Stories

The Astronaut Tier – Jonathan Laidlow – Metaphorosis Magazine via Instapaper https://ift.tt/2yzgB5U

Ten Deals with the Indigo Snake - Lightspeed Magazine via Instapaper https://ift.tt/2O5XzZG

I’m sorry I waited so long to tell you this, but I really hate your vacation cabin. Everything about it creeps me out. The sound of crickets at night makes my skin crawl. via Pocket

Use the photograph above as the inspiration for your flash fiction story. Write whatever comes to mind (no sexual, political, or religious stories, jokes, or commentary, please) and after you PROOFREAD it, submit it as your entry in the comments sec…

“London is ours! Zero-ing in on infamy!” announced Haggard Elsson, winking to the air steward and striding purposefully from the First Class exit from BA0171 with his Executive Assistant Freya trailing him, awkwardly wheeling both of their suitcases…

Paris is a city of many things — lights, sounds, whispers… and cats. Cats haunt modern Paris like fur-clad ghosts — whiskered faces through window panes, gray mousers plying their trade in alleyways, rooftop cats and cats who sleep and dream curled …

I let the children play with the lions because I decided that it was part of their education to examine life from another planet. This was after I ordered a box of domestic cats but many of my students, the boys in particular, didn’t know their own …

Grampa Don hated houseflies. To hear him talk you’d think there weren’t no flies in Chicago, but we visited once and there were flies a’plenty, I assure you. But when Grampa stayed with us he was forever complaining about flies in the house. via Poc…

Her fingers are young but they feel wrapped in the heft of ancient mountains as she writes. Her nails are blotched with ink but she remembers the taste of the paint, that which she mined from beneath their tips as she thought with the edge of her te…

The sign outside Hello Design Coffin Works read, FOR SALE: FANTASY COFFINS. But the little girl imagined more ominous words floating just below the other letters, “Ababuo Need Not Apply.” via Pocket

Bg’lkk Ut’rk had found the blue jewel with its eccentric inhabitants and decided he wouldn’t make contact. via Pocket

PodCastle 545: The Aunties Return the Ocean

Author : Q. B. Fox Simon looked up from what he was doing, and even in the dim light of the rack mounted servers I recognise the pinched expression. via Pocket

Marshal was a photographer, an anachronist and a killer. Before we met, he hadn’t bothered to iCap any of the women he had finished with: he used an old camera, the print kind. That’s a throwaway fact- an affectation- for someone who isn’t a killer.…

My lips are so bitten up it’s like my mouth just chewed its way out of my face. I think my mother is about to tell me about the divorce between her and my father. Guess my age, with my parents getting divorced. You’re wrong, add ten years. via Pocket

Mary Kay Bonfante is the Readers’ Choice in this week’s Indies Unlimited Flash Fiction Challenge. The winning entry is decided by the popular vote and rewarded with a special feature here today. (In the case of a tie, the writer who submitted an ent…

We dash around a long curve that should get us out of their sights for a while. “In all those old films we watched, fighting the evil empire involved a lot less running away from angry warriors with frighteningly accurate weapons. via Pocket

Everyone fails the first time. It’s what Tucker told you, morning after morning, as you and he sipped coffee from the same old mugs, preparing for another day of training. via Pocket

In all my days on Gulliver’s Rest, I never believed that the War would reach us. From the window, I see the sky is pitted with scars from the wreckage of an Artari Sunskipper, ripped from history in a series of blinding flashes. I came to this plane…

The manual had been totally inadequate. For a start the Chinglish translation was hopelessly out of date, there were archaic digiverbs in it that must have been superseded at least three authorisations ago. via Pocket

The metal clasps dug into my arms as they strapped me to the chair. I spat on one of the guards and called into question the loyalty of his wife. He raised his hand to strike but the other guard stopped him with a simple movement of the eyes. via Po…

“—and she said, well, that’s as may be, lad, but if you don’t recall what color it was, then I don’t see how I can help you!” Roars of laughter seemed to shake the hot taproom. via Pocket

It is the business of the Dream Curator to choose, and at the moment he is doing so. On his left, an uninspiring rococo fantasia on a childhood humiliation; on his right, a fractured symbolist nightmare of mollusks and walls of televisions. via Pock…

We were getting coffee, which we used to do all the time, when Tierney told me she was thinking of having it done. I’d hurt her feelings. I hadn’t meant to. As I tried to think of what to say I followed the line of her eyes to a woman who’d just wal…

The Dream Curator - Lightspeed Magazine via Instapaper https://ift.tt/2QVrLZx

The Real You™ - Lightspeed Magazine via Instapaper https://ift.tt/2AgNQw1

Use the photograph above as the inspiration for your flash fiction story. Write whatever comes to mind (no sexual, political, or religious stories, jokes, or commentary, please) and after you PROOFREAD it, submit it as your entry in the comments sec…

“House The Restaurant,” by Lee Blevins - Defenestration via Instapaper https://ift.tt/2PFQWyP

I regain consciousness in a small hut made from sweet-smelling grass and blue sticks. A male garbed in the same type of grass stands over me. When he notices my eyes are open, he looks away and begins clicking and whistling. I ask about my crewmates…

I first encountered the new barre studio in my neighborhood as I was walking home after meeting my coworkers for drinks. The light streaming through the floor-to-ceiling windows and illuminating the crisp white walls and hardwood floors caught my at…