Larry Benjamin's Blog: Larry Benjamin's blog - This Writer's Life - Posts Tagged "flash-fiction"

This week, I join Wednesday Briefs―a blog hop where authors post 500-1000 words of free flash fiction every week.

I posted my very first flash fiction, a short-short titled "Sahel." Check it out and leave a comment telling me what you think.

Read "Sahel" now.

In this week's, flash fiction, a gay son confronts his father for the last time.

St John and his father were not close though they’d only had one argument in their life as father and son. When St John confessed he was gay, his father had called him immoral.

“Heterosexuality,” St John roared, “Is not a universal truth!”

“You,” his father had countered angrily, “are an abomination! You and your kind, are damned.”

“Damned? Damned, did you say? Hah! We soar, unchained by your righteous morality, your church-sanctioned unions. Our possibilities are unlimited―unlike yours which are limited by the circumference of a vagina!”

The argument had occurred when St John was fifteen. His mother China had intervened and calmed them both down. But the chasm that opened between them that day was to remain open, uncrossable.

After that, when he and his father did speak, they did so cautiously; their language constricted, their wording taut. They asked each other only closed questions, tightly phrased, which allowed no wrong answers and led to no conversations.

Now looking at his father, laying in his coffin, St John thought he didn’t look so much at peace as robbed of malevolence.
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