Tag Archives: flash fiction
Known for being pragmatic, calm, cool, and collected, K was jolted to the depths of his soul with a fear he’d never experienced!
K screamed, “Oh my God!” in a desperate tone that surprised even himself. “What’s happening?!” . . .he didn’t know.
Ever so briefly and with a sheepish smile, K surmised that whatever was happening must be in part to the craziness of the previous night’s wild escapade, if not directly, contributing to what was happening to him now.
Regardless, now was not the time for mindless internal distractions!
Something WAS happening.
Suddenly, K noticed that he was in complete silence while his surroundings were spinning, spinning, spinning. Then, shaking his head franticly, K demanded, “STOP the SPINNING!”
Now it dawned on K. . . he seemed to be observing himself from an autoscopic perspective.
Damn it, now what?
1 Comment | tags: affect, body, flash fiction, short story | posted in Uncategorized
For the rest of her life, she would blame herself for the death of all that could have been because she decided that the risks, whatever they were (she didn’t know), were too great. She said nothing on the phone, really, the first time they had spoken in months, while he tried to convince her (bless his heart) that the risks, whatever they were (he didn’t know), were not insurmountable.
They were both dissatisfied by the course their relationship had taken, and were equally frustrated in their inability to right things. They had been the best couple: fashionable, catty, glamorous. (They could only be those things independently now.) They loved each other deeply. She felt that she should have done more to alleviate the stress that built over the years. She felt she should have said I love you more.
Now was her chance to do that, to turn over a new leaf or whatever. But she didn’t, and instead told him that she would do nothing to fix what seemed so, so broken.
“I just want to put things back how they were,” she said, before hanging up.
So did he. But she meant it in a different way.
2 Comments | tags: affect, crying, fiction, flash fiction, glamour, love, relationships, risk, Short Fiction, short story | posted in Her, Him, Short Fiction
Something possessed him to enroll in a woodworking class at the community college. Which was fine.
Ever since she introduced him to the male members of her family – all tall, rich, and unfaithful to their wives and girlfriends – he sought to “up his man game.” She rolled her eyes whenever he said this and was secretly sad that he felt the need to be different. Nevertheless, every Wednesday for the past eight weeks he came home late. Which was fine. He was making her a clock.
When he climbed in bed – after showering, naturally – he dutifully whispered in her ear his progress. “It’s done,” he said softly. “It’s on the table.”
She jumped up, not bothering to put a stitch of clothing on (this did not bother him), and dashed to the dining room. It was an awful thing – uneven and splintery.
“K,” she said like a homeroom teacher, “it’s not even telling the right time.”
“I know,” he replied proudly. “It’s set to when we first kissed.”
She looked at him incredulously.
He explained. “Your eyes were closed and I looked at my watch. I wanted to remember.”
She began to cry, and he glanced down at his watch.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, clock, college, fiction, flash fiction, love, manliness, relationships, Short Fiction, short story, tears, unfaithful, watch, wealth, wood, wood working | posted in Short Fiction
Lying in the dark, a thought dances along the edges of his mind, carefully gliding over the puddles of vodka and sidestepping the scattered SSRIs.
He had always been careful to turn music on; it was the only way he could get her to sleep. He preferred a tomb-like enclosure. She was the opposite, but she was also loved by him. So he cued up gentle piano music and let it lull her to sleep. During the early days of their relationship, he slept very little, distracted by the sound and unable to settle down because of the presence of someone in his bed. He grew accustomed and eventually dependent on her body being next to his. But he never trained himself to sleep through the music, faint though it was.
When he woke to find her gone, he recalls now, there had been a power outage, or else he had been too wasted. Either way there was no music. There was, instead, silence. But it wasn’t the silence he wanted. It claimed her, unjustly.
He feels her in the silence. But he can’t sleep. So he turns her piano sounds back on. But he can’t sleep that way either.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, body, darkness, fiction, flash fiction, insomnia, loss, love, music, piano, relationships, Short Fiction, short story, silence, sleep, tomb | posted in Him, Short Fiction
Still not used to her new glasses, she reached behind the lenses and rubbed an eye. “Why did you make me get these?” she asked. “I can see fine.”
