Daily Flash Fiction Stories
By Eva Dagbjört
Up here, she can see everything. The streets flow below her, merging and diverging, crossing and tangling, running across the city and down to the docklands or on through the suburbs and out. She leans on the railing and bats the hair out of her face. It’s windy on the viewing deck, even on sunny days.
By Rosalind Goldsmith
That year all the hummingbirds died, their tiny wings folded in sorrow. They lay strewn across our wide yards like dropped commas, delicate in their death, and some even said eloquent. But what was it they were trying to say to us? Maybe they wanted to inscribe a vision upon our minds, a vision we would never forget, and it was true, we never did forget their deaths, the picture of them fallen and silent.
By Myles Alexander
Where does one bury a dog in the city?
My favorite sweatshirt sits crumpled in the corner, looking like frozen ripples on a pond. It bears my college insignia, but that’s not what makes it important. If you picked it up, you’d think it garbage: the tattered, moth-bitten sleeves; the clumps of black dog hair sprinkled in patches, clinging tight like dust mites; the giant stain across the belly, once tomato red, now the maroon of weathered bricks. I lift it by the collar, and it folds in on itself like a broken umbrella. Feeling the fabric on my fingertips, even for a moment, is far too difficult. I let it go, and it parachutes back down to the carpet.
By Rob Hill
The bookkeeper riding the elevated train took his nose, momentarily, out of his paperback. Across from him sat a young woman and a child. The child wore a striped ballet costume under her padded winter jacket. Every so often, she hopped to her feet and twirled enthusiastically around the center pole of the train before being reeled back to the bench. Was the young woman her mother? She looked barely twenty. An older sister perhaps. Through the window behind them, a frosted roofscape of brick chimneys and lightning rods carouseled past. Conscious of staring, the bookkeeper returned his nose to his paperback.
By Kit Garrett
There’s an odd thing we seem bound to do as English people: lie to each other as easy as breathing. “How’re y’doing?” we ask. A fella could have an arm in a sling, his leg in a cast and be missing his head, and we’d still reply, “Ah, not so bad, y’know. Getting by.” As if admitting that a fractured femur is slowing us down a bit is the equivalent of refusing a cup of tea at your nan’s.
It took me a long time to figure out just how shitty this kind of behaviour is; in fact, it didn’t hit me until my wife’s first miscarriage.
A buried word leaps to the front of my brain: Roundabout!
I blow past the yield sign at forty miles an hour. Swerving, the right front tire slams over the outside curb. I overcorrect left, slam on the brakes, and ricochet back to the center circle.
Universal laws of physics say, “No!”
Papers tucked above the visor fly out. My purse takes to the air. Shot like a bullet into the night sky, time and space become finite, suspended in the ether.
Tom, why?
Two weeks ago today, I had been on the far side of town. A new guild member had opened her home for our monthly meeting. Afterward, I drove around the eclectic neighborhood, admiring the boutique shops and restaurants. Colorful awnings and lamp posts with hanging flower baskets decorated the vibrant new community.
I looked twice when I saw him. Why is he here? How does he know about this place? I was so confused—then I saw her.