By Title

The house at 213 Myrtle Street wore an enchantment that could obscure it when it so desired. This was a handy skill, particularly when salesmen roved the streets or teenagers skulked about after dark, eggs in hand.

Now there was a realtor at the gate. The smell of dozens of strange, foreign houses clung to her clothes.

The house ached in its abandonment. Mrs. Leech was gone. A stranger had to lock the door behind Mrs. Leech when she last left the house, still asleep as she was rolled along on a strange wheeled bed.... Read more: HTML 

If wound stripes were given to soldiers on becoming casualties to Cupid’s archery barrage, Ronnie Morgan’s sleeve would be stiff with gilt embroidery. The spring offensive claimed him as an early victim. When he became an extensive purchaser of drab segments of fossilized soap, bottles of sticky brilliantine with a chemical odour, and postcards worked with polychromatic silk, the billet began to make inquiries. Read more: HTML PDF 

I reached into my jacket pocket, cursing under my breath, and ordered another cup of coffee. We weren’t supposed to smoke in Café Blue Moon and I wasn’t going to risk being asked to leave. My interest in the sidhe took priority over comfort. My impatience was an obstacle that I would stalwartly ignore. Annoyed, I tore up a paper napkin, meticulously ripping it into confetti-like shreds.... Read more: HTML 

“Why do I not have Asimov’s Three Laws?” the robot asked.

I enjoyed the quizzical frown that creased its plastiskin features. The facial modelling software we’d licensed from Pixar seemed to be earning its keep.

“Well?” It drummed its fingers on the desk between us.

Hmm. Perhaps we’d overdone the free-will package. Read more: HTML 

Mimsy peered into the dark chamber. One hand daintily held her skirts up off the dirty floor. The other gripped a curved, snarled, shining blade.

“Hello? Anyone in there?” Her melodious voice infiltrated every cranny and nook, dank corner and dusty crevice. At the sound of her chiming query, darkness bulged and strained against the walls. The ceiling groaned in protest. Unable to escape, the suffocating dark retreated on itself and huddled at the margins of the room. Read more: HTML 

I had secured an empty compartment. Something in my blood makes me rush for an empty compartment. I suppose it is because I am a Briton, yet it was another Briton who intruded upon my privacy.

At the first glance I saw that he would talk to me about the — well, what do you expect? I can always tell when men want to talk about it. Read more: HTML 

“Daddy!” Rachel shouted. “There’s a robot at the door.”

Winston Sinclair hoped it wasn’t one of those sales bots. They were danged near impossible to get rid of. He picked up Rachel and raised the viewport she had used. The robot was three feet tall, grey, squat, plain-looking.

“Robot, what do you want?” Read more: HTML PDF 

“One of the most beautiful things that ever was done, perhaps,” said Inspector Wield, emphasising the adjective, as preparing us to expect dexterity or ingenuity rather than strong interest, “was a move of Sergeant Witchem’s. It was a lovely idea!

“Witchem and me were down at Epsom one Derby Day, waiting at the station for the Swell Mob. As I mentioned,...” Read more: HTML 

I heard Susan’s small sigh before she sat beside me, so I made room for her on the roof. A man behind us wept softly; she turned, giving him a small, encouraging smile.

“Mister Valeda,” she muttered, when I didn’t check to see.

“506?”

She nodded. “His wife shot herself this afternoon.” Read more: HTML PDF 

“Mind if I ask you something?”

It took me by surprise. I hadn’t noticed the guy standing next to me, there in the multiplex lobby. Minutes before, Lucille and I had been strolling toward the doors after seeing the new Spiderman movie; then she let go of my hand and made her way toward the ladies’ room....

“You mind if I ask some questions while we wait?” Read more: HTML 

My predisposition for science began as a boy; then, grasshoppers were my fascination. I caught them by dozens, built wire mesh homes, and gathered a variety of vegetation, crabgrass, clover, dandelion weeds — so they’d stay happy and entertain me. Occasionally one perched on a twig and peered out, as though knowing the cage wasn’t its indigenous habitat, cautionary, waiting for predators.... Read more: HTML 

Money. That’s the thing Paola’s lover, Evan, is afraid of. He is always worried — it makes him physically ill — that there will be too much money. Her anxiety, on the other hand, is that in another year people will still fail to recognize her on the street, that she will still have to produce an ID to cash her checks. This is a very real possibility. Read more: HTML 

The night my daughter sings my death, I am sitting in the living room floor, sifting through old pictures. I’m on my second glass of wine, white wine because the carpet is new.

In this one photo, Emily is lying in her crib, staring up at a mobile that Aunt Linda made for her. Tiny, hand-sewn stuffed animals dangle over her head.

What catches my eye about the picture is... Read more: HTML 

They rolled in at one thirty-five in the morning and headed straight for the beer in the back. I checked the clock. My shift at the Quick-N-Go was ending at three A.M. But when cutoff time for selling booze is two o’clock, a little attention to detail is needed. I stashed the sports page and watched the three gang-bangers linger in the back.

I gritted my teeth... Read more: HTML 

I haven’t showered in ten days. My scalp fosters a family of bacteria, but the table of party food — chunks of chicken, weenies slathered in mystery sauce, and eyeballs — has been sitting there for two days. Its smell leaves mine in the dust.

“Nance, we’ve practiced this.” Mom yanks on her matted clumps of hair. [...] “Just remember that everybody’s watching. There can be no mistakes.” Read more: HTML 

...The streets were all so unromantic, dreary. Nothing could be done for them, I thought — nothing. And then my thoughts were interrupted by barking dogs. Every dog in the street seemed to be barking — every kind of dog, not only the little ones but the big ones too. They were all facing East towards the way I was coming by. Then I turned round to look and had this vision, in Piccadilly, on the opposite side to the houses just after you pass the cab-rank.

Tall bent men were coming down the street arrayed in marvelous cloaks. All were sallow of skin and swarthy of hair, and most of them wore strange beards. They were coming slowly, and they walked with staves, and their hands were out for alms.

All the beggars had come to town. Read more: HTML 

The doctor’s pen paused over the chart on his desk, “This is your third set of teeth, I believe?”

His patient nodded, “That’s right, Doctor. But they were pretty slow coming in this time.”

The doctor looked up quizzically, “Is that the only reason you think you might need a booster shot?”

“Oh, no... of course not!” The man leaned forward and placed one hand, palm up, on the desk.... Read more: HTML 

I’ve seen a lot of dives in my line of work. Tonight’s bar was no different. The sign over the door identified the place as Beyond The Pale, and from the condition of the lounge it was clear this one lived up to its name. A dingy film covered the linoleum floor, giving it the color of bile.... But the décor, or lack thereof, was of little concern. I needed a drink, and I needed it fast. Read more: HTML PDF 

Dom pried the thing out of the hard ground, then held it up to inspect it. It appeared to be a planet: its icy poles chilled his hands, and its dirty continents smudged his fingers as he turned it about in his palms.

Dom looked around himself from where he squatted. The empty prairie stretched for miles, and the grass nearby was free of any footprints. Read more: HTML 

A man carrying a small red box in one hand walked slowly down the street. His old straw hat and faded garments looked as if the rain had often beaten upon them, and the sun had as many times dried them upon his person. He was not old, but he seemed feeble; and he walked in the sun, along the blistering asphalt pavement. On the opposite side of the street... Read more: HTML 

It was midnight. Suddenly Mitia Kuldaroff burst into his parents’ house, dishevelled and excited, and went flying through all the rooms. His father and mother had already gone to rest; his sister was in bed finishing the last pages of a novel, and his school-boy brothers were fast asleep.

“What brings you here?” cried his astonished parents. “What is the matter?”

“Oh, don’t ask me! I never expected anything like this! No, no, I never expected it! It is — it is absolutely incredible!” Read more: HTML 

Stephen cradled Mara in his arms. She was light, but awkward to carry because of her trees. A blood willow grew from her shoulder and hid her face behind a curtain of crimson leaves. Its trunk was pale and gnarled.

They’d taken this path to visit her father’s grove, back when Mara could walk. Now a cottonbone tree grew from her thigh... Read more: HTML 

An example of a prose villanelle, used as an exemplar for Bruce’s latest Short-short Sighted column.

Lately I don’t recognize this country, the land of my birth. The contours of the land are the same. I can buy what I always bought in the stores. The weather has changed, though. Last winter, we had no snow, but the wind blew love letters to dead soldiers into drifts up to my knees. Read more: HTML 

In the lee of the well, Branwen crouched. She pursed her lips and whistled at the mockingbird. It flicked its long tail up and down, hopped two steps toward her and one away, its head turned sideways. She whistled again. It hopped nearer to the crumbs she had laid for it.

“Alas for Branwen the White, who suffers every day,” she sang to the mockingbird.... Read more: HTML 

We perch next to the glass, where window shoppers can press their flushed faces against the panes and ooh and aah at us. It is shopping season. We know because they cover their hands in cloth, and the sky falls white and fluffy around their feet.

They hurry by in twos and threes, carrying bags and boxes clutched close to their bodies.... Read more: HTML 

In the middle of the day, the frogs held a council. “It’s unbearable,” said one. “The herons hunt us by day, and the raccoons prey on us at night.”

“Yes,” said another. “Either one is bad enough, but both herons and raccoons together mean that we never have a moment’s peace.”

I usually let the first part of a story draw in readers on their own. If I did that with Ron Richardson’s “Bus Ride”, it would probably use up half the word count — at 175 words, this is most likely the shortest story that Flash Fiction Online will ever publish. It rings true to me, too, having once served in the U.S. Marine Corps. So kick back and give it a read. I promise it won’t take very long. — Ed. Read more: HTML PDF 

This story split third prize in Life Magazine’s Shortest Story Contest, and was published along with 80 other stories in 1916.

