Flash from Smokelong, various National Flash Day anthologies, Bath Flash Fiction, Cease Cows, Cheap Pop, etc. A good read. I'm especially impressed that they've all been written since 2019.
Some are lists (p.9, p.16) or possible versions - p.12, p.16. "Osmosis" is one long sentence. There's sometimes poetic repetition, sometimes aspects of fairy tale. Some have no dialogue, others are nearly all dialogue. The longer pieces often have the undercurrents of a short story without all the perfunctory stage scenery to reinforce realism.
The pieces can be dense. The title piece is less than 3 pages. I presume "Birds" in its title is an allusion to girls. Some youths (girls only?) are at a camp learning survival skills. Hope is good at the activities but refuses to shoot pigeons with home-made arrows. The male leader tells them to "aim for the breast". At first they're distracted by the iridescent plumage round the necks, and the cooing. The leader says "Think its thoughts - if it has any. Predict its responses." "Depending on the age of the bird, the leader said, it would be skewered, roasted, or stewed". But Hope didn't eat what her friends killed. She said "we all crawled out of the sea together ... then we took to the trees and air". The leader said "If you want to be sure you've got tender meat, go for the ones with skinny legs". The team force Hope to shoot. She misses by a foot. The final sentence is "When the lucky bird rose up in flight, we weren't far behind."
"Lions in the Amazon" is less than 3 pages too. It begins with "Telling fortunates usually takes fifteen minutes, longer if a ghost turns up, and all night if there's more than one. Mama reminds me and Charlie to stay in our room" because then the ghosts won't find them. They look through an atlas, fantacising about Marrakech, Rome, etc while they hear their mother laughing. There's "steady squeaking", moans. At school, boys have asked the narrator if she reads fortunes like her mother does. The two children try to incorporate the overheard sounds into their fantasies. They hear pounding and think of rowing down the Amazon. Charlie says they're not scared of the lions. She knows there aren't lions, but the silence after the pounding is menacing. Charlie asks if there are cannibals. She imagines seeing humans "Licking the remains off a femur and drinking water from a foam white skull" - sexual imagery.
A lot happens on the first page of "Heart-Tongue Connection" - "My daughter's imaginary friend has an invisible seeing-eye dog". Lottie, the daughter, is 10. Her father moved out 6 months before. His new family has a dog. A "seeing-eye" dog can see inside of people. The dog has a special diet - eggs and jam, etc. In this piece (and a few of the other stories) there are too many quirky details for my liking, though I'd rather stories failed by being too ambitious rather than not having enough.
p.21 and p.22 are disappointing. And after p.50 there are quite a few more disappointments. "Some things never change" is ok, but I have trouble with the hippos and tigers. I like the final piece.
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