On the couch, Max noodles his guitar slowly, in a minor key.
I sit next to him. “What’s goin’ on?”
He says, “Pandora kept hope in the box, right?”
“Far as I know, yeah. Why?”
“Was that kindness or a cruel joke?”
I spot a crumpled sonogram. Realization hits hard.
If you like, keep in touch with Jim at his Substack.
Gloom is a thing with feathers, too: it’s perched over my childhood like a pigeon, flapping its dirty wings and doing that dull Sunday coo that means my friends are out of town, the library is closed, and it will be a decade before I’m old enough to move away.
Kati lives in France, writes short fiction and often thinks about cheesecake. Some of her stories are at vocal.media/authors/kati-bumbera.
At daybreak, skyscrapers are silhouetted against the horizon’s halo of orange and paradise pink. Light pierces shreds of grey stratus cloud, falling on shattered glass, twisted steel and pavements perforated by roots. Shadows retreat, exposing crumbling brickwork and cars colonized by rust, lichen and moss. Yet another dawn goes unwitnessed.
Andy Hedgecock is a freelance writer, researcher and editor from Nottinghamshire, UK. In 2014, after 30 years of writing nonfiction, he was enticed into storytelling by inspirational publisher Ra Page (Comma Press). When not being lured into unsettling new activities, Andy wanders post-industrial landscapes with Drake, his Staffordshire Bull Terrier.
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.