Microfiction Monday – 78th Edition
The Mermaid
by Jean Straton
She was half-fish, half-human. “A mermaid.” Jack whispered.
She wasn’t moving. Could she breathe?
“Hey, are you alive? Please be alive.” He grabbed a nearby stick and jabbed it at her.
The mermaid coughed and seawater shot out from her mouth.
“Are you okay?” Jack asked.
The mermaid groaned and rubbed her eyes. “Where… am I?”
“You’re on land. Do you want me to help you get-“
“Oh, thank God.” She blurted and pulled her legs out from the mermaid tail.
Aunt Edna’s Stuffing
by Bill Diamond
Aunt Edna loved the holiday season: the decorations, music and food. Even the crowded shopping brought her joy. She especially liked the family gatherings.
So, the family was surprised, but not shocked at her will. It requested she be stuffed and displayed each year from Thanksgiving to New Year’s to enjoy the celebrations and camaraderie.
It was weird at first. But soon, decorating Aunt Edna was an annual tradition. The children rubbed her nose for luck and wished for presents.
Edna was an island of seasonal cheer. She beamed regardless of the chaos, family traumas, or how outrageous her costume.
Workplace Chat
by Annalise Grey
“What are your plans for the future?” Dr. Madden asked as he sipped his fourth cup of coffee.
George shrugged. “Marry a pretty Martian girl and raise a green family.”
Dr. Madden laughed before turning to leave. “Extraordinary sense of humor, son. I’m sure the new hyperdrive we’re developing will make your fantasy come true.”
Glancing over his shoulder, George carefully shoved his Martian porn comic into his desk’s only lockable drawer.
The Calendar
by Mark Reels
The calendar featured a scene from some exotic location above each month’s blank grid of days.
Nathan dutifully added his work schedule, his son’s soccer games and his daughter’s swim lessons to the grid representing June.
Ayers Rock sat above the timetable for his daily life. The monolith sat beneath a full moon in a velvet sky streaked with starlight.
Nathan recalled a documentary about Australia. The contrast between its vibrant coral reef and the desert that makes up most of the continent had left him melancholy for days.
Next year he would get a calendar with puppies or something.
From This Distance
by Ed Higgins
Can you remember now? How we could each disappear completely, connected despite fault lines; subduction zones all our own. Lie protected. Surfaces sliding under failed recognitions as overlying sediments accumulate under pressure transforming into anthracite or other hardened evidence. Reminding me of a nearly lost premise: Once we sang so goofily out of tune we may actually have laughed out loud. Uncertain now are favored wines: zinfandel, chardonnay, oaky pinots we declared made just for us. Little suspecting some later taste, like treachery, say, calculated–or maybe only through regret, conveniently overlooked. While staring into one another’s eyes.
Microfiction Monday – 77th Edition
The Field
by Susan Sabry
Pumpkins fell from the sky, and managed to hit everything but a small girl in the middle of a field. There were no witnesses. In fact, every man driving by could only see a small scarecrow. A scarecrow with a summer dress and a mouth stitched in a circle letting out a silent scream.
Moby Dick: The Abridged Version
by Marc Simon
He is above. I am below. He is air. I am water. He is black. I am white. He lives to hunt. I hunt to live. He has steel. I have tooth. He’s drawn my blood. I’ve tasted his flesh. He wants my life. I want to live. Come noon the third day we will meet on the in between, and once and for all, decide.
Children
by Alexis Nau
This tiny creature is getting larger and harder to feed. She whines out for more of me, cry like a ravaged beast. Sometimes I wonder if she only plays at being small, for I’m certain on my down-low days she could grind me into dust under her smudged heel. Her brother is golden, my sunshine-boy who likes to hide under snow drifts in winter. Sometimes I forget his name amidst the clamor of her wailing. I set him on his feet and he bobbles away, frightened by the sound of her again.