She kept the windows open even in the winter, and a sharp frozen breeze blew in. I retrieved her favorite cashmere throw and draped it over her shoulders. “Thanks,” she said with surprising sweetness. She extended her hand as I walked back to the kitchen, grazing my arm. It was the first time in three weeks she had touched me.
I asked her how many eggs she wanted and she said two.
Her touch, though faint, stayed on my skin. As chilly as it was inside, I felt myself growing warm and the kitchen seemed stuffy. An eerie quiet settled in and I could hear her measured breath.
“Are you okay, K?” she asked from the kitchen table where she was reading a fashion magazine.
Without warning, I toppled to the floor. I heard her scream with an unfamiliar urgency as she rushed to my side. Her hair was messy and the lenses of her new glasses were fogged up. I closed my eyes, stung by the life in her breath.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, cold, death, December, eggs, fashion, fiction, flash fiction, glasses, love, magazine, reading, relationships, Short Fiction, short story, winter, women | posted in Me, Uncategorized
The door creaked open. The bald florist on the other side offered K the same expression he offers him every year on the thirtieth of December – looking somewhat like a vet explaining to a crying child the fate of her shar-pei.
“Happy anniversary, K,” said the florist, presenting the same maudlin bouquet of half-dead flowers he presents every thirtieth of December.
“Thanks,” replied K heavily, reaching one arm through the gap in the door. “No card, I suppose?”
The florist shook his head. “I’m afraid not.” He looked at K with no expression: “Why do you keep putting yourself through this?”
K propped the rotting flowers on his hip. “I don’t know. I keep hoping that maybe this year it will be her knocking instead of” – he paused – “well, you. Not that I don’t like you.”
“It won’t, K. It’s been five years. She’s not coming back. At least she remembers your wedding day, I guess.” The florist shrugged and took his leave.
K closed the door and set the dying flowers – her favorites – on the kitchen table.
He then marked in his calendar exactly 51 weeks into the future, when he would place his next order with the bald florist.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, bouquet, break up, calendar, flash fiction, florist, flowers, heart break, marriage, relationships, Short Fiction, short story | posted in Man, Short Fiction, Woman
Even the cruelest and most random moments of the turbulent past year and a half failed to upset the fragile stability they found that snowy night, exactly 729 days ago, in some shabby Italian restaurant in some equally shabby track mall. She was in rare form, babbling sweetly – in hushed tones; for all its dilapidation, the restaurant was undulating with working-class Christmas Eve romance – into his ear.
She was, he reasoned, still high on the adrenaline that washed over the two of them when his new Lexus spun off the road and into a snowbank – where it was fated to remain until the roads were properly cleared and salted. They wanted to interpret every extraordinary thing as fate drawing them (back) together, as some force telling them that everything would be okay. If only they would only almost die whenever their relationship seemed beyond resuscitation.
She ordered french fries (somewhere near the end of the menu with stuff like friend chicken, just in case) and a glass of red wine. He ordered red wine, too, but spent the next several hours, until the only other patrons were two drunkards attempting courtship, watching her and worrying that the snow would eventually stop.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, flash fiction, french fries, italian, italian food, lexus, red wine, relationships, restaurant, romance, Short Fiction, short story, snow, wine, winter | posted in Him, Short Fiction
The dazzle of the evening – fancy cocktails, lots of cleavage, rolled up sleeves – was eclipsed by the weight of inevitable failure.
She took me to a french restaurant, where we sat rooftop and looked out at the decaying skyline. Ever the portrait of dark sophistication, she sat contemplatively in the embrace of the day’s remaining shadows, her gaze drawn to something beyond my right shoulder.
“There’s a building on fire over there,” she said, removing the olives from her martini. “It’s pretty bad.” When I first met her, she was, to me, impossibly unapproachable. I made up a bullshit story about wanting to adopt her dog.
“Is there a lot of smoke,” I replied, losing myself in her eyes.
