The Pittsburgh Flash Fiction Gazette is always on the look out for new writing talent.
Hello, my brother and sister bloggers and writers. The Gazette prides itself on being a resource and a showcase for writers. Finding a place for your fiction can sometimes be more difficult than writing the story. It doesn’t have to be that way. I want to publish you in this magazine, the most dynamic flash fiction magazine on the Internet.
Just read and follow the submissions guidelines. The submissions tab is at the top of the page. You have here at The Gazette, an editor and a publisher who is on your side.
Now for our feature presentation.
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Highway Man
He worked for the Highway Department calculating the amounts of rolled asphalt needed for road construction and repairs. He spent years consumed by the brownish-black liquid as it took shape and hardened into the lanes of black-gray roads demarcated by white lines. In his dreams, the lanes and white lines were endless. He felt isolated and lost in this gray and white world, a deep nausea gripping him when he awoke. His wife told him it would be the same if he were a pilot, only it would be blue and white that sickened him and made him fearful. What made him so afraid? she asked him, touching his forehead for signs of a fever. The sky, he thought, and the road. White clouds, white lanes—going nowhere and everywhere at once.
That day, he drove his government car to a new worksite. The sun, sharp and hot, glinted off the giant yellow road graders as the steam waves rose from the hardening asphalt. The sun was dazzlingly white in intensity and made him think of clouds and skies and the roads above and below. He remembered hearing in a sermon that the streets of heaven were paved with gold as transparent as glass. He tried to take that in—how gold was transparent and why God would bother with laying out and paving streets. Why would even God want streets? And why paved ones? And if they were paving streets in heaven, what was going on in hell?
Nothing came clear in his mind as the sun’s heat seared into him. Gold, glass, God, the smell of tar sizzling in the heat and taking form as a highway to be worn down by the relentless rolling of car tires and truck tires—headed where? This road or that in the nowhere of endless, endless searching? Perhaps to a heaven where the gold light was welcoming, not blinding, and every man, maybe even he, might find the solace of a destination.
The End
Bio: Christina Murphy lives and writes in a 100 year-old Arts and Crafts style house along the Ohio River. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in a number of journals including, most recently, ABJECTIVE, A cappella Zoo, Fiction Collective, LITnIMAGE, Splash of Red, and Corium Magazine. Her work has received two Editor’s Choice Awards and Special Mention for a Pushcart Prize.
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