I fell into old habbits with this months short story recommendations. So this one is going to be an all-out flash fiction list. Though, I hope you’ll find something you like even if you’re normally reading longer stories
Waiting in the Weeds by Andrew Kaye (Daily Science Fiction): An epic tale (in flash fiction format) about a gardner trying to defend the royal garden from monstreous weeds invading the palace. It doesn’t get much more original than that. The writing was passable, and I would’ve loved to see the magic system given more detail than the flash length permits, but the basic premise and the plot alone made this an excellent story.
James Brown is Alive and Doing Laundry in South Lake Tahoe by Stefanie Freele (Flash Fiction Online): The very brief scenes and constantly changing POV gave this a quite different narrative style than of most other flash fiction stories. In my experience, this ruins the story 9 out of 10 times, but here it worked exceptionally well and added a layer of originality to the piece. There was less of a traditional plot and character arc as well, but the author made the most of the small character-vs-character conflicts there were and let that drive the story.
Carpools and Coworkers by Kurt Joseph Pankau (DSF): It’s been a while since I’ve read a good comedic short story, but this one did it for me. It’s about a group of magical beings playing a table-top RPG simulating ordinary boring office life. If that’s not a funny setup, I don’t know what is. And the jokes are well executed throughout. This is the kind of story that made me read DSF in the first place. I wish they would keep publishing more of them.
Chameleon by Kate Heartfield (DSF): A nice little piece that takes the, to most of us, familiar feeling of wanting to blend in and not be noticed to extremes and turning it into magical element. The premise is original, and the emotions get across nicely, making it less important that the plot is a little predictable.
Gesamtkunstwerk by Stephen S. Power (DSF): Like Chameleon, this was a story with a relatively linear plot but an interesting speculative idea. Here, the alien invanders SF trope is twisted into something new, as the focus is on how the invanders view art and their sense for aesthetics. It’s a great example of how an overused idea can be tweaked and turned until it becomes something entirely new.
Toby Backman 