Microfiction Monday – 131st Edition
Reason for the Fall
by Ken Poyner
A red dog goes by on a bicycle. I don’t mind a red dog commanding a bicycle, but he seems to be ignoring all the traffic signs that should apply to bicyclists. Not that he is being otherwise reckless, just unheedful. He sits upright, focused on the road, well within the speed limit, oblivious to all the guides that are supposed to inform him of what bicyclists must do. And he is a red dog. Were he a blue dog, the environment, the import, would be different. I wave, not unfriendly, but not inviting, and the hidden curb snatches him.
Theatre Trance
by Amber Steenberg
Pierre was a lanky college graduate, 6’1, and had the hair of a Greek god. What brought him to Robin was their shared interest in film.
He found himself sitting in the back of an empty theatre, the movie murmuring as if grey were a voice. The projection’s hue pooled a mountain of contour as he turned his head, and he watched as she smiled on the edge of her seat, bright eyes glistening, and as soft breaths of laughter spilled through her teeth, which lingered in the theatre air. From this moment he fell into a trance of adoration.
Alpha and Omega
by Leesa Voth
She wished her mother had told her that breasts reveal how it begins and ends. That they emerge from the flat plains of childhood into dual summits that men would climb. That they achingly swell with milk after children arrive from the body. That their aging deflation concedes to a distant shadow of femininity.
She stood at the scanning machine.
Breathe…
An off-color secretion on the glass.
Do I have…?
She fainted. Later, the nurse gave her juice. In the dressing room, she searched the summit but hesitated before praying. For God is Man, and she just wanted her Mother.
Microfiction Monday – 130th Edition
Late Night Coffee
by Steve Bates
“That’s the last of the coffee,” she said. We’d talked half the night. She’d told me more about herself than I wanted to know, and I’d told her more about myself than I intended to. That’s the curse of two lonely people living in the same lonely apartment building in the same lonely city finally meeting. We’d revealed our dreams, dancing around our disappointments, which was really all either of us had found since moving here. No amount of small-town education can prepare you for this. “Should I put on another pot?” she asked. “Sure, why not,” I said.
It’s Not The Music
by G.J. Williams
He thinks the music brought back the rat. It’s not the music I said, and there is no rat. It’ll be the violins he said, the higher-pitched pieces. Or the promise of warmth in a cello. Neither I said, besides there being no rat. The walls are quiet when you’re around he said. And I certainly heard no pattering of feet across any ceiling. The music all the while stayed stopped. That’s not healthy I said, you love your music. There’s no serenading any rat. It’ll be the piccolos he said, it’ll be the woodwind the flutes the pipes.
Feeding the Hungry
Tiny tunnels lead through the grass to the crime scene – young squash vines strewn over the ground like corpses, decapitated chard shoots poking out of the soil, pole bean seedlings cut off in their prime, a harvest thwarted before it even had a chance. At the edge of the garden, a heron stands in silent vigil, then – stab! – and it’s vole for dinner. “Come back,” I call as it lifts its great blue body into the sky. In the shadows by the riverbank, a crow hovers over the heron’s nest.
Cradle and All
by David M Wallace
There was an official investigation, of course. No one blamed her. These things happen. It’s nobody’s fault. But next morning a little flurry of hail fell. She stood at the window watching it gather against the porch steps and dreamed of fairies and baby teeth.
Microfiction Monday – 129th Edition
Gone
by Linda Lowe
Linen napkins and tablecloths went first, along with candlelight and flowers. Predictable, given the times, but what happened in the heavens was downright surprising. While no one worried much about the disappearance of the Big Dipper, or stars, period, when it came to the moon, there was genuine concern. Short lived, though, as people seemed more intent on leaving than looking up. After a while so much was gone it made more sense to marvel over what was still around. You and me for example. Left to tell the truth I guess. Without a single sharpened pencil to be found.
Gone in a Flash
by A.M. McCaffrey
The civilisation business had finally gone under, and abandoned cars were among its rapidly depreciating assets. Shells and tyres would be gone in a century; engine blocks, five centuries; polyurethane seat cushions, ten; glass windshields, ten thousand. Every human construction, like the machines on the highway, would atrophy, and the second hand on the cosmic clock would twitch barely one space forward.
Winged
by David M Wallace
Every day at lunch Brenda sat alone in the playground sharing her sandwiches with a score of hungry pigeons surging around her. Patiently, she weaved their stray feathers into a dappled carpet.
“Where is Brenda?” asked Ms. Chen one afternoon.
A blur soared past the windows.