“Yeah.” She lifted her martini. “People are jumping.”
“I imagine it’ll spread soon.”
She scrutinized the scene behind me. “Probably. We’re the only ones left up here. At least we won’t have to pay. But my martini is almost gone.”
She was right. I could feel an uncomfortable warmth biting at my neck.
“Do you want some of this?”
“I think mezcal is disgusting.”
“Are we in trouble?”
She nodded silently, took my hand and pressed her lips to my knuckles.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, alcohol, death, disaster, fire, flash fiction, french, french food, martini, mezcal, relationships, rooftop, Short Fiction, short story, smoke | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
She had been a robust child.
Years later, however, she found herself prone to serious illness and disease. On Christmas several years ago, I nursed her through pneumonia, strep throat, and a host of other dangerous afflictions.
As terrible as it all was, watching her die (It was inevitable. If not this illness, then surely that one, or that one.), we benefitted handsomely on, as we came to call it, PharmDay. We would put on our best farmerwear – a hard thing for a couple of middle-class snobs to accomplish – and head to the pharmacy. The whole thing was terribly fun.
Back at home, we would dump her medicine on the kitchen table and play with it. Small pills became stones from which we erected mighty pyramids; other pills became grenades as we tried to blow each other up. Still others we simply abused with alcohol.
She maintained until the end that she would rather spend her time this way than filling little boxes – one for each day of the week – with medicine.
And so we did. And one day she overdosed on a little green drug.
I tried carrying on the tradition without her. But it just wasn’t as fun.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, death, disease, drugs, flash fiction, grenade, love, medicine, overdose, pharmacy, pills, pyramid, relationships, Short Fiction, short story | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
By degrees, the night swallowed us, leaving her luxury SUV to grope its way to civilization. Her relatives didn’t live far, but in the rural midwest it doesn’t take much to transport you to the edge of the world.
“I need a drink,” I said, taking her hand. “Let’s never do that again. Until next year of course.” I glanced at her profile.
She was crying inaudibly, eyes focused on the crisp white beams of light projecting from the front of her Volvo.
“You need a drink, too,” I said gently.
When the city emerged later, we were dismayed to find nothing but empty streets and solemn lampposts.
Still we drove, desperate for an alcoholic reprieve from our holiday traumas. We settled on a kitschy hotel on the border of the bad part of town. In the bar was a handful of middle-class refugees like us. The bartender, the Death Star tattooed on his forearm, looked inexplicably tragic in his vest and bowtie.
I ordered our drinks and followed her to the end of the bar. Less than ten minutes later I ordered two more drinks. This was a blatant attempt at escape. She put her head on my shoulder.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, alcohol, bar, bartender, bow tie, Death Star, drink, drinking, family, fiction, flash fiction, holidays, luxury, Moon Rise, relationships, Saint Louis, Short Fiction, short story, Star Wars, SUV, trauma, vest, Volvo | posted in Short Fiction
I made myself a drink with his expensive scotch and lay on his expensive couch. For some reason, I felt uneasy. “K?” I asked. He didn’t answer. “K?” I asked again, deciding that he, under the influence of too much alcohol, passed out somewhere out of view. I turned on the television and watched a show about winter in upstate New York.
I fell asleep.
When I woke up, my coat had been thrown over me. K was banging around in the kitchen.
I sat up. “What time is it?”
“Five,” he called from behind me.
“What are you doing up?”
“Making waffles. Want some?”
“I guess,” I whined.
He dropped a plate of waffles on my lap, returned to the kitchen.
We hadn’t spoken about what had happened several nights prior, and amidst the lunacy of the waffle conversation, I felt the need to speak up.
“K,” I said from his couch. “I’m going to kill you.”
“Huh,” he replied cooly. “I feel the same way.”
I didn’t get the joke he was trying to make. He continued: “How are the waffles?”
“Fine,” I replied, not yet aware of what had just happened.
