Tag: flash fiction

  • Waiting for the interurban

    city street with cars during night time
    Photo by Josh Hild on Pexels.com

    The bus was running late, as usual. The only sensible thing to do in such conditions is to smoke a cigarette, as far as Paul was concerned. So he did.

    “I’ve run out of fucks to give,” he said, dropping a pinch of tobacco into the cigarette paper. He shifted the distribution of the tan, shredded leaf, pushing it to the edges of the paper. The amount was still unsatisfactory by whatever criteria he had, so another pinch was added shifted about until he was satisfied and his fingers started their practiced rolling to transform the package into a serviceable cigarette.

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  • Drip drop

    Photo by Roger Starnes Sr on Unsplash

    Drip drop, water in the well. She peers down between the moss stones and half-shadows to the water’s tenebrious surface casing ripples with each drop of dew gathering in the chill of the dark before it casts itself downward, a suicide plunge to rejoin the well of spirits gathered below.

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  • Horses

    Photo by Raychel Sanner on Unsplash

    “Can you hear it? The wind is calling to carry.”

    She stood away from me, turned away from the buildings, the trees and me, her black hair blowing on the gathering breeze as the skies grew flint to match the color of her eyes she wore before the turning away. I did not doubt her eyes could change colors to match her mood, I had seen it happen many time before. Her mood was that of the coming storms, unsettled, roiling and only barely constrained — and so she now wore flint and heather where most people wore mere eyes.

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  • Winter

    red poppy flower field
    Photo by Elina Sazonova on Pexels.com

    “I told yer ma, that’s a season — tain’t no name for a girl,” her father used to tell her when she was young, before he had choked on all that ash that started falling from the skies and died. He was never one to wear a mask, and refused to cover his face after the Ashfalls began. The particulates, buried deep under the earth until recent years, made quick work of his cigarette-ravaged lungs.

    “I n’ver did know why she gone did that, but she made me promise to name y’that after you was born.”

    “Maybe it was because my hair was white as snow?” she would always suggest, knowing the answer even as she said it. It was a game they played, this conversation of theirs.

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  • Poppy

    red poppy flower field
    Photo by Elina Sazonova on Pexels.com

    How do I write a story? I forget. Perhaps one goes a little like this:

    There once was a little girl, and she liked red and so she wore red. Except that her mum called it crimson and her da preferred scarlet. But the fae said it was more poppy, and so that stuck because her mum thought it a more cheery thing than those other blood colors.

    The girl said nothing at all and not because she did not have a mind of her own, but because someone had stolen her voice before she was born and she had no head for writing, though she knew plenty of words like “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”, “snicker-snack” and “albatross” (a word she dreamed of shouting from the top of the radio tower that rose over the place she was born). But writing those words? Oh, well, that just was not something she could do.

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