When the girl found me, I carried no traces of humanity. Unremembered, I became smooth as an egg. Seeing me should have killed her.
Though blind, she could hear my stories. As she listened, my limbs and features reappeared.
I kissed her eyelids and dissolved, tethered to Earth no more.
Becky Kjelstrom watches the night sky and ponders, what is light without dark or the known without the unknown?
They stopped listening when the truck hit us. From the back seat I’d been explaining Three- and Five-Act Structure.
The side door crumpled and I realised my mistake: this was Act Five of my story, not Act Two.
Maybe the Midpoint of the lorry driver’s arc, Point of No Return.
Tom O’Brien is an Irishman living in London. He’s been published in numerous places across the web and has short stories printed in Blood & Bourbon, Blink-Ink, and DEFY! Anthologies. His novella Straw Gods will be published by Reflex Press in 2020. He’s on Twitter at @tomwrote and his website is tomobrien.co.uk.
Withering from within, she huddled her hunched-over spirit through the imposing church doors.
In her closed fist was enough shiny and dull copper, grubbed from the streets, to pay.
Perhaps crumbs of kind words. Or drops of holy water from the priest’s aspergill.
Just enough sustenance to survive another week.
Una Nina Nine loves to read and write.
Football ruled his weekend. College all Saturday and pros all Sunday. This was his just reward for a hard week of work.
He turned the television off after the last weekend football game. The house was eerily quiet.
He wondered, idly, when she’d left and whether she would come back.
NT Franklin has been published in Page and Spine, Fiction on the Web, 101 Words, Friday Flash Fiction, CafeLit, Madswirl, Postcard Shorts, 404 Words, Scarlet Leaf Review, Freedom Fiction, Burrst, Entropy, Alsina Publishing, Fifty-word stories, Dime Show Review, among others.
The story of the week for October 21 to 25 is…
Grocery Run by Mariya Khan
and
Like a Crow by Louella Lester
The zombies falter. Flesh becomes corrupt. Limbs are shed; animation a struggle.
Yet the fiends still pursue us. Onto our fields we stagger; new furrows disrupted by frantic feet.
Spades raised, we strike; the dead fall, cleaved into pieces. Good fertilizer, for our crop.
We live on, another winter assured.
Paul Lewthwaite, who hails from Scotland, hopes to start writing again after a ten-year hiatus.
Shayna was standing as still as a statue, small fists clenched, glaring up at Abraham Lincoln. After almost a minute, she took a deep breath, marched boldly up, and slapped that huge bronze boot. Then she stated, with great satisfaction, “He’s not real.”
So we went to feed the ducks.
Katharine Valentino retired from drudgery in 2015 and now stays busy as the owner of Setting Forth—on a Literary Itinerary and as co-lead and website administrator of Plastic Up-Cycling.
Her eyes scan the fruits and vegetables—oranges, apples, eggplants, peppers—neatly piled like cascading mountains. Nothing like the crowded, messy markets of home. No loud negotiations and catch-ups with familiar faces. Here, just screeches from carts.
Swallowing the lump in her throat, she takes some okra and moves on.
Mariya Khan is a fiction writer from Maryland and Editorial Assistant at National Geographic. When she’s not visiting museums or exploring D.C., you can find her cooking new recipes while binge-watching crime dramas.
In my teens, when it wasn’t safe to go home after school, I’d hide out in the library.
To fool the librarians into thinking I belonged there, I flipped through books and magazines.
In this way I slipped into an intimacy with words from which I have yet to recover.
Bob Thurber is the author of “Paperboy: A Dysfunctional Novel” and two collections of stories. A celebrated master of Flash and Micro Fiction, his work has appeared in 60 anthologies, received dozens of awards, and been used in schools and colleges throughout the world. He resides in Massachusetts where, though legally blind, he continues to write every day. Visit his website at BobThurber.net.
“Where’s your darling husband?” asked my neighbour, peeking above our shared hedge.
“Travelling,” I replied, juggling the parcels I held while struggling to open the boot of my car.
“Oh? Where to?”
I wiped one of the parcels that was slightly blood-stained and pushed it further into the boot. “Everywhere.”
AJ Joseph occasionally writes at Words from Sonobe and tweets very short stories as @sonobeus.