Tag: flash fiction

  • Just Alice

    Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

    He was minding his own business, fishing there up on the bridge and not catching much at all when she went and showed up. The only thing biting were the ‘squitoes and deerflies in the heat of the summer haze. And although he had his line dipped in the cool fishing hole swirling about in the creek below the bridge, and there were plainly river trout with their speckled bellies flashing in the noontime sun, he was not catching a thing. Not that was surprising at all to him, seeing as he had neither baited his line nor tied a hook at the end of the line for which he might bait.

    The way Hank saw it, if you put a hook on a fishing line, you were apt to catching something at the end of it even without bait. He had seen it happen that the fish would get all glammed up by the shine of the sun on the metal and decide that if something were so shiny, well then it might be tasty too.

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  • In the evening

    Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

    Ed watched his neighbor undress in the moonlight in the window in the apartment across the way. He dimmed his reading lamp so he could better appreciate the natural contrasts of the moon against the inky blackness of her room, put down his book on Celtic mythology filled with more fiction than the latest bestselling high fantasy novel. It was truly awful scholarship, if there was any scholarship involved in its writing at all. The lack of references and indices told most of that tale.

    It was not the first time he had played peeping tom and he doubted it would be the last. Although he suspected his neighbor knew full well that he often watched her in the semidarkness, her eyes never once stole to the window framing her slow dance from clothing to skin. That his neighbor had never once drawn her curtains in the name of modesty, Francis Edward Carlisle (“Ed” to most folks) was damned if he was not going to allow himself to take in the show visible in varying degrees of light as the moon waxed and waned throughout the year. His neighber was “a looker” by his book and Ed was not exactly flush with offers from women willing to share their naked bodies with him at fifty-two. That had stopped happening someplace in the last decade or so and, to be honest, he had never had all that many offers in life but it still happened on the rare occasion before he had acquired his permanent beer belly and man tits.

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  • Chipped nails

    conceptual portrait of hands with red thread
    Photo by Amirhossein Kianbakht on Pexels.com

    Her matte-black nail polish was chipped again, a detail she had grown used to. She knew she was rough on her nails, using them for everything from a makeshift screwdriver to a replacement for the worrystone her grandmother had given her and that she had lost. Instead of rubbing a smooth stone to assuage her nerves, she taken up nail-biting. Or, rather, she had taken it up again. The stone was her grandmother’s way of trying to break of the nail-eating habit. And it had worked, until she went and lost the stone one night out on the town. She kept hoping the stone would show up but considered the possibility unlikely. And she had yet to get around to replacing it.

    She ran a ragged fingernail over her lips, drawing a pinprick of blood where the rough edge accidentally caught a ridge of flesh. When she thought about it, she found that she did not care. Maybe he would think that was sexy. If not, she had other ways of getting his attention.

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  • Repost from sceadugenga.com

    Part reminder that I have moved to the new site here, part flash fiction, I posted this over at sceadugenga this morning. I’m reposting the flash fiction section here in case you have already changed your followed site to this one and removed the old site. If you read it at the old site, you won’t find much of anything new here unless I end up mucking about and start playing editor. I hadn’t intended to write flash fiction when I started the post at the old site, but that’s how it ended up.

    If you haven’t already noticed, the lights have gone up and the bartender is calling “last call” to make you get the message, as if the ambiance change was not indication enough.

    “Last call! Last call!”

    Someone nudges you and you look down at the resident drunk, Louie. “Hey man, can you buy me a drink, I’ll pay you back nex–“

    “Last call!”

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