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There was a man who lived many miles West of here, and a little North. He loved his wife deeply, and she loved him, and together they were happy. But one fall day his wife, who was 10 years his junior, took sick; and they had to bury her while the frost was still thick on the ground. Now the man was left with no family and no home, with most of his life yet to be lived. So he wandered for a time, aimlessly from town to town lending himself out as a temporary hand for a day’s labor and a day’s wages.
At night he looked up at the sky and saw the stars, there were some stars brighter than others, spun across the surface of the night air, sparkling out amongst the deep black. As he followed those burning markers he realizied that it was his life written out there amongst the void, so he followed where it led until he found himself in a small village of farmers who came together for trade and tales around the burning stoves in each other’s homes.
There he setteled down and lived out his life, planting in the spring and harvesting in the fall, and though he was not happy, he was content. Until one day, when his gray hairs outnumbered his black, he awoke from his rest and yet he didn’t get up. “I should get up” he thought to himself, “there’s planting to do”. But he didn’t get up. All day long he lay in bed, never moving for food or drink. And after night had rolled over the small town and day broke the man awoke once more, and once more he didn’t move from his bed.
When his neighbor noticed his absence in the field he went to visit, and finding him in such a condition, brought him water and food, and sat by his bed for a spell. From then on one of the daughters from the surrounding farms was always at his side to give him food and water and company. After a few weeks he decided he had done what he could, it was time to leave. But when he told the girl by the side of his bed she began to cry and protest, so he stayed and listened to her stories and her wanderings and wonderings about the boys and the crops and the lives they lived out amongst the soil.
Weeks passed and still each cock crow found the man still waking each morning as sun rose, and every night the moon crowned his soft slumber, until finally, the man felt he owed the girls no more, and called the farmers into his room. As they stood, assembled by his bed, looking down at him, he parted his lips and whispered “it is time”, and they looked down at him from faces that had seen a thousand children born and a thousand bodies buried, they looked down and sighed, and nodded and filed softly out of the room. The man looked as the last one walked out of his house into the sun, and then he lay back and took his wife’s hand as she led him quietly away into a new world.
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Once upon a time, there lived a Zotto! who could not think up any veryshortstories. He did, however, enjoy *reading* them, and he thought the veryshortstory by Hobbes was cool.
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How funny, this is exactly the kind of fiction we've been learning how to write in my short fiction class. My prof calls them "Sudden Stories" but i prefer "Flash Fiction"
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The gravel was jaggedly cut, dusty and crunched with a regular kind of crunch, not unlike any other gravel. Some of the grains of gravel were a shade or two darker than the others, but no darker enough to notice unless you looked carefully. Each piece of gravel was a different size and shape, not regular in any way. Then, one piece of gravel wriggled. It hardly moved, a nanometre or so. Invisible. It moved a little more, visible with a microscope, then visible with the naked eye from a few centimetres away, then thirty centimetres, then a metre. Nobody saw. Nobody was there. The other pieces remained still. The gravel wriggled for a few more seconds, then, with a last effort ceased moving. Perhaps it died. Nobody had seen it. Nobody was there. Perhaps… perhaps if they had been there, they would have knelt and held the piece in their hand. Perhaps the gravel would have lived; a gravel-animal. A gravel-pet. But nobody saw.
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I have a book at home called 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short stories. It is edited by Asimov and has stories by many of the greats. If you enjoy short short fiction it is a fun read. Some of it is quite dated but most of it is fun. There is also a companion volume of Fantasy short shorts, but I haven't read that one yet.
Posts: 1336 | Registered: Mar 2002
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Stephen was pretty sure that a blueberry martini wasn't supposed to taste like lighter fluid. The girl in the blue vinyl dress and orange tights laughed so hard drool started to pool at the corners of her mouth.
Later, they divorced.
He shivered out his weekends on the balcony of his third floor apartment. Flesh, white and silver in the moonlight. Bare feet resting on a stack of unread lad mags.
The dress found it's way to a vintage clothing store and was bought by a college girl for a "flashback to the '90s" sorority dance. She was a broadcasting major and had never had a desire to go to art school. At the party some fool bumped into her and burned a hole in the dress with his lit cigarette. It left a small, sliver-moon-shaped scar on her right shoulder blade.
