I remember the soothing sun kissing my exposed skin as the soft tide ran over my toes. The feeling of summer will forever be in my mind, as will the memory of you and your haunting, blue eyes.
Like the season of summer, all good things come to an end.
Rachael Scharp likes to write, especially poetry, and summer is her favorite season.
Rachael is part of a creative writing class from Liberty High School in Colorado Springs, Colorado, that wrote fifty-word stories and submitted them as a group.
She had a burning but unrequited love. The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, so she transformed herself into a microorganism and crawled up his intestines.
She discovered some deep fried fig newtons in there, which intensified her affections.
She lived in his heart until he died.
Based on a title suggested by Dan Hingston via Facebook.
The residents of what was colloquially known as the 9th Ave. Bawdy House were sad souls. They had abrasive personalities, they ate their fingernails, and they performed their “Yes, pleases” and “No, thank yous” with their mouths and their hands, but never their eyes.
They were rescued, but never saved.
This story was based on a request for prompts in the form of three adjectives beginning with the letters A, B, and C. The adjectives abrasive, bawdy, and colloquial, were provided by @LorGraham.
Molly slipped into the icy water, her eyes closing with a steely resolve.
No more would they bully or call her names. She’d had enough.
A note and her diary sat on the counter.
Her parents turned her sad tale into a bestselling novel. It’s true: money heals all wounds.
Nancy A. Cavanaugh is a freelance writer living in Keene, NH. You can read her flash and micro fiction at myflashywords.blogspot.com.
An apple and a pear fell in love.
They knew it was unusual, but they wanted to make it work, and the wise old hummingbird knew how they could.
They scattered their seeds all around the orchard, and when the trees grew they grafted branches onto one another and lived forever.
Because I am an angel, you said you believed in them, and so I believed in you.
Yet here at the door of death who should come for you but Him.
The light of your love for me outshone the darkness in your soul.
And for that we are doomed.
Editor’s Note: This story grows on me a little more each time I read it, as I start to tease out more meaning from each sentence. At first it was an enigma, and now I find it appealingly haunting. I recommend coming back for a repeated read later, so you have time to explore and digest it.
Tammy’s poem “Twas the Night Before Blood Moon” will be published in Pill Hill Press’s Leap Year Edition of Daily Flash 2012: 366 Days of Flash Fiction, and she is a proud mother whose son is the joy and light of her life.
Thrashing through the midnight darkness,
he stumbled
but did not cry out.
Silently he lay
listening to silence.
Then he fumbled
in his pocket
for a match.
In the flame’s flickering glow, he was struck
by irony
and the traitor’s arrow.
He had assumed
he would die
by the sword.
A bubbling creek wended its way through the sun-dappled wood, between the wild apple trees and the bushes drooping with juicy purple berries.
An inquisitive fawn dipped its tongue into the creek and pulled away with a frightened bleat.
Upstream, where the beavers built and warred, the bricked-in bayou boiled.
There was a man at the corner with one third of a hat and half a pair of shoes. I offered him my boots. He sold them to a homeless guy for ten bucks and gave the money to a woman at a bus stop.
I really liked those boots…
Alternate Version:
He stood there on the corner, with tattered hat and coat. His backpack overflowed with toys that he was handing out.
His shoes were only halfers: they covered just his heels. I offered mine, but he declined, ungrateful little eel.
He made me feel guilty, and guilt is not genteel.
This story, and the supplementary poem, were inspired by a title suggested by @hexapodium.
You tell me that I’ve changed,
My priorities rearranged.
Did you ever really know me
At all?
It’s been a long time
Since you swept me off my feet.
But I won’t admit defeat.
I have faith enough for both of us.
That’s the one thing that’s never changed
At all.
J Dianne Waye found a link to Fifty-Word Stories on Kelley Armstrong’s writing forum. She isn’t the first to submit a story because of that link, and hopefully she won’t be the last!