Feedback | Short Story

Dear Ronald,

I have had the opportunity to read your submission – an opportunity I wish I had not availed myself of.

As you will no doubt be aware, flash fiction is a flexible format which authors have used in a near-limitless number of ways to tell stories. I suppose your piece meets this criteria, although it was flash fiction to me in the sense that it left the imprint of your hackneyed spelling and of a grammatical smorgasbord of dunderheadedness imprinted on the insides of my eyelids.

As for structure? I can only assume that something happened to your submission between your posting it and the document arriving in my hands. Some intra-dimensional event perhaps? Maybe it was torn apart by rabid, foam-flecked Alsatians before being hurriedly pasted back together by a well-meaning postal worker with an acute visual impairment.

The most basic function of a piece of flash fiction is that it must demonstrate or prompt a narrative curve; put more simply, you should tell me a story!! In a limited sense you did achieve this; you told me that you can’t write for toffee.

We pride ourselves on giving useful feedback at Ether Magazine – a task I struggled with on this occasion. Nevertheless, I have divined a way forward for your creative endeavours…

The keeping of exotic animals in the UK is subject to strict laws. If it weren’t, I’d advise you to make all reasonable efforts to purchase a chimp, thrust a piece of blackboard chalk in its wrinkled fingers, and tell it to let rip on whatever piece of degraded concrete takes its fancy. Whatever it produced would undoubtedly be an improvement on this desiccated, congealed, compost maker-bound word-salad of a story.

Please, please do not darken our letterbox again. Ever.

Yours sincerely,

The Editor.

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Recent short stories include ‘Shift‘ and ‘The End of the Day‘.

Matthew Richardson is a writer of short stories. His work has featured in Gold Dust magazine, Literally Stories, Close to the Bone, McStorytellers, Penny Shorts, Soft Cartel, Whatever Keeps the Lights On, Flashback Fiction, Cafelit, Best MicroFiction 2021, Writer’s Egg, Idle Ink, The Wild Word, Down in the Dirt, and Shooter magazine. He has a Professional Doctorate in Education. Matthew blogs at www.matthewjrichardson.com.