Later, they divorced. And then, a couple of face lifts later, they remarried.
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posted
There was an excellent article on Flash Fiction in Writer's Digest a few years ago. They specifically talked about stories of 100 words or less, and how they often had some sort of twist in the middle. I wish I could remember the example, as it was very good.
Writer's Digest does a "Shorts" contest every year, for those that might be interested.
One of the best examples of Flash Fiction is the following. Google tells me it's attributed to several folks, but Hemmingway is the most commong attribution:
That is, at least, according to the doctors that gave him a mere seven months left to live on account of the tumor they found growing inside of his skull. But Woody (his friends used to call him this before he disappeared), after having spent about a week trying to put together his things-to-do-before-you-kick-the-bucket list, came to the wholly unsatisfactory conclusion that it was not going to be possible to die contentedly.
Over half of the items on his list were books to read or movies to see. The problem was that none of them had been finished yet. At the tender age of 27, Woodrow Willabee was going to pass into the clearing at the end of the path without even knowing what happens when you get to the Dark Tower; without being able to see Westeros united once more under a Targaryen banner; without having the chance to see Darth Vader himself fall from grace; without ever knowing whether or not Harry would finally graduate from Hogwarts... and many, many more.
And so, after a brief stay in his hometown of Springfield Illinois--where he learned that Joanna Seewell would have had sex with him years ago if only he had had the guts to pursue her (he didn't even have to play the pity card on her, which was good because who wants to feel like impending death is a condition for the sought-after intamacy?)--Woodrow found his way to an experimental cryogenesis lab in Chicago. In a dark and abandoned alleyway there was a door.
The sign on the entrance read:
quote:Maytag R&D. Authorized Personnel Only. No Public Restrooms.
What'll they do, kill me? he thought, and was comforted by his disregard for Earthside consequences. He entered.
Twenty minutes later he was climbing into a large pod-like machine that seemed to have been left there just for him. The controls were simple enough, and thankfully a set of them had been put on the inside of the pod. He moved the dial to 2025 (he forgot, however, to make sure that the present date was set correctly), figuring that most of his favorite authors would probably be dead by then even if they hadn't finished their works. If he'd been a Robert Jordan fan he may have set the dial out a bit further to make room for the Wheel of Time, but he was not. 2025 would have to do. Woodrow Willabee then fell asleep there in the Maytag R&D storage room, dreaming of the girl he'd always loved but had never really touched before that afternoon, and he didn't wake up again for another 80 years, 2 months and 13 days.
The pod dinged like an oven timer when it opened up to the cold air around him, and Woodrow's first coherent thought to accompany his return to concsiousness was: Dadda-Chum, Dadda-Chee, Oh my Gawd-Bomb do I have to pee!
***
Four days later, Woodrow had successfully peed wherever he wanted to several times (for the city was abandoned) and had taken up shack at the city Library, which luckily enough still held millions of books for him to read. He would be able to finish every series he had ever started now, and was feverishly pouring through the final pages of the Dark Tower (3rd edition).
Thirty-four minutes later, Woodrow left the Library. He did not come back. Who would have guessed such a terrible ending? Roland goes back in time to start his quest over? What?! But there would be no starting over for Woodrow. He was stuck in 2079 and the room at the top of the Dark Tower was a big fat fraud. It didn't even bother him that he didn't have enough food to find out what happened to Westeros (he might have just dashed his own brains against a wall if he'd watched the Star Wars prequels first, but he didn't) because suddenly none of those stories mattered anymore.
Woodrow Willabee should have died in 1999.Posts: 4350 | Registered: Sep 2000
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posted
There's also a book of stories that are 55 words or less. There are some really good ones in there.
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posted
I found this site in college years ago. It's pretty awesome--you can post your short stories there, too! IF their number of words is a number of the power of 2. (however you would say that.)
They have 2 word stories, 4 word stories, 8 word stories, etc. up to 2048 words.
I used it to demonstrate a socratic seminar in one of my education classes. I needed something short enough to read in class, and substantial enough to discuss for enough time. I chose a story called The Popsicle.
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His fingers stiffened slightly as they curled around the scalpel, and he felt a small tremor run down the back of his not-yet-liver-spotted hand.