Then an uncomfortable silence settled in.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, alcohol, breakfast, couch, death, flash fiction, murder, relationships, Rochester, scotch, Short Fiction, short story, Upstate, Upstate New York, waffles, winter | posted in Short Fiction
And so we went to Thirsty Thursday, as her short-haired friend liked to call it. Thirsty Thursday was the cutesy name for the four of us gathering around her friend’s dining room table making stilted, domestic chit-chat and drinking poorly made gin-and-tonics.
Thirsty Thursday used to just be three, but her friend went and got herself a boyfriend – bald, midwestern, decently friendly. He worked in a train yard, kept a tally of how many vagrants he busted riding the rails.
I drank six poorly made gin-and-tonics, slept until 2 pm. I woke up with a terrible headache and a half-baked plan to take up model railroad.
“Enjoy yourself last night?”
Her voice rattled against the insides of my skull, causing me to wince. “I always do.”
“You wouldn’t shut up about trains and” – a dramatic pause – “their symbolism as great modernity or some shit.”
I dropped my head back on the pillow. “Sounds like something I’d say. Trains are always going forward after all. Progress.”
“Whatever.”
I closed my eyes. “Remember how I used to live next to some tracks?”
“Yeah. I used to fantasize about your death by train.”
She heard me sigh, then added: “Now that would be progress.”
Leave a comment | tags: affect, alcohol, death, domesticity, fiction, flash fiction, gin, Gin and tonic, hang over, modernity, murder, progress, railroad, relationships, Short Fiction, Thirsty Thursday, thursday, train, travel | posted in Me
I was walking home that night, paying little attention to my surroundings, when a woman – slight, fashionably dressed, dark eyes – approached me.
“Are you K?”
I said that I was, trying to ignore the incredulity of the moment. It was dark, but I knew her voice.
She looked at me, then punched me in the face, sending me backward. Her punch had knocked her off balance, so the force of the blow was relatively tame. Still, my right eye began to swell.
“Stay the fuck away from me!” she shouted.
Too stunned to reply, I grimaced at her. She took a knife from her back pocket. “And give me your fucking watch.”
I did. Then she flipped me off before tottering off into the shadows.
In a daze, I tripped and had to limp home in the dark.
I woke the next morning on the couch, and you were sitting next to me. “Sorry,” you said with resignation, handing me my watch. “I’ve always kind of liked it, I guess. We met the day you bought it.”
You were leaving for work.
“At least you didn’t try to run me over this time,” I said, watching the front door close.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, assault, couch, fashion, fiction, flash fiction, love, punch, relationships, Short Fiction, short story, time piece, violence, watch | posted in Me, Woman
For a moment neither of us spoke. She had taken up smoking, was practiced in exhaling through her nose. It was cool, I admit. She leaned hard on her elbows, took a moment to glare at me, and jammed her cigarette violently into its ashtray. Music from a neighbor’s stereo was stirring somewhere outside.
“It’s a terrible thing, what happened,” she sighed, lighting another cigarette.
I couldn’t disagree, but I said nothing. She had painted her apartment this odd shade of light blue. Through the haze (she had been smoking all night), the walls took on a dinghy, worn look – like a discarded Tiffany’s bag.
“What did you expect,” she said abruptly, pissed that I wasn’t listening. “You left. I had to stay here. I threw out all your shit and painted over your poems. They were good, really good. But they had to go.”
My eyes burned from the smoke, and from fourteen hours of driving. I swallowed the rest of my martini.
“I write fiction now,” I said in a way that I found impressively detached. Then I walked to her desk and unearthed a Sharpie from under a pile of cords, papers, and letters (unopened) from me.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, alcohol, art, cigarette, fiction, flash fiction, heart break, life, love, martini, music, poetry, relationships, Sharpie, Short Fiction, short story, smoking, Tiffany & Co. | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
I must have fallen asleep, for I don’t know how long – at some point she had lit her favorite candle (shaped like a man’s bashed in skull), so I had probably slept a while. She was as I remembered: arms hugging her legs, book in her hands. The flame of her favorite candle looked like a man trying to shake off his own immolation. He writhed, casting her profile in varying depths of black.
