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 – 216th Edition
Dayenu
by Sara Merkin
Maybe if she could just let him plan a date. If he could plan a date. Maybe if she wasn’t so controlling. If he wasn’t so disorganized. If she could just trust his compliments. If he could learn that ‘your tits are amazing’ wasn’t enough to make her feel attractive. If she had the courage to ask for what she needed. If he didn’t put his needs first. Maybe if she wasn’t so afraid of being abandoned. Maybe If he wasn’t so afraid of commitment. Maybe if this wasn’t true for all the relationships she’d had, she could be happy.
Maria Jumps into a Big Blue Mouth
by Tiffany Farr
She nestled into the corner of the suitcase. Nose tucked under tail, trying to hide within herself. First day home from the rescue and learning her triggers. Who knew dogs could understand the concept of leaving? It’s possible permeance.
The motions of handling my jumbo-sized hard-scuffed suitcase, warmly named Big Blue, were fluid. I found unpacking a suitcase harmless, but the instinct etched into her body said Jump inside! Don’t be left behind!
Consider the body of a newly homed six-pound pup. The shaking and panting, pointed ears that don’t twitch when your mouth forms the words “Maria” and “Home.”
Wentwell
by G.J. Williams
Eyes pink veined, it was Wentwell alright. What formerly loomed now stooped, what had radiated now oozed. He seemed all overcoat. He took his plate of food and sat away from the others. Of all people. Mr Wentwell. Geography. He of the sly cigarette and extracurricular punishments. Keeping his eyes to himself.
The Award
by Johannes Springenseiss
After the committee handed her the Widows of the Revolution plaque and a manilla envelope containing cash that was more money than the annual salary of most of us, we could hardly wait until they left.
It was entirely up to her how to spend the money, after all grandpa had been one of the first martyrs of the uprising, and she herself had worked in various underground hospitals the entire time.
“First we’re going to buy new sturdy suitcases and waterproof boots for us. When the wind changes, we’ll have to get out of here in a jiffy.”
On Watching Lawn Maintenance Videos
by Tom Gadd
There are videos, now, of lawn vigilantes, who knock on the doors of houses where yard grasses are reaching toward fulfillment and tiny furred creatures find solace and insects dip themselves into the pollen of wildflowers and he watches as all that life is hacked and harassed with mowers and edgers and whackers. Watches abundance converted into easy geometry. Watches one lawn maintenance video after the next in his one-bedroom apartment. In the city he grudgingly moved to for work. Where the sight of a thistle hunkered in a sidewalk crack fills him with equal amounts of hope and despair.
Microfiction Monday – 212th Edition
There Is No Pirate Treasure in Indiana
by Zebulon Huset
They knew it wasn’t likely that pirates had made their way as far inland as Indiana, but they still couldn’t wait to find some sort of buried treasure in their back woods. It was in all of the movies. It wasn’t until the girls found a third human femur in the way of their treasure hunting that the police cordoned off the woods, ending their adventures for good—and sparking a lifelong interest in forensics for one sister, and something darker in the second which laid dormant for years until she found a local mentor, years before the police would.
Bernie’s Buyin’
He shouldn’t, but he’s doin’ it anyway.
Bernie can’t afford to sit here, the one bar in this half-horse town, buying the rest of us codgers rounds. I ‘spect we’re drinking grocery money.
“Anything ya like,” Bernie repeats, saluting us, his pals, with a Coors that’s surely gone warm.
Wives’ll soon be after us.
I wonder if this has to do with Annie’s recent passing. They never had kids. It’s just him and that mutt in the trailer out on the prairie.
“You like dogs, don’tcha, Lou?” Bernie asks, an imploring look in his eye. “You like old Buddy, dont’cha?”
Friends With Guns
by F.D. Jackson
The circumstances have suddenly changed; Will had been pounding Caleb in the face. Caleb has the upper hand now, pulling Will across the yard by his dislocated arm, Will howling in pain. Caleb slams Will’s head against the 47 Chevy’s wheel well.
A shot reverberates through the trees. Caleb leans over Will with his head resting on Will’s left shoulder. A hole the size of a child’s hand is just over the spot where Caleb’s heart would have been.
