Tag Archives: flash fiction

March 4, 2015

Letter from Camp – Friday Fictioneer

Hey Mom and Dad!

So, this is my first letter from camp! It is wonderful here. Say hello to Brad and Margot for me. No point writing twice. 🙂 The food is amazing! I’d get so fat except for all the activities, like 3-leg races. My team has broken the record for fastest time! Kassie was on my team. I’m glad she came or she’d be missing all the fun.

I might not send another letter. Too busy having fun! I’ll help you plant the roses when I get back, Mom. Please don’t do it without me.

Your daughter,

Noelle

Note: If anyone is reading this on a black and white screen, this story may not make any sense. Just saying.

44 Comments | tags: camp, creepy, fiction, flash fiction, Friday Fictioneers, hidden message, letter | posted in Friday Fictioneers

March 2, 2015

Any Suggestions?

By David Stewart

Any suggestions?

“Next week is the midterm,” the computer ethics professor Dr. Bevin said. “There is no exam.” He cut off the collective sigh of relief with a sharp gesture. “No, instead you have to break your world.

“All of you have been observing your custom world simulators for eight weeks now, or 20,000 years in-program. Unless you have a world that is already a nuclear wasteland—Jared—I want you to write the inhabitants a message. From you. Ask for suggestions on how to make things better. Write an essay giving the results and what you think the impact of those changes might be.”

There was a stunned silence, then a phalanx of questioning hands. Dr. Bevin dismissed them all. “That’s all. You figure out the rest.”

That night, Ben opened the program and rewound to watch the last four centuries that had progressed during the day. A lot had happened; way more than he could take in. There were 12 billion people now in his little world, spinning through the cosmos that was the class’s shared universe. Some of his classmates wanted to help their people explore and find each other’s planets, except that Dr. Bevin forbade any interference.

Until now.

It took Ben five minutes of coding to set it up. He hated to do it. It would wreck everything, but in the end, this little world was just a Petri dish, a place to play around with issues in the safety of a computer. He sighed and hit Enter.

* * *

On the planet of Geral, a man named Hyerai was walking home from work when he looked up at the moon. Slowly, lines of fire appeared on its surface, forming into words. He gaped. They said, “HI, I’M BEN. ANY SUGGESTIONS?”

17 Comments | tags: Alastair's Photo Fiction, computer, exam, fiction, flash fiction, midterm, other worlds, playing God, science-fiction, simulation, university | posted in Dusk

February 25, 2015

10,000 Miles Straight Ahead – Friday Fictioneers

By David Stewart

10,000 Miles Straight Ahead

My sister Olivia left to ride the rails when she was sixteen. She only told me, but I was 10 and scared. I tattled.

Too late.

Olivia came back three years, 22,400 miles, and an entire lifetime later. She had the best stories. Mom was furious. Dad wiped away a tear and hugged her.

“Stay around,” I said. “For me?”

She nodded, but two weeks later I found the note by my bed.

“That’s who she is,” Dad said.

“Will she ever change?”

“She’s like a train,” he said. “10,000 miles straight ahead, but not an inch left or right.”

39 Comments | tags: adventure, fiction, flash fiction, Friday Fictioneers, runaway, train | posted in Friday Fictioneers

February 23, 2015

5 Annoying Things About the Apocalypse

By David Stewart

It was the end of the world in a few hours. Yep, no doubt about it. The news had confirmed it and they were never wrong. Half the population was cowering and the other half was making fun of it or partying.

She clicked on a comedy site link: 5 Annoying Things about the Apocalypse.

We’re never going to be able to make a movie about this.

We’ll never be able to eat up all the canned beans in our fallout shelter in time.

Game of Thrones will never, ever be finished.

Bruce Willis really dropped the ball on this one.

Despite all our pop culture about the apocalypse, absolutely no one saw this coming.

Cassandra looked sadly over at her sandwich board lying by the door, The End is Nigh scrawled in her spidery handwriting. She opened up her blog where the last entry: WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE! sat with no comments and no likes. It had been posted a week before the news of the monster asteroid had been announced.

