Flash 11/2010, #1: Gina Sakalarios-Rogers

Canine 401(k)

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 

Flash 11/2010, #2: Peter McLean

Dragonslayer

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 

Short-Short Sighted #26: Bruce Holland Rogers

Again Again Again: Repetition

One of the first things I learned about English prose style, far back in the ancient days of grade school, was that I should vary my vocabulary. Repetition of the same word (other than prepositions, conjunctions and articles that have to be repeated often) displayed a lack of art. If I were writing a paragraph about a rose, then I should next refer to it as “flower” and then perhaps refer to its “petals,” rather than writing “rose” in three different sentences. Read more: HTML