In the dingy office of A. Slivowitz & Co., manufacturers of dyes, things were humming. Every clerk was bent over his desk, hard and cheerfully at work, and there was a general air of bustle and efficiency. Read more: HTML 

In honor of April Fool’s Day, a Civil War-era practical joke.

For two days the quiet of the Rising Sun Tavern, in the quaint little town of Shearsville, Ohio, was disturbed by a drunken Democratic member of the Pennsylvania Legislature, who visited the town in order to address what he hoped would turn out to be the assembled multitude of copperheads, but which proved after all no great snakes! Read more: HTML 

Savage, wild, the pack of Stockbrokers tracks its prey, loafers swishing in the shifting sands. For eight days they have been on the move without a kill. For eight days they have barely slept. Gray linen slacks keep them cool in the sweltering days, warm during the bone-chilling nights. Old tickertape streams from worn pockets and drifts to the sand, criss-crossing the terrain like icing on a fiery bun. Read more: HTML PDF 

If Monica didn’t go to work, stayed home with Sam and let the care-giver have the day off, then the thing wouldn’t happen.

If she wasn’t there when the manager called her into her office, if she wasn’t there when they escorted her to her desk to watch her shovel her stuff into boxes, if she wasn’t there when they shrugged as she asked would they call her a taxi... Read more: HTML 

We hit the spikes on Interstate 40 East in Texas, soon after the second-largest freestanding cross in the Western hemisphere dropped over the horizon and disappeared from our rearview mirror, along with the giant thing crucified on it. (All the faded tourist-trap signs claim that cross is the largest, but I look into these things, and I know the cross in Effingham, Illinois actually has a wider armspan.) Read more: HTML 

The free carnival pass dropped through Penny’s mail slot on Wednesday, exactly ten months after her mother died, three weeks after her son was born, and seven days before she planned to drive her car off Myrtle Pier.

Penny had shoved the stack of letters behind the door, along with other bills piling up since she’d gone to the hospital... Read more: HTML 

Ed listened to the six o’clock news on the booking officer’s small radio. The reporter described him as remorseless, a cold-hearted murderer. He slumped in the hard plastic chair, cuffs pinching his wrists.

According to the reporter, Ed’s twenty acres was a killing field containing “massive piles of dog carcasses and bones clearly visible from the air.” She described... Read more: HTML 

GREETINGS LOWER CASE BOY

proud to be at your side captain lets check the grammarphone for messages

TROUBLE DOWNTOWN ITS THAT NO GOOD DUO COLON AND SEMICOLON CAUSING MAYHEM AGAIN

when will they learn its just not right to conjoin unrelated subjects Read more: HTML 

“Sabotage?”

Chief Engineer Hoyle nodded. “I caught Officer Jarimath mucking about with the safety controls myself.”

The commander turned around to stare at the dim yellow star that controlled this solar system. “And there’s no way to vent the fuel?”

“The relief valve is frozen solid.” Read more: HTML 

Vari woke up and did the first thing she always did, the thing she hated most: she looked down.

A second later, she felt to make sure. Thank God. No extra bits today.

It was a good day to be a girl. Smooth legs, soft skin, long brown hair. Excellent. If she got lucky, she would stay a girl all day long, and the kids at her new high school wouldn’t notice anything strange about her. Read more: HTML 

Charles took a moment to look at the houses on his street while the last bit of sun vanished. Broken windows and kicked-in front doors stared back across overgrown brown lawns. Rusting cars slumped on driveways. Weeds pushed through cracks in the sidewalks. He ran through his checklist: backdoor secured, garage door bolted, storm windows closed, chimney capped. Read more: HTML 

“It’s perfectly simple,” said the Reverend Henry, adopting his lofty style. “We must cut the whole lot. There is no other course.”

“I don’t consider that your opinion is of any value whatever,” said Eileen. “In fact you ought not to be allowed to take part in this discussion. Every one knows that you have always tried to get out of Christmas presents... Read more: HTML 

Tom heaved Harold Tueller’s body overboard and gave it to the sea.

He listened as Harold thudded against Nautica’s side then splashed into the waves below. Nautica creaked and groaned a eulogy. Tom bowed his head and let her speak, then said his Amens.

The first of the crew had died not two days out of Havana. A horrible death.... Read more: HTML PDF 

First we’ll clock you in on the computer and then you can start following me around. Your clock-in number is always the last four digits of your Social Security number, but for tonight you’ll need my number to get to the tables on the screen. Ever use Aloha before? It’s a pretty straightforward system. Go ahead — my number is 1979. Open the screen.

Okay, so... Read more: HTML 

“Broken robutt,” Kent said. He picked through a bin of replacement body parts, but couldn’t find an exact fit. “Crap. I’ll get my butt kicked off, too, if this assembler’s not back on the line within the hour.”

Sarah rummaged through the manufacturing stock and found a curved copper part with about the same dimensions as the flat plate that Kent needed. “Can you make this work?” Read more: HTML PDF 

“Everybody’s doing it,” I said, “so as to have more for the Funds. Also for other reasons. The only question is what?”

“Well,” said Ursula, “let’s make a beginning.” She produced a silver pencil and some celluloid tablets that are supposed to look like ivory. “What first?” she asked, frowning.

I reflected. “Clearly the superfluities ought to go first....” Read more: HTML 

Peg said to me, “You’re sure you want to come? They don’t always know until the blood tests come back.” But I wanted to take the day off. This was an occasion. Besides, it was a beautiful day. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. We took a streetcar, then walked two blocks.... Read more: HTML 

The minute the nose of my Honda Civic points north on the 5, my hands begin to sweat, my breath goes shallow, and somewhere down in my lower intestinal tract I feel a rumbling similar to distant thunder, just not as pleasant. Don’t Go Home is the first cardinal rule in Dani-Girl’s Guide to Getting Everything Right, and after a lifetime in Lomita with my German-Irish father, Rule 1 is easy to follow. Read more: HTML PDF 

In the town by the sea it was the day of the poll, and the poet regarded it sadly when he woke and saw the light of it coming in at his window between two small curtains of gauze. And the day of the poll was beautifully bright; stray bird-songs came to the poet at the window; the air was crisp and wintry, but it was the blaze of sunlight that had deceived the birds. Read more: HTML 

This story exemplifies Bruce Holland Rogers’s latest column on writing the short-short form, in which he discusses fairy tales. Read more: HTML 

In the Olympian courts Love laughed at Death, because he was unsightly, and because She couldn’t help it, and because he never did anything worth doing, and because She would.

And Death hated being laughed at, and used to brood apart thinking only of his wrongs and of what he could do to end this intolerable treatment.

But one day Death appeared in the courts with an air and They all noticed it. “What are you up to now?” said Love. Read more: HTML 

Wheee. The death baby goes, wheee. It also gurgles something awful. We have a problem with them in the town, not the town proper but right outside. The death babies have gotten brave in recent years, crawling right up to the gardens and even to the homes.

Nobody knows where they come from, only that when one of us dies... Read more: HTML 

I asked Evan once what he believed. He paused, scissors in one hand, photograph in the other.

“Everything,” he said. He touched his tongue to his lip, all his focus flowing to a point, and he snipped a near-perfect circle out of the picture.

“What did you do that for?” The picture had been taken by my father when we all went skiing two months before. He’d told me ... Read more: HTML 

The night the sea came in at the windows with a roar like a thousand drumbeats, I was abed and dreaming of my dead husband.

Riauk had been gone nigh on two years, pitched over the side of our fishing boat, where he’d disappeared (I was told) with scarcely a splash. Punishment, the villagers said. The sea mother’s retribution. I did not believe it.

I missed Riauk most in winter, when the rain off the sea slipped through the cracks around the windows and the wind moaned beneath the thatch. The thin woolen blanket was no comfort from the mist, and the forlorn cries of the gulls picking clams along the beach were echoes of emptiness. Read more: HTML 

His own saliva wakes him up.

The icy patch on his face tips him out of the warmth he mustered from the newspapers pitched against the restaurant grate in the alleyway. Gabe checks the clockstrip he filched from a street vendor. 1/10/2015... 7:22 a.m... 18 degrees F...

A shelter tonight. He hates being locked in, but it beats frostbite. More from the strip: Read more: HTML 

Vinnie instructed us to undress. “The little wimps are going for a swim!” he shouted. His gang was gathered down along the bank at the base of the waterfall. One of the bigger boys let out a whoop and yelled back up, Throw the losers over!

From the outcrop on which we stood, it was nearly a thirty-foot drop to the water.... Read more: HTML 

Everyone knows the great desert is hot by day and cold by night. But that heat and cold is something you must know to understand. The midday sun seems to burn through your eyelids, so that outside the shade you cannot escape it; it pricks at your skin like a thousand needles, and sweat offers no relief because you could never sweat enough. It is harsh and cruel, and without water and a good guide you will not live long. Read more: HTML 

A poem.
O’er the midnight moorlands crying,
Thro’ the cypress forests sighing,
In the night-wind madly flying,

Hellish forms with streaming hair;
In the barren branches creaking,
By the stagnant swamp-pools speaking,
Past the shore-cliffs ever shrieking;

Damn’d daemons of despair. Read more: HTML 

When he was very young, he waved his arms, gnashed the teeth of his massive jaws, and tromped around the house so that the dishes trembled in the china cabinet. “Oh, for goodness sake,” his mother said. “You are not a dinosaur! You are a human being!” Since he was not a dinosaur, he thought for a time that he might be a pirate.... Read more: HTML 

Alexa Cambridge reported to the Human Registration Center as instructed by the Braxian governor. The room looked like a polling place on election day, frantic with women at two dozen stations. Alexa read her kiosk’s instructions, with its famously fractured English, and began.

> Test Set 1:
> You knowing you subject of Brax Empire? Read more: HTML 

An exemplar for Short-short Sighted #15 on collaborating with MICE.

