Short Fictions - Short Édition - page 10 - all works

Short Fiction

Portrait Love & Loss 2 min Mature Audience

Shiny, Pretty, Bright

Not long after she moved – ties cut, no looking back, he'd never find her on that side of town anyway, if he bothered to look – she found a string of Christmas lights at the thrift store when she ... [+]

Short Fiction

Slice of Life Modern Love 1 min

The Sword Swallower Cuts Their Tongue While Saying Goodbye

Jesse Bradley

The weather was good today, you answer whenever I ask how are you, how was your day. I don't know when we stopped talking about what mattered the most because you won't tell me. I ask are you ... [+]

Short Fiction

Quirky Humor 5 min

The Night Library

E. E. King

I heard it before I saw it, a jingling of bells like the soundtrack to a corny Christmas movie. Then out of the mist rolled a small carriage, round and bright as a converted pumpkin. Florescent ... [+]

Short Fiction

Sci-Fi & Fantasy Suspense & Mystery 3 min

Bespoke

Shawn Bailey

In the movies, it's always an invasion. Us against them. And they've got tech that far surpasses ours. We fight in the streets and a ragtag group finds a weak spot that the advanced beings have ... [+]

Short Fiction

Modern Love Slice of Life 5 min Mature Audience

Dallas Fireflies

Zoe Marie Bel

It began at a sports bar, the kind of place the realtor would call "happy-go-lucky." In other words, if your barstool wasn't sticky, assume it had just been swabbed clean by CSI. There was graffiti ... [+]

Short Fiction

Suspense & Mystery Sci-Fi & Fantasy 5 min

Castrapitheca - City of the Ape

Peter Hankins

To call this elegant metropolis "The City of the Ape" does it a considerable disservice, but it is impossible to avoid. Every time we speak of something being as old as the Ape, we reaffirm the ... [+]

Short Fiction

Suspense & Mystery Historical 5 min Mature Audience

The Trees Have Eyes

Lee Schwartz

He wakes with a veil of fading orange sunset falling over his face. Slowly, he raises a hand, twisting it through the shards of light. There are no callouses. No dry cracks of peeling skin. It is ... [+]

Short Fiction

Slice of Life Portrait 5 min

Charlie

Tammy Emo

"Charlie...Charlie...are you daydreaming again? It's work time now, please get your pencil," asks Ms. Amy sweetly.
Charlie Madison is in the 3rd grade, at KB Woodward Elementary school. Generally ... [+]

Short Fiction

Suspense & Mystery 3 min Mature Audience

The Waiting

Kilmeny MacMichael

Near Paulo's home, in the rich deep earth, dark eggs lay. They waited for decades, to be brought to hatch. When they hatched, they hatched death, or dismemberment, bursting forth with all the energy ... [+]

Short Fiction

Slice of Life 4 min Mature Audience

Absolution

Jeremy Glazer

It was real cold that night, not just Miami cold, and it was late. I'd had to wait until the girls were asleep to go out into the pre-Christmas lunacy of the mall because my wife and I were keeping ... [+]

Short Fiction

Suspense & Mystery 5 min

The Tiger Talk

Stephen Hundley

Royals Primary has the second grade corralled into the gym.
"What you want to do," I tell the kids, "is draw a mask that looks a lot like your face. As close as you can get it, except we're going ... [+]

Short Fiction

Portrait Nostalgia Suspense & Mystery 5 min

Glacial Motion

Seymour Aab

August brought with it a new easy-swallow scheme by a new self-improvement mentor. Luna Rojas had measured out her life with the likes of them – detoxes, spiritual awakenings, fad diets. She craved ... [+]

Short Fiction

Sorrow Portrait 3 min Mature Audience

Disappearing Acts

Erin Kirsh

When she left, Anita took Mom's valise, the round one with the wooden handle from Eaton's department store. Mom was furious. She'd had it on hold at the store for weeks while she earned enough to ... [+]

Short Fiction

Nostalgia Modern Love Love & Loss 4 min

Bargaining

Lyle Enright

I remember when my world divided into male and female, when the girls screamed "Shaun has cooties!" across the playground and flushed with what I thought was anger. I remember being in a closet with ... [+]

Short Fiction

Slice of Life 3 min Mature Audience

In the Name of Love...or Hate

Tammy Euliano

The name on the chart, Winnaker, tightened my throat. Funny how, decades later, a word can evoke a memory that evokes a physical response. It's a good thing the evil woman's name hadn't been Smith ... [+]

Short Fiction

Quirky Absurd Suspense & Mystery 5 min

Delicious

Megan Hart

Jess was only ten when the first pods washed up on the shore. She'd been standing with her toes dug into the sand, letting the cold Atlantic Ocean swirl around her ankles, daring herself to venture ... [+]

Short Fiction

Slice of Life Joy 5 min

A Happy Color

Lynn Assimacopoulos

Jake lay in the darkness, the sun creeping under the shade...thinking why should he get out of bed. He had no place to go, no one to see and nobody would be coming to visit. He probably wouldn't ... [+]

Short Fiction

Love & Loss 5 min Mature Audience

Maggie and Mary

L N Hunter

First thing every day, I count out the same colorful cocktail of medications into Mother's four containers: morning, midday, evening meal and nighttime. Two pink pills shortly after waking up, and ... [+]

Short Fiction

Humor Sorrow Portrait 2 min

Inheritance

Susannah Cate

Joan feels remorse for having hated her toes most of her life. She inherited them from her grandmother, who had hated them too. Her grandmother had cried at the swimming pool on Joan's 11th birthday ... [+]

Short Fiction

Slice of Life Portrait Sorrow 3 min

Out of Reach

Julie Wilkerson

He was reaching for the top shelf then stopped. He moved his eyes to the next, lower shelf down and chose a jar. His hair was sheet white and his body frame resembled my father, tall and heavy set ... [+]

A New Kind of Literary Pulse

A New Kind of Literary Pulse

Shiny, Pretty, Bright

The Sword Swallower Cuts Their Tongue While Saying Goodbye

The Night Library

Bespoke

Dallas Fireflies

Castrapitheca - City of the Ape

The Trees Have Eyes

Charlie

The Waiting

Absolution

The Tiger Talk

Glacial Motion

Disappearing Acts

Bargaining

In the Name of Love...or Hate

Delicious

A Happy Color

Maggie and Mary

Inheritance

Out of Reach