Broken Men On the Outskirts of Town
“Trebuchet,” flash fiction by Avitus B. Carle
https://electricliterature.com/trebuchet-by-avitus-carle/?mc_cid=44a6c790d8
#flash
I know it’s mostly due to my growing up in Oklahoma, a Brown Dirt Boy, but I love this little chapbook from Myna Chang!
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/95121430-the-potential-of-radio-and-rain
https://newworldwriting.net/myna-chang-the-potential-of-radio-and-rain/
(I received and devoured her chapbook of the same name a couple of days ago. Love Love Love what she has done!)
The Potential of Radio and Rain
by Myna Chang
June 21, 1984
Deaf Smith County, Texas
I.
Moonshot Rodriguez used to mash up lightning bugs and smear them on his front teeth. His grandpa had named him, and told him the graveyard was haunted with the light of special lives. Moonshot believed him. He wanted to shine.
II.
On her 17th birthday, Gracie Lynn Johnson stole her stepdad’s truck: freedom in the form of a twelve-year-old stepside Chevy, red, stick shift, with an empty gun rack and an AM radio. Pulse thundering, she stepped on the gas.
III.
It was one of those close, rare summer nights when radio waves bounced from the WLS studio in Chicago across the continent and the mesquite and the grit, through layers of atmosphere miraculously windless and damp with possibility, alighting the Caprock like a secret love. Gracie Lynn adjusted the knob. John Cougar cut through the static, singing about Jack & Diane, bass setting the brittle speakers to a tremble.
Moonshot was parked outside the Church of Christ, in the gray Pontiac that once belonged to his grandpa. He crumpled a beer can, waiting.
Gracie Lynn rolled up in a swirl of caliche dust. “Shut up and get in,” she said.
Moonshot didn’t have to be told twice. He grabbed a couple of cold ones out of his cooler.
“Graveyard night,” he said.
They passed the hardware store and the diner, and then Gracie Lynn shifted into third, leaving town behind. Two minutes later, they topped Coyote Ridge and turned on the dirt track that led to the cemetery. The air tasted like sage and, maybe, rain. Lightning bug flickers lit the polished tombstones ahead, and it was magic, that quick sparkle of life under a starshine sky.
“This is almost good enough,” Gracie Lynn breathed.
A lightning bug fluttered through the open window, its glow fading. Moonshot cupped it in his hand and steered it back into the charged night and the AM waves.
~
Myna Chang writes flash and short stories. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in X‑R-A‑Y Lit Mag, Reflex Fiction, FlashFlood, Atlas & Alice, Writers Resist, and Daily Science Fiction. Anthologies featuring her stories include the Grace & Gravity collection Furious Gravity IX; and the forthcoming This is What America Looks Like anthology by Washington Writers’ Publishing House. Read more at MynaChang.com or on Twitter at @MynaChang.
https://newworldwriting.net/myna-chang-the-potential-of-radio-and-rain/
Big #sunspot AR3590 is as dangerous as it looks. Late yesterday (Feb. 21 @ 2307 UT), the active region produced a powerful X1.8-class #solarflare with a shortwave radio blackout over the western USA and Pacific Ocean. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the extreme #ultraviolet #flash:
The explosion did not produce a CME, at least not a bright one. NOAA analysts are still inspecting SOHO coronagraph data for signs of a storm cloud. If they find one, it will be reported here.
This could be the first of many flares from AR3590. The sunspot has an unstable 'beta-gamma-delta' magnetic field that harbors energy for multiple #X-class #explosions
Disbelief by Ashley Hutson
https://jellyfishreview.wordpress.com/2016/05/31/disbelief-by-ashley-hutson/
Brevity’s special Trans Experience issue features brilliant new writing by Lee Anderson, Nic Anstett, Kay Ulanday Barrett, KB Brookins, Rivka Clifton, Mac Crane, Atlas Desmond, Melissa Faliveno, Eric LeMay, Katherine Scott Nelson, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and Ocean Wei. Artwork by Kah Yangni. Issue 75 / January 2024 January 21, 2024
Gone in 60 Seconds: A #Green #Flash #Sunset
#Astronomy #Picture of the Day
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap231025.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3_88eyN44w
#INDIA is #submerged! #Dam #Destroyed, #Monster #Flash #Flood & #Landslide Washed #Millions of #Houses & #Cars
WIN TV
"The recent #catastrophic #natural #disasters in India has stunned the# world.
Extremely heavy monsoon rains triggered massive flash flooding and landslides, causing tremendous destruction across large parts of the country.
This monster natural disasters washed away millions of homes, businesses, and vehicles.
Sadly, hundreds of lives were also lost in the devastating flash floods and mudslides.
Scientists say climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of many types of natural disasters.
As the planet warms, weather patterns are disrupted, leading to more extreme rainfall capable of causing devastating natural disasters like this one.
India's vulnerability to these natural disasters is increased by its climate, mountainous terrain in many regions, and large population living in flood-prone areas.
This terrible tragedy underscores the urgent need to improve natural disasters preparedness and response.
