After a year of retirement spent plopped on the couch bingeing on-demand TV and enjoying the freedom from corporate deadlines that filled sleepless nights with worry, I’m thinking I better start setting my own deadlines and get my butt moving or else the inevitable deadline will arrive sooner than later.
Charles Gray is retired and living in Austin, Texas. He enjoys playing chess and writing.
“Thank you, Darling, that’s just exactly what I needed,” he said without even looking up, too busy shoveling the meal’s few delectable remnants into his drooling face; too insensitive and neglectful to provide the eye contact every great chef both craves and deserves.
“You’re welcome,” she replied, mentally debating antidotes.
Ron. Lavalette lives on Vermont’s Canadian border. His poetry, flash fiction, and creative nonfiction has been very widely published in both print and pixel forms. His first chapbook, Fallen Away (Finishing Line Press), is now available at all standard outlets. A reasonable sample of his published works can be found at EGGS OVER TOKYO.
The picnic was everything they’d hoped for.
The table, beautifully set, sparkled in the afternoon sun.
Heavenly aromas wafted on the summer breeze.
They anxiously gathered around in anticipation of the upcoming feast.
Betty brought potato salad.
Bill made his famous meatloaf.
Sadly for them, Mildred brought a fly swatter.
Susan Gale Wickes lives in Indiana. She enjoys writing short stories, cartoon captioning contests, and the occasional picnic.
I once dated a man who never smelled. No sour morning breath, no corn-chip feet, no pungent sweat. My nose—less trusting than my heart—sniffed for signs of humanity. But even his gas didn’t provide a whiff. Farts of a hollow man, all sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Laurie P. Mendoza is an elementary school counselor and children’s author who has been published in Spider Magazine. She also dabbles in playwriting, personal essays, and holding a grudge. This is her second story for Fifty-Word Stories.
As the group approached the house, it was clearly uninhabited.
The windows were dusty, cobwebs hung in every corner.
“We gonna do this or what?” Jake asked the group. No one spoke.
Creeping around back, even before gaining entry, they felt the presence.
Emily said, “I’m out!”
Everyone else died.
Kim Smyth is a freelance writer/blogger studying to become a transcriptionist. Find her at her blog, Words on a Page, or on Medium.
Majestic waterfalls, cascading and splashing; deep rivers, surging and flowing; mountain streams, sparkling and burbling; heavy rain, falling and sweeping; powerful surf, cresting and churning; all God’s work, in which we rejoice, but all things Maxwell tried not to think about as he willed his excruciating bus ride to end.
Archibald Hobbs is looking forward to the publication of his debut novel, “The Glorious Face of Sorrow” (Austin Macauley), later this year. Whilst he primarily writes to impress his wife, he would not object to a wider audience.
He was doing headstands on the beach when a radio blared: Income inequality at all-time high!
Sinking, he allowed the sand to reach his ears.
Violence, poverty, global warming!
“Oh, enough already,” he grumbled.
Down went his head, nice and snug, until the radio was muted.
Then the sea rose.
Michelle Wilson’s words have appeared in Litro Magazine, The Drabble, 50-Word Stories, Literally Stories, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, among others. She lives in Miami Beach, Florida. Sometimes she can be found at medium.com/@wilsmk.
Dough. I needed dough that day.
Ray would loan it for a price.
Me? I took the loan. “Oy vey—”
father said, “such bad advice!”
Soul? I sold mine on that day,
lamenting the price I’d pay.
Teams of hitmen bat away
’til I pay them back their dough!
Ken Gosse prefers writing short, rhyming, humorous poetry. First published in First Literary Review–East in November 2016, he is also in The Offbeat, Pure Slush, Parody, Home Planet News Online, and other publications. Raised in the Chicago suburbs, now retired, he and his wife have lived with their dogs and cats in Mesa, AZ, over twenty years.
Soon after the admission to full membership of a significant number of female applicants, the board of a previously all-male Bostonian club considered a motion for a new construction project designed specifically to expand the capacity of the powder rooms.
To no one’s great surprise, the voting followed potty lines.
John H. Dromey has had short fiction published in Mystery Weekly Magazine and 190 other venues.
On the way to the crematorium a large beer truck inserts itself between the hearse and the cortege, then, despite signals to overtake, tenaciously holds its position. In the moments of sad gladness, down the line of following cars, the laughter ripples. “Harry would have appreciated that,” they all agree.
John Young is an old chap grappling with themes of limits and longings. He lives in St Andrews Scotland.