misc. flash fiction
by littlefallsmets
Entries 259
Page 1 of 11
prompt: star, title: how do you sleep at night?
I was a very different person when I was a child. I mean, I hope we all change over our lives. It’d be a profoundly boring thing if we all remained constant through this entire befuddling journe...
prompt: bottle, title: three plus one
Dorothy, Wendy and Alice, so different on the surface but so very much the same at the end of the day. Each of these lost girls three thrust into worlds beyond their young reckoning, beyond imagi...
prompt: return, title: the candyman could
It was the most exciting day of Charlie Bucket’s life. Of course it was. Growing up poor as dirt, barely having his own surname’s sake to relieve himself in, winning The Golden Ticket contest fro...
prompt: match, title: birthday mediation
The bad news is there are no happy endings in this life, as nothing really ever ends at all. You might get sick or might get healthy, might get married or divorced, still as long as you draw bre...
prompt: rose, title: by many other names
One day, Rose awoke to discover she could suddenly be two places at once. Literally, two places at once. She could copy herself over to live out her lives twice at a time. She was never sure why ...
prompt: season, title: the piano fighter
My father played the piano like it was his actual voice, not the crude low grumble erupting from his throat, constantly code-switching and dumbing down his impressively self-taught vocabulary so ...
prompt: heat, title: the post-modern sisyphus
Working in a library is, at its essence, a daily battle with the universal force of Entropy. I mean, sure, every other job is as well, just living is temporary defeat of physics’ tendency to degr...
prompt: fine, title: it's been a long long time
The worst part about being functionally-immortal is watching people you loved age to death and places you cherished crumble to dust, sure. That sort of trauma never erases your humanity, soul or ...
prompt: lock, title: lock stock and barrel
The mythological creature as tourism hook is hardly new, of course. Shysters have been selling crude plesiosaur carvings at Loch Ness in Scotland since the 500s, before the word “plesiosaur” was ...
prompt: forever, title: her best to understand
The sailor indeed said “Brandy, you’re a fine girl, what a good wife you would be… but my life, my love and my lady is the sea”. That much is entirely accurate, but you gotta understand, that’s a...
prompt: stage, title: for his age
“Your son is a wonderful writer for his age,” Miss Sobiecki told my parents or at least something approximate to that through thirtyish years of gauzy memory, “but that doesn’t mean I can read a ...
prompt: give, title: if at first
“So,” he asked gently, holding her hand in his right hand and an engagement-ring box in his left, “what do you say?” She stared blankly, clearly in shock. He couldn’t tell if it was good shock or...
prompt: rock, title: the oceans near the shore
“It wasn’t a dream,” a voice called from the darkness, “we had to pretend it was for a while but we’re sorry nonetheless.” As Dorothy opened her eyelids, vibrant colours made it clear this was in...
prompt: drum, title: corrective fluid
The heart is a palimpsest. That’s a sentence as difficult to explain as it is to spell or pronounce. Explaining what a palimpsest is, that’s actually the easy part. It’s the original recycling s...
prompt: dirt, title: Mrs. Ruth Didn't Even Name Him Babe
Someone once asked John Lennon an obvious question, as to whether the song “Lucy in The Sky with Diamonds” was actually about drugs, because yes, of course it was about drugs. The initials were L...
I don’t collect things because I think they are worth a lot of money or are going to be worth a lot of money someday. Far from it. When I was a child, I suppose I thought that way about some of m...
prompt: bow, title: undercover bosses
You can’t judge a book by its cover, they say, whoever the hell “they” are. And far as aphorisms go, it’s mostly true, at least literally so. A book’s cover isn’t made to reflect its contents, ra...
prompt: date, title: the sweet songs of lyres
The Clio Awards are an annual awards program recognizing innovation and creative excellence in advertising-related fields, according to some basement-dweller weirdo writing on Wikipedia. Sort of ...
prompt: date, title: Mr. Bad Example
There are some things we will never know. If you consider the vastness of this universe, how long it’s been and will be around, the percentage of things-knowable by the human race is so infinites...
prompt: perfect, title: reading lessons for mice
He’s afraid he needs to be perfect. He doesn’t need that. It’s easy as putting a disc in the slot and hitting a button on the remote control. I know that even if he made a mistake, it’d do no dam...
prompt: cut, title: physician, consult thyself
Power, most acutely power over others, seems to be our universal human allergen. We all react so badly to power. With concentrated enough dosage, we begin to lose some of the most useful tools th...
prompt: case, title: all acquaintence be forgot
You may have noticed a growing emphasis inside what’s left of our shared culture on alternative Earths, parallel dimensions, multiverses. Roads not taken, what-ifs, mulligans for all regrets. You...
prompt: rib, title: he's doing the best he can
We’d been waiting on it for weeks: my uncle’s yearly request for a Christmas tree. He’s a virtual shut-in due to mental illnesses, has lived on the third floor of my grandparents’ house nearly-fi...
Prompt: Buckle, Title: AND GOOD RIDDANCE
Michael Cecconi of Little Falls, forty-four, shuffled off his mortal coil Monday December 4th, tumbling down three flights of stairs in a Victorian McMansion converted into a library while attemp...
prompt: kind, title: YIPPIE-KAI-YAI-YAY, YOU OLD BUILDING-AND-LOAN
While most can find a few traditions they enjoy associated with the American secular winterish holidays, the truth of it is that even the holliest or jolliest of us also have a few Yuletide custo...
Book Description
Wherein the typist shares flash fiction experiments from writing groups.