Climate change is expected to keep worsening natural disasters around the world.
All nations must make resilience to these natural disasters a top priority.
Improved early warning systems, flood control infrastructure, and public education can help mitigate loss of life and destruction when the next inevitable natural disasters strikes.
The world grieves with India as the country works to recover and rebuild from this monster natural disasters.
We can only hope global leaders take the growing threat of climate change-fueled natural disasters seriously.
More must be done to protect people worldwide from the heartbreak and devastation of natural disasters like this one.
Our thoughts are with the victims and rescuers responding to this horrific natural disasters in India.
00:00 - natural disasters
00:28 - sikkim flash flood
02:50 - sikkim flood
04:55 - sikkim floods
07:00 - india flood
10:20 - india storm
13:55 - india news
16:33 - heavy rain
-------------------------"
After thirty-five years, The Gettysburg Review, Gettysburg College’s quarterly literary magazine, is ceasing publication. We encourage everyone to continue to read and SUBSCRIBE to literary magazines and journals, where you can find great pieces like this essay on time in life and in fiction (The Gettysburg Review), an essay on passing in America (New England Review), Héctor Tobar on California smog (ZYZZYVA), a piece on personal and environmental grief (Conjunctions), a story by Morgan Tatly (TriQuarterly), a conversation between Margaret Atwood and Rebecca Solnit (Orion), fiction from Christine Schutt (NOON), and this essay on whale dildos (The Common). SUPPORT LIT MAGS, SUPPORT LITERARY CULTURE!
https://twitter.com/GburgReview/status/1709557701737316407
#poems #poetry #writing #authors #stories #essays #flash #literature
Lydia Davis Interview
https://lithub.com/if-lydia-davis-wasnt-a-writer-shed-devote-herself-to-climate-activism
We live in a time, where you can tune in LIVE to New York City getting hit by a major flash flood from wherever on this planet you fscking want.
And there are still ppl out there don't "believing" in human made climate change.
Go fuck yourself... i hope you sit tight in some underground transport while such a event rolls over your head.
See:
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-us-canada-66963276 LIVE Major flash flooding hits New York City
https://youtu.be/I5XJNbtOgyw CBS New York - State of Emergency in NYC and beyond due to flooding; Live First Alert Weather team coverage.
From Brevity
Lunch with Norman Mailer, 1987
by MOLLY GILES • September 18, 2023
The Round Table meets at Trader Vic’s. Would I come as their guest? They need a woman. I don’t know, I say: I’m no Dorothy Parker. “No,” my host agrees kindly, “but you’ll do.” Nervous, I follow him up the stairs to the Captain’s Cabin. I meet the famous movie producer, the famous architect, the famous director, the famous columnist, and there he is, the famous writer, Norman Mailer—just like his photos, twinkly blue eyes, curly silver hair. We sit. They talk. Books. Money. Movies. Money. Boxing. Money. Jazz. No one speaks to me, so I don’t say a word. Carafes of wine appear and plates of food. Norman Mailer starts to move his silverware around with his tiny hands; I have never seen such tiny hands. Baby hands. He lifts his knife up, sets it down. Is he strong enough to cut his steak? Without thinking, I, oldest daughter, mother of three, reach over and begin to cut it for him. The table stills, stares. Well, I think, looking up, they said they needed a woman. Mailer beside me grunts and starts to eat.
The Fall Smokelong Quarterly is out
We Go Hiking A Lot
Story by Alida Dean (Read author interview) September 18, 2023
My boyfriend’s ex-wife abused him. The first time he told me about it, I was giving him a ride to Salamanca, New York, so he could buy a forty-year-old dump truck. He stared out the window at the half-frozen Allegheny River and described how she’d tried to tear off his testicles. How she poured hot soup on him while he was sleeping. How she chased him down the road with her black Volkswagen Golf. He tried to assure me that because she had recently been hired as an Assistant Professor and didn’t want to lose her new job, she was unlikely to violate the restraining order he’d filed against her the previous summer. Still, I should be careful. Her license plate starts with H-S-X, he said.
When she was trying to run him over, he sprinted into the forest, and ended up staying there a long time. He ate huckleberries, acorns, drank water from a stream. He balled his shirt up into a pillow and slept on a bed of moss. Mornings, he chewed the stems of sassafras leaves to freshen his breath.
I have a history of punishing the wrong people. When I dropped him off at the gas station where he’d arranged to meet the owner of the dump truck, I was thinking I might not see him again. I liked him, but he was damaged goods. He set his metal tool box down so he could hug me goodbye with both arms. I felt his heart through his wool sweater. Da-dum, da-dum, da-dum.
The dump truck’s forty-one now. We go hiking in the Adirondacks, the Catskills, the nature preserve behind our house. Wherever we go, he leaves the trail to forage. I’ve watched him eat fistfuls of ramps, fiddleheads, bitter crabapples, even chokecherries, which are supposed to be poisonous. I always offer to share my trail mix, but he only stares at the combination of peanuts, dried fruit, and chocolate like he doesn’t understand.
Full issue Here
#stories #flash #flashfiction #literature