A Single Cloud
by Henry Bladon
It can’t be that bad, he said. I looked out of the hospital window. A single cloud means something bad, I said. You’ll be fine, he said. He didn’t look convincing I gestured to the tubes sprouting from my arm, the bag above my head. That’s nothing, he said. You’re a winner. You always win. I said that sounded tautological. He shrugged. Anyway, I said: You know what they say in all the films? He looked at me hopefully. Tell me it’s something good. I shook my head. So tell me, he said. I put him out of his misery. They say: ‘Let’s get out of here’.
Bucket List
by Nick T. Johnson
The narrow piece of paper, tacked to a bulletin board, loomed in the room like an ominous hourglass. Among the many markings of accomplishment upon it, there remained, for the last ten years, only one unadulterated item. When reached by the aging man, the implications of finishing the final task, Learn to play the Piano, had become paralyzing. Awoken, revelation from his mother’s past words consumed him, “Only God knows when it’s your time; he doesn’t bargain.” Drawn to the dusty fixture, he struck an unknown key, praying it was his first of many.
Microfiction Monday – 76th Edition
Forbidden
by David Galef
Denvers was halfway down the trellis when the miasma hit. The breeze carried bougainvillea and pollen that stuck in his throat. He grew dizzy, about to fall when a child’s hand pulled him through an open first-floor window. He fainted on the linoleum floor, waking up alone in the darkness, which is how he spends most of his time these days. Once in a while, he’ll raise his head to look at the garden, but the effort costs him. The child never returned. The window is now barred. Those at the institution act as if he’s no longer there.
Bear
by Andy Brennan
I don’t know what else to say except I’m sorry. You were faithful; you stood by us through the evacuation; you bristled on the trail; you scented danger; you listened in the night. You were good. I told the kids you’d broken your leg in a trapper’s trap. They knew we couldn’t carry you and that we couldn’t heal you. They didn’t know we’d eaten our last can of navy beans two weeks prior. They didn’t know it wasn’t possum stew. You gave and gave and gave until the very end. That’s always how I’ll remember you.
Fitting Together
by Debora C. Martin
Tom tossed in the king-sized bed while Sally assembled the 5,000 piece puzzle portraying the Milky Way. He wished her star gazing would end, and remembered a better life before her sobriety. Leaning over the wobbly table, neck and shoulders aching, Sally inserted lavender-hued pieces into purple skies speckled with microscopic stars. In her trance, she failed to hear Tom descend the stairs and walk to the kitchen, opening and closing cabinets. But, she ceased working, and commenced hating herself, when he entered the room and handed her a glass of wine.
Dreaming
by Hannah Whiteoak
Lying awake, imagine buying a patch of land in some remote place. You’ll build a tiny house: no space for his smelly socks, dishes piled in the sink, gadgets he buys but never uses. You’ll plant potatoes, keep chickens, walk in the wilderness with only a shaggy dog for company, and finally figure out who you could’ve been without him. He rolls over and drapes an arm across you. Remember your career in digital marketing has not equipped you with housebuilding skills. You’ve killed every plant you’ve owned. Animals frighten you. At least he’s stopped snoring.
Cancer Ward
by Jim Doss
A Solzhenitsyn look-alike slumps into the chair beside me, scowling. I always pick slot #13 for its anti-luck in this world of science. We don’t believe in miracles. We grunt at each other, starving men in a bread line awaiting our meager portion. The nurse hangs his bag of treated blood before feeding a clear liquid into my veins that shrouds me in fog. We live trapped in the gulags of our minds each day, never knowing when the bullet might come, or the gates swing open to forests filled with life, freedom beckoning like a mirage.
Microfiction Monday – 75th Edition
Run
by Hannah Whiteoak
Run until your heart races, breath wheezes, January air grazes your throat, feet are on fire, a stitch gnaws at your side, legs burn and buckle as you sprint across the finish line and stagger to a stop. Bend at the waist, hands on your thighs, nauseous, gasping as you reach for your watch to check your time. Plan to run again tomorrow, despite aching calves and quads; set the alarm, plaster blisters, gulp coffee and go, because you remember when the black dog was gnashing at your heels and you know it is never far behind.
