more than a defiant old survivor headed up the mountain to bargain for a break from the weather, but the resolution suggests a reading as an origin story for the goddess of Spring. The mythical context, the bargained resolution, and the salutation offered the protagonist by the titular hag all make for a resolution that feels like a solid fit. Recommended.
KT Wagner‘s fantasy “The Moist Breath of a Cold Stranger” opens on a drive through a snowstorm on the Winter Solstice in a pickup whose heater has died. The protagonist’s backstory—adopted, intolerant of Southern warmth, tending to draw supernatural concern from North-dwelling locals—suggests supernatural origin and connection to Winter. Entertainingly her day job finances her real work as a self-produced online reporter debunking the supernatural. You can tell this will go well from the first page. Since the protagonist is a debunker and is recording her experience inside the truck to add to later videos, the climax is caught on a camera left behind at the scene, entertainingly promising a found-footage production of the whole thing later. Don’t believe in the frost giants, eh?
Nadia Born‘s “The Ice Cutter’s Daughter and Her Looking Glass” builds from youthful hope to an adulthood of disappointment, nostalgia, and loss. The almost-remembered feeling of the good things one’s lost, the loneliness of being different, the inability to return to the home of one’s youth—they concentrate to give Born’s work its bite. If you want to feel blue, here is your ticket.
C.D. Lewis lives and writes in Faerie.