Five Breathtaking Places To Visit Before You Die

Short Fiction ~ Susan L. Lin

Honourable Mention, Strands International Flash Fiction Competition - 20 


#5
 
On your way to a famous national park, you find a city called 2:00 PM. According to the guidebook, it was named that because a dip in the main road causes momentary blindness at that time thanks to the angel (you wonder if maybe the writer meant “angle”?) of the sun. Apparently, an encore happens every day at 6:00 PM. An investigative journalist asks you to describe the phenomenon on camera, and to read a poem you’ve written in the same notebook as your travelogues, but you politely decline. Choosing, instead, to keep moving. Eventually you find yourself standing at the mouth of a large canyon, wondering how it might feel to be swallowed up. To spend the rest of your days languishing inside those bottomless bowels.
 
 
#4
 
You black out, coming to inside a roomy building overflowing with other people. You’re uncertain whether they’re family or not. All the windows and doors are covered with dark cloth. Someone makes a reference to the night, but you notice rays shining through an open flap: It’s daytime! But your protests are met with a dismissive wave: “Pffft, sunlight? Haven’t you heard? It’s like that outside 24/7 now.” Scornful rejection spurs you to theft. You begin lifting everyone’s shoes from their bedrooms. The stolen goods finding a cool new home in your empty mini fridge.
 
 
#3
 
The plot of land neighboring your alma mater goes untouched for years. But three months after graduation, bulldozers appear overnight. Billboards announce a new institution of higher learning: Proust University. A winding staircase bridges the two properties. While other schools boast about the bright futures of their alumni, PU seems preoccupied with their pasts. The objects inside designed to trigger déjà vu in every prospective student. You catch a glimpse of Little Red Riding Hood within its halls, ducking into a dim room with an endless collection of sinister clown beds.
 
 
#2
 
One evening, you’re walking to a friend’s place for a sleepover, pillow and blanket in hand. An ominous house across the street. A blurry structure your eyes can’t focus on stands between you and the building, creating a mustache-like mask over its features. The night falls apart from there: Yearbook pages defaced, threatening messages scrawled across the grotesque photos. Soon you are hiding in a bathroom. The bashful toilet is sitting inside the bathtub, obscured by a shower curtain. You don’t notice it at first. Someone is at the door, demanding to be let in.
 
#1
 
You find an elusive screening elevator in a hotel lobby. The sliding doors open to reveal a compartment where travelers can sit to enjoy a film as the suspended box ascends. It is either a very slow elevator or a very short film. You hear screams before you reach your destination. A woman who looks a lot like your mother (at least from afar) is delivering a baby at the end of the hallway. Inside your suite, you find poetry stenciled on a bus bench.


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​Susan L. Lin​ is a Taiwanese American storyteller who hails from southeast Texas and holds an MFA in Writing from California College of the Arts. Her novella Goodbye to the Ocean won the 2022 Etchings Press novella prize, and her short prose and poetry have appeared in over sixty different publications. Find more at https://susanllin.wordpress.com.

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