Seaside Proposal
by Vincent Aldrich
She cried good tears. The long wait finally over. She said she loved the ring, and me, and I cried a little too, grinning. We laughed together, and it was pretty much perfect. But somewhere in the conversation following, while I worked my second drink, I made some offhanded comment about credit card debt and changing diapers, and something in her eyes clouded over. Now she stares at the grey waves in silence, then her phone, then the waves again. I sip my fresh drink and flip through the appetizers, while seagulls argue over some dead thing by the water.
Thirst
by Maura Yzmore
I’ve always thirsted for rain. For gloomy skies and thunder. For running soaked to the bone along wide, sparkling streets.
Those streets led to a desert, and in the desert were you. Amidst scorpions, cacti, in the sweltering heat, the thirst felt deep in my loins, and it was quenched by your sweat.
Our children grow up on ice. All water, you say, like rain. But streets are narrow and mean, far too cold to get drenched… And you, my love, are a liar.
With you, it’s ice or heat. Never, ever my rain.
You let me die of thirst.
Auspices
by Alanna Weissman
“Inoperable,” the doctor told her, showing her a scan. She attempted to decipher the black-and-white image, its contents a Rorschach, the tumor blooming like a flower, growing like a weed. She thought back to when she was a child and fascinated with medicine. Scabs, lipomas—how fascinating the things the body produced! She would squeeze a clogged follicle for the hardened bead of lymph it produced, peel the outer layer off a crusted-over cut. But illness, true illness, was something that only happened in television dramas and medical textbooks. Now she could only wait.
My Life Without Me
by Jim Doss
I quit my job a year before I did. After 20 years of service, the company gave me the big promotion to a corner office. I’d shut my door hours at a time, pretend I was engaged in delicate negotiations with an acquisition target only to watch pigeons landing on my window ledge, or people in the street below hurrying place to place. I sat there in my Brooks Brothers suits, staring at the double reflection in the corner windows, first left-side, then right-side, wondering who this stranger was, and why he stared back so intent on probing my soul.
Microfiction Monday – 74th Edition
A Prayer in Cinnamon
by Ellen Perleberg
Wander to the kitchen at one a.m., sleepless. She’s there, of course. Try politely not to notice She’s been crying. She looks up, smiles, conspiratorial. It’s less lonely when there are people in the house. “I was about to make hot chocolate,” She says. “Want some?” She hadn’t really been intending on cocoa. But it’s what people do for each other in midnight kitchens. She respects that. People need their litanies and lullabies. Take a seat at the table while She whisks chocolate, the kind that comes in disks and dissolves grainy, imperfect, into milk. Real cinnamon. Taste and see.
The Pastor and His Dark Church
by Stephen D Gibson
Someone changes the porch light bulb to red again. A “red-light district” bulb. A persistent prank. It doesn’t seem, to him, an accusation: “Pastor, you prostitute.” His parishioners are always outraged. It bothers him less. He advises turning the other cheek. Changing bulbs. They want private security. “No,” he says. “Who wants angrier, more expensive vandalism?” They’re conservative. Sharing wealth, even with God from whence it came, is difficult for them. So, he walks toward his building, sunrise only a glow. The barest pink behind the silhouette of the church comforts him. Stepping inside, he leaves the porch light burning.
The Summer of Love
by Jim Doss
1967. They were Barbie and Ken. Everything perfect, the world before sex and death. Plenty of money, Cadillacs, steaks cut into precise squares. Each evening always full debonair dress, hand in hand, hand on waist, violins swirling. Nothing could spoil the magic, not even war, that distant echo growing louder in foreign jungles. Then the draft, daddy’s money failures, deferment that didn’t happen. Mekong, Tet Offensive, napalm, flame throwers, tunnel rats scurrying past bullet-riddled bodies. Fear that makes a person retreat into themselves, cowering behind a wall of corpses. In his room the light goes on, off, on, off. Forever.
Chelsea
by Mark Reels
When Chelsea stopped by the supermarket, they were setting up for the wine tasting. The store put on a “Six for Six Celebration” with six appetizers and six samples of wine at little stations throughout the store. She bought a pregnancy test and headed home. When Brad picked her up, Chelsea didn’t tell him about the baby. Instead, they complimented each other’s outfits and drove to the store. Later, she stood in the gluten free aisle sipping a dry Chardonnay while scrolling through her phone looking for a clinic. She used the online form to make an appointment for Monday.
