Microfiction Monday – 193rd Edition
Deviled Eggs
by Erin Jamieson
I add too much pepper.
My nose tickles but I’ve trained myself to hold back sneezes.
You’re up early, you say.
I spot the birthmark on your wrist, the birthmark I saw on our first date.
The same birthmark I saw every time you left marks on my neck.
I just don’t want to lose you.
I grab my keys.
For the first time in months, I step out the front door, running faster as you call my name, until my name becomes distorted, carried away with a gust of wind, until the pepper leaves my nose.
Going Up
Wobbly from fitful sleep, I arrive at an oak door listing on its hinges—a tenement school house. The cold fist of the new job pounds my stomach. The grizzled guard, dead-eyed, orders me to the second floor. The once grand staircase holds no steps. The dark wood banister hangs above an empty maw. How will I rise?
A bevy of rats—joyful, bright, cunning—leap to the handrail. A queue of energy, they run upward, tails waving. “Of course,” I think, strength returning to my legs, warmth and purpose to my heart. I jump up and follow.
Matching Pair
She hung onto him like a coat on a hook, colored herself the same shades of him: matching sneakers, matching backpacks, matching starlit gazes for each other. Two into one like a vanishing twin. She ate what he loved, fish paste on toasts she found repulsive but gobbled without wincing, held his fish-smelling hand, followed his hikes in the canyon, slipped on a rock, opened his bag thinking it was hers and found love notes he exchanged with another woman. “It’s not cheating if there’s no sex involved yet!” he said. She threw a sneaker at him and limped away.
Vespertine
by Lorette C. Luzajic
She was a crepuscular creature, always, as much a part of the gloaming as the crab-plovers and fireflies. After she got sick, he would look for her, knew she’d be wandering the woods with the nightjars and the rising moon, or rowing in the thin weeds. He was still trying to find her. He followed her in the shallows towards the oyster reefs. The humidity now was close and dark above the brackish water. In the twilight bay, she was out past the lighthouse, and finally, disappearing. The vespertine world was closest to the other worlds, she always told him.
A Buck in the Road
by Robin Perry Politan
She was lost in thought when she looked up and saw the buck standing in the narrow lane, tip to tail taking up the whole pavement, a dozen yards uphill. Massive antlers. A doe wouldn’t raise the hair on your arms like this guy. His dark, glistening eyes, her light, myopic ones locked. What would he do if she kept walking toward him? Likely move aside. Still, she backed up a step, bent her shoulder into the trunk of an old, towering oak and waited for him to get bored, like her ex, and move on.
Microfiction Monday – 62nd Edition
Man and Dog Crossing the Street
by Louella Lester
There he is, about to cross the street, not at the light of course. He wears a frayed plaid shirt—the one I gave him the week before I ran out of choices and ran. When did he get a dog? Shiny short-hair, muscles, no extra fat—both of them. He grips its leash. I slip back behind the parking lot hedge and hold my breath. He steps out—chin up at an angle. No horns honk. No drivers yell. They would never imagine his tears, snot, and apologies soaking my shoulder while I made silent plans.
Seaside View of a Woman
by Melissa Bobe
Quentin could not decide whether the woman in the yellow bathing suit had neglected to shave her armpits or not. From his purview, the pleasant curves of hip and ass and arches of back and neck were visible, the hair tied back in a coy manner, even the arousing side of the one breast he could make out. But to his frustration, he could not determine whether it was a shadow or a patch of hair there beneath the place the languid arm met its socket, and so he could not decide if the woman herself was alluring or revolting.
Epic Games
by Andrew Taylor-Troutman
By junior year, every cool white boy I knew leaned against his truck and spat tobacco juice into Coke bottles, never Diet, and constantly used the word “epic”: epic party, epic hook-up, epic burrito. My best friend got braces and I did not. There were rumors other guys got laid. We all got drunk. He and I got our alcohol by asking men on downtown street corners. We called it playing Hey Mister. We enticed them by saying they could keep the change. More than a few took off with all of our money. And that was always a relief.
Crushed
by Robin Perry Politan
Early morning.
The first hit – like a small stone, thrown – took him in the throat, mid-sentence.
Midday.
The hit, bigger this time, caught him mid-stride, in the chest. His eyes watered.
Twilight.
Drinking alone, watching TV, a small boulder got him right in the gut. He wasn’t one to well up at predictable song cues, sappy movies, pet deaths. He was a bucker-upper. He hadn’t shed a tear over their bloodless divorce. It’s not like he missed the bitch.
And, after all, she did it to herself.
Midnight.
The avalanche landed on his head. His howls woke the cat.
Stream
by Dan Cohen
As a boy fishes along a mountain stream, he comes across what he first thinks is an animal, but turns out to be a man on all fours, face immersed. When the boy asks what he is doing, he says he’s drinking the top of the stream, the sweet part, where it meets the air. He leaves the layers below, which taste of fish and mud, for others. The boy points out that, once he has drunk the top, the surface of whatever remains is now the top. The old man laughs. The boy knows nothing about streams.
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