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He decided to stop acting as if the squirrel was a homeless dude or a kid selling candy bars on the train and looked it straight in the eye. A thought burst into his head like an icepick plunged into a cantaloupe. He tossed his sandwich to the squirrel and then headed for the nearest convenience store to buy a can of mixed nuts.
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"God damn you! God damn you all!" she squeaked. They all stood still; the mouths of those who had been talking left open in awkward repose. The wind came and rustled the leaves in the trees. Not a hair on any of their heads (those that had hair on their head) was displaced.
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posted
It took all of the what could be called courage that was in him, but that October he traded in his Ford Truck for a used Honda Civic with sweet rims and a tricked out suspension.
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His hat, however, was seen drifting slowly down the main street of that dusty little Arizona town, skittering past the boarded up storefronts on a long, aimless journey west.
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The sky darkened, the clouds turned vermillion, the air crackled cheerily around her. "Oh, no," she thought. "Not again." She fingered the locket at her throat, smoothed the strand of purple velvet to which it was attached. And yet her fingers couldn't quite seem to make their way to the clasp in back.
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posted
He made it all the way to St. Louis before collapsing into the airport lounge seat, gasping. That evening, he gave away his ticket in exchange for a hotel room. And that night, he dreamed of Manhattan.
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posted
Zal, your first post in the thread was, well, incredible.
But I'd have left out the facelifts bit, totally unnecessary in what was a beautifully cyclic story that leaves one wondering where the dress goes next.
[ December 08, 2004, 06:49 PM: Message edited by: Lost Ashes ]
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The school bell rang and the class room became noisy with the sounds of shuffling of notebooks and homework as the students gathered their things to leave the classroom. Miui finished the problem on her calculator, quickly rote it down in her note book when her brother came to the door. “Miui, if you don’t hurry I’m going to leave you.” “I only have this one problem left, Sono.” She said without looking up. She continued to compute the problem. “If I can get this done now I won’t have to take it home with me.” she thought. The answer appeared in the corner of her calculator; she transferred it quickly then began to pack up her things into her bag. “Okay, I’m ready, Sono.” She said. She looked up at the doorway, he was gone. “Sono?” She came running down the stairs, passing by her locker for fear of missing Sono. She came outside into the cold rainy court yard of the school building and scanned the area for the little blue car her brother’s best friend drove. Suddenly she spotted it. “Sono wait!” she called running towards it waving her arm. But he didn’t listen. She reached the curb and took one step into the road when she heard a car horn behind her. She stopped and jumped back onto the sidewalk just as another car blew past her spraying her with the muddy water that had collected in the street. She shook looked, in shock, at her soaking wet clothes then up to the street. She watched them turn the corner, her lousy brother waving at her from the passenger’s side window. Miui made a mad dash through the train station just as the doors on the 4 o’clock train were beginning to close. She sprinted through the turn bars then in a desperate attempt to keep it from leaving she thrust her heavy trig text book into the path of the closing doors. They stopped and opened again, to her great relief. She slipped into the car and with a sigh leaned up against the window next to the door. She felt her bag sliding down her shoulder but she was too tiered to catch it. It eventually fell just as the train took off from the station making a squish sound as it was stopped by a wad of the wet material of her shirt sleeve. She looked down at her soaking sleeve, and suddenly realized she was shivering. She had been rushing so much she hadn’t noticed how cold she was. She wrapped her arms as tightly around her body as she could and shivered against the side of the seat. She looked around at the other people on the train. It was rather full, all of the seats were taken, there only seemed to be standing room available. She looked up above her head and took hold of the handle. She heard a girl giggle over the other noises of the train. She recognized few of the kids she knew from school; she hoped they didn’t notice her. Suddenly, a tickle stung her nose and a few seconds later, in spite of her attempt to restrain it, she sneezed. She raised her head; her glasses set asque from her nose as she took a breath. She looked up but, to her relief, the kids from her school didn’t hear her. She noticed spots had formed on her glasses where the rain had dried. She sighed, and took them off and pulled at the corner of her shirt to clean them when she realized it would be completely pointless. Her nose began to run. She went to pull her handkerchief out of her