Another journal

Storytelling Collective does a yearly challenge for flash fic, with prompts and a nice community format. Every year I complete a run I pick my ten favourites and collect them into what is basically a zine. This is my fifth year doing it!! Check out the zine for 2026’s flash fiction here, and then enjoy a favourite from 2025’s collection.

A fun bonus for this flash, it’s set in the same world (with the same character) as the Growlers minicomic.

Andy pedalled slowly, the cart bumping along the broken asphalt behind her. The trike had an electric assist but, mindful of the season and its weak sunlight, she didn’t like using it more than she had to. She was sweating lightly, even in the autumn chill, partly because of her suit and partly because Andy sweat easily, to her annoyance.

Ahead, she saw a stumbling figure. She squinted through the eyes and shield of the suit, reaching down to slip her pusher from its cradle, keeping her pedalling even. As Andy drew closer, she could see it was one of the old ones, barely holding together despite whatever messed-up shit was keeping it ambulatory. Carefully, using her pusher, she softly batted at the thing so it would keep its distance. The wide plastic end of the modified oar poked the creature in its midsection and Andy heard something crack.

Startled, she pulled back, glancing at the paddle. It was intact, but the thing’s midsection was not. Turning her head as she passed it, Andy expected to see some sort of glistening wetness, rotted remains of intestine, but the creature’s insides looked like they’d been turned to dust. The sound Andy made was muffled by her suit.

She re-holstered the pusher and pedalled on.

The exchange at the town went like it always did. Andy dropped the supplies into a yellow-painted square, carefully laying out the boxes so nothing was touching each other. Stepping back behind the red line that bordered the square, she punched a button and turned away while the boxes were flashed with UVC before settling into the less powerful glow that would nuke them for the next hour. That done, she walked to a yellow barrel sloshing with sanitiser and used a rope to pull up her payment, sealed in a bag. Examining it through the clear plastic as she carried it, dripping, back to the trike, Andy felt it was a fair trade.

As she manoeuvred the trike and cart around in the narrow open space in front of the gates, she waved up to the guard in the tower. It looked like Tasha, from the silhouette, which made Andy all the more aware of the picture she painted in her bulky suit, coaxing the fat bike and unwieldy cart into the world’s most inelegant u-turn.

On her way back home, Andy didn’t see any more of the things, which she was grateful for. The first few months of it there had been a lot of zombie apocalypse fantasies being played out with guns, which had swelled the initial population to an unavoidable volume. A gun was a great way to avoid getting bit, but they were not so great at avoiding blood spray.

This many years out though, that initial group was like the thing she’d accidentally poked a hole in today. Annoyingly, even though most were growing older and weaker, there was always someone stupid enough to get infected, with all the energy and reflexes that a fresh body offered. By now everyone knew that you mostly just had to suit up and avoid fluids to not get infected but there was always somebody who had a festering well of machismo to prove.

Andy unlocked the lobby of the apartment building and wheeled her bike in. She adjusted the boxes still in the cart so they weren’t touching, laying the bag from town next to them, then set the timer for her own UVC, stepping back from the glow. The pusher went into a five-gallon bucket of bleach-water by the door like an umbrella stand.

Trudging up the first floor steps, Andy idly wondered if they’d reach a point she felt comfortable going outside unsuited. Probably not if there were still raccoons. They couldn’t get infected, but they were excellent carriers and liked to touch everything.

Entering the first apartment off the landing, Andy stripped off her outer suit, hanging laying it in its own little yellow square in the middle of the room. The head of the suit, which looked like a frog wearing a baseball hat, had its own square. She’d found early on that a mascot suit was basically impermeable to human teeth and most weapons. Although she knew it was objectively stupid, she’d grown fond of the thing. Shaking her head, she turned a dial for the set of sterilising lights and stepped through the connecting door to the next apartment.

De-gowning had become as automatic a procedure as removing her bra at the end of the workday had once been. Shoe covers in a bin, coverall gown on its hook, hood set aside on what had once been a kitchen counter. Glancing at her supplies, Andy made a mental note to do another run for more. Some were washable but others—like the mask, cap and gloves—went into the garbage chute and down into the building’s incinerator.

Through the anteroom, which had been a bedroom, to the bathroom and a shower, which was cold. Andy used most of the electricity she got from the panels on the roof to charge her bike and power the UVCs. When she did heat water it was for baths, anyway. She looked wistfully at the toilet, which was bone dry. She reminded herself that adding another chemical toilet here would mean another toilet to clean.

Andy passed through one more door and was home.