At the high tide line, where the waves don’t reach,
Where the wind tangles my hair.
Salt crystals on my lips, sand between my toes,
and the golden sunset on my skin.
It’s strange they said I was lost at sea
When here I am
At rest
On the beach.
Jennifer M. Smith is a long-distance offshore sailor and a pretty good swimmer, too.
I am standing on wet ground outside my childhood home, under mid-morning tropical sun. The air smells of earth and newly banished rain. Adults speak indoors; their everyday worries are abstract, distant.
I wake up to a snowy Chicago morning, work on a weekend, and infant needing to be fed.
Priya Balasubramanian is a writer and physician. She’s written a novel, and no longer wakes up to snow.
She touched the violin’s remaining strings. They quivered in fear. After so many decades in the cupboard, they’d forgotten how to sing.
Until now, the house had surrendered few clues to Uncle’s life before he fled Budapest.
The sudden grief floored her. She hadn’t even known he used to play.
Tamsin has started to ask her friends for 50-word commissions, and would like to thank Alison for the “musical instrument in the back of a cupboard” challenge.
Kellie figured that she should probably be put away for the safety of everyone.
She noticed how cheap the lawyer’s tie looked.
As the judge turned to read her judgment, Kellie undid the lock on her handcuffs. She eyed the guard’s pistol in the holster,
and moved to grab it.
Mark Konik is from Newcastle, Australia. He write short stories and plays.
He managed to get over the stout fence with ease. The derelict hut lay waiting as a fine, light snow began to fall.
If he could just get away from the voices.
Here. It must be far enough.
Obese. Grotesque. Vile. Slob.
Here he could be himself, without their judgement.
Abbie Mapley wrote this story.
From the very start the bear’s life had been miserable and brutal. Locked away in the dark for weeks without food and water. Brought out in public only to be beaten.
But now his torment was at an end.
He was taken to the charity shop with the other toys.
This is John’s very first attempt at a 50-word story. When he was teaching English last year in Lithuania, the 50-word story came up in a study book. He asked his students to try (with varying degrees of success), and to encourage them he wrote this one. He is not a writer of any sort but is attempting his first novel, based on his experiences in Lithuania. He is now back in the UK, living in Scotland and working as a Tour Guide.
James heard the Gestapo dogs barking relentlessly as they chased him.
He banged frantically on the church door. A man wearing a black cassock answered. “Come in, my son. You are safe here.”
Relieved, James knelt to receive a blessing, then froze in horror. The man was wearing combat boots.
Joann Majerle retired and recently took up writing as a hobby.
Falling, falling, crashing hard into the cold earth.
A tunnel without start or end, no light, only darkness.
Flickers of a glimpse—something is possible.
Fumbling forward for escape, grasping for the last.
Tumbling through, stumbling out—such blazing light.
A cliffside, toes curled over the edge, unable to fall.
Rebecca Milton is an author from London, England, who is currently preparing her first print novel for publication whilst writing her second. She has been featured here at 50-Word Stories and in Here Comes Everyone magazine.
My greatest loves have all been in my head.
Safe from failure, I dive into passion; into romance; into perfection. I know things will go as I plan; I am planning them all.
Sometimes I wake from these daydreams, longing for them—struggling to remember their lips are not mine.
Rebecca Milton is a writer from London, England who was once described as “cute like a polar bear sliding down a rainbow”. Coincidentally, that has always been her aspiration in life.
She tore down each of her MISSING posters, cursing her own name more than her mother’s. She slinked beneath bridges, laid on the mattresses of marsh slime, or drifted into alleys.
Yet, she preserved the posters, her printed visages, because they documented the time, long ago, when she could smile.
Caroline Cao is an Earthling residing and surviving under the fickle weather of League City, TX. When she’s not doing poetry or researching techno-babbles for sci-fic drafts, she’s out swing dancing or experimenting with ramen noodles. She nudges you to scan through her film and writing portfolio.