Defenestrationism FLASH SUITE Contest (no fee)
Deadline: November 1, 2018
Only on Defenestrationism.net
Combine three or more Flash works into something greater. Recurring characters, extended motifs, harmonious subject matters—all are such correlations, but we encourage innovation and new ideas. Go crazy with it, kids, flash your faces off.
- Winner: $75
- Runner-up: $60
No fee to enter. See the full guidelines.
Please enjoy this excerpt from our most recent Grand Prize Winner:
The Minotaur
by Salvatore DifalcoTHE BUS
I could smell exhaust fumes. I wasn't fully awake. My estranged wife Carolina had knitted the burgundy mohair sweater I was wearing, before she started hating me, but I had no memory of putting it on. I rubbed my face. A glimpse of my hands made me start. My fingers looked swollen and inflamed, fingernails discoloured. I performed violent jazz hands, hoping to restore circulation. But this was painful.
People on the bus looked like animals bearing reproachful burdens. A commensurate odour prevailed. Life in the city can be hard. Yet I felt little empathy for them, my fellow beasts. We had failed. We had all failed. What was left for us to do but despair, moving from foot to foot, or hoof to hoof, like doomed livestock?
The bus driver leaned to his open side window and blew snot from his nose in a silvery mucous-jet. He turned and caught my eye. Blue-tinged steel-wool sideburns coiled from under his ill-fitting navy driver's cap. The black holes of his nostrils yawned, small black eyes peeping out above them, like their satellites.
A man beside me, who bore a resemblance to a fine English horse, lifted and lowered his chin, fluttering his lips. I held the stanchion, white-knuckled; an unpleasant disequilibrium threatened to topple me whenever the bus swerved or jerked to a sudden stop.
"You don't look well," said a woman wearing red plastic, gripping the same stanchion, in a falsetto rivaling that of Johnny, Señor Wences's talking hand. Her arm seemed unattached to her small, round body. I tried not to think about it too much.
"I slept poorly," I said.
A whiff of salami breath made me turn my head and face the window. Clouds darkened the world without. Perhaps a great storm was moving in, a monsoon, to cleanse the city.
"I know who you are," said the woman in my ear.
