“What is she like?”
“Like hearing your favorite song play with just a slight hiss from the vinyl.”
Blank stare.
“Like a robin sweetly singing just for you.”
Furrowed brow.
“Like the smell of sunshine.”
Bewildered eyes.
“So what does that make her?”
“She’s an indescribable experience you never forget.”
Lawrence Fawkes hails from Southern California and aspires to become some sort of professional writer in journalism, fiction, or another field.
Some folks say that when a red moon crests the horizon, twenty-three percent of the world’s pregnant women are within an hour (in either direction) of giving birth.
Me? I say it’s more like eighteen percent. A lot of folks like to exaggerate. I found that out the hard way.
Randy burst through the door. “Mandy, do you only love me for my money?!”
Mandy looked up from her fashion magazine, startled. “What? No! Honey! I love you for your… well, for your eyes!”
Randy sank into his chair stuffed with hundred-dollar bills. “Oh, phew.”
Mandy gripped her eye-socket spoon.
Ecstatically they haul our creaking wooden horse to the center of their city. The molten sun cooks our hidden wooden womb while spitting sweat blinds us.
My beating heart embraces the huge coming of death that will bring an end to this, the greatest war the world has ever seen.
Mike Cahill is the President of www.futureknowledge.biz. He borrowed the title of this story from Plato.
The day after the day all the fruit disappeared, I broke into a grocery store in the middle of the night. It was a ghost town: the empty aisles were strewn with plastic bags lit by ghastly signs declaring, “We Still Have Vegetables!”
The Vitamin C pills were already gone.
“I’m an utter failure,” moaned Willy the possum. “If only I had gone to the Interstate with my brother Ben. I could’ve really been somebody!”
Willy flopped down beside a pothole on the back-country road and sighed wretchedly. “Goodbye, Linda.”
Perhaps symbolically, the truck driver didn’t even notice the bump.
Vigafray suggested the title this story was written for. I interpreted it as a play on the classic, erm, play, Death of a Salesman, which I’ve never actually seen or read. Maybe that’s why this story is so depressing and not funny. I don’t know. So sue me. The lack of humor in this story is just another in my long line of failures and uselessnesses. (Heh, there are so many “S”es in “uselessnesses”. Hee hee.)
Life as a superhero has become difficult with the preponderance of cell-phones. Phone booths are getting so rare as to be nonexistent. One is forced to change into tights in a Port-o-Potty when one can find one. Unfortunately, clothes left in a portable toilet usually aren’t there when you return.
This story, by L. Christopher Bird, was originally submitted for the Mere 50 Words contest.
Two glowing eyes peered at me from the shadows: wolves.
I blinked, and there were four eyes. Then six. Then ten.
Then… Thirteen?
I did a quick recount. Thirteen? That didn’t make sense. Had one lost an eye in a fight?
Ah, it had just been winking. I winked back.
They weren’t there before I slept last night. I would have noticed for sure. The dusty shapes stood out in stark contrast on the otherwise pristine surface. Size 9 at a guess. Two sizes larger than my own. Two clearly defined footprints.
Why the hell were they on my ceiling?
This story earned an Honourable Mention, with a $10 prize, in the Mere 50 Words contest.
When Grace asked me out I was already in the limousine pouring gin, feeling her fingers on my cheek. That blood-red dress—like she was poured into it and some splashed on my skin.
Later I saw her kissing Alex. People said she played games. I thought it was love.
This story earned an Honourable Mention, with a $10 prize, in the Mere 50 Words contest.