“Catrina,” said Professor Brownhair, “you’ve been marking students’ papers with blue ink. What is the meaning of this!?”
“Red is so… angry,” said Catrina.
Professor Brownhair proffered a photograph of a winged child holding a pickaxe. “They mine the red ink,” he intoned. “Save the cherubs’ jobs, Catrina. Save them!“
She explained to me that produce was essential to progress. “Science?” she would say. “Show me science on an empty stomach!”
Farming was her calling. Everything else, she said, didn’t really matter.
A twist of fate brought me, undeserving, through the famine, left alone to carry her message of life.
“Help me, Doctor!” yelled Harry.
“What’s the problem?”
“I can’t write 50-word stories.”
“I’ll check your head bumps. A-hah! Your Inflated Prose, Trivial Detail, and Superfluous Description bumps are too high. I’ll lower them for $300 cash.”
Harry paid.
“Brace yourself. This is going to hurt. Nurse, hand me that sledgehammer.”
Michael A. Kechula’s flash fiction and microfiction has been published in 132 magazines and 42 anthologies. His four books of flash fiction are available from BooksForABuck.com.
He was a subculture within a subculture. Cowboys called him “bisonboy,” which wasn’t technically accurate, but it had a better ring to it than “buffaloboy.” He listened to country southern music and wore a 9-gallon hat.
But when he was sad, his tears made mud puddles, just like everybody else’s.
This story was based on a title suggested by @metcarfre.
It was late. Mintred and Neldred were on their way home from Neldred’s retirement party from Municipal Dolphin Transport.
Suddenly, they heard a shout and a splash. Hardly thinking, Neldred dove and kicked, arriving just in time to save the man’s life.
Thus began a series of new aquatic adventures.
This story is based on a series of tweets in which I asked people to guess what form of transport I was riding.
It was Mars-ish. (Mars-like? Hmm. Red and dusty, anyways.) Regardless, it was his backyard, and he was proud of it.
Land ownership was one of the purest forms of power, and it felt good. He knew his great-great-great-great grandfather Karl would agree.
Now all he was missing were some factories.
This story is based on a title suggested by King Kool.
“Didja see that new offer on the television set?”
“Yeah, I seen it.”
“Sez we can get internets fer only a coupla bucks a month!”
“I said I seen it.”
“So, d’ya wanna?”
“Heck, alright. How’d we go ’bout it?”
“Offer sez order online.”
“What’s ‘online’?”
“Heck if I know.”
This story is based on a title suggested by @klancashire.
He really didn’t want to go in.
He’d heard stories about this place, and they weren’t good. The person in charge was mean and scary.
He knew that once he was in, there was no way back: he would be trapped – at least until his mum collected him at three.
Mike Jackson is a retired primary school head teacher who is enjoying having time and freedom to write. You can read more of his writing here.
The gatekeepers see all, never blinking, no matter what the time.
Those who seek the angels don’t see them for they hide in plain sight.
With one foot in each world your fate is decided with the yowl of annoyance or the purr of contentment.
Those wonderful misaligned felines.
Gareth Wilson would call himself a serial reader, slayer of titles, leaving a woody (and shortly electron) swathe in his wake. Currently he is improving his writing skills by cutting his teeth on short pieces to work up to his own full-length title. He reviews general fiction here and YA and children’s books here.
He lived inside his phone, drifting from app to app and nesting in the dim recesses of the End Call button.
He’d been there since the rotary days. The passing years had drastically reduced his living space.
He had no idea how he’d fit his mattress into a Bluetooth headset.