Tag: flash fiction

Spark

Robots had squashed human rebellion by making an example of Crazy Gage. Whip marks on Gage’s back were the stuff of legend. The ‘crazy’ got added to his name after his stint in the underground cells.

Tiny droplets of vapor collected inside the oxygen mask every time he exhaled. A thin layer of crust had formed on his eyelashes, like cobwebs in an abandoned house. Clear fluid dripped from an IV line in slow, almost hypnotic droplets. The room was quiet except for the staccato beeping of the heart monitor and the whooshing, Darth Vader-ish noise of the ventilator.

Before You Order that Pizza…

I loaded the last spoon into the dishwasher when I heard her coming down the steps. “At last, the tiny dictator sleeps!” she beamed with her hands in the air like a victorious… Read more »

The Moon Bazaar

As she neared the bazaar, the brightness almost fooled her into happy thoughts. She could smell the warm notes of cardamom and incense mixed with the acrid stench of moonshine from the bordello.

Inside a Writer’s Mind

There’s an anger, a restlessness about you. You’re carrying scars from your childhood, perhaps. I see you in pigtails laying flowers on your mother’s grave on a winter morning. You’re wondering to yourself why Dad is crying and where Mom went. Or did your dad leave you when you were a child? Mom cried every time you asked her when dad would be back and you didn’t know why.

Malignant

She first felt a low ringing in her ears when Esmeralda made an entrance with her goat, Djali. Was it the magic of Hugo’s writing or the light summer breeze playing with the wind chimes? So strange!

Adolescence

This is as disappointing as that time I put pencil shavings and a few leaves of basil in an empty matchbox and chanted some gibberish to turn it into gold coins.

How to Clean a Cast Iron Skillet

Wipe your skillet clean with a dry towel. Water makes iron rust. Rusting isn’t good, for skillets or people.

I cannot focus on my books. The peeling green wallpaper, the holes in our heavily stained carpet and my mother’s tired eyes like two broken windows are all pictures of our rusting lives.

Tiny Shoes

With their candyfloss pink tutus, their hair high in slick buns and their flesh-pink ballet shoes, they looked like elegant flamingos.

Stranger than Fiction

She flaps her wings and melts into the horizon. It’s freezing here. I can feel my blood coagulate. It probably looks like strawberry jello on the inside.