“Where’s your darling husband?” asked my neighbour, peeking above our shared hedge.
“Travelling,” I replied, juggling the parcels I held while struggling to open the boot of my car.
“Oh? Where to?”
I wiped one of the parcels that was slightly blood-stained and pushed it further into the boot. “Everywhere.”
AJ Joseph occasionally writes at Words from Sonobe and tweets very short stories as @sonobeus.
I warned them. The book stays locked in the attic for a good reason.
That attic had gathered dust for three generations, weakening the wood and strings of the instruments.
I warned my sons not to play those haunting melodies, not to summon those ghosts, but they did it anyway.
Zack Smith is a Senior English Major at Salem State University. He has been published in the Dead River Review. Zack is an aspiring Book Editor who writes creatively in his spare time.
I was sitting in my office cleaning my .38 when in she walked. High heels. Legs for miles. Lipstick.
“You Mickey Lewis?”
“That’s what the sign says, sugar.”
I cracked a deck of Luckies, dug out a jug of Jack.
Lousy time to be cleaning a gun. She shot first.
Bradley Harris is a Canadian freelance writer and editor. He is a two-time winner of the 3-Day International Novel competition, with ‘Ruby Ruby’ (Anvil Press: 1999) and ‘Thorazine Beach’ (Anvil Press: 2013). He loves and lives with his wife Liz Deeley and their fictitious dog Webley in Memphis, Tennessee. He despises and refuses to live with semicolons.
The metal frame lay across the pasture, its ironwork rusty red. Edward mused that it had once stood erect, envisioning a tower that would have pierced the very sky.
“To have seen such a thing!” he marvelled.
The wind howled its agreement, as it roared through the ruins of Paris.
Bill lives in Aberdeen, Scotland. He doubts his sanity all the time, and sometimes it doubts him right back.
Jenice left the dorm, left her purse bedside.
Success: her phone showed Channel 3 suspected abduction. Maybe that police siren nearing Lowell Woods was coming to search for her at last.
She ripped her shirt collar, threw her phone into the creek.
Denny would never threaten to leave her again.
Shoshauna is often inspired by the other 50-word stories that authors write for this site, and is grateful for that.
Nell waits, anxious for sunset. Charred towers silhouette against orange sky. Rusted leaves line her runway.
Burning equinox rays make the castle briefly whole; she prays this time she’ll make it through the door.
Her fiancé waits inside. They’re both still twenty-six years old, though it’s been a hundred years.
Cathy is a UK-based writer who has loved words for as long as she can remember. You’ll find her scribbling in a notebook. You can read more of her work at cacharlton.com or on Twitter at @cathyannewrites.
The sounds of the forest dull around me. My eyes no longer focus in this gloom, making me squint and blink. Separated from my pack, cursed to walk on two legs.
In the ditch water a pink, hairless face, flat and round, stares back.
One bite was all it took.
Tracy Fells has over 85 stories published in online and print journals. She won the 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Canada and Europe. Tracy tweets as @theliterarypig and is seeking a publisher for her short story collection.
I met this intriguing woman on an internet dating site, fascinated by her profile line that said she was a welder on a deep-water offshore oil rig.
We’d been hard at it for three months and two days.
The Texas authorities dubbed her the “Ninety-nine-day killer.”
I was that close.
Ed N. White is a writer of Mysteries. A teller of Tales. A graduate of the University of Iowa with an M. A. from the University of Rhode Island. An unapologetic self-publisher of Thrillers and Middle-Grade mysteries. A New Englander trapped on the Suncoast of Florida hoping for a little snow.
The bottle was half-buried in the sand, its neck protruding at an angle, a cylinder of clouded and pitted sea glass.
The cork stopper had a thick wax overlay, showing its age.
The message inside was disturbing:
If you found this bottle, I know who you are. Be very afraid.
Ed N. White is a writer of Mysteries. A teller of Tales. A graduate of the University of Iowa with an M.A. from the University of Rhode Island, and a former faculty member there. A New Englander trapped on the Suncoast of Florida hoping for some snow.
He hadn’t planned it,
at least not consciously.
They were twins, after all,
each incomplete without the other.
He could not be a failure
without his brother’s disproportionate success.
It was a wild night of shared mayhem,
careening, crescendoing
to the perfect finale:
matching death dates.
Twins to the end.
Jackie reads 50-Word Stories and writes religiously. She has never submitted her work, save to this site.