Daily Flash Fiction Stories
By Valerie Lake
“Hi Max, I’m Miss Beth. Your dad told me you are eight years old.”
Hunched in his chair, Max looks at his feet.
“When he called, I heard what he had to say. But let’s find out what YOU think about why you are here.”
“He thinks I’m crazy.”
“Most of the kids I see are not crazy, Max. They’re usually sad, mad, or scared. Does one of those fit for you?”
By Jenny Wu
Filing past the wheel of the day’s last bus, huddled in engine fumes, brown smog, cigarette smoke and incense, the people of this region travel in a somber mood. They circulate a wet cough. They smell burnt rubber when nothing is burning. And though I cannot pinpoint the origin of this somberness, I know it charges the atmosphere with potential for a ruse. The passengers bring their own food to eat onboard, several meals’ worth in thin plastic bags, sautéed vegetables dripping grease from these bags. Meats and steamed buns. They are in my care until I release them—into the cesspool of taxicab drivers barking for addresses, wrenching women by their elbows off my bus.
The throat of my mailbox feeds me another crisp package of books. The thrill of unwrapping it. The delight in each cover, its rave reviews. The pride of owning it. The pressure in my heart, force fed, because now I must read it, dissect it, digest it. I’m engorged. 1,958 books and magazines litter my walls, windowsills, chairs, tables, my bed, under my bed, in the bathroom. I can’t get movement. I finish one book for every five I buy. I can’t get movement, not in my books, not in my home, not in my body. Everything’s stuck.
And there’s a rat in the wall. At night it chews those two-by-fours with its sharp teeth. Scritch scratch. I pound on the wall, pound some fear into that creature. He shivers quiet for sixty seconds. Scritch scratch. He won’t leave.
Everybody else left. My kids are seven hundred miles away in different directions.
And worse, my eardrum is buzzing. My nurse sister says it’s an aneurysm: it could burst into my brain at any moment.
By Gilkey Wildridge
His lips tasted like saltwater taffy bought from the boardwalk where we first met. It was a warm and free June afternoon; young and naive, we grabbed a handful from the old confectioner’s kiosk. He left some money, far more than what it was worth, and we rushed down the planks.
Over time, the influence of salted caramel wore off as we sped unknowing toward our final year together. The taffy mixed with other scents, tastes, and sounds of life with him: the crackle and pop of a fried egg searing in oil on a Sunday morning; the sweet ochre of his favorite pipe tobacco trapped within the screened walls of the porch on a rain-soaked August evening; the icy desperation of his seizures.
“Come here,” he says.
He sits in the armchair by the empty fireplace. Outside, the magnolia scrapes and rattles against the windowpane, heavy flowers bobbing and heaving. The dawn is windy, as if the world awoke angry. We have not been to sleep.
His flight to Düsseldorf is at 10 AM. I will finish packing his suitcase because he “cannot give a fuck anymore—it is only for work. It is only for two weeks.”
By Ed Maples
I will never forget the magical feeling of the summer of 1972, when I discovered the Eagles. It wasn’t just me, everyone knew the Eagles. As I sang in a flat, out-of-tune voice to their music, I dreamed of the places of which they sang and longed to travel to the romantic venues.
I decided to see Winslow, Arizona, or die! In my mind, Winslow, Arizona was Shangri-La. When the Eagles sang “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” the most beautiful image was painted in my young, impressionable mind. I could see the desert sunset with the saguaros and the sparse, but beautiful, flora. Also, I could see her: this splendiferous beauty silhouetted against a rapidly darkening desert evening. This idea became my ideal fantasy. I got to third base with a girl while “Take it to the Limit” was playing on my 8-track as we parked along the Arkansas River. I had sex for the first time listening to “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” and I got married to the Eagles Christmas song. Glenn Frey had been there for all the peaks and valleys. As I listened, I became an Eagle. They were speaking to me. I didn’t listen to the Eagles, I did things with the Eagles. There was no way the town or the girl with sparkling earrings could ever live up to my expectations.