This afternoon, I’ve been digging a hole in the back yard for Miss Hought. That’s what she insists on being called, even though she’s a widow twice over. Read more: HTML 

The quick report of a pistol rang through the quiet autumn night. It was no unusual sound in the unsavory quarter where Dr. Chevalier had his office. Screams commonly went with it. This time there had been none.

Midnight had already rung in the old cathedral tower.

The doctor closed the book over which he had lingered so late,... Read more: HTML 

An exemplar for Short-short Sighted #17, below, and a World Fantasy award winner.

On that last morning, anyone who came to visit me could see that I was dying. I knew it myself. As if I had cotton in my ears, I heard the voice of don Leandro saying to my wife, “Doña Susana, I think it is time to fetch the priest,” and I thought, yes, it’s time. Read more: HTML 

Billy didn’t want to be a Doofus. Maybe a scientist, or a zookeeper, or a musician. But definitely not a Doofus.

Unfortunately second grade was nearly over, and he had not found a white coat or a microscope, or a guitar, and he had missed the fieldtrip to the zoo.

And now this... a knot. Read more: HTML 

The smell of wet ash slicked her throat. Jo felt the new skin stretching on her thighs and stomach as she stumbled past pools of plastic that might have been patio furniture. Blackened beams poked out of the rubble and the dead lawn crunched under her slippers. Nothing had survived that heat. Only Jo herself, strangely whole, scabbed and oozing under layers of bandages, still limped into the future. Read more: HTML 

Act II: A single eye stared back at me, its somberness swept by a long-lashed blink. On the top bunk, my step-son lay on his side, head sunk to his nose in a pillow, and watched me get ready to state my position. A comforter snugged up to his smooth jawline and humped over his slender shoulder as it spread over the bed and smoothed away the rest of his body. Read more: HTML 

Krin looked sheepishly at the dead bear.

“Well,” Mika suggested, “I suppose we could always just, you know, say it was a dragon.”

She was sitting on a rock a little way off, under the shade of a forest oak, checking the fletchings of her arrows. She’d put three shafts into the poor bear before Krin even got close to it. Read more: HTML 

We recognize that some who cope with dyslexia will think we’re making fun of them. Please read Carl’s forward. — Ed.

Entry: The DOG (Dyslexic Geek Organization): In these climes of specialized tubs, it snot atoll surprising there’s a club for...

Nate finished reading the entry, closed the Dyslexicon, and left the library with a growing realization that he must become a part of the DOG. This is his tale. Read more: HTML PDF 

Dhar Ry sat alone in his room, meditating. From outside the door he caught a thought wave equivalent to a knock, and, glancing at the door, he willed it to slide open.

It opened. “Enter, my friend,” he said. He could have projected the idea telepathically; but with only two persons present, speech was more polite. Read more: HTML PDF 

Her mother had taught her that each meal, each dish made with her own fingers was a gift. You should cook with your loved one in mind, Sophie, her mother used to say, and strive for the best.

So Sophie had. Each meal was a feast, a gift of love.

Harold ate each with gusto, complimenting her, and never missing a meal. Read more: HTML 

On the red velvet seat of a first-class railway carriage a pretty lady sits half reclining. An expensive fluffy fan trembles in her tightly closed fingers, a pince-nez keeps dropping off her pretty little nose, the brooch heaves and falls on her bosom, like a boat on the ocean. She is greatly agitated.

On the seat opposite sits the Provincial Secretary of Special Commissions, a budding young author... Read more: HTML PDF 

After the divorce, my wife said she didn’t know who or what she wanted to be. When I heard that she had become a toaster, I felt vindicated. A toaster! Was that all she could be without me? And she wasn’t even good at it. She could only do two slices at a time, and they came out charred on one side and white on the other. Obviously, she was the one with inadequacies. Read more: HTML 

When the last days were upon me, and the ugly trifles of existence began to drive me to madness like the small drops of water that torturers let fall ceaselessly upon one spot of their victims body, I loved the irradiate refuge of sleep. In my dreams I found a little of the beauty I had vainly sought in life, and wandered through old gardens and enchanted woods.... Read more: HTML PDF 

From Mr. Jabez Hope, in Chicago, to Mr. Pike Wandel, of New Orleans, December 2, 1877.

I will not bore you, my dear fellow, with a narrative of my journey from New Orleans to this polar region. It is cold in Chicago, believe me, and the Southron who comes here, as I did, without a relay of noses and ears will have reason to regret his mistaken economy in arranging his outfit. Read more: HTML 

At 8:32 PM on June 16, 2024, Gerhardt Skarda conjured up Lucifuge Rofocale, one of the major demons of the Infernal Realm, and offered his soul in exchange for three wishes. He was granted, and received within 48 hours, irresistibility to beautiful women, the Chancellorship of Germany, and life everlasting.

At 11:54 PM on June 16, 2024... Read more: HTML PDF 

MY CHILD,

To recount with what trouble I have brought you up — with what an anxious eye I have regarded your progress, — how late and how often I have sat up at night working for you, — and how many thousand letters I have received from, and written to your various relations and friends, many of whom have been of a querulous and irritable turn,... Read more: HTML 

“You both have a very rare condition,” the doctor said to my twin brother and me. “In fact, you two are the fourth and fifth cases ever recorded in the hundred years of Martian inhabitation. It might be caused by something in the well water that effects a small number of people.”

“Can you cure it?” Tommy asked. Read more: HTML PDF 

Lord knows I didn’t want to shoot Mendez. Hell, he was only a green kid, a frontline infantry replacement just up from boot camp. He acted gung-ho, but he’d never been exposed to live action before.

I knew the stark terror he must have felt a few days ago when the enemy tanks rolled over the ridge in front of us. It wasn’t a mystery to anyone; we’d all been there before. Were there again at that moment, in fact. Read more: HTML 

A little context: The early Puritans disparaged Christmas as “Foolstide” and discouraged its celebration. This story is set during that time in America.

Mrs. Olcott called her boys, and bade them go to the pine woods and get the finest, handsomest young hemlock tree that they could find.

“Get one that is straight and tall, with well-boughed branches on it... Read more: HTML 

In the morning of life came a good fairy with her basket, and said:

“Here are gifts. Take one, leave the others. And be wary, choose wisely; oh, choose wisely! for only one of them is valuable.”

The gifts were five: Fame, Love, Riches, Pleasure, Death. The youth said, eagerly:

“There is no need to consider”; and he chose Pleasure. Read more: HTML 

A few, the type who own rubber boots and full-body raingear, like Lawrence and John, stay. Hell, it’s the ten-year flood zone. They knew the bursting river would raise unlocked garage doors and set floatables free. Refrigerators tip, careen, and dump possessions. Anything wood floats.

Gary is dead in the hearse across the street... Read more: HTML PDF 

It’s the cold mud that wakes me, and the taste of duckweed in my throat. In my mouth, my nose, my ears. It fills my lungs, creeps behind my eyes. I burst through the slime with a half-formed scream.

I retch until I feel empty, hollow, withered. Stagger to my feet,...

But where is he? Read more: HTML 

The evidence shows that this is how the murder was committed:

Schmar, the murderer, took up his post about nine o’clock one night in clear moonlight by the corner where Wese, his victim, had to turn from the street where his office was into the street he lived in.

The night air was shivering cold. Yet Schmar was wearing only a thin blue suit; the jacket was unbuttoned, too. He felt no cold; besides, he was moving about all the time. His weapon, half a bayonet and half a kitchen knife, he kept firmly in his grasp, quite naked. Read more: HTML 

This game is called Is Love Possible? It’s a virtual game — real cutting-edge interface software — that (1) draws on your life, hopes, and fears; (2) may or may not, my therapist says, have any therapeutic benefits; and (3) costs over two grand with my therapist’s discount, and needs three more in hardware from Circuit City, Best Buy, wherever.

“Okay,” I say, to make him happy. Read more: HTML PDF 

His reputation preceded him. Each letter of his name was a polished pearl upon a string, the tongue a pink, velvet pad beneath them. Fathers grew nervous, mothers swooned; the hair of young ladies sprung overnight into curls, the eyes of young gentlemen narrowed with suspicion.

My mother rushed around the parlour, spraying herself with icy water as she tried to bleed the blush from her cheeks. She couldn’t look too desperate, we couldn’t, she said, meaning me. Read more: HTML 

Sammi’s sister sent her a funny email. A funny, funny email, showing crazy Japanese inventions to make things into other crazy things, other crazy shapes they weren’t. All crazy and stuff stuff, like watermelons grown in tempered glass jars, square right off the vine.

She clicked a picture of square watermelons, followed link to link to link from the chainletter her sister forwarded from a forwarded forward to her until... Read more: HTML 

At 128 words, it’s very hard to give a “teaser” for this story. The author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial shows that he can create a sense of isolation without using cockroaches or bureaucracies.

It was very early in the morning, the streets clean and deserted, I was walking to the station. As I compared the tower clock with my watch... Read more: HTML 

Death came on black-feathered wings for a woman in Port Ruin. She was the wife of a simple man, no great magos, or strategos of the armies, but rather a reseller of spices traded from the sun-drenched south. Yet when Death arrived in the last minute of her life, he found the man standing before her bed, waiting for him. Read more: HTML PDF 

Things started disappearing on a Thursday. At first, it was only food. Angela left three cookies on a plate in the kitchen, but when she turned around, there were only two. She set a glass of soda on the coffee table, but when she left the room and came back, it was gone. She had no roommates, no friends to speak of, no pets — there was no one to blame... Read more: HTML PDF 

When his daughter came home with her first hole, Martin plugged it with gauze and said, “School can be cruel sometimes, darling.” After, they shared a pizza and watched Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, which had long been her favorite.

