‘Piece of My Heart’ by Mitchell Toews

The best flash fiction conveys deep truths compressed in only a few words. It relies on brevity and concision of language, and resonates long after the final page is turned.

And there was one story in the 2020 Bumblebee Flash Fiction Contest whose haunting echo we editors just couldn’t shake.

Winner of the Bumblebee Editors’ Choice award, and excerpted here from Issue 27,  is ‘Piece of My Heart’ by Mitchell Toews.

Piece of My Heart

by Mitchell Toews

On a still fall day, I walk through the woods near the river. My knee is behaving, and I work up a sweat under my Mackinaw. I come across an old campsite. A rusted stove, white enamel peeling. Tin cans in a pile. There is a blackened jackknife folded and set with care on a cushion of moss.

It’s generations old, this place. The smell here is fetid and wild — no longer the stench of humans and the way we lay to waste and tame. We think we tame. Nature has reclaimed this antiquity with a bear hug of fresh growth and decay. Inevitability sits on its haunches near the long-cold fire pit.

But so too, this is the crude home where people like me and mine endured, fresh from a steamer ride across the brutish North Atlantic. My people, here in a sod-hut sanctuary where parents fed hungry children. Where families huddled, awe-filled under a blackout sky. Some evenings — and I can hear it and feel it, still present in today’s silent hum — voices startle the quiet of the bush. Hymns sung with a fervour born of nothing left to lose. Eyes shine with hope in the glint of a midnight fire. There’s the hollow, rhythmic clank of a spoon on a metal cup.

And the generations drew down and on, babies coming, some dying as they emerged, mothers staying teenagers forever. And slowly the black suits gave way to shiny belt buckles and plaid guffaws and soon TV antennas stood guard over prairie bungalows, their sin of worldliness now forgiven. “Billy Graham said so, Opa.”

To find out what happens next, pick up your copy of Pulp Literature Issue 27, Summer 2020!

Mitchell Toews lives and writes lakeside in Manitoba. His work appears in print and online, in places near and far. He is working on a novel. Mitchell’s story ‘Away Game’ appeared in Issue 20 of Pulp Literature. You may follow him on the trails or out on the water or ice, or more conveniently at Mitchellaneous.com, Twitter, or Facebook.