Microfiction Monday – 128th Edition
Formal Feeling
by Andrew Stancek
I am not in denial any more.
I spend my time on the couch, a blanket up to my ears. Monster has opened the box of Chablis, brings a glass, pops a pepperoni pizza in the oven.
I’ve mentioned him to the shrink but he always lets it slide. Hallucinations are not on the list of side effects of my pills.
Monster farts, burps, eats sausages and granola – he can’t be just a figment.
Can I love her more than before, since she died?
The pizza box said it serves six, so why is it all gone already?
Spaceships Landing
by Alan James Beard
Aaahh, goes the singer, spaceships landing between the voice and the lights. He melted over to his future wife sat in the corner bored and talked down to her so he could see her face upturned, the body beneath, full display of legs in jeans. Dropped to his haunches, face bobbing in front of hers now. The music came up around her face as he looked popping colours around the rather long nose and chin, and drew them reluctantly together.
The Secrets of Lipstick
by Angela Joynes
Except for my Aunt Charlotte, everyone in this family lies. But she speaks truth as bold as the Avon lipstick she sells from a case that trigger-clicks open, containing dozens of samples the size of .22 bullets. With her jam-glossy lips–pomegranate, heirloom tomato, or maraschino–she exposes lying uncles, cheating grandfathers, and deer-jacking cousins.
And when I’m thirteen she offers to teach me her secrets. Makeup, she means. But all I want are her lips, the color and courage and power to dispatch my own secret cloaked by the night.
Honeymoon: St. Lucia
by Susan Morehouse
“It’s an island,” he said. “Flat. You’ll be fine.”
She knew about islands rising hot and stinking from the depths of the sea. How they were not habitable for centuries. How they weren’t flat.
On the back of the van, the wheels of her bike spun easily next to his. He sang “My Girl” with the radio. She changed the station.
It rained all week. She pushed her bike up mountains. She fell, rose, and pedaled on. Rainbows shimmered in the spray from his tires.
At night, her heated body exploded, like song, like something feral, like fire inside water.
Microfiction Monday – 127th Edition
Otter Love
by Judith Shapiro
Otters sleep holding hands lest they float away and lose one another.
After our argument, we turned and faced the other way, feigning sleep that eluded us, keenly aware that we’d both still be here in the morning.
Elephants are like ballerinas. You think they have these big, flat feet but underneath it all, they’re walking on their tiptoes, as if in toe shoes.
I wanted to ask you if you’d rather be an otter or an elephant in your next life.
Crown of Rain
by Matthew McEwan
Rain fell and drowned in curbside rivers.
The man in the grey suit waited under a drumming umbrella.
He used to love standing out in the downpours. His mother would yell at him for getting wet. But when the streets were empty, the city was his. He could walk anywhere. He was a king.
The man stuck his hand out, catching cool raindrops.
The taxi’s brakes whined.
‘Where to?’
‘Uh-‘ the man stammered, wiping his hand on his suit.
Cravings
by Gail Tyson
On this frigid night, I’m famished. Linda and I order at the bar, but my entrée doesn’t come. She kindly shares her salad. So far in life, I’ve avoided kale, but tonight my fork spears a blue-green leaf curled around a wedge of butter-soaked toast. Salty-sweet tang explodes in my mouth. Bite after bite, kale and toast remind me what I’ve been missing: how what is good for you and what is not can come together, spark hunger I never knew was there, every mouthful making me want more until only the taste lingers on my tongue.
Like you.
Please Dispose Of Your Heart Properly
by Elad Haber
“I gave him everything!” I sobbed to the screen. “Six years!”
The matronly woman on the other side of the screen had wire-rimmed glasses and calm, understanding eyes. She pressed a button and a slot opened in front of me. A proffered tissue. I wiped my eyes with it.
“It seems to me,” said the therapist, “that your heart is broken and you will need a replacement.”
Another slot opened with a ticket.
“Please take this to the next screen for further assistance.”
In the surgical room, warnings papered the walls.
I sighed and attempted to follow the on-screen directions.
Microfiction Monday – 126th Edition
Daddy, Can We Build a Snowman?
He knows he should say no, but he can’t. So he bundles his four-year-old in her winter coat and carries her to the center of the road, where together they begin rolling snow into three orbs of differing sizes. After the orbs have been placed in a snowman configuration, he makes his way to their gravely stuck car where they have no cell service, where his wife breastfeeds their newborn, where they only have enough snacks for a day trip and only a half tank of gas, to rummage through their belongings for something that will make a good nose.
