New Developments

Randall Brown

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We went off the beaten path, one spring dawn, ten years before, the purple crocuses opening their unhurried mouths and the fresh birch buds brightening into a suffused gold. Down the far-off lane, the garbage man shouted “Ahoy!,” his call bouncing off the gilded train track. A sound-proof wall half rose in the golden glimmer and consternation bustled within the thickets. Branches bent like ostriches, afraid to look. An owl asked, over and over, for our identities. The new train would connect the city to the woodlands, would wed a decades-old pipe dream to civic action. We need Superman, we said, to save the day. On and on we walked, ending back on the lane, the dim dawn emerging into a blaze, and now, the screech of the starving foxes ignites the rusty night and we pace up and down the hallways, chasing sleep.

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Randall Brown is the author of the award-winning collection Mad to Live, his essay on (very) short fiction appears in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, and he appears in Best Small Fictions 2015, 2017, & 2019 and The Norton Anthologies Flash Fiction: America and New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction & Hint Fiction; also, his essays appeared in Grey House’s Critical Insights: American Short Story and Critical Insights: Flash Fiction. He founded and directs FlashFiction.net and has been published and anthologized widely, both online and in print. Recent books include the flash fiction collection This Is How He Learned to Love (Sonders Press 2019), the prose poetry collection I Might Never Learn (Finishing Line Press 2018) and the novella How Long is Forever (Running Wild Press 2018). He served as the Director for the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Rosemont College, as a reader, editor, and Lead Editor at Smokelong Quarterly, and as a judge for numerous flash fiction awards, including Rose Metal Press’ annual chapbook contest. He is also the founder and managing editor of Matter Press and its Journal of Compressed Creative Arts. He received his MFA in Fiction from Vermont College.

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