Flash Fiction Online #154, July 2026
“Kingdom of Steve” by Nick Badot (Literary, not reviewed)
“A Perfect Light” by Laura Duerr
“Fragments Recovered from the Wreck of the Seaglass” by E.M. Linden
“Seastrand Beyond” by Anna Clark
“End of the World” by Nick Ekkizogloy (Literary, not reviewed)
Reviewed by Wendy Vidlak
The July issue of Flash Fiction Online opens with off-planet horror. Pipe fitters in an alien ocean play the main characters in this horror short story entitled “A Perfect Light” by Laura Duerr. The scene is set early with alien barnacles that eat through pipes in hours and teams of workers tasked with cleaning them. The workers identified through their headlamps inconsistent light bulbs, important for the newcomer to realize because comms go out often. As the story progresses, the new pipefitter Reyna is left on her own to face a crazy underwater environment and a monster or two. The headlamps play a pivotal role in the horror portion of this story, making for a fun, somewhat ambiguous ending, giving enough of an image of what Reyna is facing for the imagination of the reader to take the horror the rest of the way.
The next piece of flash fiction is told in the form of an epistolary story. Journal entries, lab reports, and letters make up the contents of “Fragments Recovered From The Wreck of the Seaglass” by E.M. Linden. The format of the story augments the mystery well, with illegible blanks placed in key parts, making this story one of discovery both for the main character, but also the reader. Puzzling out what happened to the Lake Eyrie expedition that crashed on a voyage to a mysterious forest on a distant shore where the locals fear visiting. Told from a botanist’s standpoint, we learn of the crew and what befalls them when they find the mysterious trees bearing fruit. The ending contextual notes give it a truly scary resolution.
What if you could receive texts from beyond? “Seastrand Beyond” by Anna Clark explores family dynamics and faith through a comforting fantasy piece. A caretaker of the beach named Agnes watches for the sayings of the deceased that appear occasionally upon the sand. She takes the job hoping to hear from her own parents. The piece displays a lot of emotion through the processing of short sayings written in seaweed on the beach and the caretakers’ reactions to them. It is a character-driven piece that makes the reader think long and hard.