She smiled. “Someone was tired.”
I rubbed my eyes. “I guess.”
The house was shadowy and cool.
“It’s snowing,” she said, eyes returned to her book.
I looked behind me. “Jesus,” I said, transfixed by the vast white on the other side of the window. “How long was I asleep?”
She shrugged. “A few days. It hasn’t been snowing this whole time, though. Just since yesterday.”
Yesterday?
I swung my legs off of the couch and stared at her. She caught my gaze, momentarily, before the shadow cast by her favorite candle swelled again.
“What,” she said from somewhere in the shadow. “I wanted to finish my book. But your friend K came over instead.”
The shadow receded from her face and she was still smiling.
Leave a comment | tags: affair, affect, book, burning, candle, darkness, fiction, fire, flame, flash fiction, house, marriage, reading, relationships, Short Fiction, short story, snow, winter | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
The photographer called again. “Just checking in. Are you okay?”
He had been calling everyday for the past week, leaving the same message: “It’s terrible. Just terrible.” I answered today, figuring that if he hadn’t caught his error by now, he never would.
“Are you sure you have the right number?”
“I’m sure. How are you holding up?”
“Um. Excuse me?”
“And this close to the wedding,” he continued to himself. “I’ll return your deposit. You’re dealing with enough.”
“We got married in December of last year.”
He paused: “I don’t think so…” His voice trailed off into confusion.
“I’m positive. You took our photos. My favorite one is on my desk.” Her head on my shoulder, my hand creeping up her dress; we looked like models in a perfume advertisement. The me in the picture stared back at me. Was he as confused as I was?
“Look, K,” the photographer whined. “It was on the news.”
I hung up and read on the internet about my wife’s death. I read, too, about our imminent vows.
I looked back at our picture. The me in the photo looked upset now, his hand continuing it ascent up my wife’s wedding dress.
Leave a comment | tags: accident, affect, death, December, fiction, flash fiction, love, marriage, news, photo, photographer, photography, picture, relationships, Short Fiction, short story, vows, wedding | posted in Her, Him, Me, Short Fiction
This wasn’t how things were supposed to be.
She was the whore – fallen, despicable.
Yet here she sat, poised on the edge of the bed like an angel, ever the image of one neither fallen nor despicable.
“Are we doing this or not?” Her disdain filled the room. She wrapped her arms around her knees, sighed, looked toward the carpet.
I said nothing, leaned harder against the door.
She was the whore, repository of failure. But the intensity in her eyes compromised her expendability. Had I known then, when I let her into my luxury car, that she was not, in fact, human waste, I would have driven elsewhere, looked elsewhere for whatever it was I was looking for.
I didn’t want to fuck her because of carnal desire. I wanted to fuck her to debase her, to make myself feel better. I was the upright citizen; she was the whore.
I had ruined lives, trashed futures, lost everything.
She was supposed to absorb, affirm my failures, allow me to start anew.
But her body radiated goodness, filled the motel room with oppressive optimism.
“You’ll still have to pay me,” she said, oblivious to the worth I saw in her.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, capitalism, fiction, flash fiction, humanity, money, motel, prostitution, sex, sexuality, Short Fiction, whore | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
“Sorry,” she said, lunging at her eye which was lodged between the floor and the heel of my left shoe. “I can’t get it to stay in.”
The casualness with which she spoke of her abnormality offended me. She glanced at me with her one good eye, looked away in feigned innocence.
I retrieved her eye, offered it to her from my open palm. I figured she rolled her eye in my direction on purpose. She figured, I figured, that since I’m a retard she could become my retard friend, sister in arms.
“How did that happen,”she asked. Everybody else pretended not to notice. But she spoke with the confidence of a retarded Other, identified some sort of twisted commonality between us.
I looked her up and down, decided I would try to fuck her. I answered. “You did this.” I traced the hole in my chest, pointed to where my heart used to be.
She stared at me with her one good eye, the other eye now in her hand. “No I didn’t.”
I responded with a sigh: “Then who did?”
