It was her first blind date.
“Sit at the table near the window,” he’d said. “Wear yellow.”
Now, at the table near the window, she waited. Their eyes met briefly as he passed. She anticipated the cold rush of air, but the door never opened. She still felt the chill.
Susan Gale Wickes wrote this story. She rarely window shops and never wears yellow.
The blind date was at a charming French restaurant. They had a wonderful dinner: foie gras, lobster, and crème brülée, while they drank a bottle of Château Lafite 1787, everything requested by him to celebrate that magic moment.
Afterwards, he asked her to pay the bill; he’d forgotten his wallet.
Claudia Ramalho is Brazilian and is in the upper intermediate English level (B2).
Nervously, in darkness, she waits on a park bench holding his photograph printed from the internet. Eventually, red carnation discarded, she trails disconsolately homeward.
Meanwhile, local traffic police pull a body from wreckage, note the crushed carnation, and discover in his pockets a woman’s photo, duct tape, and a knife.
Viv lives in Somerset, England, and is retired, but still nippy on her pins. She recently joined a writing class and has been trying out 50-word stories on her fellow writers, as her normal stories sent them to sleep. Viv has no pets, but has one partner and a garden full of birds that require daily feeding, as well as a love of books, Shakespeare, and treacle tart.
One after another, Meg ignored all of the warning signs that her blind date might be trouble: his deathly-pale complexion; the creaky door to his castle and the heavy drapes that kept the so-called solarium dark as a dungeon; his Transylvanian accent; the lobster bib with her picture on it…
John H. Dromey has had flash fiction published in a number of print anthologies, as well as online at Liquid Imagination, three minute plastic, Thrillers, Killers ’n’ Chillers, and elsewhere.