Stories
-
Micro-Fiction Corner: Shook By A Graveyard Look
The cemetery caretaker had a phrase for the expression certain visitors acquired after standing too long over a grave. He called it the graveyard look and claimed he could recognize it from half a field away.
-
Micro-Fiction Corner: Bleak of Dawn
The phrase first appeared in the logbook of a fishing vessel that vanished for eleven days and returned with fuel tanks nearly full, nets empty, and its crew physically unharmed.
-
Micro-Fiction Corner: Eschaton is Going to be a Fine Day
The preacher on local access television had announced the end of the world every autumn for thirty years.
-
Micro-Fiction Corner: Wouldst Me Marry Thee?
The question appeared carved into the oak at the edge of the churchyard in lettering old enough to send the vicar searching through reference books. Wouldst me marry thee? was the closest translation anyone agreed upon.
-
Micro-Fiction Corner: Do As Eternity
The phrase was stitched into a sampler that had hung in the hallway of every house my family owned for as far back as anyone bothered tracing. The linen had yellowed, the thread had gone brown, and the words formed a careful oval around an empty center.
-
Micro-Fiction Corner: Hwalas ðec herigað
The chapel had been abandoned for nearly seventy years before the historical society restored it. Salt had softened the carvings, storms had taken most of the roof twice, and the parish records survived only in fragments.
-
Micro-Fiction Corner: Swa breþel seo, swa þystel
The phrase appeared in my great-aunt’s notebook between a recipe for seed cake and instructions for removing rust from garden tools. Beside it she had written a rough translation about worthless things growing wherever they were allowed to root.
-
Micro-Fiction Corner: Soð bið swicolost
My grandmother used the phrase whenever someone became too pleased about exposing a lie. Soð bið swicolost, she would say, then translate it loosely as truth is the most treacherous thing.
-
Micro-Fiction Corner: þa cwom semninga sunnan beorhtra Lacende
The line was carved into the standing stone at the edge of the pasture, shallow enough that rain had nearly erased it. The farmer who owned the land dismissed it as decoration whenever visitors asked, something commissioned by an ancestor with more money than judgment.