Daily Flash Fiction Stories
By Charlie Rogers
It was right here a second ago.
Socks disappear all the time, often when they’re tumbling out of the dryer.
Elizabeth always joked, “Looks like another one’s run off to join the Navy.”
“Is it argyle? Probably the Marine Corps,” I’d respond. I don’t recall what that meant anymore. I didn’t own any argyle, never did.
So now I have one sock on my foot, the other has gone AWOL. It was right next to me when I was putting on this one.
[Read more…] about We Did a Good ThingI was out on the quad bike this morning, amid the bogs and outcrops, hills and vales of the fens and dales, the cold winter wind whipping my cheeks as the engine scrawled and spluttered. In the low winter sun, the shabby flanks of the sheep seemed camouflaged against the tired landscape, inhabiting, as they are bound to do, the marshy low valleys where the wind is only occasionally funnelled. These winter inspections are a necessary part of life on the moors, that I may gauge the state of the flock and their general demeanour, for an unhappy flock seldom procreates. Sheep get headaches, too.
[Read more…] about The Funnelled WindBy M D Smith IV
Selling the cow’s been difficult, she thought, but we had to have the money. Times are tough.
The Nez Perce Nation pursuing the U.S. Army. Some settlers were casualties as they retreated toward Yellowstone. The Campbell family settled in harm’s way.
Maddie tried to nurse her infant daughter, Dot, at her breast, but the milk was slow to return. The withering garden wasn’t doing well in the hot August heat. Danger was near. The Maybe in a day or two, I’ll have enough again. She smiled down at the fussing infant in her arms.
[Read more…] about Unlike Any Mother’s StoryBy Jeff Harvey
Crazy Bill dropped out of Pearl’s Beauty Academy after the instructor told him that women in this area wouldn’t want someone like him doing their hair. Bill asked her what that meant, and she said, “You know what I mean.”
He went back to sleeping late and watching game shows. Occasionally, he cut and styled hair without a license for money to eat. Kicked out by his parents after he wore one of his momma’s dresses to his senior prom, Bill was homeless for a while. The only place he could find to live was a room in back of a feed store that smelled like a horse farm. He cleaned the store in exchange for the room.
[Read more…] about Crazy BillBy Mary Morris
The day that Shane McKenzie stole the white squirrel from the Richland High gymnasium, you’d have thought that the world was ending. It was the screaming that did it, both animal and human: the squirrel’s outraged chitters and shrieks piercing, mingling with Shane’s post-puberty warrior yodel of exultation. In response, people erupted from every door in every hallway, flooding out, gazing around and at each other with bewildered faces like goats wandering through a slaughterhouse, scattering for the screaming tornado of mischief and mayhem running surefooted up and down the hallway through the crowd he created, leaping over there and away again, skinny arms held high, palms supporting the cage bottom as he brandished it high in the air, fingers curled into the bottom bars so tightly that even if the squirrel, in all its panic and rage, got hold of them with curved claws or rodent teeth, Shane probably wouldn’t have noticed.
[Read more…] about White SquirrelBy Katie Lu
The early Saturday sky sits idle behind the trees of Mulberry Street Park. The clouds are whipped into the blue, and the sun showers its liquid gold down unto the ground. Droplets of morning dew are spider-webbed into the grass, the hours are slow, and the day is still.
It’s in places like Mulberry and days like Saturday where I can throw stones into the pond and watch the rings ripple out. Where there are sweet amaretto coffee shops and leaves that fall like gentle rain.
[Read more…] about We Meet in the Waters of Mulberry Street