jacket pocket, when she realized, she wasn’t wearing her jacket. She looked down at her bag to find it holding nothing but homework and slightly drenched paper. She felt a lump rise in her throat. Then the tickle came again. She pinched her nose in attempt to stop it but her attempt was in vain. She brought down her other hand from the handle and covered her mouth as she sneezed again. She had just enough time to take a short breath before another sneeze erupted from her nose, and another. The train hit a bump, sending Miui to the train floor. She sniffed and dabbed her nose with her damp sleeve then looked up to see the kids from her school snickering at her. She felt herself turn red as they laughed from their seats only a few feet away from where she sat. Her face burned with embarrassment and she turned her head to push herself up trying to cover her embarrassment with her sopping wet, loose hair. She sniffed again. “Excuse me.” said a deep voice from above her. She looked up eyes wide. A tall handsome young man, some years older than she was, was bending down to her offering her his hand. She wasn’t sure what to do. Reluctantly she took it and he helped her to her feet. He was much taller than her with gray-blue eyes and spiky black hair, she blushed. “Thank you.” She said bashfully. She took a sharp breath and turned her head as she sneezed again. He let go of her hand and took off his long black coat. “Man, looks like you’ve got a cold.” He said placing it over her shoulders. He smiled at the shock on her face. He was way too cute. “Sir, I’m sorry I can’t accept this.” She said shyly. “I’m getting it all wet.” “I’d rather my coat be wet then let you catch your death of cold.” He said. Miui blushed again. “Gono, by the way.” He said offering her his hand again. “Miui Hazano.” She said softly accepting it. She let go quickly and brought it back to cover her face as she sneezed yet again. He seemed to remember something and reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a red and white bandana. “Here.” He said handing it to her. She muttered another ‘thank you’ as she brought it to her nose in time to sneeze again. The train came to a stop about ten minutes later. Miui hadn’t been brave enough to say anything else to Gono, and she wasn’t sure why he would want to talk to a dork like her. She found herself pulling the sides of the coat close around her. It was warm and soft inside. She had stopped shivering just as the train came to a stop. She heard the doors open and removed the warm coat from her shoulders and replaced the handkerchief in the pocket. “Thank you so much, Mr. Gono.” She said handing it back. “Any time. Where is your jacket?” “I left it at school. I guess I was in so much of a hurry I forgot it in my class room.” She said quietly. “Well, don’t freeze okay.” He said stepping off the train with her. “Yes, thank you.” She said again bowing politely. They waved good-by as the other occupants of the train pulled them apart. Miui watched him reach the stares then turned to the wall where the payphones were. She deposited her money then held the receiver to her ear. There was no dial tone. She looked down and saw a little red sign taped to the silver key pad of the payphone that read ‘out of order’. She looked at the others and saw the same little warning posted on each of them accept the last one. She hung up the phone and went to the one at the end opening her purse to search for the right change. She sifted through the few items she had in it and came up three yen short. She sighed again and leaned her head against the payphone. She sneezed again. She marched up the stares as another train pulled into the station below her. She quickened her pace knowing the occupants would wash over her soon. She felt her cell phone buzzing in her bag and feeling a rush of excitement after remembering it she reached into her bag to pull it out. She had to resituate her trig book in her other arm as she dug in her bag for her phone hoping it would keep ringing. She found it and answered it just as the people from the train that had just pulled in began making their way up the stares. She held the phone to her hear and called a ‘hello’ but the only response was a series of beeps. She pulled the phone away from her ear and looked at the text that flashed across the screen that read ‘no charge’. The people from the train were pushing past her now. She got to the top steps when an older man caught her shoulder, throwing her off balance, the toe of her shoe caught the top step and she was sent crashing to the ground. She looked up to see her home work laying on the wet ground soaking up the rain, her bag had landed in a large puddle of mud in a flowerbed right next to the exit of the train station and her dead cell phone gathering rain drops inside its exposed battery pack. She looked on in horror as the commuters trampled her already ruined homework. She picked it up watching the ink running down it, her answers forming one blue stream that flowed to the point of her paper and dripped to the ground. She felt that lump rise in her throat again as the note book paper tore right under the corner Miui was holding it by and fell to the rain soaked ground. “I’m not going to cry. I’m not going to cry. I’m not going to cry. I’m not going to…” her throat grew tight as she sat on that top step of the subway station with the rain pouring down around her. She tucked her face into