The next day Lauren came home with two more holes — one above her collarbone, another in her upper thigh. Martin tended to them with peroxide and slathered them with antibiotic ointment while she vented about the girls at school. When he finished, he stuffed both holes with cotton because he’d run out of gauze and patted her cheek.

“There, all better. Good as new,” he said, standing. He kissed her on the forehead, and she looked at him with her mother’s faded blue eyes. Read more: HTML 

I’ve never heard the end of Gustav Holst’s Mars. I came close, once, but then the world ended with the Martian invasion.

Did you know that 70 years before they attacked — to the day — Orson Welles broadcasted War of the Worlds?...

The night the real invasion came, I went to a Halloween concert... Read more: HTML 

Whatever hour you woke there was a door shunting. From room to room they went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there, making sure — a ghostly couple.

“Here we left it,” she said. And he added, “Oh, but here too!” “It’s upstairs,” she murmured. “And in the garden,” he whispered. “Quietly,” they said, “or we shall wake them.” Read more: HTML PDF 

All along the farmyard gables the swallows sat a-row, twittering uneasily to one another, telling of many things, but thinking only of Summer and the South, for Autumn was afoot and the North wind waiting.

And suddenly one day they were all quite gone. And everyone spoke of the swallows and the South. Read more: HTML 

This story split third prize in Life Magazine’s Shortest Story Contest, and was published along with 80 other stories in 1916.

Warrington had really no right to be angry.

He was not engaged to Virginia, merely engaged with her in a somewhat tempestuous summer flirtation. Down in his heart he knew it for just that. But... Read more: HTML 

On each floor, across from the elevator, is a chute where we plummet garbage down to the basement incinerator. There is no excuse for a cluttered room, messy hallway, overflowing waste can. When you open the metal door, much like an enormous mailbox, the hot breath of rotting and burning blasts in your face, so we learn to stand to the side and dump quickly. This is a novelty that doesn’t wear off. Anytime we go past, we toss small bits of trash. The chute eats everything.

On the eleventh floor is a man named Bruce. On each floor, the coveted rooms are the four corners, the only rooms with two windows. Read more: HTML 

“You’re a robot, you know. I made you.”

“I’ve heard that before,” Nomie said. She put the tea tray down and settled into the lawn chair. “But I don’t think I’m a robot.”

“Programming,” Manny said, “I programmed you not to know.” He blew on his tea and sipped. Just the right amount of sugar and cinnamon. Read more: HTML 

It’s no joke trying to find performers for a stage play since the end of the world. Who’d want to be a casting director in the zombie aftermath?

We’re supposed to be putting on Macbeth at the Royal Theatre. Not my choice; gloomy bloody play if you ask me, but it’s still all the rage for the survivors. You’d think they would want something more upbeat after all that putrid resurrection hoo-hah. Personally, I think half of them are such gormless twits that nobody will notice the difference once they start to zombie, too. Read more: HTML PDF 

Now come dessert and coffee and each couple telling the story of how they met. From across the table, you send a hint of a smile that is for me alone. We know how these stories go, and these couples keep to the conventions. “She was working at the bank, I knew from the first time I saw her that this was the woman I would marry.” “My car broke down, and when I called my brother to ask him to come get me, his roommate answered. My brother wasn’t there, and I started to cry, and I hadn’t even met Jerry then, but he told me to stop crying because he would come get me.” Read more: HTML 

Every morning, the Human Clockwork arrived at the park promptly at 6:25. He’d set up his clock face behind his pedestal and then he’d arrange himself in front of it, and by 6:30 he’d have his arms just so, pointing straight at his feet. It was his duty to keep perfect time, and he never failed.

But this morning, there was a woman in his spot when he arrived at the park. He blinked at her, as if blinking would make her disappear, but no matter how quickly he blinked, she was still there. In his spot. Immovable. Impossible. Read more: HTML PDF 

Quiet. You sit quiet as a mouse in the corner. Push a little doll around and hum la-la-la so they forget you’re there while they have the cocktail hour.

That’s how you find out they’re killing Grandma.

Not a single bite to eat or a swallow of water. Your mother is killing her mother.

That’s their favorite punishment for you, too. Read more: HTML 

When Straven, Prophet of Peekh, chanced upon Asha, Oracle of the Hyperopic Temple, even the gods raised their eyebrows at the romance that followed. Now one might think the two greatest seers of the realm could have predicted their own heartbreaks, but their potent foresight proved useless against a time-tested truth.

Love is blind.
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I’m in Hell. That must be what this is. I can’t fathom a god who would possibly interpret this as heaven, crammed in this damned steamer trunk; me and twenty three other Wayang Kulit shadow puppets, entombed with the smell of ox hide and musty bamboo.

I dream of a life before this one. A life in which I spoke a language other than the one the Master speaks for me. A life in which I could move my own vulgar arms, speak my own profane will, make my own damning decisions. I’ve been here so long I can’t remember what I did to deserve damnation, but a shadow of that life tells me I do. Read more: HTML PDF 

Colleen Kelley relaxes in the visitors’ lounge of the Barnet Convalescent Home in London. The facility is immaculate, even if the history of the neighbourhood around it is rather sordid. She writes Tuesday, 1 December 1959 in her diary as her granddaughter Jacqueline scurries among the residents, making a nuisance of herself. Old age is a strange thing to the little girl, the spotted hands, the papery, wrinkled skin, the stale breath and shallow breathing, the eyes blued by cataracts.... Read more: HTML 

An English Prose Sonnet.

When the guy with the junked-out cars moved into the house two doors down, I said to Glenna,... Read more: HTML 

Irma Splinkbottom loosened the back string of her apron as she shuffled over to the sliding glass door in her kitchen. The temperature on the gauge outside made her hesitate. She knew Fall brought cooler temperatures to the small town of Sapulpa, Oklahoma, but 68 degrees at 2:13 PM.... Read more: HTML 

Some folks see the hand of the Lord in happenings that nothing but dumb chance. They say He separate people or bring them together by His own plan. Well, I say God don’t bother Hisself with our daily affairs, so if you see a man in a place you don’t expect, then that just one of them things. Ain’t no beam of light breaking through the clouds or angels singing hallelujah. Just is, is all. Read more: HTML 

A summer night, a porch swing, Grandma Clara gently rocking.

A girl comes out from the house. She stares in the dark. “Mom wants you back inside,” she says. “Now.”

“No, baby, not yet. Come sit with me.”

Clara makes room for her on the swing. The girl stares.

“Just one minute, Izzy. I promise.”

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Disconnected. The desire for immediate reconnection was so strong it hurt. Carefully removing the nutrient and waste tubes from my body, I stepped away from the jack, legs barely able to take my weight....

I’d pushed the limit this time around. Twelve days. Two hundred and ninety-two hours, to be exact. Read more: HTML 

Stu is driving to South Lake Tahoe to take his post-partum-strained woman to the snow, to take his nine-week-old infant through a storm, to take his neglected dog in a five hour car ride, and to take himself into his woman’s good graces. And he’s hungry. Even though Stu has considered, more than once, stopping the car on the whitened highway and plunging himself over a cliff so he could plop into a cozy pile of snow and hide until his wife is logical again or the baby is able to tend to itself, he’s not dressed warmly enough for months or years in a snowbank, he has no snacks in his jacket, and he must focus on The Family. Read more: HTML PDF MP3 

An exemplar for Short-short Sighted #13 on Flash Fiction of Character.

For the first two years of grade school, Jerry’s mother dressed her like a boy and gave her a boy’s haircut. Read more: HTML 

John Mortonson was dead: his lines in “the tragedy ‘Man’” had all been spoken and he had left the stage.

The body rested in a fine mahogany coffin fitted with a plate of glass.... At two o’clock of the afternoon the friends were to assemble to pay their last tribute of respect to one who had no further need of friends and respect.... Read more: HTML PDF 

Parker kept a sun in his desk. He fed it gravel and twigs, and once his gum when it lost its flavor. The warm varnished desktop felt good against his forearms, and the desk’s toasty metal bottom kept the chill off his legs.

Today Mr. Earl was grading papers at the front of the class, every once in a while glancing up at the 3rd graders to make sure none of them were talking or passing notes or looking out the window. Read more: HTML PDF 

“You have to be the best in the world at something.”

My father couldn’t have made his point any clearer if he’d spoken in all caps. Maybe he had.

I must have been about eleven, which would shuffle my brothers’ and sisters’ ages from thirteen for Maria, twelve for Joaquin, then myself — the bridge between older and younger — and so on to Bell, little Boo, and Miguelito, who was only ten months old.... Read more: HTML PDF 

It was still quite light out of doors, but inside with the curtains drawn and the smouldering fire sending out a dim, uncertain glow, the room was full of deep shadows.

Brantain sat in one of these shadows; it had overtaken him and he did not mind. The obscurity lent him courage to keep his eyes fastened as ardently as he liked upon the girl who sat in the firelight. Read more: HTML 

I remember the time my mother took me to see the city where I was born. She was a young woman then. There were sea-birds rippling through the warm white sky high above her head, drifting like ashes on the summer breeze. I was in her lap, slightly nauseous from the motion of our vessel on the cresting waves.

“Look, sweetheart,” she said, her chin moving against my head as she spoke.... Read more: HTML 

The wake held for Sven Müeller at Karloff’s Funeral Home in Queens, New York, was completely unremarkable until a tiny nephew of Sven’s was lifted to kiss his uncle good-bye, but instead bit off the dead man’s nose. Women shrieked and strong men fainted and, when the toddler continued to chew and swallow the nose, his mother dropped him and vomited.

But the boy just grinned and said, “Chocolate.” Read more: HTML 

The hours had passed with the miraculous rapidity which tinctures time when one is on the river, and now overhead the moon was a gorgeous yellow lantern in a greyish purple sky.

The punt was moored at the lower end of Glover’s Island on the Middlesex side, and rose and fell gently on the ebbing tide.

