“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. Everything was fine and then nothing, no calls, no messages. She’s ghosted me.”
“You must have done something to upset her.”
“Well, she didn’t like me driving fast.”
“That must be it.”
“Anyway, I’m going out.” Then he walked through the walls to the street.
Connell still writes a bit from time to time.
Dolly squinted up, stolen from her busy holopad by the boisterous burst of blue-hued starlight. Her pupils adjusted. She caught her breath.
“Oh!”
Her Comet-class space train, cantering along the networked velocity gates, weaved a shimmering silver thread through the dense asteroid cloud.
“…I’ll need celery for soup,” she remembered.
Ben Toovey is a Brit living in Germany, and a keen procrastinator.
Margo used to wonder about her friend Ellen’s strange requests.
“Would you mind picking up some industrial-sized trash bags?”
“Can I borrow your duct tape?”
“Wanna hold my new pistol?”
“Just take my phone.”
Now, sitting here in prison, it all made perfect sense.
Ellen wasn’t her friend after all.
Susan Gale Wickes is a writer from Indiana. She claims nobody was harmed in the writing of this story.
Tonight I write by candlelight. A scheduled outage, they said. No light, no heat, no electronic hum, but in the shadows story pours from my pen. Stream of consciousness, words flow like water or wine or my own blood.
Now I know I should have contrived a blackout long ago.
Robin writes in the odd corners of the day and night and often about birds. See more at thenightmail.com.
I arrive at school hot, sweaty. I want to run like Usain Bolt. He runs as fast as a car. My teacher says it’s not possible to keep up that speed for long, but she’s wrong. She has to be.
When I can, I’ll be gone. From he-who-hits and she-who-ignores.
Laura Besley writes short fiction in the precious moments that her children are asleep. Her fiction has appeared online, in print and in various anthologies. She tweets at @laurabesley.
The story of the week for September 9 to 13 is…
Decay by Lisa Alletson
The house began to eat itself. It had no other choice, having grown sluggish and depressed from the family secrets rotting inside its crevices.
Help would’ve come if anyone asked, but no one recognized its deep decay. It had been staged for sale, appearing in peak condition from the outside.
Lisa Alletson is an emerging writer whose work has been published in The Globe and Mail, Ginosko Literary Journal, and The Write Launch. She was born in South Africa and lives in Toronto, Canada. Follow her on Twitter at @LisaAlletson.
She combs the soft shoulders of highways for lost garments fossilized in the sun-baked gravel.
By moonlight, she sews her scarecrow children and poses them on the slouching swing set in her yard. She tells herself it’s only kitsch, like bathtub Jesus, but catches herself watching from the kitchen window.
C.F. Carter is a Canadian publisher and writer. His microfiction has been published in Microfiction Monday Magazine and Postcard Shorts.
The owners complained they no longer had the time—with marriage, kids, and life in general—and could no longer afford to operate a business with such slim margins, but when the time came to officially close its doors, none of them could bear to let the old bookstore go.
Ran Walker is the author of seventeen books, the most recent of which is Portable Black Magic: Tales of the Afro Strange. He teaches creative writing at Hampton University in Virginia.
Turns out it wasn’t me. It was her.
Two weeks ago we were in the same place but not together, at the funeral for a mutual friend. She walked the church aisle with the guy she’d married. They made such an unpretty pair that I was freed from what ifs.
Kent Oswald writes, edits and pedagogs in NYC. Find additional words at kentoswald.com.