Daily Flash Fiction Stories
By Robert J Hudgens
Carson scavenges through a dump heap amassed on top of a wooded mountainside clearing, just before the mouth of an abandoned bikeway. A yellow sign riddled with shotgun pellets reads: Trail Closed. The muddy grey, empty bike path runs down the slope to the “haunted” Silver Lane Tunnel. Both routes have been prohibited for years—the tunnel at the Civil War’s conclusion and the bike trail, ever since the locals turned it into cocaine candy land.
By Steven Lempriere
Shit! He’d only meant to pistol-whip the guy, rough him up a little, a warning from on high, not blow his fucking head off. Not only had he forgotten to engage the safety, but he’d hollow-points in the gun for his next job.
Jesus. What a fucking mess. The mark lay slumped over his spaghetti, and it was difficult to distinguish where his brains ended and the meat sauce began. Still, it was only a matter of time. Pond-life like this punk soon reach their use-by date. He had it coming, if not now, then sometime soon. So, no loss as far as he was concerned, but to keep his client onside, this one would need to be gratis.
By Sami Jean
In the corner office of the old, established college, the professor thinks he’s written books on topics entirely new. He sits in the corner office and studies a young woman, whose hair cascades and whose eyes are like deep, emerald pools. They are talking of casual things. A paper lies face down with red slashes in the margins, barely visible.
The young woman is on a chair and crosses one leg over the other, though the lilac skirt is long enough to cover her knees generously. The professor compares her to a portrait he once saw of a duchess, though he would much prefer it were otherwise. There is a billboard across the street and the model wears no lilac or colored fabric of any kind. The professor’s eyes linger where he would have preferred to see the beginnings of a collar bone at the base of the woman’s neck. Instead, she shifts in her chair and repeats, “No, I haven’t seen the show.”
They were “rescue doves.” They lived in an ornate, antique cage for a few days as a furniture store display. When a customer inquired about the little doves, the store person said they would go into a dumpster after someone buys the cage. The customer offered to buy the cage with the doves in it.
By Steven Moss
As we high-tailed our way out of the flats, my wife Veronica suggested a bungalow in the more retiring part of town. I pressed the address into the sat-nav as she drove.
Once we’d unpacked comfortably into our new conditions, we discovered ourselves half the average age. I bought beige slacks, wore a knitted diamond jumper while my wife complimented her outfits with a headscarf and sunglasses. We’d enough to rest between the sun-kissed, hedge-lined drives for a year or so, so we got busy being neighbourly.
By Christopher Records
He rises, the one in the plaid. The other follows. The follower is wearing a tight baseball shirt.
They are both handsome in a specific, LA way. They are irrationally attractive, but committed to looking slightly damaged. They look like many men who live east of the 405, away from yoga blondeness and granola; they try to look tarnished, they try to gray themselves, make asymmetry happen, make themselves fit thematically into asphalt and graffiti and smog and the LA River, which is really just a concrete drainage channel. Their style is a pastiche of punk and goth and Baroque Catholicism. They look like they yield to the sun, like they incline their faces automatically toward it. They look like they live in a place where blood-colored roses spindle around black wrought iron and the bathroom tiles are seafoam green and the style has never not been Art Deco.
[Read more…] about Two Men Heading Home at the End of a Date
