Microfiction Monday – 218th Edition
Inheritance
Dad is cutting Mom in half while I watch. I know it’s an illusion, but from the wings it seems real— the anger in Dad’s eyes as he calmly wields the saw, the fear in Mom’s despite her stage smile. I’m forced to feel both—the seething resentment toward the woman who tied him down, and the agony of legs crammed in the box, of waiting for the blade to fall and finally take away all ability to run.
Gob-Smacked
by Marjan Sierhuis
In the morning, Piper collapses on her living room sofa. She opens one of the business-sized envelopes that she has removed from her front porch.
Ring.
She listens to the automated messaging system. Her heart beats rapidly in her chest, her hands tremble, and the phone slips from her grasp.
Several days later, more envelopes land on her porch.
Ring.
She takes a deep breath, swears into the microphone and then listens to the speaker.
“Sorry, mother. I thought you were someone else.”
Piper decides it is time to move and change her service provider.
How to Happen
by G.J. Williams
Watch him sleep. How he scowls, mumbles, snorts, shudders, frets. I’ve yet to hear him wake with a shriek. But he’s getting there. The odd flail at first light. Bad dreams, he’ll say, nothing more. As ordinary as it gets. Were it not for those dreams he’d be brighteyed and bushytailed, no question. As if. How he sleeps is how it is. Who knows what world he wakes to. Other people’s daylight impossible to bask in. Friends hover, corners darken. He pales, gets paler, flirts with a statue, moons. He’ll continue or he’ll not. He panics: nothing is happening.
Move-In Day
by Cecilia Kennedy
The walls of the house lash out, whispering Mel’s name, telling her they’ve seen her hide some bodies.
An exorcism won’t do, so she calls a therapist instead.
“But do you feel scared?” the therapist asks.
“No—judged, which is worse.”
After her session, she paints over the walls, installs new floors, pushes ghost hands and feet into graves, posts the renovations, while the voices condemn her, but she sells the house and moves into a new one that’s freshly built. She digs her hands in her pockets, her fingers brushing old paint chips: a fine dust, ashes of whispers.
Famous Last Words
by Ina Briar
“It’s fine,” he said, wrapping the oily cloth around his thumb. He rolled back under the car, gripping the flashlight between his teeth.
His six-year-old threw up her hands and marched back to the house. “Mooom!”
Sirens blared, clearing a line through traffic.
“Another do-it-yourselfer,” grumbled the driver.
His wife watched them tow the car away. The service was at eleven. Flats, she decided, since she’d have to walk.
Microfiction Monday – 2016 AWP Edition!
A few weeks ago, during the AWP conference in Los Angeles, the Blue Skirt Productions team asked participants to submit microfiction on post-it notes for a chance to be published online. Below are the chosen entries. Enjoy!
Possum
by Ann Hillesland
When Victoria saw the possum, she knew it was her dead husband. He hunkered in the apple tree, staring at her as she carried clean laundry past.
She remembered once walking down their wooded driveway, finding a young possum frozen, mouth agape in a stilled scream, sharp teeth revealed. She felt pity, but when she returned from the mailbox the creature had vanished. Playing possum.
She thought of his empty casket beneath the ill-fitting soil where just yesterday she had left fresh chrysanthemums.
She stooped for a rock, aimed for the eyes.
Train
by Aimee Lowenstern
The train comes in the dark. It is longer than your room and mostly made of your drooling jaw. The wheels are uneven, and not as white as they once were. A woman sits in the tongue soft seat, holding a suitcase of your dreams tight between her knees. She is going home.
God
by Zach Roberge
Someone pissed “God” on the sidewalk in high-class poet letters, and the liturgy is rapidly drying in the Los Angeles sun. The moment is so perfect, so symbolically ironic, that I trod on the O, and walk away with God dripping off the heel of my shoe.
Milner Yelp Review
by Angela Spires
The unofficial roof tour of our hotel was in exchange for a pineapple hard cider and a cupcake. The attendant’s hard day led us into a restricted area of our Shining-esque hotel, where we walked up concrete steps to what he called the “Gotham City view.” Empty beer bottles lined the satellite dish we squeezed around for the black mundane outlook. I could see the darkness he had referenced perfectly. A city with so many stars, but no real light was shining through. I took a single picture of a moment unable to be captured, and we took another drink.
Red as Blood
by Savannah Ridgley
It would be cliche to say her lips were as red as blood. But it was not just the pink of her lips, pristinely layered with lipstick, most of the lower half of her face was coated with a color as vibrant as the blood that swells from my hand when a crushed can becomes too sharp. No longer though the color of her blood. Her body stiff and blue and contorted. The news says the alcohol and cold together crept, attacked, and sedated. Still, as I watch from my sofa, I raise another bottle to my lips.
Microfiction Monday Magazine 