Will is wide-eyed, holding his breath, blood and tissue smattered on his face and in his hair. “I’m sorry,” he whispers.
Manchild
by G.J. Williams
In another life she’s on her way upstairs, her feet bare, the carpet deep. No one’ll say nothing doing. She’ll climb. She’ll run a bath, go for aromatic and take her time, knowing there’s no man sitting on the bottom step. The stairs are clear. Music is a distinct possibility.
This is Why She Never Gets Anything Accomplished
She deftly placed some curves in her sketchbook until the vague shape of an elephant sitting on an overturned classroom wastebasket appeared. She erased the back and redrew, adding skin folds. After she finished water coloring, she signed the piece. That’s when a foot lifted off the page. The other feet followed suit, and the trunk wrapped around her pencil, so she reluctantly released it. The elephant erased itself, letting the colors float out the window.
Microfiction Monday – 208th Edition
The Quick
by G.J. Williams
Being lifeless, Cyrus strove to sound the exuberant note in all that he said, and, having little to say, loudly doubling the number of words required to say it. Was what little he had to say worth hearing? Sadly it was not. Was Cyrus aware of this? Sadly he was. Did he succumb to the knowledge? By the sounds of it he did not. Yet who knows the 3 a.m. of anyone’s soul. Cyrus surely clocked his. What there was of it. Life as lip-service was still life, still service. Did Cyrus believe this? Sadly, he did.
Accident
by John Szamosi
He runs over a dog and doesn’t even flinch. When I ask him if we should go back, he shakes his head. “No worries, mate, let the sleeping dog lie.”
Driving back an hour later we find a crowd at the site. It can’t be good. Getting closer we see the villagers butchering the dog and distributing the meat among themselves. I reflexively cover my eyes. No use, I can tell I’m going to be sick.
He puts his hand on my shoulder. “No worries, mate, it’s a man-eat-dog world here. We’ll be like that, too, just question of time.”
Busy Week
On Monday Alicia arrived to leave me, bringing her mother and two sisters for moral support. They sneered and helped her gather clothes.
On Tuesday her attorney contacted me and suggested I hire my own.
On Thursday Alicia returned, this time only with her mother. They hauled away more. She said papers would arrive by day’s end.
On Friday she called and said she was sorry it had come to this. “Can I keep the television?” I asked. It was a 4K smart TV that I’d grabbed last year in a Black Friday sale.
“Oh, Andrew. Just sign the papers.”
Disco 2000
by Mileva Anastasiadou
If you were a fruit, you’d be the sourest lemon, the way you shake my hand, like we didn’t once share our deepest secrets, and if you were a notebook, you’d be a diary, you only have to pat my back and I spit it all out, and if you were a party, you’d be a cozy gathering, you listen carefully, you nod in sympathy, and if you were a song, you’d be Disco 2000 but for a friendship lost, and if you were anything at all, you wouldn’t have left, not then, not now, you’d stay and hold me
The Shed
Thunder rumbled distantly.
From our window, we saw Dad enter the shed near the corral.
Excited to check on our rescued bunnies, Roberta and I slunk into the kitchen, peering into their box, warmed by the stove’s pilot light.
A clap of thunder startled us, made the bunnies squeak, so Roberta peeked into our parents’ bedroom to make certain Mom was still asleep.
She motioned me over, pointing.
Next to Mom was Dad, snoring.
Roberta dragged me to our bedroom. We knelt beside the window, staring into the night.
“That wasn’t Dad we saw, was it?” she whispered.
Microfiction Monday – 202nd Edition
Matinee
by G.J. Williams
The film talked and the leading man died. The tinny note had been struck and there was no getting away from it. News came from all sides. The face was no longer enough. The narrowed gaze in close-up required a timbre of command. Our hero tried and tried, his voice a thin man’s question. He took up whisky: it didn’t help; and harsher brands of cigarette caused only coughing. Eyes, cheekbones, lips: what they’d always been. The mirror, like the camera, lied. He was face down, floor strewn with torn reel. There were no suspicious circumstances. There’d been no guests.
