James Stanson lives and writes in Vienna, Austria. He is currently working on his first novel, as well as a second volume of minifiction with Jamie Hershing. He has worked in the boreal forests of the Canadian north, served in a foreign army, and claims to have a rudimentary knowledge of things past – as evidenced by a piece of a paper from an accredited university. Visit his website here: www.mini-fiction.com.

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Flypaper (July 20, 2010. Issue 19.)

(From the recently self-published ebook "Minifiction *Volume 1: Marouflage.")

Written with Jamie Hershing .

You had this decoration in your apartment, something that looked like a strip of flypaper, the one with the pictures of usconnected by thin pieces of tape, each frame an inch lower than the next. If I remember right, you first strung it up just inside the sliding doors to the balcony. But then, the next morning, we found all these flies stuck to the sticky parts of the tape. So you moved it to the living room, only, after a week or so, we started to feel sick at the sight of all those dead insects. The last place we decided to try was the bedroom, and it was up there for a good month before all these little worms started to hatch from their bodies. I’ve always wondered: at what point did you realize that it wasn’t going to work out?