"things left and found by the side of the road (bath flash fiction 3)" (Ad Hoc, 2018)

135 stories from the year's 2,755 entries to 3 competitions. The first 15 stories are the winning/commended pieces. It's not easy differentiating between those and the other pieces. "The Undertakers' Jolly" (p.5) seems a bit straightforward to me. Most of the pieces have something of interest - observations, ideas, turns of phrase. Rarely do I have a "so what?" reaction. Sometimes I think I can guess how a piece will end, but I'm more often than not wrong. I think I yearn for tidy closures. For example, in "Satin Nightwear For Women Irregular" (p.11) I think a man is tidying up after his wife's death. He starts by planting her 69 hoarded light-bulbs in her allotment. The earth shatters. He gives away her cookery books then sees her most used one on sale in the Oxfam window for 99p, and for 3 weeks avoids walking home that way. At the end I was expecting him to be walking home one night and see the distant glow of the bulbs.

"How can a woman sleep when the Master is in pain" (p.15) is interesting. p.17 has an "it's" typo, and the story seems bland. p.21 doesn't have enough, p.23 almost has too much.

Anxious that I'm missing things, I notice details that may be irrelevant. The first paragraph of "Erratic Ant" (p.53) ends with the memory of a now dead father telling the narrator "It's all about paying attention. And that's a difficult thing to do". In the final paragraph, sentence 1 has "as", "open" and "over". Sentence 2 has "over". Sentence 3 has "up[stairs]". Sentence 6 has "up". Sentence 7 has "open", "as" and "open" again. Is this an example of the narrator not paying attention? Maybe.

p.57 isn't enough. I like "The Pink" (p.61) and "Birds in the Thames" (p.62). "Life's too short" (p.76) and "Fat girls have fine nails" (p.78) baffle me. I like "Every love story is a ghost story" (p.87). I don't get "Virtuoso" (p.102). I like "The Weight" (p.106). "The Witness" (p.128)is the kind of piece that non-Flashers can immediately appreciate: the plot has emotion plus symbolism, and there are carefully crafted phrases - a man is described as a "creature that subsisted on petrol station gin and only ever slithered away from the glow of the television to breed."