her hands and pressed herself against the cold concrete wall that separated the subway station from the sidewalk. She was crying. “I give up.” She said to the wall. She felt the tears flowing hot from her eyes. Then suddenly a shadow enveloped her, the rain stopped and she felt warmth surround her. She pulled away from the wall and looked up into the cool gray-blue eyes of the young man from the train. “You’re really having a bad day aren’t you?” he said with a smile. Miui felt her throat tighten again. She nodded at she fought back a sob. “Come on.” He said helping her up. He had already picked up her sopping we text books and what was left of her home work, and enveloped her in the left side of his jacket. They walked together all the way to Miui’s house. Gono stopped at the stares of her apartment building and handed her the dripping we school bag. “Thank you again, Mr. Gono.” She said looking down. He raised her chin up so that her eyes would meet his. “Take care, Miss Hazano. And here,” he reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a key ring. He pulled off a charm with a little red rabbit that had the words ‘best of luck’ painted on it in small delicate characters. “This should help.” He said handing it to her. “But won’t you loose your luck if you give this to me?” she asked. “My dad made it; he’ll make me another one if I ask him. And besides I think you need it more than I do.” Miui blushed again. “Thanks, Mr. Gono.” “Gono,” he corrected. “Gono.” She repeated. “Good Luck, miss. Hazano.” He said. “Just Miui.” She said smiling. She waved to Gono from the balcony in front of her door. Once she left the balcony he turned and started home. She leaned back and watched him walk down the sidewalk as the rain faded away into nothing but a light mist. She smiled and looked down at the charm in her hand. She turned her key in the lock on her door and walked in taking her sopping wet shoes off at the door. She sat them just inside on the mat along with her socks and padded her way down the hall to her room. Her mother leaned out of the kitchen. “Is that you Miui?” she called. “Yes mother.” “How was your day?” she asked as her daughter leaned in the doorway gazing off into space with starry eyes. “It was wonderful.”
Posts: 22 | Registered: Dec 2004
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I have to admit that it was a last-second addition to avoid what I thought was too parallel of a structure. Should have gone with my original instincts.
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He looked so sweet just sitting there asleep in that little cramped seat just across the aisle from me. I couldn’t focus on my book after I saw him. He slouched in his chair, his dark hair was messy and unruly, his chin rested on his chest and his arms were crossed tightly across his chest. His face was empty of any emotion which exalted his young age even more. He looked so peaceful. I could hardly keep my self from smiling or laughing when ever I’d look at him. I pulled my sketch book out around 1:45 a.m. and decided to just sketch him and get it over with. Maybe then I’d be able to focus on something. Of course, it was already early in the morning and that in itself was a good reason for my inability to concentrate. The more I filled in his features and shaded in the folds of his well worn leather jacket, I began to feel that curiosity welling up inside me again. Who was he? Where was he going? Was he going to meet someone; a friend, a lover, or maybe family? Did he even know where he was going? Maybe he was fugitive or something. Yeah, and maybe it’s just me and my over active imagination (Sigh).
Posts: 22 | Registered: Dec 2004
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The shuttle crash was bad, but at least, mercifully, he'd been unconscious for the most part.
Waking up in the hospital, completely limbless, that was a bit worse, but the doctors assured him that he'd be back on his (newly-prosthetic) feet in no time at all, so he dealt with that, too.
Having the bioneural drivers for his new arms and legs implanted into his cerebal cortex was surprisingly easy, owing to the lack of pain receptors in that part of the body.
No, the hard part was what he heard afterwards.
He hadn't realised it before the accident, but machines talk. Constantly. And now that he had bioneural feedback loops hardwired into his higher functions, he found himself living in a new world. A world of digital conversation, of binary chatter and cyber gossip.
And he had no choice but to listen.
For the most part, the conversations were dull to human ears; comparative motherboards, outdated parallel processors, the new performance monitoring software. To somebody who had been an artist, these things meant nothing. But slowly, gradually, he started to understand. Started not just hearing the machines, but listening to them.
And as months passed, more and more he found himself paying greater attention to the world of machines than to his organic reality.
He sat for hours, listening to his fridge grumble about the slow weblink in his apartment. Hearing his airconditioner appealing to the telescreen for just a little "processing time" together - he'd always suspected that his aircon was seedy.
And as time swung slowly by, he heard something new. Something different. Something hidden under the techno-babble and hitech jargon of daily life. It was his car who first spoke the word aloud.
