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2018 Best New Talent - Short and Sweet Festival Sydney
2014 Pushcart Prize nominee. (more)


A Flash Fiction for the Net Generation


One of those stories.

The girl clicks the mouse. Electrons dance and the screen surges. A white beam shoots up her arm and sucks her into the net. It isn’t as she imagined. Numbers fly every which way, streams of code, like those movies, without the fancy colors and sound effects. It is noiseless. It is dull.
Millions of people logged in, infatuated, giving credence to cyber novels of yore. If only they could see what she sees. It's really quite dull. How much time had she wasted? Online.
On. And now In.
A code zooms by.

6 3 7 5 2
What? Is that minutes? Surely not hours. Oh my God! That’s her life! And what did it all mean? What did she get out of it? But the internet had the possibility for so much good! Right? What had she used it for? Surfing… chatting… She had made some real friends... Well, maybe not real, she’d never met them, never actually spoken to them, but they were real… Weren’t they?
But… But...
What about…
She struggled to think of the good things. She knew there had to be many things. So many. But all she could recall at that moment was the cold hours in her room.
On her own.
What a fucking waste.
I’ll stop. I’ll change! I swear…
A code appears.

2 8
What are you saying? Two. Eight. Too late?
But I’ll change… I promise!
The electrons fire again, her arm frazzles. And she's out.
She lifts groggily from the keyboard.
Dribble on the keys, seeping in-between.
She snatches the nearest piece of clothing, a dirty sock from the floor and quickly wipes the keyboard.
She tests the computer.
It still works.



(Inspired by a teen I know who spends way too much time online).

Coming Soon,
A new Poem, Wheelchair
and more Greatest Written Films,

Until Then,


  1. Lord, this was depressing. Thanks Anthony. Thanks a lot. J/K.
    :) xo Robyn

  2. Awesome, very powerful, and VERY cinematic, Anthony! Would love to see this on the Big Screen.

  3. This was great Anthony as well as being right on the money. The internet does seem to have some kind of gravitational pull & it can suck the hours away if you let it... I get it & I too have wasted hours on the net when I should have been doing something else but now I set myself a limit and then it's off.

  4. Thanks Robyn, James and Katherine.. appreciate your stopping by and comments...

    I too, am guilty of spending too much time online.. and theres little to show for it at the end..

    still, better than picking out toe jam...


  5. Wow!
    Now, I'm sure were all calculating how much of our lives we've spent on line. I think it's not such a bad thing...
    If you still get out of the house.
    If you still have other avenues of input.
    If you still talk to folks face to face.
    If your not otherwise buried in front of the TV.

    Great post and Story Anthony! There's just so much information on the internet, it's so darn ADDICTING...

