Tag: short story

All Stories, General Fiction

Another Summer Day by Mitchell Waldman

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Sam held the squirming green legs with both hands while Nick held the long scissors, trying to get the blades in the proper position. He prodded the tip of one blade into its mouth, the other blade hanging above the smooth skin behind its raised eyes. With one quick squeeze the steel sliced cleanly through the frog’s skin and the head flew into the air. The squirming had stopped. Sticky red fluid flowed out of the opening and onto Sam’s pink palm. Sam set the body on the lab counter and both boys’ mouths hung open as the frog crouched into its normal sitting position. It didn’t even seem to miss its head. Nick touched the frog with the moist tip of the scissors. The boys jerked back quickly as the headless frog jumped off the table onto the cold gray floor. Not knowing what to expect next, they kept their eyes on the frog, which was now motionless. Their eyes darted from the floor to each other as they stood in silence. A sudden burst of laughter broke through their bewildered expressions and echoed through the empty classroom.

How were they to know?

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All Stories, Horror

Jakantha by Amiel Rossin

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Jake drove his convertible Mustang up Highway 1, the Pacific Ocean stretching into oblivion on his left, his girlfriend Samantha sitting far to his right, as if she planned to throw the door open and roll onto the blacktop at any moment.  They were on their way to a little B&B that Sam had discovered online (one Yelp reviewer called it ‘kitschy but tolerable’), and although neither of them said so out loud, they both knew that if this weekend was a disaster, their relationship would never recover.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

So, Where Are You Now by Jeffrey L Higgs

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The distance between the house and the cliff isn’t long, nor is it short.  The distance is the distance. Years ago flowers bloomed here in ever increasing numbers, filling the landscape.  Their lithe youthful necks stretched upwards basking in the warmth of the sun’s rays.  But no more.  Time’s passage stole the flowers beauty and they began a slow, steady decline.

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All Stories, Humour, Short Fiction

The Flexible Rules of Anthropology by Alex Colvin

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October 11th, 1997

I am about to make history. That I know beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Armed with several months of supplies and two inept-but-well-meaning graduate students, I have begun what I am sure will be a monumental work of scholarship. I, Dr. Reginald Fitzfauntleroy, will be the first person to contact and live among the ancient and reclusive Sentinelese People. These people have existed for thousands of years, and they have resisted contact with the outside world. There have been attempts, but all previous explorers have been killed or were engaged in skirmishes that made the Sentinelese passionately loath outsiders. To contact or to visit the Sentinelese is considered to be a death sentence. They are the most elusive and dangerous peoples in the world, considered a myth by some anthropologists.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Where the Air Tastes Like Copper by Lee Conrad

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Roscoe Griffin, sheltered by the corner of the three story windowless building, waited for the procession of cars to begin drifting into the parking lot. Morning was just breaking and the autumn sun converted the chemical fumes coming from the stacks on top of the building into a mosaic of colors. Colorful though the fumes were, they held a deadly future. The smell, as the fumes drifted down, made Roscoe’s already nauseated stomach even worse.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Fertility by Jeffrey Penn May

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Justin and the campesino, Santos, spent the morning hiking deep into a ravine, carefully picking their way down narrow goat paths and occasionally chopping through vines and thickets. Now they were at the bottom of the ravine and sitting on a boulder that sloped into a stream snaking around gray rocks and lush vegetation. Santos was tired, a man who had lived well past fifty, pushing sixty maybe; it was difficult to tell. He had been evasive about his age, gesturing with his callused hand and saying, “Viejo. Old.” The younger man Justin had stated boldly without shame that he was twenty-seven.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

The Back Side of Sight by Tom Sheehan

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In the bedroom, upstairs, front corner, blind amid the toss of linens he had known intimately for seven long years, in touch with passing traffic and summer conversations when the windows were open, Jack Derrick lay in the middle of sound, in the middle of darkness. His left leg, or most of it, set upon by diabetes and the perfection of the surgeon, was elsewhere; his right hand was stained by nicotine, the index finger and close companion yellowed as shoe leather, and those fingernails bore fragments of that same deep stain. Gray, thin hair, most of it about his ears except for one thatch above his forehead as if an odd bird, at length, would roost there, drooped like fallen stalk. The stubble of his beard sprouted as off-white as an old field of corn waiting the last reaper.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Body in the Bay by James Hanna

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Nietzsche’s cutting quote, “If you gaze into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you,” is by now a redundancy.  And so, when I became a San Francisco probation officer, I prepared myself to keep company with the abyss.  But I had not quite realized how extensive the abyss was.  I saw it in the eyes of the senior probation officers, so exhausted by massive caseloads that they were counting the months to retirement.  I saw it in the faces of deputy jailors, disaffected shift workers who were all but deaf to the human clamor of the cell ranges.  And, of course, I saw it in my clientele: hollow-cheeked crack heads, asocial gang bangers, vagrants with thousand mile stares.  But at least the abyss could be mellow where probationers were concerned.  It was mellow in the case of Joseph Shepherd, a middle-age drug peddler on probation for choking his girlfriend.  Entering my office for his intake interview, he glanced at the tower of case files on my desk and chuckled.  “I know you have it rough,” he remarked in a voice that could be poured over waffles.  “So I plan to make it easy on you, sir.”  He smiled with the insular charm of a sociopath then shook my hand with a python grip.  He seemed to be a man of elemental strength—a brawn with a life of its own—yet his broad open face and puppy dog eyes set me completely at ease.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Frozen Tag by Mitchell Toews

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SHE HAD ONCE BEEN A SHOW PONY, sleek of shank and withers. Now she walked the pool deck, eyes forward and a neutral look on her face. I watched her for a moment and noticed that her head described a perfectly level line as she strode along, barefoot and bikini-clad.

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All Stories, Science Fiction

Towers of Grass and Clay by Kip Hanson

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Li Tsai stood beside the groundship and studied the ruins of the ancient city. She’d learned in school that the inhabitants of that unhappy place called it Denver, in honor of some forgotten politician. Today those people were naught but dust and troubled memories, she thought, shifting her glance towards the new city standing alongside the bones of the old: Deng Xiaoping, city of the people.

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