The phone rang. “Hey Cassandra, let’s go out with a bang!” her friend said. “A group of us are going over to the bar to get drunk.”

“It’ll be closed,” Cassandra said.

“No it won’t. Come on!” Her friend hung up.

Sigh.

19 Comments | tags: Alastair's Photo Fiction, apocalypse, Cassandra, fiction, flash fiction, prophesy, quirky, science-fiction | posted in Light

February 18, 2015

Death Maker – Friday Fictioneers

By David Stewart

make death:

long, beautiful

annihilation.

We all do here

at the forge,

but Harold,

who’s a klutz,

makes axes:

tree death,

and William

shapes animal

slaughter for

the butchers.

I am the best.

I make human

death. I sweat

at the steely

altar of Hades,

heated crimson

like future blood.

My masterpiece was for the king. It took a year to make. The hilt was set with a

fountain of diamonds, like the seeds of mourning lilies.

It won me a

citation. I

cannot read it,

but I know what

it says. The

best death

maker in

the realm.

34 Comments | tags: death, fiction, flash fiction, forging, Friday Fictioneers, historical, swords | posted in Friday Fictioneers

February 15, 2015

Paper Dolls – Friday Fictioneers

By David Stewart

I am super late this week in posting my story for Friday Fictioneers. There are several reasons for this, including being very busy at work, but one main one is that I am finding Friday Fictioneers stories harder and harder to write. It’s not that I can’t think of a story: I could probably sit down and write a hundred stories in a row for any given picture. It’s just that as time goes on, my standards for myself for originality and quality keep increasing and after 113 100-word stories, I feel like everything has been done. That’s one reason why I play around ways of presenting stories: I feel like I’m stagnating or at least I don’t want to. Sometimes a story that I like comes right to me, but usually it doesn’t and these days, I often agonize about it for days. If you do Friday Fictioneers stories, do you ever feel this way? Is it just me?

Paper Dolls

Snip, snip. A line of identical dolls appeared.

Elise picked up one of the crayons from her father.

“Make them colorful,” he’d said. “Bring them to life.”

She left the first one blank; drew a happy face on the second. The third had clothes and hair.

The tenth took all week. Finally, the light glowed off her perfectly shaded face. Her name was Galatea; Elise had ten pages of history for her. She was Greek. And liked chocolate and rainbows.

Elise put down the pencil and Galatea’s arm floated up as if waving, blown by an imaginary breeze.

Elise smiled.

30 Comments | tags: fantasy, fiction, flash fiction, Friday Fictioneers, life, paper dolls, Pygmalion | posted in Friday Fictioneers

February 9, 2015

The Bronze Lady

By David Stewart

The Bronze Lady

There was a crunch and the chariot lurched. Another puppy gone. A scream from the owner.

“Watch where you’re going, you maniac!”

“Shut up, shut up!” Boudicca yelled. She maneuvered the chariot further into the dog park. This clearly hadn’t been a good idea.

“Are you insane?”

“I’m trying to give the horses some exercise!” she shouted over her shoulder. There were too many trees here for a good run.

“They’re bronze! Why do they need exercise?” someone yelled.

“Well, I don’t need to kick your arse, but I still might,” she said, pulling back a bronze foot to emphasize her point.

It was no good anyway; the heavy wheels were sinking into the turf. She turned around and retreated.

As she rode back sadly along Bridge Street to her pedestal, cars honking behind her, she sighed. There was no place in this modern world for a bronze woman. It was lonely, being the only one of her kind. If only her friend the Iron Lady were still alive.

17 Comments | tags: Alastair's Photo Fiction, Boudicca, bronze, dog park, fantasy, fiction, flash fiction, funny, lady, London, Margaret Thatcher | posted in Light

February 7, 2015

Dear Man in 45C

By David Stewart

I saw on a flight for my job interview. It seemed like desperate pleading to me. Thus, this story.

I saw on a flight for my job interview last summer. It seemed like desperate pleading to me. Thus, this story.

