Every now and then I gotta flash someone . . .

Hey lady, wanna see my story?

I guess a little post holiday indolence is to be expected. You get through the seasonal nog orgy, you finally get the damn lights down, you got taxes to think about, you’re living inside a freakin’ sno-globe half the time, and not a happy Alpine village scene sno-globe, but instead some nightmarish quagmire of car tires spinning in spit-gray slush, vertebrae creaking under sodden shovel loads, bumper-to-bumper commutes with the wipers fighting the constant shit spray until you finally run out of washer fluid and THEN the fucking sun comes out, just in time to blind you by refracting all through the saltsmear that’s coating your windshield in a kind of death brine.

But hey, if that don’t make you wanna write about killing people, what will?

So whaddya say, folks? Is it flash fiction time again? Yes, says I, so I’m throwing down the gauntlet.

And would you look at that, almost Ash Wednesday. In this lovely Puritanical Republic of ours, the ancestral home of Jimmy Swaggert, the Bakers and buggered altar boys (well, OK, maybe we can’t take credit for inventing that last one, though they damn near perfected it out Boston way, I’m told, and, damn it, televangelism? We OWN that) it seems your local house of worship is the perfect setting for a little malfeasance.

You with me? 1000 words max, set wherever good folk hit their knees. Let’s say March 1. If you’re game, lemme know and I’ll add your name to the dishonor roll.