“You can be whatever you want to be.” my father said.
“Then I want to be a writer, Dad,” I told him.
“You can’t.”
“But you told me I can be whatever I want to be.”
“Sorry. What I meant was you can be whatever doctor you want to be.”
Mary Kaye Valdez has been fond of written words since the second she found out she couldn’t get along with spoken ones. She also loves storytelling, but frankly, she’s just a liar who wants an excuse. Her work has previously been published in Down in the Dirt.
A breeze scuttles through the jostling limbs of the coppiced chestnuts, and they clatter like masts in a marina.
In my imagination, when the hill is stripped bare, these trees will be crafted into green-winged ships, thrusting proudly towards the broad horizon.
In reality, I know they’ll become fence posts.
Tamsin keeps finding herself writing about trees – but then, literally, we can’t live without them.
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.
My old business lecturer at Harvard always used to say, “If you can dream it, you can do it.”
Hauntingly ironic really. Last night I dreamed I murdered her.
The body is now in the trunk of my car. I will wait until it’s past midnight, then dispose of it.
Steve Coverdale is an Englishman living in Nova Scotia. He is currently writing his first novel about a football player who lives forever.
In the end nothing would remain. Faerie and all it had ever been would now seep into the soil and the streams, filtering down over rocks into the villages below.
Its ether would become something foreign to men. They would call it imagination, but we would always call it magic.
David recently won a competition and then another and now he’s gonna be a Dad… He needs a drink.
The most communicative owl in the owl kingdom is perched outside Michael’s window. She’s on a chatter-on-chatter-off schedule: approximately twenty minutes chatter, ten minutes silence.
During the silences, Michael’s been sleeping and dreaming in vivid bursts. He’s expecting the dialogue of these dreams to soon be reduced to, “Who? Who?”
Nan McLamb lives and writes in a Carolina pine forest wedged between a swamp and the ocean. She is rarely kept awake by owls.
Nobody saw the blood on her hands, as she walked out the door. She had only done him and herself a favour. They probably wouldn’t have had a “bright future” together anyway. It was for the best.
Back in the room, her inner artist child lay slain, bleeding to death.
Yassi Dooo believes the inner artist of each person is of the opposite sex. How else could one pro(actively)create?
“It’s literally unbelievable how fast I can run.”
“Uh huh. Sure. Are you as fast as a car?”
“I’m faster than that.”
“As fast as a jet?”
“Faster than that.”
“As fast as Usain Bolt?”
“Faster than that.”
“Pfff. Maybe in your dreams.”
“…Isn’t that what we were talking about?”
This story was based on the TypeTrigger prompt “faster than that.”