Dear man in 45C,

Please feel better. Please? I’ve noticed that slightly green look on your face, and the way you heave slightly with every lurch of the plane. I can see that the spew volcano is restless and I’m doing every ritual dance I know to keep it from erupting. I’ll even bring you another ginger ale, if it helps.

I don’t normally beg, but you’ve seen this flight and carting off your full bag of transformed airplane food would be the puke-colored straw on the back of the camel that is this flight.

It’s not just the dead guy either. True, it was a bit jarring to witness a guy have a heart attack and die screaming just after I’d served him his peanuts. That was a new one, I’ll admit. One for the ol’ memoir. But for the moment, it’s not helping my day, especially when I see other passengers looking askance at their own peanuts, as if I knock off people as a hobby, or something. And it didn’t make it any better that since I’m the only male flight attendant and the dead guy had had more than his share of triple fudge sundaes, I was the one who had to haul him off to cold storage for the rest of the flight.

Also, this job is stressful enough without the two teenagers throwing a Nerf football back and forth and running plays in the aisles (and calling me a “stewardess”, no less). And let’s not forget about the two racist women in first class, talking loudly about how the Jews and the blacks are taking over the world. That would be annoying enough for anyone, even if I weren’t a black Jew.

So that’s why I’m asking you—begging you—please don’t drop a puke cherry on top of this septic sundae.

Oh look, there you go. Goody.

And you missed the bag too. Wonderful.

Two hours into a twelve-hour flight. Hooray.

“Excuse me, sir. It looks like you are in some discomfort. It would be my pleasure to clean this up for you.”

9 Comments | tags: air sick, airplane, fiction, flash fiction, flight attendant, funny, puke | posted in Light

February 4, 2015

The Labyrinth – Friday Fictioneers

By David Stewart

The Labyrinth

For years, adoption was our goal. Every form signed was another step through the bureaucratic labyrinth, until we stepped out into open air and he was ours.

~*~

“Michael is seeing the school psychologist again today,” I told my friend Brent over coffee. “He still starts fights, and fires.”

“It’s hard being a teenager.”

“Did we make a mistake adopting older? Maybe we should’ve gotten a baby.”

“Don’t tell Michael that.”

“I just feel like we’re back in the maze. I don’t know how to get out this time.”

Brent shrugged. “That’s parenthood. You don’t get out, you just go through.”

36 Comments | tags: adoption, fiction, fighting, flash fiction, Friday Fictioneers, maze, parenting, psychologist, school | posted in Friday Fictioneers

February 1, 2015

The Tireless Pirate

By David Stewart

Everyone knows that the squeaky wheel gets the grease and a pirate that doesn’t yell “Avast!” every now and then, or at least swing his cutlass around, is likely going to be ignored.

It was a busy day at the tire garage to begin with. Pete called in sick again, one of the machines broke and the customers just kept coming. Around 10, the guy walked in, dressed like an extra from Pirates of the Carribbean 6: Jack Sparrow Takes Manhattan.

“I need new tires for my ship,” he said.

I frowned. “Ships don’t have tires.”

“Mine does.”

“Well, okay then.” I pulled out a form. “What’s the make, model and year?”

“Make?”

“Who made it,” I said slowly.

He wrinkled his brows, thinking. “Spain?”

“Okay . . . Model and year.”

“A brigantine, around 1802.”

“Gotcha. Your name?”

“Alec Greenbeard.”

“Okay, just have a seat, Mr. Greenbeard. We’ll get right on that.” Just then I got a call and I put the form on the desk.

I did look once but the manufacturer laughed at me when I asked for a lookup on tires for an 1802 Spanish brigantine. After that, I was too busy to worry about it and Mr. Greenbeard just sat there, waiting patiently. It was easy enough to ignore him. Soon he just seemed to fade into the décor.

A couple months later, the janitor found me. “You remember that pirate?”

“No.”

“The one who wanted the tires for his ship.”

“Oh crap! I forgot about him. Where is he?”

“Maybe you should come into the waiting room.”