Fiction
These are works of flash fiction written in the manner most natural to Jessica.
They are unusually compressed because she does not naturally construct stories as continuous lived scenes. Time is thin. Description is sparse. Atmosphere appears only when it matters. Emotional states are more often inferred from what changes than carried forward through an extended emotional arc.
Characters tend to arrive already in motion. Settings are sufficient rather than immersive. Years may disappear between sentences. A life can collapse into a handful of facts.
What matters to Jessica is not so much what happened next as what changed.
A person becomes something else. A rule fails. A relationship reverses. An assumption becomes impossible. One configuration gives way to another.
That produces fiction that can resemble a fable, parable, thought experiment, joke, or proof as much as a conventional short story.
The missing description is not shorthand for a description she imagined.
The missing scene is not happening somewhere offstage.
Quite often, there is no scene at all.
There is the state before.
There is what happens.
And there is the state after.
These stories are written that way because that is the way stories occur to Jessica.
57 ROCKET 88
~2 minute read · Fiction · Identity · Gender · Transformation
“Overnight, I went from ‘Hey, Asshole!’ to ‘Hello, Babe.’”
A beautiful mask changes considerably more than a face. The world responds differently, the wearer responds to the world differently, and somewhere amid gang warfare, twin pistols, a Raven mask, and a speeding Oldsmobile, two men discover that love has terrible timing.
CASH FOR MEMORIES
~4 minute read · Fiction · SDAM · Memory · Identity
What would your childhood memories be worth if everyone discovered you never had them?
Harmony enters the Memory Exchange hoping to sell the few precious memories she believes she possesses. Instead, she discovers that what she has been calling memories are semantic reconstructions—and that the extraterrestrials buying human childhoods already have exactly what she has.
CODE 6
~4 minute read · Fiction · Childhood · School · Difference
“You contradicted yourself.”
Felix is eight, small, pretty, relentlessly curious, and cursed with the inability to leave contradictions alone. His teacher has finally had enough. Two words—Code 6—send him toward the principal and into a system determined to teach him the one lesson he seems constitutionally incapable of learning: shut up.
DEMON SACRIFICE
~3 minute read · Fiction · Trauma · Servitude · Dark Comedy
“Why am I always the one? Why not her? The pretty girl?”
Dr. Ravencroft has brought a young woman to sacrifice to a demon. Unfortunately, the demon wants Dr. Femoral instead—the harmless, accommodating little man who has spent a lifetime being handed from monster to monster and has become distressingly good at being sacrificed.
ENDURANCE
~4 minute read · Fiction · Survival · Life · Persistence
Survival was impossible. She survived anyway.
After a plane crashes in the mountains, forty-seven people begin the descent toward civilization. Resolution fails. Hope fails. Even the desire to live eventually fails. What remains is something older and considerably stupider: life refusing to accept an ending.
EXCHANGES
~2 minute read · Fiction · Gender · Recognition · Love
“Of course. He said he only likes girls.”
A boy comes to the door looking for Danny. Danny is away in New Zealand on an exchange. The girl who answers knows exactly what is supposed to happen next. The boy does not. A few sentences later, an entire possible future has quietly collapsed.
HEAVENLY COURT
~6 minute read · Fiction · God · Free Will · Justice
“I didn’t give her a free will.”
Jessica dies and discovers that Heaven has lawyers. Her defense is straightforward: circumstance and childhood trauma left her functioning more like a machine than a freely choosing human being. God agrees completely. That turns out to be considerably worse than losing the case.
IMMORTAL BELOVED
~7 minute read · Fiction · Identity · Desire · Captivity
“I’m not an idiot. I took Psych 101. I know about Stockholm syndrome.”
A surgeon loses his beloved Estella, finds someone sufficiently close to replace her, and spends years making the resemblance exact. His captive insists this is not Stockholm syndrome. To explain why, she must first explain Ben—a man who could reflect everybody else’s desires but seemed to possess none of his own.
JESSICA IS A TERRIBLE MOTHER
~5 minute read · Fiction · SDAM · Motherhood · Identity
“Jessica is a terrible mother. Just ask her.”
A dynasty of Jessicas discovers a practical solution to mortality: clone the next one, raise her quickly, and transfer the important facts before dying. Memory is unnecessary. Identity can simply be decanted from mother to daughter. The research, after all, remains unfinished.
PATIENCE
~4 minute read · Fiction · Childhood · Hope · Betrayal
“But I’m eight years old now. I don’t have much time left.”
An orphan named Patience wants only a family. The sisters assure her that goodness, prayer, and patience will eventually be rewarded. They are right. Her prayer is answered on the threshold of her eighteenth birthday—precisely when the answer can no longer give her what she actually asked for.
PRINCE ALBERT IN A CAN
~7 minute read · Fiction · Science Fiction · Isolation · Intelligence
“I like absolute quiet and tiny spaces. And I never ever get lonely or bored.”
Interstellar travel requires an impossibly light spacecraft. An impossibly light spacecraft requires a tiny crew. Enter Albert: brilliant, solitary, difficult, beige-food-loving, and almost perfectly adapted to a mission that would drive a more ordinary human being mad. His first mate is an AI called P. Pan. Naturally, nothing could go wrong.
R. M. RENFIELD
~7 minute read · Fiction · Gothic · Servitude · Identity
“Autobiographical questions were what he dreaded most.”
Dracula has spent years transforming Renfield into the perfect servant: beautiful, obedient, anticipatory, and progressively emptied of everything that once belonged to Renfield alone. The Count genuinely loves his creation. That may be the most horrifying part.
SIMPLE PROBLEM
~6 minute read · Fiction · SDAM · Trauma · Understanding
“But not your dog. Your dog is dead.”
Billy has watched enough television to know how life works: find the seminal childhood trauma, understand it, and everything gets better. Unfortunately, when he searches his past he comes up with squat. What follows is an increasingly peculiar attempt by a peculiar man to explain why explaining himself has always been the problem.