She held up her wrists to show the scar at the end of the world, peeled away flesh to reveal the bruises within.
He kissed her cheek, remembered when they first met—how happy they’d been—and he watched the earth cover the last rose he could ever give her.
Mike McLaren gave up teaching and technical writing to play slide blues. When not gigging, he sits in an RV somewhere in the Oregon Wilderness with a journal—his mish-mosh of stories, poems, and essays.
A knock on my front door awakened me.
When I opened the door I saw a red fellow who stood three feet high. He asked me for a cup of sugar.
I was out of sugar.
He flew billions of light years and went home empty-handed.
Small tragedy I suppose.
Doug attends Wittenberg University. He hopes to entertain the world through the written word.
“I thought you said you wanted a kid.” Brandon plopped the chubby little brown-eyed toddler into her lap.
“Yeah, but…” Marie looked nervous. She ran her fingers through the boy’s curly brown hair.
“But what?”
Marie lowered her voice to a whisper. “I didn’t know you were gonna steal one.”
Sara Jacobelli lives in New Orleans, where she tries to avoid vampires, Bourbon Street and tourists.
Lucy is eating her second watermelon slice. I indulge her because her sister, Rachel, is on a playdate and she’s not.
Slurp. Drip.
“Lucy, please don’t get watermelon on your dress.”
“Okay.”
Slurp. Drip. Drip.
“Lucy, I just said not to get watermelon on your dress!”
“I’m wearing Rachel’s dress.”
Wendy White Lees is a freelance writer and editor. Her two daughters fuel both her creativity and her insomnia.
“What’s wrong?” asked my tattoo artist.
I took another swig from the bottle. “Ann left me.”
His bloodshot eyes said he knew the feeling. “Zita walked out on me,” he confessed.
I blinked, shared the bottle.
When I woke, I found a swirling, black ‘Z’ forever inscribed on my chest.
Alexis A. Hunter specializes in short stories and flash fiction. Thankfully, she types her imaginings out now instead of scribbling them in notebooks like she did as a child. To learn more about Alexis visit www.idreamagain.wordpress.com.
“You’re under arrest for the murder of your husband,” said the cop.
“But it was all his fault!”
“What did your husband say to you when you woke him up this morning?”
He said, “Where am I, Trixie?”
“And that upset you enough to shoot him?”
“My name is Margo.”
Gary Clifton, forty years a cop, has nearly 60 short fiction pieces published or pending with online sites. He has an M.S. from Abilene Christian University.
He is dead.
I’m lying beneath the stars in this tranquil, idyllic paradise you built. Our own Eden. The clock ceased from ticking, the moon stripped of its shine, and I’m asking the leaves to teach me gently how to breathe.
Come back. It’s not too late, not too late.
Alex Alvarez is a pre-med student who wants to be a writer and not just someone who writes.
“I am so tired,” he admits.
“I adore you,” I reply.
Corinne Engber currently resides in Ohio, where she writes lots of essays and likes someone she shouldn’t.
I watched her from across the street.
Dorothy, predictable, walking her dog, jogging, gardening.
I don’t know what it was about Dorothy. The first time I saw her, she strolled casually up the driveway; that was it.
She was mine, she did not know; my lovely Dorothy across the street.
Bill Drummond is a scuba diver with a writing problem.
As Don drove, he reveled in this week’s ecstasies: a promotion, the Humanitarian Award, and his engagement.
He bent to answer his phone, looked up to see red–the traffic light–heard a thud, and saw red again in his mirror, oozing from a still body.
He hit the gas.
Bryan Joyner is a middle-aged banker who read about 50-word stories in Daniel Pink’s book “A Whole New Mind”, and began using the concept to connect with his two college age children. Each of them write stories and send them to each other for feedback.