Loch Ness
by Nancy Stohlman
After the rapture, the people voted to drain Loch Ness—the infamous lake in the Scottish Highlands that may or may not have contained a monster—and find out the goddamn truth once and for all.
The draining began on a Saturday. The water was channeled through makeshift valves and diverted north for 16 miles, all the way to the sea along carefully built irrigation ditches. By Saturday night the people were getting impatient; the lake emptied so slowly, like a clogged bathtub. But as the water table lowered over subsequent days, travelers arrived from all over Scotland, then the greater UK, and then from all over Europe to wait on the lakeshore edges, excited by every rock suddenly exposed. But the rocks always proved to be just rocks, and somehow the people already knew what was coming. They continued anyway. People came from all over the world to witness this slow draining of imagination, the small water of faith shrinking day after day until it become impossible to deny that the bottom of Loch Ness was covered with rocks and shells and abandoned furniture and clumps of waterlogged trash, and the people knew it was too late to put all the water back and pretend they hadn’t seen the bottom, because even if the water returned the monster would not.
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Join us in Bristol in 2019 for the 3rd Flash Fiction Festival!
Sixty micro fictions written by participants and presenters inspired by the second UK Flash Fiction Festival held in Bristol, July 2018. The stories here, by writers from several different countries, touch on world politics, relationships in all their forms, fantasy and historical themes. Short-short fictions that surprise and linger long.
Nancy Stohlman 