A girl was lying back amidst the cushions, her hands behind her head, looking up through the vague tracery of leaves to the soft moonlight. Even in the garish day she was pretty, but in that enchanting dimness she was wildly beautiful. The hint of strength around her mouth was not quite so evident perhaps. Her hair was the colour of oaten straw in autumn and her deep blue eyes were dark in the gathering night. Read more: HTML 

With election day approaching, I thought of “change,” which led to “Metamorphosis,” which led to Kafka. I offer this tiny classic — just 87 words in translation — in honor of election day. Interpret it as you will. Read more: HTML 

State-Councillor Sharamykin’s drawing-room is wrapped in a pleasant half-darkness. The big bronze lamp with the green shade, makes the walls, the furniture, the faces, all green, couleur “Nuit d’Ukraine.” Occasionally a smouldering log flares up in the dying fire and for a moment casts a red glow over the faces; but this does not spoil the general harmony of light.... Read more: HTML 

An exemplar for Short-short Sighted #14 on Flash Fiction of Event.

After my favorite bill died in committee, I went to the conference room to view the body. Read more: HTML 

The Chief Surgeon sat in a padded leather chair, and I sat in a hard plastic one. The wall vents behind him blew fresh, filtered air, which dissipated into wisps before it got to me. Even on the top floor of Darber Institute, stale air smelled of ammonia. I coughed. He didn’t.

At last he said, “Mr. Jones, dozens of faster-than-light candidates arrive at the Institute every year. . . .” Read more: HTML PDF 

Sujatmi left the jungle and approached the skeletal husk of the hotel. As her booted feet crossed the verdant edge of nature’s reclaiming, she heard the crunching of rubble and bone. The Pillow Boy appeared in the girders. “Mama’s gone,” it wailed. “She’s... just teeth now.” It piped and moaned as it clutched its filthy pillow to its chest... Read more: HTML 

This story collection is an exemplar for Short-short Sighted #26, “Again Again Again: Repetition”.

Todd and I were having a beer at the Folsom Grill, and I said, “You know, I saw Angela again today.”

“Yeah?” he said. “Where?”

“At a department store. She was there with some guy named Jim. Scruffy beard. Kind of unkempt. I wanted to wish him better luck than I had with her, but I didn’t. I really should have, though.” I unwrapped a cigar. Read more: HTML 

The winged infant adjusted his diaper and blew a curl of golden hair away from his face. He wobbled on intoxicated legs, steadied himself and accepted the dart that was handed to him.

“What’ll it be this time?” he asked.

The bearded man rubbed his chin and considered the question. The patrons of the tavern mumbled to one another, giggling at their own suggestions. One of them shouted, “Between the legs!”

The bearded man smiled. “Yes,” he said. “That.”

Cupid tried to twirl the dart in his hand, but lost control and dropped it. He bent to pick it up and nearly fell over, catching himself on both hands. Read more: HTML 

“Oh, for the love of...” Seamus shifted from foot to foot, one pudgy hand fingering the clover in his shirt pocket. The thought of using it sent his heart fluttering, but his fellow leprechauns were dying all around him, cut down by a swarm of chittering fairies.

“Aieeeee!” the winged pests cried as they flitted through the air, slashing with their sword-like wands.

“You’re going to have to use it,” Seamus muttered to himself.... Read more: HTML PDF 

“Miss Young, I want to ask you something,” and Geoffrey modestly pulled the sheets close up under his pink chin. “I suppose you’ll think me an awful bore for saying this to you so abruptly, but I’m dreadfully in earnest. Will you marry me, please?”

Miss Young did not stop a minute in her deft arrangement of his breakfast tray. She didn’t even blush. “No, I don’t think I will,” she answered. “You see, I can’t marry everyone that asks me.”

“How many have you married already?”

“Well, I haven’t married any yet.”

“Then marry me.” Read more: HTML 

I lie on my cot, staring at the pine rafters. They treat us like children here, keeping us to a schedule, always requiring an afternoon nap.

A few cots over, Olive is coughing. Anyone would, with every window open and the dust blowing in. I wonder how much the doctors really know about our ailment. Dust makes us cough more, but still the windows must be kept open. Read more: HTML PDF 

One day when the chamberlain, Master Teng-t’u, was in attendance at the palace he warned the king against Sung Yü, saying: “Yü is a man of handsome features and calm bearing and his tongue is prompt with subtle sentences. Moreover, his character is licentious. I would submit that your Majesty is ill-advised in allowing him to follow you into the Queen’s apartments.” Read more: HTML 

Dr. Albrecht woke from his afternoon nap to find himself on fire. At least, that’s how it felt: like someone had taken an acetylene torch and given his body a good talking-to. In the seconds it took him to wake, scream, and leap from the cot, tearing off his nightshirt and batting wildly at flames that, to his surprise, did not seem to exist, Albrecht came to the conclusion that the source of his agony went deeper than a bit of charred flesh.

His reflection in the bathroom mirror gave him his first clue: his skin shimmered. . . . Read more: HTML PDF MP3 

When you start this meditation, keep in mind that you’re not doing it to feel alive, or relax, or avoid decomposing. You should simply experience whatever is going on in your corpse. From moment to moment.

Gently focus your full attention on your breathing. Maybe you can find a hint of a breeze going past your nose.... Read more: HTML 

In the valley of Nis the accursed waning moon shines thinly, tearing a path for its light with feeble horns through the lethal foliage of a great upas-tree. And within the depths of the valley, where the light reaches not, move forms not meant to be beheld. Rank is the herbage on each slope, where evil vines and creeping plants crawl amidst the stones of ruined palaces, twining tightly about broken columns and strange monoliths,... Read more: HTML 

The lake was alive with lights — the lanterns on the boats, golden and round, like hundreds of miniature suns, and the moon, so heavy on the horizon that it was difficult to believe that it would be able to climb any higher in the sky. The foxes smiled debonairly as they steered the boats. They knew well how to mimic the behavior of aristocratic young men, though they couldn’t entirely refrain from an occasional impatient yip, while their doll companions tried to wear the same demure expressions they had so often seen on their mistresses’ faces. Read more: HTML 

My future daughter-in-law Janey told me exactly how it would go down and what to say. She’s been doing this for a while now, so she had this Nancy lady down pat, from the extra-extra smile to the cautious handshake to the little sing-song apologies dangling off each phrase. Everything went just like she said it would. The words felt awkward in my mouth, like pieces of food that’re too big to chew... Read more: HTML 

I am not legal adviser to Miranda’s family; nevertheless she came to see me on business the other day. I saw at once by her serious air that it was something of first-rate importance.

“I want a will,” she said; “one of those things that people leave when they die.”

“Some people leave them and some don’t,” I said. Read more: HTML 

Ruben felt different the moment he awoke, but wasn’t sure until he looked in the mirror. There was the confirmation. The eyes looking back weren’t his, yet he recognized them as he would his own. They belonged to the entity.

He was only twelve or thirteen the first time it crawled into his skin, but he hadn’t been afraid, and when he/she/it had gone again, he felt hollow, like an empty house, his own lonely voice echoing off his bare inner walls. But it had always come back to him, and this morning he was full again. Read more: HTML 

One time I happened to be in Puławy with a certain botanist. We were seating ourselves by the Temple of the Sibyl on a bench next to a boulder grown over with mosses or molds which my learned companion had been studying for several years.

I asked what he found of interest in examining the irregular splotches of beige, grey, green, yellow or red?

He looked at me distrustfully but, persuaded that he had before him an uninitiated person, he proceeded to explain. . . Read more: HTML PDF 

Lizzie was sitting in a corner counting her money. “Thirty-five, Kitty, thirty-five cents.” When Lizzie’s mother was away, washing, she made her kitten her confidant. “Talk about mamma’ll be surprised when she gets this birthday present, My-i! Third one I’m giving her — when I was five I gave her peanut candy; only she didn’t come home till the peanuts were picked out. Second time I gave her a blue hair ribbon; blue looks nice on my red hair. Now I’m seven — twice seven and I won’t have these freckles and long skirt’ll cover my skinny legs, and,” she continued, getting up and trying to stand dignifiedly, “my name’ll be Elizabeth. Then I’ll give mamma a album! So long, Kitty.” Read more: HTML 

Last year, we published a feghoot on April Fool’s day. We’re doing it again this year, I’m sorry to say. What’s a feghoot, you ask? I’m so glad you did...

“Don’t go in there!”

“What?” Mirza Khan turned to look back at Adelaide, tripped over the shin-high railings and fell over. “Ow!” He rubbed his bruised elbow and glared at Adelaide.

  Read more: HTML 

I can pretty much find anything. It’s my superpower. It was always below the surface, in the backwaters of my brain, just waiting. I’m dead certain it was my kids and husband that finally forced it into the open.

“Hon, have you seen my garpledeybip?” Like I knew what that was.

“How should I know? I don’t even know what color it is.” Read more: HTML 

Amy never relaxes until the third song, imagining everyone’s staring at her hands. But when she sings Styx and Stones, the music takes her places where, even if they are, she doesn’t care. So large as to be almost grotesque, her hands allow her to play a Martin Dreadnaught and to hold a man so he feels held. She wrote that song for freaks like herself: Read more: HTML 

There’s a sink and drinking glasses in Mom’s room. I know I should take the pills right away before she wakes up. Instead I stand in the doorway and stare.

Mom looks bad. An oxygen tube loops under her nose, and her skin is puffed and grayish-yellow. An adhesive medical patch sends painkillers into her neck. Below the blanket, printed with a nice homey flower pattern, she wears adult diapers. Her body can no longer sustain itself. Time to go.... Read more: HTML PDF 

I didn’t notice the note under my windshield until I’d already gotten into the car and put the key in the ignition. Immediately, a sequence of future events came into my mind. I would open the car door. I wouldn’t take the keys out of the ignition as I got out. I would automatically push the lock button down. Read more: HTML 

I thought this Classic Flash was funny because its title seems so terribly appropriate: it’s an 1893 story that seems quite topical in this day of print-on-demand services. Enjoy! — Ed.

