Category Archives: Short Short Stories

Flaps

Short Fiction for Guests of the WordFeeder
Sunday, June 19, 2011 (Father’s Day!)

“You know,” Verna observed apprehensively, closing the front of the sweater she was wearing to cut the cool evening air while they drove deeper and deeper into the countryside toward the renovated eighteenth century mill where Jacob lived and worked, “I didn’t realize how far out you lived.”

“What?” Jacob faked an offended tone. “Have you been talking to the parents of the other women I’ve murdered?”

She giggled back at him nervously. “That’s not funny. This is only our fourth date.”
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Stranger On The Bus*

Sunday, May 22, 2011 (*From the song, “One of us,” by Eric Bazilian, originally released by Joan Osborne in March of 1995.)

“You’re late.” Shirley looked up from the charts she was reviewing, pretending to be the mean supervisor, watching her friend adjust the scrubs nurses wore in their section, and then use a scrunchy to wrap her shoulder length hair into a sloppy bun.

“Walter needed a quickie,” Denise giggled back, her arms up and hands still working on the back of her head, “which, thank goodness, turned out to take a little longer than he expected and I missed the early bus.”

“Go, Walter,” Shirley commented approvingly, her usual enthusiasm lost in what she was reading about the critically ill woman waiting for a room in the temporary patient area behind the glass walls across from their nurses’ station.

“What’s going on in there?”

“The patient is Emma Gold, 86. Medics brought her in an hour ago. It’s congestive heart failure she’s had for years. That’s her husband sitting in the chair next to her. I called her daughter. She and a brother are on their way over, but they’re an hour away.”

“She’s not going to make it, is she?” Denise could tell from the description of Mrs. Gold’s condition, but more by the way the flesh on the sides of her friend’s mouth lay heavy, without the slightest hint of optimism.
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Shiny Things

Short Fiction for Guests of the WordFeeder
Sunday, May 15, 2011

His handwriting was something you had to learn to read. It was quick, the way he talked, going this way and that, often without stopping between the words. Slightly out of control, but in an artistic way. And so began another entry, the way he started all the others.

“This is the Journal of Jason Sinners,” he wrote at the top of a fresh page. “Wednesday, April 20, 2011.” He’d be given a beautiful leather bound diary, but preferred to write on single sheets of copier paper he kept in a drawer, still in the torn paper the ream had come wrapped in, next to an open box of his favorite pens. He like the gel kind, black ink, with the medium tip, that moved effortlessly across the page. There was a notebook computer, screen up, to his left on the table he used as a desk, but there was something about drawing his thoughts on paper that he preferred.

Rubbing the pen for a moment, he let his hand settle into position and wrote, “She was a girl who liked shiny things.”
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Trouble Sleeping

Short Fiction for Guests of the WoodFeeder
Monday, September 6, 2010

12:35 AM, early Wednesday morning.

“Are you awake?”

“Hm,” was all his wife, lying next to him, her face down in her pillow, could manage to say. [Translation: “No.”]

“Jimmy Fallon’s coming on.”

“Hm.” [“Who gives a crap? I need to sleep.”]

“You know that new girl I told you about, the one they hired in public relations?”

Nothing.

“Well, she comes in my office today. I’m busy like a beaver editing a screenplay. Doesn’t even bother to knock. She’s wearing one of those v-neck tops, without the undershirt thing. Lot’s of cleavage showing, looking even more boobous than usual. I’m guessing she has a platinum card at Victoria Secrets. …You following this?”
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The Hangover

(Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea, eating the worm.)

Short Fiction for Guests of the WordFeeder
Sunday, September 5, 2010

“Hey.” The short line in front of him at the familiar shop down the street from his office had moved quickly. More than most days, today he needed the perfect cup of coffee. “I’ll have my usual.”