Righteous
Upstairs, Carl logs on and searches for forbidden fantasies: classics removed from schools and libraries because the district now calls them “unbalanced” and “inappropriate”.
“Ain’t nobody gonna tell me what to read. I hear worse language in class every day”, he thinks, skimming another ‘offensive’ story. “I know people like this, they’re cool. What are these idiots trying to prove? It’s all online anyhow.”
He loses himself in books the censors don’t want him to see; they’re tinder to the spark inside him. Another file copied, another friend messaged, and he spreads the brushfire further.
Object Lessons
by G.J. Williams
Music as Terror: Discuss. The wiping out of villages to Shostakovich. The snow-muffled strains of Schubert as played by the Angel of Death, circa 1943. Or those funkier numbers favoured by the Mad Sams of the underworld who drill through flesh in derelict basements. Music to kill by. The soaring guitars against the Vietcong. The songs in Manson. The headphones of Nilsen. Not forgetting Stalin’s perfect pitch. For Stalin, every sound had its key. A building might crumble in E-flat, a tram go by in A-minor, a fly buzz in F-sharp. Every human had a special scream. Discuss.
Eastern Approach
by David M Wallace
Lena’s teacup performed a little jig in its saucer as the vibrations grew closer. The tiny cry of porcelain chiming over the rumble of tanks grinding in the street below her window. Soldiers trudged behind, clad in khakis and impunity.
Microfiction Monday – 125th Edition
Featurette
by G.J. Williams
It’s in his face: no dog and twenty old ghosts. It’s in the way he sits, his clothes shining with years of ingrained dirt. Been in those clothes so long they’d have to be surgically removed, layer by layer. A man without. Muttering into his beard. And that muttering of his can fire up and things get noisy. Many’s the scuffle he’s had with thin air. Leathered on god knows what gutrot. Been at the end of his life for years kind of bloke. Always on his tod. With a bunch of ghosts. And like I say, no dog.
Skin
Ninety-year-old bare skin is crepe, crossed with turkey’s wattle and if you lightly bump or grip too tight it bruises like an evil has been done. My mother hates that her arms, her neck, her décolletage look this way.
When I hug her I can see Mum’s scalp through the thinning, flyaway hair now worn short, as her fingers can no longer manage hair ties. Mum was always proud of her hair so she hates that too.
Worse still is the oedema, the fluid retention that merges her ankles and calves into one inflamed whole. Anyone would hate that.
EVERYTHING MUST GO
by E. O’Neill
The hands of a thousand brides carry the life’s work of Saul Bergman. Stone tokens of love everlasting, each expertly cut and polished under his watchful eye. Now, the sign in the store window announces the closeout sale. The sign’s reach goes far beyond the store’s inventory. Its message has roots and limbs. It grows like ivy and covers all.
Four rows away a lawnmower rumbles, drowning out the rabbi’s prayer. Ida grieves but doesn’t weep. She steels herself to the weather’s chill and the uncertainty of the future. She’ll move to West Islip to be closer to her sister.
The Merest Crack
by Philippa Bowe
Syl balances on the Waterloo Bridge balustrade, waits for a sign, body swaying though there’s no wind, battered by gusts of forever-anxiety, and there! the last city lights stutter and go out, snuffed by the night’s dark, time to let go, plunge into the water below, wet cold shadows enfolding her, time to sink and rest, but no, up she floats on pillowing wings of clothes and lungs, face breaking the surface, tilting up to a seeping cleft in the sky, a finger of light beckoning as a solitary star – tiny, determined – eyeballs her, and she says, Well okay then.
Microfiction Monday – 124th Edition
This week’s artwork is by G.J. Mintz
Mantis
by JW Goll
I’m on my second vodka and ginger ale. Delilah has had five, but as always, she’s steady and lucid. We sit in cheap plastic chairs near a greasy motel pool in Sturgis. We talk about Vietnam and she mentions a cousin killed at Hue, a childhood friend crippled at Dac To. She opens the second fifth, ignoring the ginger ale.
The light turns golden as does Delilah’s skin. A large praying mantis lands on a nearby table. It’s a love animal she declares. She takes a long drink from her tumbler. I wonder who it is here for, she says.
Scar Tissue
by Tim Frank
Why did the lonely boy from the high-rise estate, with his scarred wrists and nicotine breath, kill the dead-eyed drifter with a machete in the local park?
Why did the community act shocked and alarmed when behind closed doors they claimed he had it coming, like all the boys with infected tattoos – that they were a stain on the neighborhood, and deserved to have their stomachs carved up like pizza dough and then left to rot in a hole, forgotten forever?