She shrugged, answered, “You did,” offered me the knife I gave her for her birthday, stained red now.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, birthday, eye, fiction, flash fiction, handicap, knife, love, murder, relationship, relationships, retard, Short Fiction, short story | posted in Her, Me, Uncategorized
I make a cocktail every night, stir it with the long helixed spoon she gave me the night she killed herself.
It was a birthday present, I think, the spoon. Or maybe her suicide. She jumped from our veranda at 8 pm central time. So at 8 pm central time I always make a cocktail, toast her, toast the life we used to have.
I cue up Interpol first, good Interpol, not their recent shit, and irritate my upstairs neighbor. Then I mix my cocktail – often vodka because she loved vodka, but sometimes something jingoistic because she hated jingoism.
Then I sit in the dark and drink. I cry, too, in the dark, let the good memories carry me away for a while. I think about how we used to listen to Interpol in the dark, went so far as to get matching Interpol lyrics tattooed on our bodies some snowy night some November.
We sat next to each other, grimaced in unison as our bodies accepted their tattoos. We healed our tattoos together, put expensive lotion on our tattoos, defended our tattoos from cynics who questioned our devotion.
To Interpol?
To each other?
It’s hard to say.
I make another drink.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, cocktail, death, drink, fiction, flash fiction, Interpol, life, love, mixology, music, neighbor, present, relationships, Short Fiction, short story, spoon, suicide, tattoo, tattoos | posted in Uncategorized
The train’s repetitive click-clack wakes her every night.
“Did you hear that noise,” she asked the morning after she first stayed the night, nose pressed against my cheek, head sunk deep into her pillow.
“It was the train,” I replied, feeling myself fall in love.
“Charming. Does it come through here every night?”
“It does.”
“Great. You’re lucky I like you.”
I propped myself up on my elbow, glanced around the room: wine bottles, condom wrappers, and empty chocolate boxes. “We should do something else some time.”
“Why?” She climbed on top of me.
She moved in with me several weeks later, complaining about the train. Then we started to fight, and our nightly bingeing on wine, sex, and chocolate gave way to heavy silence and passive aggression.
As our relationship worsened she took to walking the train tracks at night.
“I’m not going to kill myself, K, relax,” she said.
I was unconvinced. So I walked with her, behind her, like a scolded but loyal pet. I bought her expensive earrings, tried to cheer her up. She pushed me in front of the train.
Now she sleeps in my bed, wakes with a smile whenever the train rumbles past.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, chocolate, condom, flash fiction, love, murder, relationships, sex, Short Fiction, short story, suicide, train, wine, woman | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
I refused to finish the bottle of sake she brought over.
I didn’t like her much, and neither did she care for me. We were bored, worn out by too much solitude. So I cooked her dinner, touched her elbow. She left before dark and before I could touch her in better places.
“Keep the sake,” she said with false candor.
“Gladly,” I replied, flatly.
Alone in my apartment, I snatched up the glimmering green bottle of alcohol, held it close. My distorted reflection mocked my equally distorted existence.
Then, following protocol, I wrote her name on the bottle before putting it in the refrigerator with the other unfinished bottles of refrigerated alcohol other women had brought over and left behind. Countless kinds of cheap white wine, expensive vermouth, decently sophisticated beer, pretentious red wine. Now fancy sake.
I examined each bottle, touched carefully and purposefully each bottle, as though handling the delicate women whose feminine names adorned each bottle.
Satisfied that my record of romantic failures was still in tact, and indeed growing, I closed the refrigerator and spent the night – just like every night – curled up next to it, lulled to sleep by its gentle and accusatory hum.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, alcohol, date, dating, failure, flash fiction, red wine, refrigerator, relationships, sake, Short Fiction, short story, vermouth, white wine, women | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction, Woman
Experience taught me that antidepressant medication keeps the world’s miseries at arm’s length. Like living in a bubble, or being strung out all the time.
Experience also taught me that emotional invincibility is a dangerous pursuit, the limit too easily pursued. In my lesser moments I fell in love with women just to break their hearts. Their tears, spite, and venom had no effect. I betrayed friends, family; I did terrible things so the women I loved would vanish from my life. Just to see.