Totaled
by Kelsey Maccombs
“I got you cinnamon tea. Is that okay?” Cinnamon tea tastes like screeching brakes and burned skin. Like pushing open the classroom door, still gasping, forty minutes after the exam started and explaining to the teacher I canttakethetest, needtogohome, donthavedryclothes, cantstopcrying. I spent an hour cleaning cinnamon tea out of the seats before I learned what totaled meant, so no, it’s not okay. But this is a first date, so I drink it anyway.
Microfiction Monday – 73rd Edition
This week’s artwork is “Where It Leads” by G.J. Mintz.
Faded Blue Loveseat
by Paul Germano
After an unpleasant evening at a holiday party neither of them wanted to attend at the festively-decorated red-brick home of the lovey-dovey couple they sometimes hang out with, they unlock the dead-bolted door to their tiny apartment, still miffed by an argument in the car and immediately head for their living room, turning on the TV and reluctantly taking their appropriate spots, sitting uneasy and far apart, on a faded blue loveseat that’s not up for the job.
The Beauty Within
by Jim Doss
Each day people die, only to be reborn again. It’s like they never left, same features, same clothes, same age, same memories, rising from the usual bed to eat a normal breakfast. Uncle Eddie last week. Sister Mary yesterday. They greeted me on their way to church this morning, two true believers walking the straight and narrow. I tip my hat to all who have witnessed the afterlife, felt their soul leave the body. Everyone’s time of dying remains a mystery of synthetic tendons, semiconductors, algorithms of good and evil. In my heaven, God’s just one more lonely computer scientist.
Unlike the Ones That Came Before Me
by Daeira Brown
I’ve seen things I shouldn’t have seen.
There were others like me. But they always do something wrong. When they do, the room goes cold and I hear the faintest hush of whispers.
I’m afraid. The last time I heard the hushes, one of us disappeared. But I am still here.
I’m still here, so I must be right. The way I speak/think is right. Suddenly, it all added up. I was right, so I wouldn’t disappear.
I curved my lips into a smile. Except this time, I did not need the numbers to tell me to do so.
Not Following
by J.R. Heatherton
A sickly gentleman from Prague opens a window to peer down at a throng-filled street where each pedestrian busily carries a chiseled rock from one side of the street to the other, giving thumbs-up once post is made and congratulating one another on a job well-done before carrying their rocks back across the street to repeat the process all over again. The man yells out, “Can anyone tell me how any of this matters?” No one answers his plea, paying no attention to anything other than passing time carrying rocks. So he shuts the window and draws closed the drapes.
Microfiction Monday – 72nd Edition
Yellow
by Jake Woods
The solitary dandelion grips life in the midst of this asphalt prison, growing sideways out of the curb like an intrepid, windswept conifer rooted to a concrete mountainside. The shade of yellow is not unlike the solid yellow line, arrow straight, that leads to freedom, or the fiery yellow orb that holds me captive. The wizened panhandler with scraggly beard, shuffles, yellow eyes downcast, defeated. Hope: yellow flower; yellow eyes. As I ponder, he stops, peers at the flower, considers. He staggers a bit as he opens his fly, and I look away as he pisses on my yellow daydream.
Clairvoyance
by JJ Collins
Far from home, away from his wife and kids, Harvey McGarvin decided to die.
It wasn’t quite as simple as that; no, Harvey loved his family very much. But Harvey had a secret, and secrets eventually flee the hearts of the impulsive.
Harvey could see the future.
Angst and worry consumed him, robbed him of sleep and forced him along a path he once believed to be his own. Finally, under the weight of false autonomy, he rode his motorcycle deep into the Nevada desert, and put a pistol in his mouth.
As he’d always known he would.
