I was staring blankly at a dirty old apartment building, wondering whether more people go down fire escapes or up them.
You said, “It happened so suddenly; I found out yesterday,” and I wasn’t sure whether to slip out the back door, or embrace the opportunity to sneak back in.
Bethany stormed into the panda run.
Sammy and Florence, the local inmates, sauntered over and began looking for treats.
“He won’t listen!” said Bethany, stifling a sob.
The pandas’ faces drooped.
“Can’t he see how lonely you are? All we want is a couple of play dates with the orangutans.”
He’d been flirting with me for months. He always tried to make eye contact, and smiled extra big, and laughed at all my jokes.
When my friends asked, I said he “wasn’t my type,” and changed the subject.
Then one day he forgot to shave, and I fell in love.
This story was based on the TypeTrigger prompt “stubble.”
People were lined up, waiting for a table, standing too close to her chair. She was almost touching the butt of a heavy-set, bleached blond, overweight woman who was describing her “last” trip to Paris in excruciating detail.
She quickly downed her glass of red wine, stood up, and left.
Bobbi Lurie is the author of three poetry collections: The Book I Never Read, Letter from the Lawn and Grief Suite.
Jurgen shook free of the dog’s steel-trap grip and tossed it over the cliff. For a moment, he felt guilty; then he cleansed the useless emotions from his mind.
They were coming, with guns and flashlights.
If the animal shelter would not give him a pet, he would take one.
Cynthia had made a habit of sneaking cookies out of the jar when Mom left the room.
One day, Mom caught her, and Cynthia received a crisp slap on the wrist.
The next afternoon, Cynthia emerged from her bedroom with foam padding taped to her wrists, and took a cookie.
This story was based on the prompt “slap on the wrist” at TypeTrigger.
They stood by the charred crater that had been their home and listened to the wind.
It told them, You’ve been hard done by.
It said, They had no right.
It whispered, Independence is our destiny.
It commanded, Hoist the New Antland flag, stand tall, and let the humans come.
A leering face, a dark alley, and a tangy, salty-sweet flavour were all he could remember when he awoke in the hospital bed.
The contents of his wallet said he was Josip Šerić, a wealthy Croatian businessman visiting Chicago.
He didn’t care. All that mattered was finding back that flavour.
Christopher loved his wife, his kids, his dog, his job, and himself.
The only thing in the world that Christopher couldn’t stand was unhappy people. Whenever Christopher met a sad, grumpy, or irritable person, he felt sad, grumpy, and irritable, too.
He was just like the rest of us, really.
FiftyWordStories.com Year Three starts tomorrow. I’ll be kicking off the year with a week of stories written by myself, and following that we’ll go back to Monday guest stories and my writing on Tuesday to Friday.
I’m really looking forward to this year. I felt like last year’s schedule, where I was writing four stories a week instead of seven, really brought up the average quality of my writing. More overall practice with the format helped too, of course!
There are a couple of small site tweaks I want to point out. First is that there’s a new Stories page that you can use to browse through the kinds of stories you want to read. I’ve gone back through the entire archives of the site and separated the stories into thematic categories, like I do with the books, so hopefully that will make it easier to find what you’re looking for. You can also just read Guest stories, or use the Search tool in the sidebar.
On another topic, I’m hoping to have Volume Two ready for ordering by the end of August. I still have work to do on the layout, the cover, and the bonus content. More details will be forthcoming over the next few weeks. I’m hoping to have a few other things available, too; there’s been talk of story-based t-shirts and fridge magnets going around “the office.” Those things will depend on cost, practicality, and interest levels, so if there’s something you’d really like to see, let me know with a comment or an email (tim@fiftywordstories.com).
Due to the improvements in story quality, I actually have almost 130 stories picked out for inclusion in Fifty-Word Stories: Volume Two, compared to the 100 in Volume One. That means that even though I wrote fewer stories, more of them were good enough to put in the book, which is pretty cool, in my opinion.
Let’s have a bigger year than ever, and kick things off with a really fun August. Read, rate, comment, and submit!