Her face is matted with filth, her tongue swollen with thirst. She resists the temptation of flowing sewage and limps through her pain, through broken rubble. She searches until, her hands raw, she uncovers their blood smeared canvas shoes, tiny and abandoned. Only then does she sit down and weep.
Leslie Roberts is a teacher of EFL whose encounters with pupils from other lands often inspire amateur writing efforts.
Sometimes heralded by trumpet or the quacking of a duck, the phantom is released.
Mischievously, often maliciously, it materializes; only to be rebuked by coughing and the waving of hands.
Retreating into the fabric of both cushion and time, the ghost of wind past lurks, waiting to be released anew.
Craig spends his time avidly fishing for compliments and hunting for the right words. He has previously been published on fiftywordstories.com.
It’s his first shift at the trendy burgers-and-fries restaurant. Behind the counter is a whiteboard labeled “Today’s potatoes are from…”
When the trainer asks him if he has questions, he wonders whether it isn’t more important to know where today’s meat is from.
It’s his last shift at the restaurant.
A graduate of the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California, Chad Greene experiments with twitter fiction @TheShortCourse.
I came of age in a time of no heroes.
The wars we knew to be right are now the history we learned as children.
The wars we believed were right became the history we wished hadn’t happened.
The wars we are fighting now? We pretend we’ve already won them.
Stuart Turnbull is absent without leave from the majority of life and finds that writing helps him remain that way — he occasionally blogs a story at diamondsanddross.blogspot.com.
She had loved him. He said he loved her, and she trusted him.
But a week before the wedding, he ran off with her little sister.
There was a note. And everybody believed it, until the day the pipe broke in the basement and the plumber went down to investigate.
Harry Demarest has retired after careers encompassing scientific
research, teaching at a university, software development, web
application development, and voter database compilation and
distribution. He is now spending his time with his grandchildren and
writing memoirs and short stories.
A day after the funeral the murderer sat smirking, counting his profits from the killing after finding refuge. The perfect crime, he thought. No one will ever come after me.
Then the doorbell rang. Moments later his accomplice ran in, his face pale.
“Is he armed?”
“Y-yes… H-he’s a… Zombie!”
Jason Huynh is a bored student who worries about accidental plagiarism.
I wonder how many hearts you have broken.
I want to show you mine. A sparrow with a broken neck. I flew into your life like a bird into a window.
You told me I should have expected it.
You exit without remorse. I have enough for both of us.
Jeff Switt is a retired advertising agency guy who loves writing flash fiction—some days to curb his angst, other days to fuel it. His words have been featured at Dogzplot, Boston Literary Review, Flash Fiction World, and Nailpolish Stories and have appeared at lots of places that take whatever you send in.
My parents never believed me that I had an evil clown living in my closet until they met him one day.
“Stop telling tall tales,” mom would say, and dad would chime in, too. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
It took me days to remove my parents’ bloodstains from the carpet.
Doug has contributed to the popular horror anthology Demonic Visions 50 Horror Tales. Doug’s poetry is also featured in Poetry Quarterly and was an editor’s choice in a New England poetry publication.
“I wasn’t really expecting it to work.”
The door hangs off its broken hinges.
“I thought that she’d be so grateful.”
Elixir soaks into the discarded bandages.
“Why do women always leave me?”
The gilded sarcophagus is empty.
Tears are streaming down his face.
The professor really misses his mummy.
Deborah thinks: least said, soonest mended. Find her on her blog: Deborah Walker’s Bibliography.
Her breath comes in gasps, followed by the irregular cadence of her exhalations. I hold her close, sensing the sharpness of her bones beneath her fur.
As I switch off the lamp, she nestles into the crook of my arm. I bring the covers over us both and whisper, “Goodnight.”
Kalyanii is a counselor and meditation instructor who enjoys wiling away her freetime manifesting her culinary inspirations and reveling amid the magnificence of nature.