My cellphone buzzed unnaturally loud in the quiet cabin, making several boys stir. Grasping blindly, I muted it and held my breath until the room slowly returned to silence.
The next three hours crawled until reveille, when I could finally return my mother’s call and confirm my father had died.
A recovering lawyer, Liam MacDonald has written for decades. He finds some stories easier than others.
The faculty’s all smiles, all compliments. Everyone chimes in. Everyone loves and admires our Administrators. Everyone is loyal. All is clean, shiny, bright. At least on the surface. Because everyone knows, or at least suspects, the new faculty hire, the “fair-haired boy” of the Board of Trustees, is a plant.
Wendy K. Mages, a Mercy University Professor, is a Pushcart Prize nominee and an award-winning poet and author. She earned her doctorate in Human Development and Psychology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and her master’s in Theatre at Northwestern University. As part of her investigation of the effect of the arts on learning and development, she performs at storytelling events and festivals in the US and abroad. To learn more about her and her work, and to find links to her published stories and poetry, please visit her Mercy University Faculty page and her website, Wendy Mages: Storyteller.
Drippy red wax stained the white carpet where the lava lamp leaked after it tumbled off the table and cracked open when Sandy kicked it while demonstrating for her ten-year-old daughter the one-handed cartwheels she performed at high school football games before she got pregnant and had to quit cheerleading.
Rita Riebel Mitchell writes in the Pinelands of South Jersey where she lives amongst the trees with her husband. Her work appears in HAD, Flash Fiction Magazine, Versification, and more. Find her at ritariebelmitchell.com/friday-micro.
I watched as Mom-Mom made her bed.
She raised the sheet corners like four strong sails. Plumped embroidered pillowcases until the roses bloomed. Leveled her handmade quilt with an engineer’s precision.
And I felt such sorrow for this woman, who’d always warned me that girls shouldn’t have too much ambition.
Emily Hall is a freelance writer whose prose appears, or is forthcoming in, places such as Passages North, Portland Review, Blood Orange Review, 100 Word Story and Cherry Tree. She has a PhD in contemporary Anglophone novels, is a prose reader for West Trade Review, and lives in NC with her husband.
Passing through our peanut butter and jelly kitchen, she’d shoot some words at me before grabbing her movie star sunglasses and hurrying off to someplace more glamorous. A petite woman, vodka lover with sleepy cat’s eyes and hip-switching walk, poured into high leather boots, forever waving goodbye over her shoulder.
Sarah Flick is retired from the US Forest Service and lives in Colorado. She has published in 101 Words, Flash Fiction Weekly, and a Modern Love column in the New York Times.
I walk into the VA hospital and pass through two crowded waiting rooms, urology and oncology, before reaching my waiting room: neurology. Each space overflowing with men along in years, Vietnam carved into our faces, we sit and wait. Time ticks away. We wait. Wait. The waiting. Not long now.
Nick Di Carlo has been knocking around this planet for seven decades and a bit. He writes short stories to avoid looking into mirrors and watching clocks. His stories can be read in Muleskinner Journal, Flash Fiction Magazine, Guilty Crime Story Magazine and Shotgun Honey.
The news reader’s voice broke. She faltered, then started to cry. The camera cut away to a pre-edited package. This was no simple obituary. Regular programming was interrupted, because he was dead. Around the world, mourning had begun. I watched, eyes dry, and touched the scar he left that night.
A former journalist and communications consultant in the entertainment industry, John Singh has written countless newspaper articles, press releases, and speeches; a number of short stories and a couple of novels. He’s still waiting to hear back from agents on those. Some of his work can be found at jswrites.com.
“Only what I can put in my backpack.”
They ask for their Lego.
I hang a bag from each handle bar… Throws my balance off a little, but I can manage.
I can only make a few more trips before I have to make dinner.
Thank goodness it’s not far.
Michelle Dinnick really enjoys writing micro-fiction, often inspired by personal experience. Sometimes she writes longer pieces as well. She has been published in the Globe and Mail, and Chicken Soup for the Soul; and won several writing and poetry awards. You can find her online at: fiftywordstories.com, commuterlit.com, and femininecollective.com.
She apologized for being cranky, said she’d been up half the night repairing her heart, patching with duct tape and popsicle sticks, said she’d get me the back rent soon as she could find work, asked me to take her boyfriend’s name off the mailbox. Ex-boyfriend, she stressed and smiled.
Bob Thurber is the author of six books. Regarded as a master of Flash and Micro Fiction, his work has appeared in Esquire and other magazines, been anthologized 60 times, received a long list of awards, and been utilized in schools and colleges throughout the world. He resides in Massachusetts. Visit his website at BobThurber.net.
Lucky I love the sound of my own voice. Echoing, Echoing, Echoing. Lucky I love the sound of my own voice. Echoing of bare walls. Echoing. Echoing. Echoing. Lucky I love the sound of my own voice. No one listening. Listening. Lucky I. Echoing. Echoing. Lucky me. Lucky
David loves the sound of his own voice, but also the voices of his wife, children and grandchildren.