Optimal Delusions
At first he saw an octopus. A grey octopus slumbering under a white picket fence. But it turned out to be tree roots. Decades of secret squirming out of his neighbour’s backyard.
And those mottled whales breaching the surface of a sloping sea. Imperfections in the concrete retaining wall along the railway underpass.
Verdant islands of the South Pacific? Or clumps of moss in the rain drenched alley?
These little visual anomalies visited more frequently each day. Until the edges of certainty blurred and everything became like everything else. Just another possibility.
Downtown Park
by Tim Boiteau
He liked the square park downtown best.
A tree, a bench, yellow-smelling grass.
He liked to circle the cracked fountain where water used to shimmer in the sun. A retirement home placed across the street kept the bench restocked with an old man. A different one or the same one each day, he couldn’t say for sure, they looked so interchangeable to him: hoary-headed, bent, droop-skinned. Within each window a creamy-eyed and shrunken face glaucoma-gazed at his circumambulations.
At the square park downtown all eyes projected his spry, youthful ghost beside a spraying fountain that still shimmered in the sun.
Martha and George
Martha brings a martini to her lips to begin each day. A black wind howls past the tombstones inside George’s mouth when he speaks. Martha’s a woman who’d latch onto your crotch like a vise grip and tell you it’s a new way of gettin’ right with Jesus. You’d drop to your knees, beg to be saved. George pushes a grocery cart down an aisle of empty shelves to end each day. Broken eggshells in the dairy case. Martha likes to watch the rooster she keeps for a pet scratch for grubs in the dirt. The rooster’s also named George.
Treasures
by Matthew Shepherd
The shape of the face, the song-like quality of the voice, the calming scent. All had incrementally evaporated from Carter’s memory until only the small, unexpected trinkets of Sophie remained. The swirls on her silver heart earrings, the time an inappropriate laugh was stifled, the trio of freckles which blemished her forearm. Each became more precious with every passing day. Carter considered these traces to be the very essence of love: the unhealed scars left behind once happiness has gone. Treasures that even Sophie’s illness could not steal.
Microfiction Monday – 191st Edition
Resigned
by Andy Millman
When my coworker blew out the candles on her birthday sheet cake, I made a wish to leave my job. An hour later I resigned with some made-up excuse. I didn’t say how invisible I felt. My boss asked me to finish out the week. On that final Friday there was no sheet cake. I wasn’t even sure people knew I was leaving. One of my supervisors handed me a thick file and asked when I could summarize the reports inside. I guess he hadn’t noticed the box on my desk. I told him to check with me next week.
Photograph
by Raven Pena
A photograph is all I know of you and all I have of you. You’re young in this photo, and I can tell by your smile that your mouth is trying to move. Since you’re no longer here, you’re trying to speak to me from that moment in Hawaii from across decades, dimensions, and the space between living and sleeping. You’re saying: “Look at me. Look at me, slender and long, hair thick, tied up in a knot, teeth white and strong. I’m beautiful, happy, brown eyes glistening.” You’re saying: “You’re my granddaughter and granddaughter – You’re just like me.”
Monday, Peter
by G.J. Williams
Of all the thoughtographs to have emerged from the mind of Peter Monday, perhaps the most illuminating, sadly, is that of himself hand in hand with his own double. The landscape around them is lush. Birds fill the trees. There appear to be two suns in the sky. And Peter Monday’s faces? One of them is smiling broadly, the other looks as if it could kill. In the foreground there’s a swan oozing cool, its significance quite lost. However, look closely, note the birds in the trees, how their eyes are reminiscent of Peter Monday’s; there’s no escaping him, truly.
Breaking Baking Bread
by CLS Sandoval
She was frying donuts at Winchell’s, just thinking about her next move when she realized she hadn’t had her period in a while. She kept frying donuts. Frying gave way to baking. She did the kindest thing she could; picked a mom and dad. Shortly after giving birth, she stopped frying. But she never stopped making confections. 23 years went by. She made cakes and crème brûlée. She invited me to dinner, smiled, and cried. Thanked me for coming. We started our meal with the latest from her kitchen. A crisp, piping hot, loaf of soft, buttered French bread.
On The Page
by Emma Burnett
He asks to read my stories.
