I see you smile at the gift he sent you.
It’s dead, you know.
Smile, as you care tenderly for it. All the care you lavish on his tribute won’t make it last. Won’t stop the smooth, slippery red from drying to a lusterless, coppery brown. Smile for your rose.
Katie is a young woman in college.
The walls of the canyon echoed with the blast of two shotgun barrels emptying themselves into something or another. Maybe it was a desperate fugitive. Maybe it was the sheriff. Maybe it was a snake or a wildcat. Maybe it was just a cross-eyed bush.
The vultures were curious, regardless.
He led the eager men into the cold, white room. He was a well-to-do gentleman with time and blood on his hands. It was a relief to finally reveal his passion for taxidermy.
“Is the collection finished?” they asked.
“Almost,” he said, his eyes out-gleaming the scalpel in his hand.
Kell wrote this story for a school assignment, with the title as a prompt.
His cold silhouette was hunched over. He wasn’t even enjoying his cigarette. It was like a chore to him. He took his stabs at it quickly while he paced around on the balcony.
He always blew the smoke upwards. This was probably the only time his eyes looked towards God.
Charlie Dunn is a college student who also wrote Full Count and Tracer Bullet.
Our Hero stood resolute in the middle of the rain-soaked, corpse-littered asphalt.
Zombie earthworms.
They inched closer, exuding sinister inevitability, crushed, broken, bloated, wasting away, and hungry.
Our Hero calmly set a bowl of oatmeal on the ground, flavouring it with his own blood.
That should keep them. For now.
I asked, on Twitter, what I should write a fifty-word story about today. @dotsam wrote, “Saving the universe with a bowl of oatmeal.” @RacoonResidue wrote, “Zombie earth worms.”
It was thought that the deaths of the innocent fell on her pale shoulders.
A rudimentary trial was constructed so that the people could determine whether she possessed corrupt power. If she floated when bound, the evil spirits guiding her would be made known.
At least she wasn’t a witch.
Aaron is a high-school student in central Indiana.
“They emerged at twenty-three hundred hours and were above sixty major population centers within thirty minutes. For twelve hours they scanned us in ways we don’t even understand.”
“And then they just… left?”
“Yep. Gone.”
“Any theories?”
“We think maybe they were looking for something. And they didn’t find it.”
It was New Year’s Eve, and the world was quiet. There were no people banging on pots and pans, no fireworks, no descending balls of light.
The humans peacefully, mysteriously slept.
Arthur C. Clarke predicted contact with extraterrestrial life in the year twenty-ten.
He was wrong by half an hour.
She was a natural athlete; she was born running and never stopped. She had a long career as a world champion and Olympic gold-medalist in track and field.
At the age of one hundred and three she stumbled over a chair, which gave Death a chance to finally overtake her.
The howling of wolves pierced the frosty twilight air.
“If I weren’t so scared for my life,” whispered Mina, “I’d find that eerily beautiful.”
“I think it’s still possible to find something beautiful when you’re scared,” whispered Frederick.
“Are you flirting with me?” asked Mina.
She never got an answer.