Feet
by Betty Stanton
“Talk to me about one time you saw God’s hand at work in your life,” his counselor prods him. Doctor Jim is a small, serious man with milk-colored hands.
He could be a hand model, Andrew realizes, and then he bites his lip until he tastes the copper of his own blood and tells Doctor Jim that he doesn’t believe God has hands.
Just feet.
Presumably for stepping on things.
The Last Flight of the Honeybees
by Michael Anthony Fagan
The terminal honeybees cut their wings off, forcing their bodies through the compact wire fence. Their bodies fall onto plastic flowers (doused in peppermint and sage); their journey is in vain.
Her eyes command a tempest. A queen no more. The world around her is dying. She is picked up by leather fingers, crushed into a frosted glass, and smeared onto a faux Kandinsky painting by the bald bourgeoisie artist whose father owns the mill house.
Microfiction Monday – 123rd Edition
Snowmelt
by Kapka Nilan
Back then when I used to have a father and there used to be snow for as long as I remember before my memories turned into slush and the future became all too real without the intricacies of snowflakes and with the knowledge that all Santas are temporary but melting into nothing is a bonus as that way they would never get old and develop a catalog of illnesses that can only leave one half-alive.
Picturesque
by Matthew Corbyn
The sun poured champagne into the ocean. Pristine water bubbled on the white sand.
The porcelain woman lay on dark mahogany, shaded by postcard palm trees. Her oversized sun hat and sunglasses, a polite ‘do not disturb’.
She had meant to leave two days ago.
Her phone buzzed. She ignored it.
A local walked by early evening. She didn’t return his greeting.
Even as the crowds gathered under the full moon, followed by red and blue flashing, revealing the deep, dark ocean. She dared not open her eyes, lest another sight would be her last.
If I Could Give My Former Self a Fortune Cookie
Five years from now, you will live in a modest home, in a small town, with a fulfilling job, and a new partner. You will have a golden retriever named Lucky.
But right now, you are alone, crouched on the floor in the last bathroom stall, your head in your hands, sweat droplets running along the small of your back, your knees pulled up and pushing against your palpitating chest. You smell urine and Japanese Cherry Blossom, and a layer of coffee stagnates in your mouth. You keep lifting your feet to feel the slight pull of the sticky floor.
Hug Me Once
by Tim Frank
As a child I refused hugs, always offering a firm handshake instead – even to my mother who watched sadly as I grew into a frail teenager with perpetually clammy palms.
On her deathbed, grandma offered my greatest challenge.
“Give Nana a hug, darling,” she said, with dull grey eyes, stretching out her arms. “Not long for me now.”
Reluctantly, I leaned in, pressed my cheek against her wiry purple wig until I heaved contented sighs that turned into tears.
Then I burst into flames, incinerating my grandma, leaving her charred remains glowing on the mattress.
“Oh, right,” everyone said.
Microfiction Monday – 122nd Edition
Amongst the Heaps
by Micah Castle
Endlessly we toil before the fiery maw, feeding the flames coal under towering smokestacks, billowing thick, black smog.
The world trembles and rattles with each step of the crude titanic legs, tearing the earth asunder as it mindlessly journeys.
Heaps of brittle, blackened corpses lie in the dark corners, half-hidden by shadows. We take from the piles, too, throwing them into the fire. More fuel, life for our home. Terrified to look below; horrified to see the dregs of humanity.
We futilely fill its blazing belly, staving off death, until others take our place and we’re amongst the heaps.
Cravings
His mother called him “Willy-Lump-Lump” when she was angry. She was angry often: at his father who vanished long ago, strangers who said *smile*, colleagues who laughed when she recalled her beauty queen days. She still had the shoulders and cheekbones, but her hair had turned gray in her fifth month and her waist went the way of the boy’s father. The boy devoured Karo syrup sandwiches after school; spooned jelly under the covers; shoplifted Butterfingers, TastyKakes, Doritos. Now, he is six-foot-three and mostly muscle. He works on Wall Street, has a postcard-perfect family, guzzles Jagermeister after his mother visits.
Imperfect Timing
by Josh Cohen
I didn’t wear flip-flops for the excursion from patio to parking lot. There was no need—the path was paved, and I just needed sunscreen from the rental car. But had I known the vole’s morning routine, maybe I would have donned footwear. Either way, the result would have been the same. A flattened creature pleading for swift mercy.
With an unread USA Today, I swept the evidence into a garden bed. I didn’t bury it. Or eulogize it. There was no time—I could already hear the clang of the next trolley bound for the beach.
Microfiction Monday Magazine 