I ask if he’s sure. Some of them are kind of dark.
He says yeah, sure. I want to support you.
I pull up three stories, some of my favourites. I wait while he reads, trying not to pick my nails, trying not to fidget, trying not to say: Well? Well? Did you like it?
He reads. Then he gets up and gives me a hug.
Are you ok? He asks. Do I need to check for self-harm marks?
I look at him, and consider.
No, I say. It’s all there on the page.
Microfiction Monday – 188th Edition
Small Electric Blueberry Lemonade
I blink. “It costs how much?” I still take the cup. The cashier chews a nail.
Overpriced and unsanitary. I harrumph. Tapping my card, I turn on my heel and trip.
Refreshment cascades in a shimmering arc onto the gentleman behind me, bathing him in icy slush.
He freezes. His white button-up turns translucent. Looking at me, he wipes off his chest and slowly licks the stickiness from his fingers flashing a Rolex.
Rich and dirty? Holy hell.
When he smiles, his eyes crinkle.
I swallow and turn back to the till. “We’ll take two small electric blueberry lemonades, please.”
We’ve Just Met, and I Adore You
I marvel at your face. You! My new baby. The operating room sterility, spinal block anesthetic effects and clanking of surgical tools mark the frigid ticking of time. Suspended within the white pale blue coldness of our glaring bright operating theatre, your face glows warm, tiny, cherubic. Miniature bow mouth, your five-pound human perfection stops time. Wispy lashes over closed lids I can’t brush. My arms strapped to the table. Instead, my laughter bubbles up through the smell of antiseptic and iodine, to reach you. “Hello, I love you.” Salty tears pool in my ears while I jiggle with joy.
Placing the Man
by G.J. Williams
The one they call Glebe, Mr Glebe, he of the muffler and the sorrowful moustache, he’s the one to ask, he’ll know who was who what was what. Treat him to some bottled god he’ll remember everything like it was yesterday. No enquiry too trivial. He’s been here forever, or close enough. Murders, wonders, scandals. You’ll see him about. He’ll be glad of the opportunity. Some liquid sunshine and he’s the world’s. He’ll set you right. He’s a graveyard full of friends. He’ll know the man you’re looking for and how he ended his days in a place like this.
Escaping the Memory
by Alyce Wood
I found you in the woods, sky still ravaged in ash and amber light.
Two squirrels waited with you. I always joked your hair was a squirrel’s tail—like that one in our yard, grey with the red streak down its back.
They can sense one of their own in trouble—and you were.
I sank to my knees, the smell of wet earth up my nose.
We were told not to search.
(“Could still be out there,” they’d said).
I crossed your arms over your chest, pressed your eyelids gently closed and asked you to please come home soon.
Mia Visits
by Rachel Miller
In a reversal of our usual roles, I drive. As the rain becomes ever more insistent, electricity arcs between us. We talk about anything and everything, stirring up a warmth that condenses on the windshield. When our voices tire, my mind views us from above: just a speeding metal lozenge, wending its way toward the thundering Pacific.
Thick, cold sea foam runs through the folds of my brain, gently fizzing over each sharp-edged thought. As Mia buckles under jet lag in the passenger seat, it occurs to me that giving in to the waves might not be so bad.
Microfiction Monday – 182nd Edition
Lifesaving
by David Sydney
In the advertisement, an elderly woman thanks the lifesaving device company. Having fallen, she was able to use the device to call for help. She is now alive. But…
“I can’t stand that device.”
“How do you mean, Harriet?”
We are now dealing with Harriet and Gertrude. Real people, not advertisements.
“George is still alive, Gertrude.”
Harriet had been married to George for 57 years when he fell and successfully used the device.
“Damn, Harriet. That reminds me of Frank.”
Gertrude, too, had been married for 57 years, in her case to Frank, who had one of the devices also.
Largesse
by G.J. Williams
Just think of the music you’ll not have to face tomorrow, the gauntlet you’ll not have to run, the saliva you’ll not have to wipe off, the hundred piercing voices you’ll not have to close your ears to, the funeral you’ll not have to attend, the laughter you’ll not have to endure, the fortune you’ll not have to lose, the case you’ll not have to fight, the morsel you’ll not have to reach for, the glare you’ll not have to withstand, and the corridor down which you’ll not have to shuffle. Think on these things. Regard them as windfall.