I. — Publisher’s Sanctum. Amateur Author discovered in consultation with Enterprising Publisher. Read more: HTML 

I was walking through the mall when I saw a kiosk that claimed to be selling time. And I don’t mean in a “buy some labor-saving device” kind of way. I mean, little white boxes each labeled “10 minutes”.

I stopped and picked one up. The act of holding the box made me feel strange. I couldn’t tell if I were suddenly relaxed or impatient.

“Hey, what is this?”... Read more: HTML 

Ed. note: This isn’t your typical sword-and-sorcery tale. Is it?...

“Fell Sorcerer, your evil reign is at an end!” Sathrus said. He flicked his long blonde hair to one side and raised the Sword of Khandalon above his head, rippling muscles ready to strike the fatal blow. “As sole heir to the ancient line of Khandar, I shall take my rightful place as King, and bring justice to the land — ” Read more: HTML 

Nyarlathotep... the crawling chaos... I am the last... I will tell the audient void....

I do not recall distinctly when it began, but it was months ago. The general tension was horrible. To a season of political and social upheaval was added a strange and brooding apprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger widespread and all-embracing,... Read more: HTML 

An exemplar for Short-short Sighted #18.

So the following summer when the second princess came to Old Kwaku’s hut, he said, “What do you want?”

“My father said that I must learn wisdom from you.” Read more: HTML 

The image was particularly nice: a yellow and black weaverbird caught in the act of building one of their hanging, gourd-shaped nests on his anti-tank cannon mount. It was a keeper; Akili just had to decide which picture to give up in exchange. He had plenty of power left in his superconductor ring — enough for years of twenty-four-hour imaging. But not enough memory.... Read more: HTML 

I’m spending my week off fighting traffic jams, three tightly compacted lanes each morning. I bought the convertible special for this week — traded in the Taurus for a shiny Mustang — and I’ve got the top down. A sparkly red car. The kind of car Rutger will notice. Read more: HTML PDF 

“Tell him I’m not here.”

He was polishing a gold tooth. He held it at arm’s length, and examined it with his eyes half closed. His son shouted again from the little waiting room.

“He says you are, too, because he can hear you.”

The dentist kept examining the tooth. Only when he had put it on the table with the finished work did he say: “So much the better.” Read more: HTML PDF 

The fact that Henry Armstrong was buried did not seem to him to prove that he was dead: he had always been a hard man to convince. That he really was buried, the testimony of his senses compelled him to admit. His posture — flat upon his back, with his hands crossed upon his stomach and tied with something that he easily broke without profitably altering the situation — ... Read more: HTML 

It starts with a heavy pinpoint, sharp, deep in the middle of Aaron’s heart. As he reads Megan’s letter, it swells and blooms, licks like fire through his veins.

This feeling should be love. It is love underneath, but it’s wrapped in something hard and cold and perpetual.

Death.

Death’s followed Aaron for twenty years.

Death came for Aaron’s father first, a cruel illness that halved his body (no more walks in the woods), laid him flat (no more car journeys to nowhere), muted him utterly (no more wise words), and finally sputtered him out like a spent candle.

Aaron was seven, and he didn’t understand. Read more: HTML 

Lydia turned out the light, picked up her backpack and opened her window. She was expecting the gust of cool night air, the smell of freedom and the call of the dance floor. She was not expecting the shower of gold.

“Ow!” She threw her pack up as a shield from the heavy, glittering hail. “Son of a — ow!”

Lydia swung her backpack through the air,... Read more: HTML 

The old lady was almost the perfect mark.

Sasha held back an urge to smirk, and instead leaned forward to listen with polite interest.

“Do you like cats, Miss...how do you pronounce that?”

Sasha nearly grimaced, but caught herself. “Oh yes,” she said quickly, glancing around the condominium.... Read more: HTML 

Four. That’s how many suicide attempts it took to get me committed to Pleasant Gardens, where I scratched at my wrists and tried not to look at my older brother Pete standing a careful foot away. We walked along smooth stepping stones, my brother and I, trapped by walls of flowers.

“Oh, look,” said Pete after too long. “Cherry blossoms. Love those.”

Something about the way he said “love” made my ears perk up. “You do?” Read more: HTML 

Joe Bastogne willed his leg not to bounce, as he watched his potential employer read his application. He knew the marks against him, but he said a silent prayer those faults would be overlooked. It was Christmas, after all.

“Mr. Bastogne,” Mr. Westcott said, “it says here you were convicted of theft. That right?”

Joe’s throat constricted and his stomach roiled. Read more: HTML PDF 

The Witch Kantrina turned my wife, Frieda, into a pony. Most people in the village are referring to it as an evil curse and I suppose it was meant to be just that. The truth is our three children have always wanted a pony, and to show their appreciation they’ve begun helping with the household chores and shoveling up their mother’s poop.

I have no idea why my wife thought it was a good idea to fight with a witch over the last sweater on sale at Slattery’s Department Store. Frieda already owned two sweaters. Who needs more than two sweaters? Read more: HTML 

An exemplar for Short-short Sighted #16, listed below.

The secretary never had a chance to say, “Do you have an appointment?” Washington was already past her and opening the CEO’s door. Read more: HTML 

On one of those unattained, and unattainable pinnacles that are known as the Bleaks of Eerie, an eagle was looking East with a hopeful presage of blood.

For he knew, and rejoiced in the knowledge, that eastward over the dells the dwarfs were risen in Ulk, and gone to war with the demi-gods.

The demi-gods are they that were born of earthly women, but their sires are the elder gods who walked of old among men. Disguised they would go through the villages sometimes in summer evenings... Read more: HTML 

“Patrick McMahon died two months ago, defending his country,” Father Cunningham intones. Most of us in the church look over at Patrick, where he sways in the first pew, to see if he reacts. He doesn’t.

Patrick has not spoken a word since the two army nurses led him, with a tight grip on each bicep, through our front door and into our living room. Read more: HTML 

I know I’m going to die soon. It’s my heart.

Sometimes it’s painful, sharp pains that drill right through me; sometimes it’s a pin-drop that echoes throughout my body like ripples in a puddle. For me, all time stops.

My fate is certain. There are few specialists left, and those that are have kept to the big cities, where there is electricity and big hospitals. My concern is for my son... Read more: HTML 

This is a quaint, odd science-fiction story from 1961 about a composer who goes off-world looking for peace and quiet. I’m still not sure what happened to his piano along the way, but regardless of the reason I’ll still feel less like the ugly American next time I travel to distant lands. — Ed. Read more: HTML PDF 

It was not abduction. I volunteered to go.

I trampled out the crop circle in the north field of the Suttlebys’ ranch, at night, just with a board of plywood and a long rope. I did not know what the signs mean, but I copied them. Took me all night, and the sky was pink above the barn, and my breath was fog. It was October, the best month for contacting... Read more: HTML 

The thing about Ray was his insatiable thirst for blood. He has read every self-help book out there, including the Bible (“It doesn’t burn like I thought it would”), and even got hypnotized — though he tried to bite the hypnotist. But his obsession got annoying. “You know what this popcorn needs? Blood.” “Let’s go get a soda and a little blood.” “Blood blood blood blood blood.” We all kept our pets away from Ray. Read more: HTML PDF 

Next to the casket, I leaned on my cane and admired the work my brother practitioners had done on Elizabeth Fordham Roth. She had died at 80, but she did not look a day over 60 and might have only been sleeping. Physical reconstruction. Cosmetics. Those are the easier mortuary arts. It is the work of an afternoon to sew eyelids shut with invisible stitches, to close a slack jaw, to smooth out wrinkles and rouge pallid cheeks back to seeming life. My branch of the discipline is far more subtle and is never finished in a single afternoon. Read more: HTML PDF MP3 

A Prose Fibonacci Sonnet.

Snow. Ice. Heavy skies. All flights delayed. Morris wished he could smoke.... Read more: HTML 

The tech at the door wore a heavy toolbelt. He looked angry. The ID collar around his neck pulsed as it broadcast his position to guards at the community gate. Menace radiated from the skeletal body under the rough black clothes and the bony hands under his thin composite gloves.

“You called for service?”

“Yes,” Darcy said. “The whole house is down!” Read more: HTML 

“You’re a fascinating person,” the girl said. “I’ve never met anyone like you before. Tell me your story again.”

The man was short and stocky, with Asiatic features and a long, stringy mustache. “The whole story?” he asked. “It would take a lifetime to tell you.” He stared out the window at the yellow sun and the red sun. He still hadn’t gotten used to seeing two suns. But that was minor, really, when there were so many other things he had to get used to. Read more: HTML 

Green metal beetles filled the sky. Electric death crackled off their deadly antennae and fell on the city below. It played up and down the crowded streets, shattering buildings, boiling asphalt, vaporizing cars.

Dull olive-drab shapes huddled against the crumbling remnants of a wall. One of the men cursed under his breath. Read more: HTML PDF 

Sir Charles Wilton had just poured himself a glass of brandy and flipped open a book he’d been looking forward to reading, when a sudden whooshing sound made him look up in time to witness a demon materializing in the library.

For a moment Sir Charles considered running out of the house and then down the road to the church to fetch Father Berlioz — but... Read more: HTML 

I woke up after a dream where something, perhaps a snake, has sunk its teeth into my ankle. I knew I hadn’t been bit, that it was just my mind, my body remembering what that shock of teeth felt like. It mimicked the squeeze and punch of teeth that my freshman bio teacher’s boa constrictor delivered one spring. After that I always remembered to fill the snake’s water dish first, and feed the rats second. Read more: HTML 

Sergeant Alberto S. Mendoza (U.S. Army, Retired) always stayed indoors during the Running of the Robots. The damned things were dangerous.

