She poured dosa batter, spreading it with decades of muscle memory, her hand steady.
“One more?” I nodded silently, helping myself to more coriander chutney over the sound of sizzling oil.
This was our shared solace after his memories were spread dosa-thin by the days, until he forgot us altogether.
Rani Jayakumar lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family. She has contributed to Honeyguide Magazine, Ab Terra Flash Fiction, and 100 word stories, among others.
My knee knocked the leg,
pencil thrummed the tabletop.
My gaze wandered:
Water pitcher? Commonplace.
Handmade spoon rest? Sentimental.
A bee rebounded off the window.
Then Amalie, ecstatic:
“Mom! Have you ever
stuck your nose
into a sweet pea
and breathed so deep
you thought you’d
gone to heaven?”
Perfect.
Melissa is a sweet pea enthusiast living in Canada.
The story of the week for August 9 to 13 is…
Mummy, Daddy, and Samantha by Laura Dobson
In retrospect, I cannot now remember which was worse: those moments when my flow of speech was disrupted by sputtering consonants, drawn-out vowels and endless repetition, one gush of sound colliding with another, or the unintentional silences, those tongue-tied pauses when I felt unable to produce any sound at all.
Bob Thurber is the author of six books. Regarded as a master of Flash and Micro Fiction, his work has appeared in Esquire and other magazines, been anthologized 60 times, received a long list of awards, and been utilized in schools and colleges throughout the world. He resides in Massachusetts. Visit his website at BobThurber.net.
In his hospital bed, my father,
the hearty man with the booming voice
and a thousand friends,
curls into a shell
and whispers,
“Every day I ask the Lord to please take me.”
Every day he curls a little more.
From fetal ball
to fetal ball
the endless cycle continues.
Marilyn McFarlane is a travel writer and the author of Sacred Stories: Wisdom From World Religions. She writes poetry and fiction and occasionally explores memoir. She lives in Oregon, where there is a lot of scope for the imagination.
She never asks, but they tell her about their troubles at home.
The sister’s affair.
The bully at school.
The overbearing mother-in-law.
The brother who can’t seem to keep a job.
The parent who has been diagnosed with cancer.
They shed their worries as easily as she cuts their hair.
Lorraine Christie still enjoys drinking coffee and unscrambling word jumbles.
The calendar shows another month of summer, but reality is the rustle of fallen leaves, the sky poking through trees without regard for the date. Hand in hand they walk away from summer jobs, summer picnics. Walking towards, then through, classrooms and exams, down the long corridors into their future.
In retirement, Eileen loves the challenge of encapsulating larger life experiences into the smaller 50-word life bites.
A riot of colour beams from clinical white sheets: pale as the bedding, swamped by rainbow pyjamas, and clutching a box of Crayola. Through intravenous tubes, she perseveres with her drawings.
You’re handed the latest. Three recognisable figures, the littlest a sort of butterfly hybrid.
Eventually, everything dims but this.
Laura is taking the first tentative steps towards sharing her work. This is her third 50-word story and she has a piece upcoming with The Phare Literary Magazine. She tweets at @laurarose_13.
Sugar used her loaf, whipping up half-baked ideas that proved successful and eventually raising enough dough to buy a bakery. Seeing profits roll in by beating the competition was icing on the cake, but one smart cookie took the biscuit by undercutting her. Being creamed, her creation sank, crumbling away.
Viv Burgess is taking refuge in the absurd.
“It was so sudden. I’m still in shock, I think,” he said, resting his hand sadly on the girl’s knee. “Though to be honest we hadn’t been close for a long time.”
“I’m closer than you know,” I hissed, floating beside them, and reached across the table for the bottle.
Sarah Jackson writes gently unsettling stories. She lives in east London UK and has a green tricycle called Ivy. See more at sarahijackson.com/writing.