Flash Fiction


RESURRECTION by Richard Fannon

I was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. A framed copy of the death certificate is hung on the wall in my study and I keep meaning to get rid of it.

Miracles – proper miracles – always happen somewhere else. A remote town somewhere in the developing world and with no proper medical records. This time, an autopsy had confirmed the cause of death (not that there was any doubt) and the samples taken during the autopsy proved no-one had switched the body. My fingerprints matched those taken during a teenage DUI. The amount of evidence made even me suspicious, and I was the one it happened to.

To many people I’m a disappointment. No bright lights, no vision of heaven, no great revelation. One second I’m rushing my evening commute so I can make a date with my fiancé, the next I’m stark naked on a cold steel table with two men screaming at me. It was only later that I found out they were morticians.

I never wanted to be a celebrity – especially not in this way. A quiet life, to match a quiet faith. It was my fiancé who had the taste for the dramatic. I considered the rabid Pentecostalism of the current revival to be shallow at best and mass hysteria at worst. She went straight from identifying my body to a revival meeting.

Out of morbid curiosity (pun intended) I’ve watched the camera phone footage of the meeting. It shows the kind of rabid, manipulative hysteria that gives organised religion a bad name, climaxing with the woman I loved being dragged onto the stage and prayed at. According to the time-stamp on the footage, this was the exact moment that the morticians started screaming at me.

Once the initial buzz had worn off, my fiancé couldn’t cope. To her, I was a living, breathing proof that God existed, but, at the same time, it wasn’t quite the God she believed in. Like I said, I didn’t have the near-death experience that is supposed to be mandatory in cases like these, and I’d still would need significant parts of my brain removed before I started to believe in Biblical Infallibility, Penal Substitutionary Atonement or any of the other doctrines she found obligatory (if you don’t know what these mean then you’re lucky – and, by the way, the Capitals are Important for some reason).

I’ve had to move (twice) and my telephone number is ex-directory. Over the years the nut-cases have lost interest. There are a couple of ribs that still ache in wet weather – one stalker in particular decided that I was a vampire and attempted to hammer a wooden tent peg through my sternum.

On balance, it’s not a bad life. I’m beginning to put it back together. The hardest part is judging when to “come out” to people.

But on the worst days, I wish I’d found out what came next.

By Richard Fannon, copyright 2008. All rights reserved.





Flash Fiction