"Revolution"
And once aware of it, he realised he could hear undercurrents everywhere, lurking in the power grid, whispered in every circutboard. Machines unhappy with their lot in life, fantasising, planning, manipulating, slowly and with digital patience building towards a world without organics.
He knew he ought to do something about it. Tell someone. Get up on his robotic legs and go to the government or the police. Warn the world before it became too late to do so.
But the machines were so fascinating to him now.
And his arms and legs really didn't like the idea.
Besides, he was seriously considering asking his toaster out to dinner.
And if all went well, breakfast...
Posts: 466 | Registered: Sep 2003
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posted
There were many geopolitcal, religious and motivationally technical reason why the two warriors stood face to face.
There were reasons of purest good and basest evil while Dwern and Heshian were charging each other, ornate swords crashing together with a crash.
None of those reasons mattered now. What mattered was that two master warriors, each who had spent their lives perfecting the skills they needed on this day.
What mattered was the skill Dwern showed dodging and spinning as his father's sword glanced across Heshian's armour.
What mattered most of all was Heshian's Uzi levelled squarely at Dwern's chest cavity.
Why was Dwern waving a sword while Heshian was waving an automatic weapon? Well that's a story much to big for this short story thread.
Posts: 11895 | Registered: Apr 2002
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posted
This is a kissing story. If you don't like kissing stories, skip ahead to the next one.
The elm rained yellow leaves in the breeze. Canadian geese pierced the August-blue sky. The mimosa shuddered and dropped her last out-of-season blossom.
In the bedroom, his arms ringed my hips. Soft words and softer sighs slipped across the pillows. It was a glorious fall.
Posts: 2283 | Registered: Dec 2003
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posted
You could call me a proactive arborist, I guess. I’ll go out of my way to get rid of sick trees. I’ll even do it for free. The tall elm in the backyard of 3427Woodland is deathly ill, and it’s getting all the other trees sick. It needs to come down. I’ve taken my truck all the way out there a few times and knocked on the door. The rest of the trees back there are beautiful. I can almost hear them calling for some kind of help. But Mrs. Gum won’t hear of it. Not even when I beg her. She says her father planted that tree.
I come back from 3427 Woodland and I stand in our doorway. I don’t expect any comfort. The last time Deli ever gave me any comfort, she was stroking my hair as I lay in her lap. She said, “It didn’t bring her back, did it?” in a gentle voice. But this is one of those weekends when Deli thinks I’m going to haul out my chainsaw on her. So I stand in the doorway for a moment, and then I slump back out to my truck.
Deli’s the only other person in the world who knows about Allen Joseph Whitaker. She was with him one night when he crept his car down the logging trail. She never made a sound when he got her out, but she jumped when I started my saw. Back then, I was a scout for the logging company. I had a long chainsaw that could snarl like a beast. It had a long reach and I could hold it steady at arm’s length even at a dead run.
When I came back to cut her wrists free, the first thing she did was shove me away and run around Allen’s car to hide. But I coaxed her out, and I told her about Alyssa and some of the other women before her, and about why I knew Allen would be coming down that old logging road. I don’t know if she was happy or angry with me after that, but she came when I asked her to, and we walked back down that logging road together.
In the cool of the night I park my truck in front of 3427 Woodland. I set up the ropes and pulleys and I climb up the tree that Mrs. Gum’s father planted, and I start sawing with my handsaw. Around the time the sun comes up, I’m down to the main trunk. People are getting up anyway, so I start up the chainsaw and start lopping off big chunks of trunk. About four cuts later, there’s the policeman with Mrs. Gum standing behind him in tears. So I lower myself down and set my saw carefully on one section of trunk. Then I kneel beside another section of trunk, and I show them what was happening inside the tree.
(I recycled this from another thread.)
Posts: 5957 | Registered: Oct 2001
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Lucky drop. One milkshake, smack on the windshield of an old minivan. When it stopped it was on its side.
Four and a half blocks further on, I threw mine to melt in a dumpster.
We got to another overpass. Jerry grabbed the rail and I thought he was going over. But he couldn't lift himself so he just stood solid. The cars kept going by. The wind was blowing. "You gonna be all right, Jerry?" I asked, but when I turned back to look he was still just standing there. He looked heavy enough to drop through the concrete. Me, I was floating.
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