Category: fiction

Micro Fiction – My Grandma’s Trailer

I walk down the rickety lane to Grandma’s trailer, the Taj Mahal as we called it, and knocked on the peeling yellow door. It was a single wide, and the siding was coming off from a recent hurricane. The North Carolina humidity shimmered, speckled with mosquitoes. Then grandma opened, her expansive voice welcoming me into the marble foyer. As she closed the door behind me, I greeted the koi in her fountain.

“What brings you over, Cupcake?” she asked.

“I need to borrow a little TNT for my mom.”

“Ok honey. It seems like every day it’s something, which would be fine but she never returns anything. She still has my cyanide shaker and my mentrual map.”

Grandma takes off, surprisingly spry for a hip recipient, down the corridor on the left. She whisks past the library and the music room, the terrarium room and the aquarium room. She comes back with a carefully wrapped parcel and hands it to me gingerly.

“Be careful. Remind your mother Sunday night is dinner with Father Rohrer and the Zeitgeist of the 80s.”

 

Roses – Flash Microfiction

Serena was the human equivalent of a marigold – bright and always heralding the dead. She tended her roses tenderly, until one day is a vortex of hurt she approached her violated wrists with a long thorn, sliding it deep into cuts trying desperately to heal. As her elegant friend ripped open her tortured flesh, she quieted. Her blood fell upon the sleeping soil, awakening it

The next morning, the rose bush was covered in fresh blooms, some as large as Serena’s head. Amazed, she watered them carefully. But the water sat in top of the soil, useless. Serena looked at her wrist and picked the corner of a developing scab. A delicate drop of blood fell in the soil, and from somewhere deep, the sound of slurping.

Day by day the roses grew taller, the blooms prouder. Serena grew weaker until one day, her husband came home to find her head rolled back, her arms and body drained, and roses wrapping around her corpse.

Addie – flash fiction

My old house was creaking under the weight of ghosts, and I knew it was the uneasy time labeled bed. Sleek, blue Addie hovered in her crystal aquarium.

“Goodnight Addie,” I said, placing a few pellets on the serene surface, that ether boundary of her world, residing as she does in the meniscus of life.

Later, I am yanked awake from fitful, light sleep by the sound of splashing water. Eyes bleary, I stumble down the hall to the studio to Addie’s aquarium.

Inside was a feral little girl, curled up inside the tank, her bony, bluish body pressing against the glass. Her hair, brown and unbrushed, was tangled and soaked.

“Where’s Addie ? Who are you?” I gasped.

Then she looked at me, staring bleakly out of her hollow face, and I knew it was Addie.

I blinked, and the girl was gone. The aquarium was still there but almost completely empty. I felt inwardly disheveled. My discombobulation turned to horror when I saw Addie beached on the neon rocks, gasping for breath, her gills clutching at whatever water got too close.

I ran to the sink and filled a measuring cup with water. I dumped it out into the tank quickly. First one then another, until the tank filled.
But when I returned to the aquarium with the last cup of water, Addie was gone. Wet footprints scampered out the door, and a wisp of a child somewhere runs wild.