Buzzards
by Mark Burnash
As long as you blinkin’, they’ll leave ya ‘lone. Oh they’ll hangout and they’ll circle around, but as long as they see dem eyelids keep comin’ up, they’ll jus’ wait. And you MAKE ’em wait! You hear? Don’t be givin’ them sons of bitches an easy meal. Make ’em EARN their dinner; make ’em wonder if they jus’ wasting their time. They just might be. If you strong enough to throw a rock, try’n kill one of dem bastards, but whatever you do keep them eyes BLINKIN’, so-as even if they git ye, you be more trouble than you worth.
Apocalypse
by Ethelia Pope
Water has become dark and viscous, slithering serpentine through streets, expanding, impeding. Daily hustle and hurry is stolen, compressed into infinitesimal spaces. Never sunlight, never air to breathe deep enough into lungs to satisfy. The whole world is shoulder to shoulder, elbow to elbow on shrinking islands, looking skyward at the haze.
Microfiction Monday – 71st Edition
This week’s artwork is by Julian Cloran
Ennui
by Sue Powers
Listless, languid, eyelids heavy in empathy, food called out to her, insistent, nagging, moving her to pull out lemon bars, Häagen Dazs, mozzarella cheese, sourdough bread, a leftover vegetable curry and rice entrée now five days old and her secret stash of brownies, and wash it down with a diet cola and her bottle of save-for-an-occasion Riesling. Wiping the last crumb from her chin, she laid her head onto the table, belly painfully extended, bile rising to her throat, and still, had there been any thing left, her emptiness would have devoured it.
If Turkeys Could Talk
by C. F. Carter
When you approach her house and I try to warn you, you hear only warbles and honks.
You ignore me when I bend my wing towards the barn, where cars rust in the darkness.
When I try to lead you to the well where badges soak in its cold depths, you push me aside with a shiny jackboot.
Like a strutting tom, you ring the bell, and a heartbeat later she shoos you off the porch.
She scatters cracked corn in the yard, while you beat your wings and kick up dust, erasing what I’d scratched in the ground: witch.
Drunk Mothers
by Mir-Yashar Seyedbagheri
She asked her son to take her to the liquor store. Again. She hated the look in his eyes, eager to please. As if this could patch everything together. She always lost her temper, passed out. Her career as a pianist had fallen flat. She felt a mélange of anxiety and rage, the sense of something valuable taken. “I’ll take you,” he said. She felt gratitude. Anger. She wanted him to resist and oblige. She wanted him to take her, she wanted him to hide the keys. She wanted him to leave. Run fast. “Let’s go,” was all she said.
Tomatoes
by Daryl Scroggins
Don’t go, she thought, her face pressed to the door she had closed against him. She imagined him walking down toward the road, his new car by the mailbox. She saw herself opening the door—saw him turning to her, unable to go on, starting back.
But she didn’t open the door. She went to the kitchen and got ice for her eye. Poured herself a glass of water. She saw, then, the brown bag of tomatoes she had selected for him from her garden. But when she glanced through the peephole again, everything just looked round, like a road.
What is Death Like?
by Xavier Barzey
A German cockroach lay stiff on its back as its mesothoracic legs flickered in slow motion on the front porch. “What is death like?” she asks intently with an innocent gleam in her little eye. I looked at her, uncertain of what to say. I reflected for a moment, “uh… well, I suppose it may hurt at first, but then you begin to transcend beyond the present and soon you’ll feel nothing.” Perplexed, she cupped her hands around the roach and stroked it softly on its back. It lay rigid. “There,” she says. “He’s okay now.”
Microfiction Monday – 70th Edition
Offering Nothing
by Ashlie Allen
She cries when I don’t touch her. I know I make her sad, but I’m depressed too. I throw my trench coat over the chair when I get home, grab a bottle of Merlot and snicker. Tears leak down my face when she comes to kiss my neck. “Why are you so enticing?” I wine. “Please admire me. I have bad anxiety tonight.” “I do too.” I bite her lip, taste some blood, which make my eyes protrude. I know I’m a selfish beast and will push her away. I’ll come home tomorrow night and offer the same disappointment.
The Ad
by Amy Bartley
We’d always done it thatta way. Bruised our knuckles on the glass washboards. Scraped our skin on the metal ‘n’s. On that particular Saturday, me ‘n Sis were washin’ ‘n beatin’ up our hands when Momma yelled.
