The sky was full of white jellyfish. They were drifting down over everything. Parks, neighborhoods, baseball fields, the oil refinery. Thousands of them. Tiny stickmen with backpacks clung to them.
Papa was crying beside the window. “You must always share with your brother.”
Papa was a negotiator.
I didn’t understand.
Thomas Fitzgerald McCarthy is a licensed English teacher, poker player, and short story writer from New Jersey.
The metal frame lay across the pasture, its ironwork rusty red. Edward mused that it had once stood erect, envisioning a tower that would have pierced the very sky.
“To have seen such a thing!” he marvelled.
The wind howled its agreement, as it roared through the ruins of Paris.
Bill lives in Aberdeen, Scotland. He doubts his sanity all the time, and sometimes it doubts him right back.
The story of the week for October 7 to 11 is…
No Returns, Exchanges, or Refunds by Maria Cargille
My paper doll of a mother likes to put on different cutout kits and try to convince people of things. She’s not very good at it, though, because she’s a paper doll and so when she stands in the light to make her speeches we can see right through her.
Robert Hoekman Jr. thinks you die when you stop wanting. He writes and writes and writes. He lives on a farm in Virginia and refuses to be put into a box.
He banged the door behind him without replying. She melted.
After nineteen years, her husband didn’t need a reason to be annoyed.
Giving up, she commissioned a humanoid. Same looks, his smile–the way he once was.
Now she could let him go,
and still have him to her liking.
Mandira Pattnaik writes in India. Her work has appeared in The Times of India, Editor’s Pick Juggernaut Publishing, Microfiction Monday, Fiftywordstories, Paragraph Planet, FewerThan500 and (Mac) ro (mic).
Jenice left the dorm, left her purse bedside.
Success: her phone showed Channel 3 suspected abduction. Maybe that police siren nearing Lowell Woods was coming to search for her at last.
She ripped her shirt collar, threw her phone into the creek.
Denny would never threaten to leave her again.
Shoshauna is often inspired by the other 50-word stories that authors write for this site, and is grateful for that.
Sailor’s arms beneath tobacco-scented cardigans. Milky eyes like moonlit skies, staring as though I was the finest thing on Earth.
But when he wore the hat, for memorials or military functions, he became a ghost.
I wondered what that hat had seen, to make him quiver like a frightened child.
Jo Withers writes micros, flash, and poetry from her home in South Australia. Recent work has featured or is forthcoming in Molotov Cocktail, Ellipsis Zine, Spelk, Bath Flash Anthology, and Milk Candy Review.
Giggly, smiling, innocent seductress peering out from the pages of school yearbooks. One foot on the hockey field, one in the library. The world spread out before her.
Years, babies, miscarriages, surgeries, illnesses, and life. My Mom. All grown up.
If only I had known the girl of the giggles.
Eileen Mardres is a retired teacher / social worker and sometimes writer of manuals and English test questions. She is now writing her way through her senior years with micro-fiction, poetry, and memoirs of life adventures.
Nell waits, anxious for sunset. Charred towers silhouette against orange sky. Rusted leaves line her runway.
Burning equinox rays make the castle briefly whole; she prays this time she’ll make it through the door.
Her fiancé waits inside. They’re both still twenty-six years old, though it’s been a hundred years.
Cathy is a UK-based writer who has loved words for as long as she can remember. You’ll find her scribbling in a notebook. You can read more of her work at cacharlton.com or on Twitter at @cathyannewrites.
Whenever two hummingbirds strive for dominance at a feeder, whenever they fight over a patch of blossoms, whenever one strafes my head because I’m too close to its food source, I am reminded that hummingbirds, like all birds, are the evolutionary descendants of dinosaurs.
A hummingbird has a T-Rex heart.
Robin writes in the odd corners of the day and night and often about birds. See more at thenightmail.com.