Alone and unfeeling, I swore off love and antidepressants. Without love and its complications, I wouldn’t need an escape. Without the sharp, poisonous women I crave, I would have no reason to protect myself from the consequences of my desires.
I met a woman, demure and caring, fragile. All bangs, yoga pants, and pumpkin spice lattes.
She stayed over. She stayed over a lot. I hid my pills away.
I woke one morning to find her in the bathroom, huddled over the sink. Her hair was disheveled, frightening. She turned toward me, exposing her demon within.
I backed away and hurriedly fetched my dusty vial of antidepressants. I was ready to fall in love again.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, antidepressant, demon, depression, drugs, flash fiction, love, medication, relationships, Short Fiction, short story, women | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
“You know,” she said, curling up in the passenger seat and pressing her cheek against its red leather, “I had this dream last night. You were made of pizza and I ate you.”
She reached across the console and rested her hand on mine, concernedly.
She continued: “It was awful. I felt like calling you, but I knew you were sleeping.”
Bullshit, I thought. She hadn’t called me in months. She only agreed to go out with me tonight because I told her – to my karma’s horror – that I was dying. We drank too much wine, and, in her drunken state, she decided that her dream portended my demise. Then she asked if I thought she had gotten fat.
In our months apart she got a new boyfriend and I got a new car. I stuffed her in the passenger seat and drove her home.
My car idling in her driveway, its headlights glaring at the back of an unfamiliar vehicle, she refused to remove her hand. Her house was dark.
“If K is so great,” I huffed, “where is he tonight?”
She sighed, said nothing. Then she moved to kiss me but sank her teeth into my face instead.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, alcohol, boyfriend, break up, cannibalism, dream, flash fiction, girlfriend, house, leather, love, new car, pizza, relationships, Short Fiction, short story | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
“Would anyone like a vanilla latte,” said the woman to a mass of early-evening cafe customers who were only partially listening. “They made two by mistake.”
“I’ll take it.” I met her gaze.
She smiled. “Have a nice day.” She handed me a white paper cup, brushing my fingers as she did so. Then she walked off, her towering boyfriend matching her stride.
I hate vanilla lattes. But having just purchased a new luxury car, my finances weighed heavily on my mind.
I took a seat in a dark corner of the cafe and pressed the paper cup to my lips. Her name was written on the side of the cup. In that instant, I felt an intimate, indeed too intimate, connection to this generous stranger.
I sat for hours with my vanilla latte, refused to drink it. Even after the last customers trickled out the door, I remained in my wooden chair cradling my latte like an injured animal and staring at the empty space across my table.
“Excuse me.”
Her languid voice roused me. I smiled.
“I’m glad you’re still here.”
I smiled again. “I’m glad you came back.”
She settled into the vacant chair across from me.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, capitalism, coffe, fiction, flash fiction, latte, love, relationships, romance, Short Fiction, short story, stranger, women | posted in Her, Me, Woman
“Anything at any price,” read the inside of the card, which featured a cat sleeping in a martini glass.
The attending package – displaying no return address – contained a cylindrical fish tank, complex instructions, and laudatory remarks:
Congratulations! Your new jellyfish will arrive tomorrow. Make sure your tank is calibrated to the appropriate temperature. Jellyfish are temperamental creatures, so handle your new friend with care!
I assembled the tank, placed it on my dining room table. I filled it with water and spent my evening hours envisioning various scenarios occurring within its narrow walls. In my mind, I saw her treading water, face creased with deceit, anger, and hatred. I saw her puff her cheeks up before descending toward the bottom of the tank for no reason in particular. I saw her begin to convulse and spasm, unable to ascend to the surface. I saw myself jump into the tank to retrieve her from the bottom.
The creature arrived the next day. It was dead already. I placed it in the tank and watched its tentacles gently keep it afloat. Then, thinking I could revive it, I jumped into the tank and pressed my lips to the top of its hood.
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