This table, the wine, bread and cheese—that’s nonfiction; calling it “dinner” is, perhaps, a fiction.
Your silence, my tears, these trembling hands: nonfiction. Our last meal together: fiction.
Your attraction to someone else—OK, we’ll call that nonfiction. But the idea you no longer love me… must be fiction.
Nathan Alling Long lives in Philadelphia and can be found at blogs.stockton.edu/longn. His collection of fifty flash fictions, The Origin of Doubt, was published by Press 53 in March 2018.
(For Trey, with everlasting love)
The last time the boy slept at grandma’s house he told her that portraits of her face had been painted on the inside of his eyelids, so that’s what he got to look at every night while he waited to fall asleep. He pinched finger to thumb. “Brush this big.”
Bob Thurber is the author of “Paperboy: A Dysfunctional Novel” and two collections of stories. A celebrated master of Flash and Micro Fiction, his work has appeared in 60 anthologies, received dozens of awards, and been used in schools and colleges throughout the world. He resides in Massachusetts where, despite severe vision loss, he continues to write every day. Visit his website at BobThurber.net.
You and me. A fantasy.
Love, pain — ecstasy, agony — life. That night, frigid, blankets, warm. Stars. The stars! Magic.
But we knew. We lay there, lying to ourselves, lying to the stars. The million ways it was right couldn’t overcome the handful of ways it was wrong.
Us. A fantasy.
Michael Jay Aderhold is an Appalachian-hillbilly-corporate-dropout-high-school-English-teacher living in Suwanee, Georgia, where the climate, both in the primary and secondary sense of the word, is much too warm and humid. As of this writing, he has less than two years to go.
Before dying, she softly whispered, “I’ve never really loved you, and now I can’t make it up to you.”
He already knew, and consoled, “Don’t worry about that now. I’ve loved you enough for both of us.”
That’s when he saw in her eyes the love he’d always waited for.
Connell is always upbeat about putting something in his bio section and personally writes them all by himself as others couldn’t be bothered doing it for him.
Oliver moved to California.
I don’t know when I fell in love with this child I barely knew. He’s the first person to whom I ever freely said “I love you.”
He’s only two. He won’t remember me, but he filled a void in my life I didn’t know existed.
Dana C. Smith holds an MFA in writing from Spalding University with an emphasis on fiction. Her previous work has appeared in “Ladies Home Journal” online version, “House Organ,” and “Escape Your World,” a short story anthology by Scribes Valley Publishing Company, where she was a finalist in a 2015 short fiction competition. She lives and writes in Nashville, Tennessee.
They had planned to buy an RV together and go traveling around the world after their retirement, and today was the day.
So he bought a motorbike, patiently selected the most beautiful bouquet of flowers he could find, brought it to her, washed her tombstone, and started his journey alone.
Siavash Safary wrote this story.
“Computer, retrieve memory AF-278451.”
The tablet fills with dream-like images of the first time they met, her curls, smile that lit up the room. The wine spilled deliberately to mark her as his own.
That night became every night, became 20 years. A galaxy of silence since death took her.
Jim Doss lives in Sykesville, Maryland, and earns his living as a software engineer. He has previously published two books of poems: Learning to Talk Again and What Remains. In partnership with Werner Schmitt, he also published a book of German translations entitled The Last Gold of Expired Stars: The Complete Poems of Georg Trakl 1908 – 1914. In his spare time, he is an editor for the Loch Raven Review.
Her croft was almost inaccessible.
They’d met at a church fete. The congregation crowded around her innovative confectionery.
He’d hovered over her Dunesslin Pudding.
“Hot.”
“Aye,” he’d acknowledged.
She laughed as rich as she baked. They’d had tea.
Now, he fingered the ring as the quad bounced along the track.
Irish writer Perry McDaid lives in Derry under the brooding brows of Donegal hills which he occasionally hikes in search of druidic inspiration. He even finds it on occasion.
Deadline is only some hours away.
His writer’s mind is obsessed with other thoughts.
He unsuccessfully tries to focus on the given assignment.
Eventually he gives up.
Sleep still eludes him.
Time ticks.
Notification beeps.
It reads, “You are my first thought each morning.”
He doesn’t respond.
He simply smiles.
Vijai Pant is a language teacher in a school in India. He is also a freelance writer.
I barked and barked… and the sun came up.
Morning.
His coffee, my biscuit.
Toast and a treat.
He’ll read the newspaper,
I’ll dream of slow, inattentive cats.
When he reaches down to ruffle my fur,
his hand feels like the afternoon sun.
This must be what they call Thanksgiving.
Paul Bluestein is a physician by profession (OB-GYN), a self-taught musician (guitar and keys), and a devoted Bridge and Scrabble player (yes, ZAX is a word). He is also a writer of poetry whenever the Muse unexpectedly calls him and rings insistently until he answers (even if he doesn’t want to talk with her just then).