Throwback Thursday: The Angler by Nicholas Christian

Each week, we are taking a look back at the authors, stories, and poems that captivated us in 2019. Today we offer you the winner of the 2018 Hummingbird Prize for Flash Fiction: ‘The Angler’ by Nicholas Christian. Appearing in Issue 21, Winter 2019, this story holds language that, according to judge Bob Thurber, blisters like sunburn.

Perhaps this excerpt will inspire you to take a run at the sun! This year’s 2020 Hummingbird Flash Fiction Prize opens May 1st and closes June 15th, and we can’t wait to see what will dive and dart across our path! In the meantime, explore past contests and find more inspiration here.

The Angler

It’s said Jeki la Njambe has one crow’s foot and an antelope’s hoof besides. Jeki, they say, huddles around little liver-pecked fires, has one arm and it’s a real Misha. They say he fishes with it and you’ll know it’s that time by the smell of wet maple and iron-wood, or the whistling of hollow bamboo. Sure, they ramble such as it’s cooked, but you don’t go blaming a fire for making smoke. So just gather your ears from the field. I’m to straighten things, if my name ain’t Jeki la Njambe, and I tell you I know the right of it.

Now tilt your heads and figure a sky sailing strange as blue lava, and up there nothing were dead yet three days. But that was for changing — too many fruit seeds and ugly little dog-gods. So down the first ones fell green about the ears, while up sprouted Jeki mismatched as you see here today but for the sweet yoke of those first tools, sacked together with a barrel carved branch for drumming, and I sigh now, because I knew too the honey of a canoe once. These green ears though, I set to giving them the music, and the tackle for plowing when they went hungry. But my canoe, that I kept because sure as eggs is eggs Jeki knew he’d come up the wrong way, so he goes sniffing for the nearest river.

To find out what happens next, pick up your copy of Issue 21, Winter  2019 here!

Nicholas Christian’s work has appeared in Moon City Review, TAB, The Lindenwood Review, Rat’s Ass Review, Off the Coast, as well as Pulp Literature Issue 15, Summer 2015. His work explores the significance of truth-seeking through mythology, and further what it means to live in a modern place and age where doing so is sorely needed while frequently absent. He currently lives in Changchun, China, where he teaches English composition and rhetoric at Northeast Normal University in partnership with Rutgers.