Stories
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Micro-Fiction Corner: I Date Synopses
Yes, yes, I understand the importance of a synopsis. It’s a quick ride through your story. I also realize that if you can’t condense your…
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Micro-Fiction Corner: I Don’t Wanna Be Free, I Wanna Be Pretty
The salon opened without any fanfare, tucked between a shuttered bookstore and a nail place that had been there for decades, and within a month it had a waitlist longer than anywhere else in town despite nobody being entirely sure what made the results so different. The stylist never advertised anything unusual, just cuts and…
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Micro-Fiction Corner: If You Can’t Blind Them With Brilliance…
He had built an entire career on the second half of the old saying long before hearing it phrased so neatly: If you can’t blind them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit. Confidence read as competence to almost everyone, and he had enough confidence to supply a small nation. Job interviews, sales pitches, municipal hearings,…
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Micro-Fiction Corner: My Daddy Raised Me In Outlaw Culture
The lessons started before anyone bothered to call them lessons, folded into ordinary conversation the way other families folded in manners or grace before meals. Keep your word, no matter the cost of it. Never leave a debt hanging, whether it was money or a favor or a grudge. Know which roads the deputies used…
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Micro-Fiction Corner: There Was an Old Woman
She lived alone at the edge of the county in a house too big for one person, and the neighbors had long since stopped wondering why she’d never remarried after her husband passed, assuming it was grief or stubbornness or simple contentment with her own company. What they didn’t know was that she’d been working…
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Micro-Fiction Corner: Mack and Syl
They’d been caving together for six years, long enough to trust each other blind in the dark, literally, headlamps failing more than once in that time and neither of them panicking because the other one was there counting steps and calling out the shape of the walls from memory. This particular cave was supposed to…
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Micro-Fiction Corner: Trickery Misery Clock
The clock traveled with the circus in its own velvet-lined case, carried by the mystic like something more fragile than clockwork had any right to be, and its face bore no numbers at all, only a single hand that swept slowly around a ring of small painted scenes, a wedding, a funeral, a fire, a…
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Micro-Fiction Corner: Hey Twiddle Riddle
The cat had been coming to the pub longer than any of the current regulars could account for, sitting on the same stool at the end of the bar like it had been carved into the wood specifically for that purpose, and it asked its first riddle to anyone who made the mistake of buying…
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Micro-Fiction Corner: Incy Wincy Cider
The first barrel began singing three days after it was tapped, a faint melody bubbling up through the spigot at closing time, something between a harvest song and a marching chant, and by the weekend half the regulars were humming it without realizing they’d learned the tune at all. The cider picked up verses the…
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Micro-Fiction Corner: Nah Nah Black Death
The tune had started, as far as anyone could trace it, in a village that lost most of its people in a single terrible season, back when death moved through households like weather and nobody had the luxury of grieving one loss before the next arrived. The survivors needed something to do with their hands…