Fifty-two minutes earlier…

Naked, in someone else’s bed, in a bedroom and apartment he didn’t recognize, Anthony Null went from a dead sleep to wide awake the moment he heard his watch alarm go off. Pushing himself up onto his elbows, he paused for only a second before swiveling onto the edge of the bed, his bare feet pleased to feel the cool of the floor. He pressed the big button on his watch to shut off the sound. Disoriented, he looked around to see his suit and other clothes strewn about the old hardwood.
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I, Your Son

Short Fiction for Guests of the WordFeeder
Sunday, July 18, 2010

“Shhh!” He held his finger up to his lips, cautioning the girl he was showing around their laboratories to be quiet. The large room, covering most of the fourth floor of the new graduate Physics building was usually off limits to visitors, but he had a special unlimited access pass that even their extraordinary security had to respect, and managed to get one for her, too. It was a pick-up trick that had never failed him.
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First Date

Short Fiction for Guests of the WordFeeder
Sunday, July 11, 2010

It was 5:22 AM Tuesday morning, according to the glowing numbers and letters when he pressed the button on his watch, 8 minutes later than the last time he’d checked.

“Enough already. I’m getting up,” Kenny advised himself out loud, even though he was the only resident of his studio apartment, the largest unit he could afford in the slightly better than crummy neighborhood he’d settled for when he moved to the big city. His first real job out of college, he wasn’t about to put in the hours, the “sweat equity” his father called it, only to max out his potential in a small town company. “Maybe I’ll have time to catch a nap before I leave.” He had the one air conditioner in the window, but it was too noisy to run when he was sleeping, and then there was the fan on a stick he kept in the corner moving slowly left to right, right to left. Kenny got up, turned on the air conditioner, opened the blinds a bit, and waited a couple of seconds for the compressor to come up to speed. “Com’on, baby. One more day.”
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Long Distance

Short Fiction for Guests of the WordFeeder
Sunday, July 4, 2010

“Norm honey, aren’t you going to answer it?”

Becky, the girl Norman Allgood had been dating for the past few months, had seen that look on his face before, whenever the subject of his parents came up. But lately, when the other cell phone he kept in his desk drawer would ring, the usual angst was laced with… with fear? Fear wasn’t something most people see in their friends, and she wasn’t sure, and couldn’t imagine why it would be there.
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Unfaithful

Short Fiction for Guests of the WordFeeder
Sunday, June 6, 2010

All total, he’d only been out of town for two days. Their presentation team decided to fly out Wednesday afternoon to rehearse, make last minute adjustments and get plenty of sleep for the 9 AM meeting that had to go perfectly. If it did, if it went well, they’d be invited back the next morning for what amounted to a second competition among the contract finalists. They did, and they were, and now they’d know Monday if their agency had been selected. It would be the break they needed, and had worked so hard to win. It would also affirm Ben’s standing as the heir apparent to the two aging partners who founded the agency, but whose creativity was defined by a different, no longer relevant time. Ben was the next generation, yet to realize his full potential, a natural salesman with an effortless knack for making people believe that what he said was what they wanted to hear.
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“Brainer”*

The continuing legend of “Stillborn.”
Short Fiction for Guests of the WordFeeder
Sunday, May 30, 2010

*Futurespeak for someone who hacks into people’s minds, without the need for electronic enhancement.

Personal Journal
6:18 PM, July 14, 2010

“‘There are no superheroes, or gods for that matter. Only ordinary people realizing their potential.’ Twelve years later, I can still see his eyes, the odd mix…”

“Dr. Molinara.”

No answer. The 27 year old scientist, with doctorates in electrical engineering and neuro-physiology, sat on the sofa in her office, hunched over her laptop – typing notes, so her assistant assumed, on something she’d been trying to figure out. It was how she worked. Some preferred yellow pads. Others blackboards filled with equations and chemical formulas. Hers was a more literary approach, the last stage in her creative process. Her colleagues once realized that she was able to visualize the complex science of her specialties entirely in her head, and that she only wrote it out occasionally for their sake and as a prelude to manufacturing what she had invented.
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