Threads
by Dorcas Wilson
They say we make a strange pair; you untidy and tattooed, me immaculate, not a hair or stitch out of place.
You stride through life, grabbing opportunities as they arise. I walk with precision, every step planned.
You shout and swear. I talk with quiet eloquence.
You screech into the night. I sing in the shower.
You love stories. I love facts.
They whisper about us as if we can’t hear them.
They will never know what makes us two, one. They will never see the thread that binds us. The thread that one day will snap, tearing us asunder.
Harbinger of Death
Before she became a vulture, with a wingspan stretching six feet, she was a child, with no wingspan at all, disciplined with ridicule, told to stand straight and smile, to never bend, to never give in to whimsy. To never dream. In order to survive, the other vultures told her.
Before she became a vulture, she thought she could be anything, maybe even a brightly-colored macaw.
Microfiction Monday – 179th Edition
The Night in Question
by G.J. Williams
It’s a beautiful night. There’s no one drowning in the lake. If there were, the moon would be shedding a pearly light on the fact. But no such commotion. Barely a ripple. Silky all the same. Definitely silky.
Yes, a beautiful night was had by all. That’s what they’ll say. Peaceful it was. Then came dawn.
What happened at dawn? I haven’t yet decided. But this night will be the one in question.
Presents
by Peter Burr
Jack devoured his 28th birthday tenderloin with his mother and grandmother, flung his China plate at the dining room wall, and left.
“That dinner was mostly nice,” Jack’s mom said, gathering shards, “but I really wanted to sing the song and pass the chocolate cake.”
“What was all that about?” Jack’s grandmother said.
“Jack’s efforts to find a job have fallen short and I’m tired of having him around. Today I delivered his two week notice. He’s reacting. We’re all trying to figure things out in this life.”
“Yes,” Jack’s grandmother said, “but some try a lot harder than others.”
After the Invasion
by Darcie Johnson
We sat cross-legged by the campfire, the sounds of our parents grilling burgers over the crackling fire drowned out our whispered giggles. Our lives seemed full of possibilities.
That was the night everything changed.
Their ashen ships descended from above, no pretense of coming in peace. As the fighting began, our futures were forgotten as our childhoods vanished like smoke from that last campfire.
Decades of war aged us, but after years of fighting and losing so many, we finally won.
Now, we sit around fires again telling tales to the youngest of life before. What we will build again.
Microfiction Monday – 172nd Edition
The Painting
by David Henson
As the man admires the cobalt sky and verdant meadow, he notices brush strokes everywhere, even on his arms and legs. He realizes he’s becoming the woman in a painting he once admired. He recalls the woman, though surrounded by beauty, appears horrified. This tension is what makes the painting a work of art. The man is happy to be in the painting and wants to stay there. He tries to fake the look of terror but realizes his countenance is unconvincing and ruins the great painting. The thought horrifies him. The work of art is restored.
On the Wing
by Zylla Black
I was stuffed into a cheap seat, below and behind the second set on the plane, my legs stretched flat before me. At least I could see the window, over the wing.
In flight, you can sometimes actually see the air as it funnels into channels crafted by human engineering. I love to watch the wind, the movement of metal feathers.
She was out on the wing. I blinked; she remained seated on the edge, hair and clothes snagging on the gusts, rimmed in cracking ice as we came out of a cloud.
I wondered how much her ticket cost.
Interlusion
by G.J. Williams
What you’ll see is this: Nijinsky in a straitjacket pirouetting in slo mo to some polyphonic hellbroth remastered for insane times. It’s a romance. There’ll be footage of the grainier kind, lending weight to each hieratic contortion. This’ll be history danced, the world’s psychosis incarnate. There’ll be no voiceover lacking affect, no quoting from diaries and certainly no prolonged silence to indicate the absence or otherwise of God. It’ll be wordless, and as wordless pieces go, it’ll say less than most. It’ll not even be strange.
Microfiction Monday Magazine 