A decade ago, Christmas Eve was wild – 4 AM port when we had finished the wine.
Now, I hold my tinsel-clad daughter, her tinfoil-star headband askew. You film our son bellowing Silent Night along with other offkey five-year-olds, presents to wrap when we get home.
4 AM port’s still fun with you.
Billie-Leigh Burns is a writer from Liverpool. Her work has been featured in 50 Word Stories, Fictionette, and Naked Cat Lit Magazine.
From the peaks of red mountains I’ve seen lights across the desert.
Closing my eyes, I’d strain to hear the echo of ancient war drums.
My only reward was the sound of wind blowing across the valley floor.
Wind blowing the sand, making the lights far below twinkle like stars.
Dan Johnson was born in California and grew up in Illinois. Now retired, he spent over twenty years as a high school physics teacher and school administrator, who also loves writing poetry.
We watched him come in his moth-eaten sweater and soiled khakis. A yellowing bucket hat framed his liver-spotted face. As he passed our table, we tried not to stare. After he stuffed his sail-bag into a nearby locker, Sylvie whispered: “Hard to believe he’s the richest man on the island.”
Coleman Bigelow is a Pushcart Prize- and Best MicroFiction-nominated author whose work has appeared recently in Bending Genres, Emerge Journal, Hyacinth Review, and The Dribble Drabble Review. His first chapbook “In Rare Cases and Other Unfortunate Circumstances” was published in May. Find more at: www.colemanbigelow.com or follow him on Twitter: @ColemanBigelow and Instagram: @cbigswrites.
Tom was a very badly behaved lad. Dick was frankly a demon. Their parents were careful to keep quiet when they were in the cradle.
Harry’s parents were forever playing their Rod Stewart records. He was a very well-balanced child.
Perhaps if you spare the Rod you spoil the child.
Derek McMillan is a writer in Durringon in the UK. His editor is his wife, Angela. He has written for print and online publications in the UK, USA and Canada. His latest book is the audio-book Brevity which is available on eBay. Check it out.
I went to sit next to an actor who I thought was my friend. He told me that my seat was already taken. Then someone got up and did an impromptu dance about a piece of string.
I walked down to the beach, snuck to my car, and drove home.
Art Scribbler lives in Portland, Oregon. He works in a grocery store. When he’s not working, he likes to write, read, listen to jazz, and watch old movies on TV. He also likes drinking coffee and scribbling posts on his blog called The Morning Scribble.
My mother’s rough hands fold turn-ups on my jeans, pins clamped between her teeth. I bind my feet to the floor, desperate to climb trees. Mum likes jeans – they’re easier, she says, than peeling off and washing muddy dresses. As she stands, scissors held low, the door swings behind me.
Bonnie is a British writer whose flash fiction has appeared in several literary magazines including most recently Ellipsis Zine and Tiny Molecules. She shares a house in Greater Manchester, UK, with an unpredictable number of humans; grows disobedient vegetables; and walks in the hills near home. Bonnie also travels alarming distances to see loved ones in Aotearoa/New Zealand. See more at bonniemeekums.weebly.com
I’m the ghost drifting in yesterday’s misfortune. Mother was murdered, Christmas, years before, before I was a woman, a drunk. I swallow whiskey, pills, hold snapshots, blare music, drowning in sorrow until you appear in a dream, delivering the words, “Release it, Mama’s dancing in the wind, floating amongst stars.”
Angela Carlton lives outside Atlanta with her husband and two
daughters. Her fiction has been published in EWR, Every Day Fiction, Pedestal Magazine, Long Story Short, 6S, High Noon and Friday Flash Fiction among others. Her story “Swallowed” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2023.
His Childhood was scared out of him, run off by the lash. But now, on this silent night in a less than jolly world, perhaps the greatest gift: from the twinkling lights on the tree, the family’s stockings, the crackling fire, he realizes he is still a child at heart.
Robert Ludemann is happy and retired, and that is the long and short of it.
Working beneath the eave, sheltered from the falling snow,
with a string of brightly colored bulbs
I spelled out my Yuletide proclamation
and was warmed by the message and the glow
“Noel” was what I spelled while under the eave,
but alas, passersby on the street wondered, “Who was Leon?”
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.
The story of the week for December 18 to 22 is…
Breakout by Deborah Tapper