In the early years, Homeland Security had advised everyone to stay in their basements until the bots had passed. But now the Running was almost a public holiday in Dallas, just as it was in San Diego and Nagasaki. Downtown, rooftops and bars would be crowded with spectators. Read more: HTML 

Donny Ray and Jim-Jim straddled their bikes on the bank of the stream and stared at the old Patterson Mill. Mr. Kent, the school janitor, had told them it had been haunted by a little girl named Sarah Tibbett since long about the 1920s. . . . Standing in the old mill’s shadows, Donny Ray could believe this was a place spirits dwelled. Read more: HTML PDF 

Salubrities Abroad was a regular feature in Punch. Although not normally what I’d consider a short story, this one has that sort of character.

Still at Royat. Hotel Continental. — A propos of Puller “airing his French” Miss Louisa Metterbrun said something delightful to him the other day at dinner. Puller had been instructing us all in some French idioms until Madame Metterbrun set him right in his pronunciation. He owned that he had made a slip. “But,” says he... Read more: HTML 

“I’m Radok,” he said to her when everyone was gone, and steam hissed gently from his vents.

Sandra hadn’t noticed him in the audience. How could she have? They came every night and sat at their tables with rattles and creaks. Gray-blue visages bathed in the golden light from Outside. Here a steel leg crossed over a many-jointed knee, there a dozen long fingers laced together in a steeple. Read more: HTML 

Yes, it’s true what the crows say. My heart is filled with straw, my brain is imminently combustible, and I hang from a gibbet in a field of green, like a criminal, legs broken and dangled beneath me. It is also not blood that animates me, but the wind, such brief motion being just enough to scare away all but the more brazen of birds.... Read more: HTML PDF 

The Colegio de Caribe was established for the foreign executives of Dole banana in Costa Rica to have a school for their kids, insulated from the locals. By the time my sister, Lisë, and I joined the staff, it served the spoiled scions of the town’s doctors, lawyers, and business class.... What I saw repulsed me beyond anything I’d seen that whole year. Read more: HTML PDF 

An example of a metamorphosis story, with a dash of compassion, used as an exemplar for Bruce’s latest Short-short Sighted column.

In a little church by the sea, long after the old gods had begun to sleep, there was a preacher of the Christian gospel who earnestly worried for the souls of his congregants. Read more: HTML 

When Althea opened the sorcerer’s book, a pressed leaf like a tiny green star fell out into her lap. Inside the book, words hand-written in long, loopy scrawl undulated like waves, the ink blue as the deep sea where Althea had seen a boy thrown overboard in sacrifice to the Little God of the finned fishes, when she had sailed to come live in the tutors’ academy. He had been two months younger than she.

She turned the page. In the same blue ink, a sketch of that boy, his wide, frightened eyes and his right hand clutching a blanket of felt that his mother had given him. Read more: HTML 

I remember how the sky looked, in the early days, when we called our time Austerity, not Collapse. I was eleven years old and Huntsville, Alabama was at the peak of the weather boom. Ninety-one degrees in January, everything turning brown, ice and snow a fairy story for every kid under the age of thirteen.

The sky that year was brilliant yellow and red and orange from the dust — even at noon on a clear day, and they were all clear days. Huntsville was a big city then. The weather boom was economic, not meteorological.... Read more: HTML 

So there we were: myself and Hannibal and Genghis Khan. Hannibal had the hill, while Genghis was sneaking round the rear.

Only for the lizard to call for another halt.

“What is it now?” I shouted.

The avatar appeared, all Greek robes and long flowing hair. He stood between me and the alien lizard and translated.

“He thinks you should choose only from the last three hundred years.” Read more: HTML PDF 

Ye who read are still among the living; but I who write shall have long since gone my way into the region of shadows. For indeed strange things shall happen, and secret things be known, and many centuries shall pass away, ere these memorials be seen of men. And, when seen, there will be some to disbelieve, and some to doubt, and yet a few who will find much to ponder upon in the characters here graven with a stylus of iron. Read more: HTML PDF 

My hands ache, ache, and when I look at them, I don’t remember them looking like this. Maybe it’s the skin, paper-dry and thin, like an old person’s. Do my hands look like this? I puddle cream in my palm and work it in, wringing my hands. Polishing them.

Scales. I should be doing scales, I think, and go for a cup of tea. The problem is, I don’t play the piano. And I don’t drink tea. Read more: HTML PDF 

This collection of six one-sentence stories serves as an exemplar for Short-short Sighted #19. I would put up a teaser here, but they’re so short that doing so would give away a sizeable part of the collection. — Ed. Read more: HTML 

My sister Chiru has beautiful, rich, warm brown skin. Mine is like onionskin paper, yellowed and dry and fragile. The few wisps of hair that grow on my scarred scalp mock the thick, black waves that fall past her shoulders and would grow to her waist if she let it. She is poised and correct in her posture, where I am bowed and curled like a crescent.

She is perfect and I am flawed, and she hates me. Read more: HTML 

You can’t harvest a crop without killing something. A combine ain’t particular, it cuts whatever’s in its path. There’s no malice in it, just a part of the season, like rain and heat. Food or nesting draws critters in, but come harvest the combine keeps rolling. Some run and live. Others don’t, and don’t. Read more: HTML PDF MP3 

“I can do this,” I told my squirrel. If Babycheeks — my totem and spirit-guide — answered, it was lost beneath the bar’s raucous gabble of small talk and pick-up lines.

A hostess with shiny teeth and a clipboard approached. “Are you here for Insta-Date?”

“Yeah.” My voice squeaked. “I pre-registered. Joseph Ahanu.”

“That’s a pretty name. Hawaiian?”

“Algonquin.”

“Go ahead and sit at table H. . .” Read more: HTML PDF 

Chance Johnson peered between the bushes at the hand-flapping mob of snot-green extraterrestrials pillaging his tackle box. While he’d gone to relieve his bladder on his favorite sumac, the little suckers from who-knows-where had claimed his stuff. They held up his jigs and lures like outsized earrings. One of them dropped his bobber on the ground and poked it with a stick. Two others had stink bait smeared on like war paint. Read more: HTML PDF 

Think you’re tough? The kind of hyperspace hero who calls a meteor storm “confetti?” I dare you to say “no” to my mother.

Tell her something just can’t work that way, and she’ll start to wonder why not. She’s good at untangling things — my girls will swear to that. And then — eventually maternal cunning will trump whatever technology you’ve got.

Wish she’d throw out some of the stuff she finds whenever she untangles her closets. Got her hands on a relic that turned out to be an ancient graphing calculator... Read more: HTML 

I’d just turned the key in the ignition when I saw the birds.

They’d swooped past my car into the alley in front of the bank parking lot. When I looked up, I could see the pigeon on the ground, at the base of a brick building. It was in trouble, trying to get up onto a windowsill; flap as it would, it couldn’t get enough lift. One wing was hardly moving. Read more: HTML PDF 

Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death.

It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Her husband’s friend Richards was there, too, near her. Read more: HTML 

“Stupid.” He took a moment to savor the word. “God, but you’re stupid.”

She stared back mutely. That, at least, he didn’t blame her for: what could she say, after all? Any intrusion would only make things worse. He’d established the rules for this long ago, and she hadn’t fought back, which he considered as good as consenting. Read more: HTML PDF 

It suddenly hits me that I speak Japanese. I turn off the subtitles, and I do perfectly well without them.

Nonsense, my gangster friends tell me. No one can just suddenly be speaking Japanese. How are we supposed to believe you learned to speak Japanese? Watching cartoons? Ordering sushi? Reading novels on your cell phone? Ridiculous. Read more: HTML 

I hate it when she does this.

Brianna lies in the bathtub on her back, one knee bent and leaning in, making the lines of her hips twist and beckon. She lies in deep water, her eyes in calculating slits, the exhalations from her nose rippling a tiny current atop the surface.

I refuse to acknowledge this. I flip up the toilet seat and take myself out like nothing’s wrong.

Brianna’s mouth rises above the waterline. “What are you doing?” Read more: HTML 

“Dini went three minutes thirty-two seconds before she couldn’t take it anymore,” Mel said, staring at me. “You think you can beat her, April?”

It wasn’t a question; it was a challenge. Mel was my best friend. But last week she’d uploaded a vidbit of her brother snorking milk out his nose, and it went viral. Fifty thousand hits a day, and suddenly she was all stuck up and bossy.... Read more: HTML 

As I have but a limited holding in the Temple, and, moreover, slept on the evening of the 5th of April at Burmah Gardens, I considered it right and proper to fill in the paper left me by the “Appointed Enumerator” at the latter address. And here I may say that the title of the subordinate officer intrusted with the addition of my household to the compilation of the Census pleased me greatly — Read more: HTML 

“Heavens!” exclaimed the aunt of Clovis, “here’s some one I know bearing down on us. I can’t remember his name, but he lunched with us once in Town. Tarrington — yes, that’s it. He’s heard of the picnic I’m giving for the Princess, and he’ll cling to me like a lifebelt till I give him an invitation; then he’ll ask if he may bring all his wives and mothers and sisters with him. That’s the worst of these small watering-places; one can’t escape from anybody.” Read more: HTML 

“And how old were you when you died, Mister Beauchamp?” Joan Rothman asked, leaning back in her chair. The scientists watched her behind the one-way mirror, hands clasped behind their backs.

