Bartleby Snopes/Matthew Falk/Sarah Black/Flash Fiction Review

Nominating Editor: Nate Tower

Bartleby Snopes is a magazine that publishes new works of fiction once per week. Each month we publish between 5 and 15 stories. At the end of the month the readers of the site vote for the story of the month. Every six months we collect our favorite stories in a magazine available for free as a .pdf download on the website. On January 5th we released our first issue of the semi-annual magazine format.

The first thing I look for is a story I haven't read or a character I have never met. Matthew Falk's story gave me both of those things. It seems that each month I receive several versions of the same old story with the same characters, only the stories have different titles and different authors. If the story doesn't feel new, or at least told in a fresh way, then it doesn't make it out of the slush pile. A few other things that virtually guarantee rejection:

1. Third person present tense. I am not sure when this movement began, but I don't understand it, and it just doesn't work 95% of the time.

2. Stories about struggling male-female relationships. This theme has been explored in virtually every way.

3. Unrealistic or boring dialogue.

4. Stories that try too hard to deliver a message. Tell the story and let the reader get the message.

I read every word of every story that is submitted. Sometimes a writer will surprise me, and I like that. I don't like stories that try to surprise me. It needs to happen naturally.

Nominated Flash Fiction: "Auspex Usurped" - Matthew Falk

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Reviewed: by Sarah Black

Matthew Falk has written a gorgeous tale of a fallen god, a myth of such delicate and charming language it begs to be read aloud. The title, "Auspex Usurped," refers to the Roman name for an augur, or diviner, one who watches the birds for omens, and in the course of this story, the diviner is accidentally dethroned from his park bench.

What does a god need to be a god? He needs to believe in his godliness, and he needs worshipers. The old man had worshipers, a trail of unhappy souls offering five dollar bills in exchange for his magic words. But something happens, a stranger wanders in, and his belief in his own power, and place, collapses like a pyramid of tumbling acrobats. He trudges home in wet boots, defeated without battle.

Contrast the god with the human in the story, an old woman who spills her apples in the elevator, chases after them like a fool, but remains cheerful, remains human. When a god is made a fool, he feels only shame. A human has no pedestal to fall from.

The language makes "Auspex Usurped" a particular delight for me. The rollicking round words of the title sound like your mouth feels, licking an ice cream cone on a hot July afternoon; and then comes the list of the old man’s ailments, from arthritis to zoomorphism. Like a juggler tossing more and more balls into the air, Mr. Falk gives us twenty-five ailments in ABC order. I won’t tell you which letter is missing.

My son read this list out loud over his bacon pancake at Moon’s Diner this morning, and he was giggling by halitosis. I think you will be, too. Or like me, you’ll read this and be happy to be human, chasing after your spilled apples, eyes on the ground, and not the clouds.

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Reviewer's Bio:

Sarah Black is a flash fiction writer living in Idaho. Her stories can be found in Flashquake, Everyday Fiction, Word Riot, Slow Trains, and several other online literary magazines. She has recently started Bannock Street Books, a micropress publishing illustrated flash fiction anthologies.

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Thanks for visiting Five Star Literary Stories and reading about this flash fiction.

Juked/Kyle Hemmings/Shellie Zacharia/Short Story Review

Nominating Editor: J. W. Wang

Juked began in early 1999 as a small collective of friends publishing columns and op/ed pieces. Like most projects that have had some time to grow, where and who and what we are now is almost nothing like where and who and what we were ten years ago. Since around 2004, 2005, we’ve been publishing short fiction and poetry, along with the occasional non-fiction piece, or the occasional script/screenplay. Our stories have been anthologized in collections such as W. W. Norton’s Sudden Fiction series and Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web. We publish online continuously, and put together one print issue a year. I don’t know that we fit into any sort of convenient category or label—we’ve published some pretty off-the-cuff stuff, plenty of serious stuff, stories and poems that people would consider “experimental” as well as “traditional.” Every good story has a balanced blend of the expected and the unexpected, the familiar and the unfamiliar, and we particularly love stories that surprise us while giving us something we already know.

Kyle Hemmings’ “Is There Life on Mars?” for instance, tackles familiar themes: a failed marriage, death of a loved one, a disintegrating life in which dreams crumbled into harsh realities. Yet what Kyle manages to do is provide us with arresting images and all these emotionally hot moments that feel like they could only belong to Marjorie, and not something common to everyone else. Nothing in this story felt forced, which was very difficult to do, given the uniqueness of sundogs, the delicate and often artificially-weighted subject of dementia, a delicate soul mistreated by the world. On top of this, Kyle manages to deliver a whole life, an epic feel to Marjorie, through a scant two thousand words. In doing so, Kyle gave us a story that was something entirely new, while still operating in a familiar world.

Nominated Short Story: "Is There Life on Mars?" - Kyle Hemmings

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Reviewed: by Shellie Zacharia

A sense of other-worldliness fills Kyle Hemmings’ thoughtful and lyrical short story, “Is There Life on Mars?” The story is divided into four strong vignettes that follow a character, Marjorie, from childhood through old age. In each section, we have an “alien” tie-in – though the story itself is not really about extraterrestrials. For me, it’s a story about identity and mystery and the human feeling of being elsewhere or alone in the presence of others.

In the opening section, Marjorie is a young girl sitting on her father’s shoulders surveying their land. Marjorie asks her father if they are Martians. She wonders this because her mother had just gotten a book that had strange words: UFO’s, crop circles, black holes. Her mother had told Marjorie that in Texas, people saw strange sightings or lights. Where’s Texas? Marjorie asks her father. “Someplace where you could get lost and they’d never find you,” he says. He also tells Marjorie that Mars is someplace cold – “A place where you’d float forever and forget your name.”

In the next section, which jumps years, Marjorie is with her boyfriend. They have just had sex. He asks her how it felt. “Like riding a comet. Like giving birth to a star,” she says. Something, a light, distracts Marjorie and she says it’s a space ship – “she wanted to believe in something amazing.”

In the third section of the story, Marjorie is an adult – a mother and a wife. We learn that Marjorie now lives in Dallas, Texas. We find out Marjorie’s son has distanced himself from her. Her husband has also, and Marjorie suspects affairs. When Marjorie learns that her son has been killed in a car accident, she doesn’t tell her husband right away. When she finally does, she says that some higher power “absconded” with their son. Marjorie tells her husband that if there was a god, he lived in a cold climate and very far away. “He was a lonely god, an alien, and needed humans for warmth.”

In the final section of the story, Marjorie is an old woman in a nursing home. When Marjorie is asked if she knows where she is, she says she is on Mars. The nurse, “the ghost,” answers that Marjorie is in Dallas. Marjorie wonders how she got there. “By spaceship?” she asks. When the nurse shows Marjorie a picture and asks if she recognizes the girl, Marjorie says that indeed it is her, but in someone else’s shoes. The story ends with Marjorie thinking about the stillness of the world . . . “the one she was on.”

What makes this a good story is the layering of images. Hemmings weaves references to aliens and sundogs and dust devils and black holes. Readers will notice the references to warmth and coldness that play throughout the sections. And then there are the recurrences of disconnects, isolation, and lost worlds. Each section of this story holds strong on its own and as a whole it’s a sad and beautifully-told tale.

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Reviewer's Bio:

Shellie Zacharia teaches in Florida. Her stories have appeared in Hobart, Opium, Keyhole, The Pinch, Washington Square, Georgetown Review, Canteen, Juked, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her story collection, Now Playing, is forthcoming from Keyhole Press. Find links to her work at her blog.

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Thanks for visiting Five Star Literary Stories and reading about this short story.