A Fly in Amber. Flash Fiction by Sylvia Petter

A Fly in Amber

My mother had a large piece of amber the size of my hand. She held it up to the light and I saw an entrapped insect. An ordinary fly. My mother said the amber came from Eastern Germany, from the Harz Mountains where she’d lived before the war. She said it came from the caves of old King Barbarossa, who sat asleep on his throne waiting for his nation to be reborn. When at reunification he didn’t wake up, my mother said it wasn’t just about borders that the minds of the people had to overcome frictions before they could really become one. Like this, she said, and ripped off tiny bits of the newspaper and placed them in her lap. She rubbed the amber on her sleeve and dipped it in the newspaper scraps. They clung to the amber, hiding the fly.

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Vienna born Australian Sylvia Petter trained as a translator in Vienna and Brussels.  Founding member of the Geneva Writers´ Group, she is a Humber College Toronto creative writing alumnus, holds a PhD in Creative Writing from UNSW (2009) and is a member of the Australian Society of Authors, Sydney, and GAV and IG_AutorInnen, Vienna.

Her stories have appeared online and in print since 1995, notably in The European (UK), Thema (US), The Richmond Review, Eclectica, Reading for Real series (Canada), the anthology, Valentine´s Day, Stories of Revenge (Duckworth, UK), on BBC World Service, as well as in several charity anthologies, and flash-fiction publications.

Her latest book of short fiction, Geflimmer der Vergangenheit (Riva Verlag, Germany, 2014), includes 21 stories drawn from her English-language collections, The Past Present (IUMIX, UK, 2001), Back Burning (IP Australia, Best Fiction Award 2007), and Mercury Blobs (Raging Aardvark, Australia, 2013), and translated into German by Eberhard Hain, Chemnitz.

She has led flash-fiction workshops in Vienna and Gascony, France. Writing as AstridL, several erotic stories appeared in anthologies in the US (Alyson Books) and the UK (Xcite) and subsequently in her collection of 17 erotic tales, Consuming the Muse, (Raging Aardvark, Australia, 2013.)

In 2014, she organized in Vienna the 13^th International Conference on the Short Story in English.

In March 2020, her debut novel, All the Beautiful Liars was published as a Lightning Bolt eBook by Eye & Lightning Books, UK, and came out  in 2021 in paperback and audio.

In July, 2020, she served on the jury for English-language flash fiction for the Vienna Poetry School’s second literary magazine “Gespenster” issued in October. Her antifa novelette in flash, Winds of Change, was published in April 2021 under her imprint FloDoBooks Vienna-Sydney. Sylvia blogs on her website at http://www.sylviapetter.com where there is more on her and her writing.

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