Charles Payseur Reviews Short Fiction: Small Wonders, Flash Fiction Online, and Cast of Wonders

Small Wonders 5/24
Flash Fiction Online 5/24
Cast of Wonders 5/29/24

I’ll start off with May’s Small Wonders, a pub­lication dedicated to flash fiction and poetry, which includes Angel Leal’s powerful poem ‘‘Music of the Seraphim’’. A child meets an angel and is filled with a desire for something new – new experiences, a new body, a new place to be – and find their prayers and yearning goes unanswered. While in some ways that feels like a miracle denied, the child finds as they live and as they grow and as they become more of who they are, that while some miracles don’t happen, that doesn’t erase the wondrous or miraculous. Music, love, hope, and possibility all stir in them something that is far from mundane, and that makes life almost magical, and certainly full of wonder. It’s a beautiful read. Albert Chu also appears in the issue with the story ‘‘Eloïse’’, in which a trans woman is forced to hide her truths so that she can defend her house as its primary duelist, which involves using magic to heighten her perceived masculinity. That is, until a mishap at a party gives her the chance to stand up and show the world who she really is. Chu builds a convincing world that left me wanting more, and I especially liked the magi­cal girl-esque transformations that resolve a repressive situation into something wonderful instead.

May’s Flash Fiction Online includes the de­cidedly unsettling horror of Brandon Case’s ‘‘Darkness, Blanket of My Eyes’’, which focuses on a man in a gas station on a trip where every­thing has gone Very Wrong. And faced with a horrifying invasion, the narrator’s partner, Jerry, blindfolded them and left to find help, leaving the narrator literally in the dark about what’s going on around them. And whatever fresh horror it could be, in the dark they can pretend it’s something harmless and innocent. Case does a great job of using the lack of sight to bolster the horror of the moment, as readers are faced with the narrator’s failing attempts to render their situation as anything but hopeless, even as the darkness presses ever closer and more menacingly around them. Oof.

Cast of Wonders closed out May with stories short and long, including Sam Markham’s flash ‘‘When you’re older’’. The story finds a narra­tor who feels throughout their life that they are pulled toward strange things, swords and forests that seem almost familiar, but more practical concerns win out, and their life is mostly filled avoiding the call toward something else they can still hear. At least, until they are a bit older and decide that there’s no more putting off what feels right. It’s a situation that rings true regardless of the reader’s age, and Markham shows the magic and potential still waiting out there, never missed, never wasted but still real and vital regardless of what age a person might embrace it. It makes for a lovely read!

This review and more like it in the August 2024 issue of Locus.

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