May is starting off with a bang for me: my new flash fiction piece ‘The Machine of the Devil’ is out right now at Flash Fiction Online. You can read it here.
I am so grateful to the ever-awesome team at FFO for giving this story a good home, and it’s part of a terrific issue with stories by several wonderful authors:
- The Peculiar Grace of Bees by J. R. Johnson
- Waiting for the Flood OR The Bathers by Natalia Theodoridou
- The Stars that Fall by Samantha Murray
Some notes on this story:
The story’s original working title was Tiergartenstraße, and it grew out of what I read about Nazi Germany’s first program of mass-murder: Aktion T4. You can read about it at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website.
The title comes from an interview with a holocaust survivor that I heard on Swedish Radio. A man who survived the concentration camps was talking about the brutality and horrors he’d experienced. “It was the machine of the devil”, he said towards the end of the interview, and that phrase stuck in my mind like a burr. I wish I could tell you the man’s name, but though I’ve looked for the interview on the Swedish Radio website, I have not been able to find it there.
‘The Machine of the Devil’ is my second story at Flash Fiction Online. You can read the first one, ‘Scent’, in the September, 2016 issue of FFO.
- Read the May, 2017 issue.
- Buy it from Amazon.
- Subscribe to Flash Fiction Online via Weightless Books.
Maria Haskins 