“I’m a witch,” she said, and you thought How ridiculous! Though, even then, you felt something like fright. She was crazy, but she was also magnificent. Your mentor at a school. Perhaps the best you would get. Brawls fizzled out as she glanced down corridors. Silence fell as she swept into rooms. You locked your door. She left hers open. But her desk was perfect. No one touched it. No one dared. The dysregulated purred as she charmed growth from them. Hackney’s wildest lapped sententiae from her hand. Cerise hair and blue morpho eyelids. Crooked yellow teeth. A monster. A disgrace. But a progenitor. A maker. A mistress. With an Axl Rose boyfriend who was less than half her age. Such incandescence. Such prominence. Such intransigence. Such vulnerability. Such womanly strength. “I’m a witch,” she said. And was it really so ridiculous? Were you not chained by her refusal to comply? Does she not haunt you (years after she has vanished)? Are you not still whipped by the lightning of her eyes?

Dave Alcock

has been interested in flash fiction ever since 2016 when he received Flash Fiction Forward (ed. James Thomas and Robert Shapard) as a surprise gift. He read the first page and was hooked and he has been ever since. His work has been published by Every Day Fiction, Flash Frontier, and MacQueen’s Quinterly, as well as some other excellent lit-zines, and can also be found in two anthologies published by Ad Hoc Fiction. He works as an editor and lives with his wife and two children in Devon, England.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ A Defence of Imitation, photograph and essay by Dave Alcock, with artworks by Catherine Alcock and Petrus Christus, in The Ekphrastic Review (22 February 2023)

⚡ Congeners, microfiction by Dave Alcock in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 13, May 2022); nominated by MacQ for the Best Microfiction 2023 anthology

⚡ Our Bread, microfiction by Alcock reprinted at Flash Fiction Festival online (28 November 2019)