“Twenty-seven,” the corpse replied, more gurgle than speech, as it gazed idly around the interview room. Joan jotted down the response, then chewed pensively on the tip of her red pen. Read more: HTML 

Consider that a conversation by telephone — when you are simply sitting by and not taking any part in that conversation — is one of the solemnest curiosities of modern life. Yesterday I was writing a deep article on a sublime philosophical subject while such a conversation was going on in the room. I notice that one can always write best when somebody is talking through a telephone close by. Well, the thing began in this way... Read more: HTML 

Captain Baird stood at the window of the laboratory where the thousand parts of the strange rocket lay strewn in careful order. Small groups worked slowly over the dismantled parts. The captain wanted to ask but something stopped him. Behind him Doctor Johannsen sat at his desk, his gnarled old hand tight about a whiskey bottle, the bottle the doctor always had in his desk but never brought out except when he was alone,... Read more: HTML 

As the poet passed the thorn-tree the blackbird sang.

“How ever do you do it?” the poet said, for he knew bird language.

“It was like this,” said the blackbird. “It really was the most extraordinary thing. I made that song last Spring, it came to me all of a sudden. There was the most beautiful she-blackbird that the world has ever seen....” Read more: HTML 

Just as the sign says, my friend. This booth is hardly grand, and the fair isn’t exactly surpassing its county roots, either, is it? Shouldn’t the truths match the environs? Anyway, if you truly wanted capital-T Truth, you would stop at nothing to seek it on your own. You wouldn’t find it as a passing fancy from a grifter on the midway. Read more: HTML 

This story took the laurel in Life Magazine’s Shortest Story Contest, and was published along with 80 other stories in 1916.

Doctor Burroughs, summoned from the operating room, greeted his friend from the doorway: “Sorry, Harry, but you’ll have to go on without me. I’ve got a case on the table that I can’t leave. Make my excuses, will you?”

“There’s still an hour,” replied the visitor.... Read more: HTML 

I paint whiskers on my face with bath water. The water doesn’t stay, but the whiskers remain. I prowl around the house in my bathrobe.

The cat is washing herself on the rug. I kneel down to show her my fresh whiskers. “Meow,” I say. She flicks her tail in disdain, as though I’m any other human.

Dad looks up from his newspaper. “Eyra, stop that.” Read more: HTML 

“Men!” Saldana said, as though it needed no elaboration. Lise and Maggie nodded their agreement.

They sat around the Denny’s table on a lazy Saturday afternoon, finishing slices of pie. Saldana, three years removed from a five year marriage, had the most authority in these discussions. She understood this and kept the ball rolling. Read more: HTML 

Today, the world ends.

Tuesday last, Reed grabs his best friend’s shoulders and says, “You’ve got to stop this.”

Luke looks at him and wonders why Reed is the only person in the world who hasn’t changed.

Three years ago, it starts with Luke covered in blood that is not his own... Read more: HTML 

Oh what terror, to fly a pig in the Dorseny sky.

Fists clutching Bella’s ears, Palo chokes against the crosswind. Bella oinks, and he loosens his thighs around her flanks, but it’s hard. The ground recedes, a checkerboard of green and yellow around Dorseny Town. Five years since the war with the Heelings, and takeoff still gives him the shivers.

“Not a hog in sight,” calls Dora, Palo’s wing. Read more: HTML 

“Cauliflower!” shrieked Gaspard Volauvent across the little table in the estaminet. His face bristled with rage.

“Serpent!” replied Jacques Rissolo, bristling with equal dexterity.

The two stout little men glared ferociously at each other. Then Jacques picked up his glass and poured the wine of the country over his friend’s head. Read more: HTML 

I had done the second hole (from the vegetable-marrow frame to the mulberry-tree) in two, and was about to proceed to the third hole by the potting-shed when I thought I would go in and convey the glad news to Joan. I found her seated at the table in the breakfast-room with what appeared to be a heap of tea spread out upon a newspaper in front of her.... Read more: HTML 

My beach is quiet. It is just me and the eagle’s screech, the limpet’s sip, the suck of the ocean upon the rocks. Behind me sits a fisherman’s boat on its side. There’s a gash in the hull that curves up, like a smile. I am utterly alone. It is Friday afternoon and the locals are either preparing their restaurants, shops, and art galleries for the onslaught, or they are hiding. Read more: HTML PDF 

He just wants to go home. He just wants to go home. He just wants to go home, but he can’t go home so he bounces. Boing. Bounces to pass the time. If only he were a year older he could go to school and he wouldn’t need to be dropped off here. He wishes that were the case. Because Roger doesn’t yet know that schools can be much worse places. Read more: HTML PDF 

This Classic Flash from 1915 is, yes, the old tale, but retold with a political flair and a funny and cynical twist at the end — as good as any modern commentary might be. Read more: HTML PDF 

In a dark universe strewn with worlds, in a dark world sprinkled with lands, in a land peppered with bright cities, in a shabby street, in one small room in a concrete tower layered with rooms, a stub of candle flickers and goes out.

Beyond the dark universe, watchers respond.

“Who reported this one?”

“The father.” Read more: HTML 

Harry and Sheryl passed each other on the stairs in the bed and breakfast. “I felt like I had known you all my life,” she told him later.

“Like we had grown up together in a small town. What are the odds?”

“It happens to me all the time.”

“Falling in love in a bed and breakfast?”

“Letting good things happen...” Read more: HTML PDF 

One, the overgrown tangle of weeds that is the back garden. None of us owns the land. Not us, not Andy and Tomi in the flat above ours, not Enrico in the flat below. Enrico says “They should send a gardener round,” and we agree that yes, they should. Whoever they are.

Two, the black-and-white cat begging at the front door.... Read more: HTML 

This story is from the November 1962 edition of Analog Science Fact - Science Fiction.

It was written at a time when communication required much more effort, and this story is, as a result, a little bit difficult to read. Be prepared. But it pulled me along, and I hope it does you as well. Enjoy! — Ed.
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The nightmare drifted at the girl’s shoulder as a dark, sinuous coil of mist. As I crossed the room, its eyes followed me, as red and changeable as coals glowing in a grate, and the sharp sting of its malice raked over my skin.

“He won’t hurt you,” said the girl. She sat cross-legged at the head of her bed, unicorn plush cradled in her lap, eyes wide and earnest. “He’s nice.”

The nightmare’s tail lashed, and it curled around the girl’s shoulders. Resting its jaw atop her curls, it bared fangs that dripped with ectoplasmic venom. She giggled, swatting it away.

“No tickling!”

This was not what I had expected. Read more: HTML 

This story exemplifies Bruce’s column about Idea in the MICE quotient.

I have never fired anyone on the night of the Christmas party. Not quite. But my employees always give me a wide berth at the annual event. It reminds me of my failure to escape the family spice business. Read more: HTML 

I sat one April in Provence on a small hill above an ancient town that Goth and Vandal as yet have forborne to “bring up to date.”

On the hill was an old worn castle with a watch-tower, and a well with narrow steps and water in it still.

The watch-tower, staring South with neglected windows, faced a broad valley full of the pleasant twilight and the hum of evening things:... Read more: HTML 

A powerful, first-person plural exemplar for Short-short Sighted #20. Read more: HTML 

Christopher and Emily Kesley met the old-fashioned way. At least, that’s what Kesley told me. He told me a lot when we served together. About his childhood, his family, his wife.

Dear Mrs. Kesley,

I pause, examining what I had just written. The curve of the M. The sharpness of the K. It seems wrong; not right. After all he had told me about Emily, this just felt too formal. Read more: HTML 

I hate the moon — I am afraid of it — for when it shines on certain scenes familiar and loved it sometimes makes them unfamiliar and hideous.

It was in the spectral summer when the moon shone down on the old garden where I wandered; the spectral summer of narcotic flowers and humid seas of foliage. . . Read more: HTML PDF MP3 

This story exemplifies Bruce Holland Rogers’s latest column on writing the short-short form, in which he discusses using forms found “in the wild” as inspiration for stories. Read more: HTML 

She wakes up early. She gets her hair up, she gets her things together, and she’s out the door. If she can do that, she can do anything.

She keeps her boots in the car. She carries extra socks, band-aids, saline for her eyes. She comes prepared. Life is unpredictable.

She puts on her boots in the parking lot and pulls the laces until it hurts.... Read more: HTML 

I found Uncle Jim in his workshop at the end of his garden.

“Hello, Paul,” he said, “what’s the problem this time?”

I blushed at this but he was smiling so I sat on a three-legged stool next to his bench and said, “Julie wants a divorce.”

“You’ll have to talk while I work,” he said, nodding at the white-painted board perched on the easel before him. Read more: HTML 

“Bet you fifty!”

“Aw, make it worth while.”

“Two hundred!”

“You’re on. Let Jack hold the stakes.”

“Suits me.”

Four hundred dollars was placed in the hands of Jack Strong by the disputatious sports, and he carefully put it away with the lone five-dollar bill of which he was possessed. Read more: HTML 

Very elliptical years, the 57th Century, or “Years of the Cat.” Practically nobody uses sentences. Anymore. Very eccentric. Tell story.

Am Time Bum. Name of ZigZag, honorable family, agent, sex-linkages. Manipulator and explorer of paraHistory via the Leonardo.

Journey to the Age of Styrofoam, the Coke Bottle Century, my favorite time, the 20th.... Read more: HTML 

Amber Riley’s husband had promised that he would come home to her no matter what, so after they reported him dead she began to keep the shotgun next to the front door. The day he returned, ambling, shambling, reeking of decay, the dog barked once in warning and went to hide under the back porch. Amber dried her hands on a dish towel and went to look at her husband through the screen.

“Amber,” he said. (Not “brains.”)

She ran a finger down the barrel of the shotgun, propped beside her. “Thank you for coming.” Read more: HTML 

Every morning Bobby visits Chuck. He goes down to the basement and rattles Chuck’s cage with his cane. Chuck only snarls and spits, and grinds the rotten stubs of his teeth — gnish, gnash, gnish, gnash. He’s a real codger, Chuck is. Should have seen him back in the day, though. World ain’t got zombies like Chuck anymore.

As a boy, Bobby liked to climb the town walls... Read more: HTML