2018 FlashBack Fiction Microfiction Competition
Third Place
Potato Masher
by Jake Sullins
He’d found the stick grenade half-buried in mud in a bend of the Somme, in the days after Amiens, and he’d carried it clipped to his haversack through September and into the fall, till he arrived with it finally in the cold of November, at the banks of another river, wider and bluer: Meuse.
When word came that it was all done, he pulled the porcelain bead at the base of the handle and whipped the stielhandgranate into the still blue. That night he and the other boys feasted on fish, everything still ringing with the residue of concussion.
Jake Sullins teaches writing at Georgia Highlands College and lives in Allatoona, Georgia, a town mostly covered by a lake. He is working on his dissertation in the Creative Writing PhD program at Georgia State University. Find him on Twitter at @JakeSullins.