F C Q

By Angelina Souren

FCQ stands for "funny, cheerful and quirky", quirky flash fiction with many twists. Verbal jazz. If you like the work of Spike Milligan, zen koans, or Donald Barthelme’s writings, you will appreciate FCQ. Some of it is highly readable, some of it is simple and outrageously funny, and some of it is complex. The author is a professional writer and author of non-fiction, a Dutchwoman who's lived in balmy Florida and is now based on England's south shore.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Angelina Souren
• Release date: Nov 20, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465860125

Angelina Souren

Angelina Souren is a highly versatile person who used to work in tourism and hospitality in Amsterdam, quit her job in her mid-twenties and turned herself into an earth and life scientist. She’s emigrated several times and has carried out fieldwork in yet other countries. These days, she mostly focuses on inclusivity and diversity, including aspects like workplace bullying and neuroscience, as well as on bioethics sensu lato.She is based in Portsmouth in England, has previously lived in Florida and spent a large chunk of her adult life in Amsterdam. She was the eldest of three daughters whose mother passed away after a long illness (vastly metastasised breast cancer) when all three siblings were still very young and her father had a severe borderline personality disorder, so she has always needed to be very practical.Angelina became self-employed in 1997; her siblings also run their own businesses. You can pay her a visit at angelinasouren.com for more background.She started writing stories in primary school, was on her school’s first newspaper team and already managed to get a letter published in a national magazine when she was still a teenager.Angelina has since written and edited professionally for clients from all over the word, for example for publishers and high-end engineering consultancies like Arcadis. She’s published several books, both fiction and non-fiction:Mixed Spices (flash fiction)FCQ (flash fiction, partly overlaps with Mixed Spices)Crunchy Peanuts (flash fiction)We need to talk about this - about the new eugenics (non-fiction)Is cruelty cool? (non-fiction)She is a former board member of the Environmental Chemistry (and Toxicology) Section of the Royal Netherlands Chemical Society as well as former editor-in-chief of its newsletter and scientific yearbook, a former member of the board and of various committees of a Dutch foundation for women in science and technology called NIMF, and former associate editor of the international newsletter of the US-based Geochemical Society.Fun facts about her? She flew a small aircraft for a few minutes, during a flying lesson for which she had a discount coupon, before she learned how to start a car. She sometimes sports blue, pink or turquoise hair and her hair is currently brightly henna-red.

Book preview

F C Q

By Angelina Souren

Copyright 2011 Angelina Souren

Smashwords Edition

ISBN: 978-1-4658-6012-5

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Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thanks for having purchased this e-book. It is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com or to any bookseller's web site that offers it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the work of this author.

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Table of Contents

Impossible

Free from

Freedom

The milkman's daughter

Reggae peanuts

The tree of stuff

The tomato growers

Once upon a time in the east

Lousy birthdays

For the love of crazy childhoods

When the mind is empty

The fine art of chocolate marketing

Smoke and dragons

Polka dot dancing

Chocolate cherries

Perspective

Blackberry-picking

Magic

Apple sauce

Time flies

About this anthology

About the author

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Impossible

(November 2011)

You know I adore you, said the woman to the giraffe. But I can’t possibly have sex with you. Then she gently pushed him away.

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Free from

(September 2011)

He'd saved up to have enough to live on for a year and buy a camper van, and started traveling because he wanted to be free and find himself.

His iPhone was in its custom-made pod, his laptop too, and he had a satellite dish fixed to the roof and satellite internet set up.

A year later he came back as himself. He knew this was true because everybody recognized him as the guru he'd always been, and now he was free, truly free.

He kept the van, with the satellite dish and the pods for the pad and the tablet so that he could always take off again, be freer than free again. Oh, he was such a free spirit, and people admired him for it because they knew who he was, and never had to look for him in the dark.

So why did he still need a tie, a rope, a shackle, preventing him to move, keeping him pacing in place? I am afraid you see a problem, he said, and I am afraid I misjudged you. But being afraid, he said, did not really fit him, was not part of how people described him, wasn’t in his inherited makeup.

He fumed and stamped his feet, stampeded off, back, pulled back by the bungees that bound him and are destined to break when they need to, when the limits reveal themselves as castles in the air.

Soon.

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Freedom

(September 2011)

Are you looking for a tie to set you free or to bind you? asked the girl behind the shop counter and he honestly could not tell. "Just a tie, please, a blue one, silk