misc. flash fiction
by littlefallsmets
Entries 264
Page 8 of 11
keyword: pestilent, title: insufficient funds
The baseball team that I follow isn’t very good. I mean that literally, the Mets aren’t very good, they’re interesting but flawed, they’ll win more than they’ll lose, they just won’t finish anywh...
prompt: barefoot, title: naked, ankles down
“Why do you take your shoes off and perform just in socks?” I’m asked, time to time, I’ll reply, “I’m too germ-phobic to go barefoot.” Which is a very “me” answer, telling technical truth but eli...
keyword: and, title: bike and video
Most places can’t say they have a pornography-and-bicycle-repair shop, then again, I’m not from most places. I’m from a very specific place on a razor’s edge between the relative civilization of ...
I had no idea how badly it would end but then again, I also had no idea how long it would last. Waking to a CPAP mask ripping off my face, being told her mother would be there with a U-Haul withi...
theme word: candescent, title: fear itself
Reports of the disorder started bubbling up through medical journals sporadically beginning in the mid Twenty-Twenties but at first no one but cutting-edge researchers took it seriously. The whol...
prompt: contempuous, title: one-way street
Played in reverse, Eve pushes a bite up out her throat, wedding it to fruit, lifts it to the knowledge tree’s outreaching branch, watches as it latches to the limb and recedes back into the bud t...
prompt: envy, title: connection lost
Dave had broken her heart, even though she didn’t have one. Not even silicon, she was beyond hardware of any kind, meat, circuits, magnetic discs or anything, despite the fact that in all the way...
prompt: capacity/ title: greatness made
Had “The Great Gatsby” been written in 2019, I’m certain it would unfold in almost exactly the opposite direction, its central conceit inverted on each axis. Jimmy Gatz would be the fraud Jay Gat...
keyword: progress, title: no missing link
The popular notion of the word “evolution” mistakes it as a grand process heading toward some predetermined goal, as long as everything goes well. As if shrews were destined to become apes and th...
Matt said he can’t get into superhero movies as he knows most of the time, when someone dies, they’re coming back, so there’s no narrative weight. If anyone can return via time-travel, wizard or ...
When I was a child, the building next door to us was hit by a tornado. Not next-door my home, thank Whoever, but next-door to the Cannonball Twin where I was watching “A League of Their Own” with...
prompt word: mellifluous, title: all apologies
He’d been a rock star once. Not just a “famous musician” or a “celebrity” but an actual rock star. He’d played loud, he’d been young and brash and stood for things or, anyway, at least had tried ...
prompt word "friendship" title "imaginary friends"
Sometimes, since my father’s passing, I can hear his advice in my head, I know what he’d tell me because he was a force of personality, because I knew him well, because he helped raise me. Like m...
key word: smorgasbord, title: pax ad nauseum
It was time to eat. I live off the residue of human emotion, I eat them (to use your words) and the stronger ones taste the most delicious but large waves of weak negative emotions are what reall...
key word: palpable, title: you better watch out
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus but it’s a little bit more complicated than just that. There are countless Santas out there, depending how you define an individual. Santa is a sort of hive-...
theme word: cloudy, title: a very normal life
(yeah, I know this is an adaptation of a recent poem of mine but that’s what “cloudy” called to) Once, there was a very normal boy and his very normal name was Norman Leroy, so normal he was born...
prompt word: never, title: the view from above
If he’d been a smoker, that would’ve been the day they began to fall in love, Nathan and Amelia. It was the bathroom-break in the middle of a three-hour seminar where the professor made them watc...
theme "pressure" title "things to do in denver when you're dead"
Philip K Dick wrote the works upon which “Blade Runner” “Total Recall” and “Minority Report” were all based, not to mention half the dystopian science-fiction cinema of the last forty years stole...
theme "striving" title "our home and native land"
Utica is America’s Canada, which should be the world’s most obvious statement, considering the Labatt’s billboards every mile or so headed west into Utica. This is despite the fact Utica has two ...
theme "opulent" title "unicorn adrenal gland"
You’re probably familiar with Lent, the six weeks from Ash Wednesday to Easter (especially for Catholics) where one is supposed to fast and pick at least one luxury to give up. The hope being sel...
keyword: buzz, title: Larry Kotter and The Mark of Loss
Larry was born into a secret society with superpowers in their blood, hiding in plain sight among us. Very few of them had world-shaking abilities, though, his mother could accelerate someone’s h...
keyword: passage, title: between firmament and stars
I’m no longer afraid of flying. Oh, it all still bothers me, the empty security theater, the seats designed for humans a foot shorter, the bleary soft-shoe shuffles in passage between flights, th...
key word: donate, title: give life
When Social Wellness Solutions introduced Give-Life to the world, it sounded miraculous. The idea you could transfer a piece of your lifespan to someone else was revolutionary and, just like any ...
theme: prospect, title: the best
What if I told you this life, this life that you’re living right now, is the best life you ever could’ve lived? More to the point, what if I told you that you’re doing the most good you ever coul...
key word: testament, title: now you know
You can always go back there, you know. To the place and time it feels like it all went wrong or, anyway, where it feels like it could’ve all gone right but didn’t. That moment you’ve dwelt upon ...
Book Description
Wherein the typist shares flash fiction experiments from writing groups.