I heard leaves and branches singing to the sun
I watched the trees singing as one
Grace for the day
Prayer for tomorrow
A daily prayer for one hundred years
A daily prayer answered
Until today
Whirring of encroaching engines portends the end
Of one last sunset
And no dawn
David is a St. Louis-based writer who enjoys all forms of writing from microfiction to novels.
Upturned glass wavering, I carry terror incarnate.
Every instinct screams, “Kill it! Squash it! Obliterate it!” I resist; outdoors, its freedom awaits.
Now it sits, in its newly spun web, remembering the warm, dry bedroom it once inhabited. It watches, and slowly and surely, it draws its plans against me.
William Mitchell lives in East Sussex in the South of England. He is an award-winning author, having had early success with various Horror and Science Fiction publications before winning the Writers of the Future contest in 2012. His first novel, CREATIONS, came out in 2014 with John Hunt Publishing.
When mom passed, we joked over boxes deemed for the dumpster about her catchwords of somedays and one-days and soons. We never had much growing up, but we had each other. We finally moved her old bed, only to discover a thick mat of lottery somedays and one-days and soons.
Deb DiTomaso lives in Connecticut with her husband, a dog, and a bunch of chickens. She’s a career nurse with a lifelong passion for crafting stories. Her work has placed as a finalist in CT Tassy Walden Awards for New Voices in Children’s Literature.
I love to rake. There’s a power in drawing leaves, clearing muck and nature’s chaos. It keeps me outside musk-filled rooms, much too big. For a moment, I smile; then I remember malaise, arguments, slammed doors. I tear my rake into earth and emptiness and whisper sorrow. More leaves tumble.
Yash Seyedbagheri is a graduate of Colorado State University’s MFA fiction program. His stories, “Soon,” “How To Be A Good Episcopalian,” “Tales From A Communion Line,” and “Community Time,” have been nominated for Pushcarts. Yash’s work has been published in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Write City Magazine, and Ariel Chart, among others.
At the police station, rollcall was over and the evening shift was getting underway.
“I’m wiring this rookie for his first undercover assignment. Hand me the goose tape, will ya, somebody, please?”
“Don’t you mean duct tape?” the rookie asked.
“Not for where your hidden microphone battery pack is going.”
John H. Dromey has micro-fiction, flash fiction, and short stories published in about 220 venues.
Say you own a thimble. It was your mother’s, it outlived her. You hated your mother.
You threw it out your bedroom window, awoke with it inches away from your nose. You tossed it out of your car, it immediately dropped onto the passenger’s seat.
Do you believe in ghosts?
Audrey Lee is a student from New Jersey. She enjoys writing flash fiction and poetry.
The warden thought his track meet event
would be a morale booster,
But a guard reported on Event Day
that the pole vault team had escaped.
The good news was the 100-yard dash team
was overtaken 200 yards from the gate
and the sumo wrestlers were wedged in their tunnel.
Gene Newman was a USAF cryptologist during the Korean War and is a retired engineer and journalist, including stringing for the N.Y. Times and being a crossword puzzle creator for the New York Times and USA Today.
“Come here, little sugar pillow,” my husband used to say, enfolding me in his arms on our sleep-in Saturday mornings. He died before I mastered his native Icelandic and learned he’d been using the literal translation of “marshmallow.” I still glance at my love handles, wondering just what he’d meant.
Râna had a beautiful decade of living in the northwest of Iceland interrupted by the pandemic, and she’s now preparing for the zombie apocalypse in her hometown of Montreal.
The band’s packing up. Last call at the bar. The balloons have begun to wilt, the streamers to sag. Fifty-year-old tales of teenage escapades are echoes, refracted by time. We laugh, slap backs, embrace. “See you in five years!” we say with hope while our hearts are haunted by doubt.
Nick Young is a retired award-winning CBS News Correspondent. In addition to 50-Word Stories, his writing has appeared in dozens of reviews, journals and anthologies. His first novel, “Deadline,” was published in the Fall of 2023. He lives outside Chicago.
The story of the week for August 26 to 30 is…
In Second Place by Matt Strutz