Most people de-vein their shrimp, say they don’t wanna eat the feces.
I peel back the brown track with my teeth and suck it out first.
Most people also don’t know shrimp will strip a corpse in three months.
Two more, and the wife is out of my system forever.
Alexandra Keister is an executive assistant and writer hungry for success, and on most days a good maple bar. She always de-veins her shrimp.
It was how she went up to him at him at the party, waiting for me to be on the other side of the room. I just knew. He’ll deny it, and say I’m being jealous or paranoid, like all the other times. But I knew.
A woman always knows.
Matthew Corey is a writer living in Brooklyn, and has poems published in Two Cities Review, Travel-taintd: Turtle-Point Press Review, and fiction in the Lascaux Review.
The Story of the Month is chosen from the Story of the Week winners announced from the past month.
The finalists for March were:
An Apartment on the Moon by Cathy Ulrich
Luck by Viv Burgess
Inside the Walls of Troy by Bob Thurber
The Diviner by Candace Kubinec
The winner of the March 2016 Story of the Month, and the $10 prize, is…
Luck
The pair of moments described in this story tell the most succinct parts of a much larger, and very engaging, story. That’s a great thing for a piece of microfiction to accomplish.
I glanced at her.
She eyeballed me.
Looked away.
Silent intensity swelled
As the space truncated.
And then:
We were finding it difficult to breathe
The smell, the heavy footsteps.
And yet we couldn’t bring ourselves to speak
And state the obvious.
A literal presence:
The elephant in the room.
Jon is from the North West of England and works in local Government with a background in Newspaper Journalism. He’s a father of two, who inspire him. He is attempting to write more and be creative with short written forms.
Eve had been pretending to drown for almost a whole minute when Adam finally noticed. She admired his muscular body as he dived into the water.
He was at her side in a heart-flushed moment. As he pulled her to the bank, she whispered into his ear. “You’re mine now.”
Mark Farley is attempting to write 1,000,000 words in 2016. Please wish him luck! See more from him at mumbletoes.blogspot.co.uk.
The story of the week for April 4 to 8 is…
Terror by Viv Burgess
This is great use of a twist for artistry rather than comedic or shock effect. The metaphor of the stage as torture is really interesting!
Silence. Except for the dripping. So this is what it’s like to die, he thought. He moved slightly, and the knife grated against his ribs. If only he’d put the garbage out when she’d asked him the first time, or the second, or the third…
Drip drip.
Silence.
Jackie has written three (unpublished) novels, and is also a mosaic artist and tutor, when she’s not working at her “proper” job at a training agency.
Hank was a successful plumber, but dreamed of fronting a band. He sang whilst fixing the shower, filling the bathroom with renditions of the 60s classics he heard on his father’s records.
His work complete, he belted out the last note, turned the stopcock, and listened to the shower cheer.
Guy once started a band with a stranger, at 2am, in the frozen food section of his local 24-hour Tesco. It frustrates him that he can’t seem to pull a story from it. This is his tenth 50-word story.
The girl fell, once. Gingerly, her father picked her up. He kissed her wound. “Roses bleed, too,” he said, drying the tears from her face.
She looked up to him, beautiful, bright-eyed, and unknowing of the secrets behind his eyes. Because given time, even roses grow dull and wither away.
Joaquim Chichava is unbearably quirky, and has grown to love wearing shorts.
A Russian man went to the doctor for an eye exam. He visited the doctor every year.
The doctor showed him the letters and numbers on the board: cwxy2 klta2ky.
Doctor: “Can you read the board?”
Russian Man: “What? Read? I don’t even know the guy. He’s my mom’s cousin.”
Dora Cseperkalo is a 15-year-old Hungarian student who enjoys studying English.