“Girls! Come in!”
We ran. There in her hands she had it open. The Harper’s Bazaar. Her finger pointin’, tappin’ on a full page, full color ad. “Look,” she said.
It was huge, a big square machine that automatic like magic does the washin’. Momma did a scoff then said, “Who in the world could afford a contraption like that?”
Another Glass
by Lara Lewis
“More.” He spoke with a smooth voice, his young hand holding forth the empty glass. Hands of bone tilted a pitcher of sand forward and poured.
He watched it spill down, and as it seeped into his glass his hands shriveled, and his throat tightened. It dripped down the thin hole in the stem and he watched it, letting it slip to the floor below.
The last grain of sand hit the floor, and he turned the hourglass over.
“More,” he said, and the hands poured.
Maternal
by Stephen D. Gibson
Her shoes sounded like claps against the bank’s granite floor, like gunshots. She was there to argue. I sat in the lobby while she quietly displayed page after page to the collections officer. They were people you could speak with then. I didn’t know it, but she argued for me, my safety and shelter. The bank actually had made an error. And the man had to admit it, though he couldn’t explain. Young, I thought the shoes proud: “look at me” they said. Old, I think they claimed space, claimed it with sound. She was the author of that noise.
Microfiction Monday – 69th Edition
This week’s artwork is by G.J. Mintz
Human Nature
by Katherine Bonnie Bailey
As a child, I harvested powder from butterfly wings to smear on my cheeks, glittering war paint for soft, pale skin. But beauty did not occur to me. Instead, I applied the shades for fantastical reasons, reveling in imagined potency.
“Don’t,” My mother scolded when she saw. “They need their fairy dust for flight.”
But no dust would lift my feet from the ground. And if I couldn’t wing away, why should they? So I chained the colorful creatures to the flowers with tiny tears in delicate places, my face glimmering. Stranded, they were only worms. No better than me.
Scones
by Barry Basden
On his way for scones this morning, he rolled through a stop and turned in front of a tan pickup. Immediately a cruiser appeared in his rear view.
“I beat him to the corner,” he lied.
“Not if you’d stopped. Two weeks ago a woman got T-boned there. Broke her neck.”
He remembered that cluster of EMS and police vehicles, his irritation detouring around it. So. A woman with a broken neck had been at the center of all that commotion.
He tacked the warning citation above his key rack. He wanted to see it every time he went out.
He Remembers a Girl in Scotland
by David L. Arnold
Once, when he was much younger and on orders for Nam, he backpacked Scotland. In Mallaig, he sat on the dock with a girl he met on the Sands of Morar. They shared a head of lettuce, slicing it like an apple. She was going to Ben Nevis. He was waiting for the ferry to Stornoway. He thinks he still dreams of her sometimes; a girl walking beside him on the sand who he cannot turn and see. He has been back to Scotland. He never made it to Nam. He’s older now, so he figures it worked out okay.
The Good ol’ Days on the Farm
by Kenny A. Chaffin
On the farm we’d put up bailing-wire antennas for everything – the B&W television, the CB radio, even the chickens. There was only Channel 12 with its 10,000-watt, thousand-foot tower a few miles east of the farm broadcasting to the entire Southern Oklahoma and Northern Texas region. It came through everything. Like the Philco we’d listen to KMAD on, Channel 12 always there in the background. It was on the party-line phone, in the barn somehow through the galvanized steel and chicken wire. Mama heard it on her teeth. I believe it. I’m surprised we didn’t get cancer. The pigs did.
Deadheaded
by Hannah Whiteoak
He prunes you like a rosebush, removing dead wood. He disentangles stems that might strangle growth: your mother, sister, friends.
Don’t you want to be perfect? He proffers pruning shears and urges you slice away bad habits: drinking, dancing, going out after work. Soon, you won’t need work. He provides.
You bear fruit: a daughter, with rose-red lips and skin that bruises like petals. When winter comes, you bundle her against frost. “Wait in the car. Don’t wake Daddy.”
Ten minutes later, you take the driver’s seat. You stash the pruning shears in the glove box, blades red as roses.
