Without X-ray vision, I cannot say with certainty what goes on in the apartment above. I can only speculate.
The tenant’s noise-making cannot be eliminated entirely, of course, but confiscating his pogo stick, restricting lessons for cloggers to midday only, and impounding his pet elephant might be a good start.
John H. Dromey’s short fiction’s been published in Mystery Weekly Magazine and over 150 other venues.
Arthur discovered time travel quite by accident.
It was surprisingly simple. He reached into his cupboard for a snack, and suddenly, with a WHOOSH, he was across the room, fifteen seconds ago.
“Whoa!” Arthur exclaimed. But he was still hungry, so he went over to the cupboard for a snack.
Madame Zolinska is leaning into the crystal ball.
“…and two mortgages. You and your daughter will be estranged. Sometimes you’ll wonder whatever happened to your dream of being a pediatrician.”
On the other side of the purple tablecloth, the teenager begins to cry.
“You wanted to know,” says Madame Zolinska.
Sage Tyrtle is a professional storyteller. Her stories have been featured on NPR, CBC, and PBS. She is a Moth StorySLAM and GrandSLAM winner. She’s also one of those Americans who swanned around saying, “If this gets any worse, I’M moving to CANADA,” but then she really did. See more at tyrtle.com.
He forced her retirement.
She used to love writing. He mocked her stories, told her he paid her to edit, not write drivel.
His words ate her confidence and she stopped writing.
For a while.
Bookkeeping will soon discover a theft. She’s left plenty of writing behind to implicate him.
Sharon Gerger is about to retire. She will not be committing any crimes on her way out the door. Her writing appears here and there, in print and on the internet.
I cleaned out the kitchen junk drawer, and along with toothpicks, ballpoint pens, and dead batteries, I found three hours I’d lost in 2006. Should I mow the lawn, get extra sleep, fix my life?
Caught in traffic, I pulled them out. No good: they were deader than the batteries.
David Holloway lives and writes in Northern Virginia. He has had work published in Gargoyle, Kayak, and The Mad River Review.
We’ll call our guy “B.” to protect his identity.
B.’s manager can’t make heads or tails of his convoluted delivery route. Not one straight line between stops. He doesn’t confess to dusting his ankles at Daisy’s and Violet’s, at Dahlia’s. Gathering pollen.
B. loves his job, every meander, each back-track.
Todd Mercer was nominated for Fiction and Poetry Pushcarts last year. His collection Ingenue was published Autumn of 2020 by Celery City Press.
We count pennies, dollar bills gone.
With each clink of pennies, we imagine the weight of wealth.
But after rent, utilities, closed credit cards, and expensive Merlots we needed but didn’t, we have five dollars.
That’ll buy a McChicken. A Coke. Bags of chips.
At least it’s not two dollars.
Yash Seyedbagheri is a graduate of Colorado State University’s MFA program in fiction. A native of Idaho, Yash’s work is forthcoming or has been published in The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Write City Magazine, and Ariel Chart, among others.
I was asleep, darkly dreaming. There was suddenly a scream from my little sister, whom I could hear tearing down the hallway, and next thing I knew, I was scurrying on all fours into the nearest corner, bristling with fear.
“Mom,” she sobbed, “there’s a huge rat in his room!”
Michael B. Keane is a London-based writer of dark fiction.
Walter gobbled down the watermelon.
He felt the “plop, plop” as the seeds landed in his stomach.
When he woke the next morning, Walter had stems growing out his nose and a green tinge to his skin.
He was no longer a fully human boy.
He was becoming a Waltermelon.
Hannah Kelley lives in Australia and loves writing and reading micro-fiction. Her favourite fruit is watermelon.
Editor: Groooooan.
He looks at the wheel with great determination. He turns it slowly, controlling the tepid temperature of spring in high heaven.
Cleaner silently mops the wet floor.
Thump! He slips. The wheel spins wildly. His face is pale with panic. Spring turns into summer, autumn, and winter.
He is fired.
Fannie is a girl living in Sydney, NSW, Australia with a great interest in writing and literature.