Over my shrimp fried rice, I eavesdrop on the flutter of conversations drifting from surrounding booths. Friends lunching and laughing.
Dining alone, I write about future undiscovered friendships in my journal. I’m in no rush to finish my meal, so I sip my jasmine tea and anticipate my fortune cookie.
Roberta Beach Jacobson wrote this story while dining solo at her neighborhood Chinese restaurant. Her fortune: ‘Investigate new possibilities with friends. Now is the time!’
Color splashed with feverish focus. Patterns known only to a mind set free.
Others, unknowing, are critical and harsh.
Persevering and reaching upward. Drawing inspiration from a well that any day could run dry. Straining to unveil what lies in darkness. Wanting only to give birth to what was dead.
Ken Grant is a freelance writer living in Santa Ana, California. His stories have appeared in Left Hand Publishers, Jitter Press, and Alien Dimensions.
Alzh. I cannot yet write that awful word in its entirety. I do not yet want to come to terms with it. It’s too real. It’s headed my way. It’s mine to deal with in its inevitability, its finality.
It’s me. Alzheimer’s.
There, I’ve written it while I still can.
Anne Rokeach has always loved the magic of words. Thanks to the programs of Upstate New York library systems, she has started putting them together in story form.
He had time to write and he had a plot. His favoured genre was crime, schemes to outwit the establishment. This book would be an autobiography.
He wasn’t yet sure of the ending but there was time for that, a lot of time. The judge had given him ten years.
Chris is a Health Service Research Manager from Wales, UK. He lives with his wife Hayley and Boarder Collie Toby in Pembrokeshire. He enjoys fishing, kayaking and cycling around the west coast of Wales and is a self-confessed flash fiction addict with some publication and competition success. See more at fusilliwriting.com.
A creative thought flashed through my brain. I dashed up the stairs two at a time, pushed open the office door.
Furniture, hidden beneath mountains of miscellaneous debris and detritus.
I gaped.
A recollection weeviled into my mind.
Gone.
The fog enveloped me again, and I turned and stumbled downstairs.
Jess Dubois, a retiree living near the coast in Kent, has just started writing flash fiction. When not writing she enjoys juggling all the writing, painting, and baking in her life.
Care to laugh? Perchance to shiver?
Maybe explore notions and foreign beliefs,
Or wander the depth of human emotion?
What if you could learn something about yourself
You’ve never imagined?
You can tell your tale.
The Muses claim monopoly on these wonders,
But I say every being is a bard.
Luke Swanson is a fledgling author from Oklahoma City. He has a novel and a handful of short stories featured in anthologies from Limitless Publishing.
Create a universe. Twist a hand and just let the galaxies flow through your fingertips. Obsess over tiny details: the colour of a flower, that specific shade of orange in the evening sky. Scatter moons into orbit like grains of sand.
That is what it means to be a God.
Isla is a fourteen-year-old aspiring author doing her very best to get her ideas across. Hopefully after exams she’ll have more time to write!
My students think writing these stories is impossible. I will make it my mission to show them otherwise. I will write one, right here, right now. Off the top of my head.
Some of them have started, I think. Some of them just waste time. Some of them watch, waiting.
Caitlin Griffin wrote this story.
Although labled as weatherproof, Tom’s notebook,
he learned,
was really only water resistant,
much like many watches, whose level
of protection is limited to soda spills,
brief splashes,
and like events.
From memory, he was able to reconstruct
just one of the day’s haiku, the rest being
lost beyond recall.
Phil Huffy stays up late reading Charles Dickens out loud.
Still in graduation cap and gown, Johnny gawked as a parade of robots entered the convention center, carrying colorful paintings and sculptures, sturdy keyboards and drums, even elegant, fashionable garments.
Several carried banners: “Inaugural Synthetic Art Festival.”
Disgusted, Johnny pitched his art school diploma in the trash and slouched off.
Gordon Sun is a surgeon, scientist, and consultant who lives in California and has published numerous peer-reviewed articles in the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and other medical journals. His literary writings can be found in Ars Medica and Hektoen International.