Tag: micro fiction

House Party | Dory Rousos Moore

I start on my second coat of Red Hot, the boldest color of nail polish I could find, carefully painting each nail. Aviva and I sit on our apartment balcony, our shiny legs long on the railing, hot air balloons in primary colors floating above us as everyone starts to arrive. When her new boyfriend’s black Grand Am swerves into our complex, she jumps up, her drink spilling over the edge. The way she falls in love is with a whoosh, like she’s being sucked into a vacuum, and the way I fall in love is by pretending not to. 

Moments later, Raj crosses the parking lot from his apartment to ours with long strides, grinning up at the balloons and clouds drifting toward the horizon. With graduation next weekend, we soon won’t be living close to each other for the first time since college started, and we became friends, walking to classes together and talking the whole way, drinking Red Bulls while studying for our physics exams, our laptops set up on his beer pong table as the sun rose purple-orange outside his front window, a meeting of chemistry and wonder.

In the living room, the roar of the music, bass turned up, vibrates the walls. Conversations punctuate the air with exclamation points, and the strawberry Boones Farm fills my body with soft static. Aviva is making out with her boyfriend in the middle of the room with one hand in the air, like she’s on a rollercoaster or praising God. 

Refilling my solo cup, I look at Raj across the crowded room, watching everywhere his eyes land, his irises the whorls of a fingerprint that I want to press into me. I’ve kissed boys I don’t know at parties, but never the one that I love. When his gaze finds mine, instead of glancing away, I hold on, walking toward him.   

About the Author:

The Echo of Footsteps | Ibrahim Abdulhakeem

Ayo always knew when his father was coming home. Not by the rumble of the old Peugeot stalling outside, nor by the metallic creak of the front gate, but by the sound of his footsteps—slow, deliberate, measured.

Each step carried the weight of exhaustion, of dreams deferred and dignity swallowed in silence. Ayo would listen from his room, curled up with his homework, his hands clammy as he gripped his pen. Would today be different? Would the tension in the air dissipate, leaving room for laughter instead of raised voices?

He once asked his mother why she never argued back. She had smiled—a tired, knowing smile—and ruffled his hair. “Some echoes aren’t worth chasing, my son.”

One evening, the footsteps did not come. The gate did not creak. The old Peugeot never rumbled into the driveway. The silence stretched, wrapping around the house like an unwelcome guest. Hours passed. Then days. Then weeks.

Ayo stopped listening for the footsteps. But at night, when the wind whistled through the cracked windows, he swore he could still hear them.

About the Author:

Return | Adesiyan Oluwapelumi

You arrive in the heart of the city, teeming with lorries and trucks transporting a supply of farm produce stocked in large sacks in transit to warehouses in the metropolis, the city welcoming you with the same hands you abandoned; hands pushing carts bearing purchases of market women from Sango Ojunrin market, where your mother used to sell tubers of yam, haggling with buyers who would slap prices to a ridiculous height; hands wiping beads of perspiration in the scorching sun on Oke Aare’s Hill, where your father had leaped to his death. He was a poor man with expensive dreams. But you swore yourself to the gods of The Western people to bring prosperity to your lineage. Had you known the outside world grew thorns along with its roses? 

At Mokola axis, notorious for its persistent traffic gridlock, you board a yellow-rust Danfo bus overload with passengers. The stench of cigarette from the conductor fills your nose who calls you Alakowe and charges you an exorbitant fee. 

In transit, you reflect on the city and observe how nothing has changed. The roads still sunken with potholes; its kerbs sullied with refuse and sewage; plied by motorcycles and rickety Micra motors, infamous as the instruments of kidnapping ritualists. You remember your friend, Tade, who had board a Micra in the night two years ago at Iwo road highway and how he was found three days later on Ojude Ade street, skull split and limbs dismembered. 

From the radio inside the bus, King Sunny Ade’s Mo Ti Mo plays in retrospect. The song ends and a newscaster comes on air to read the headlines. Crisis as fuel prices hike higher. Your sighs punctuate the air alongside other passengers’.

The bus passes across the State’s Library where you had often come to bask in the world of Mbari, Transition and Black Orpheus. You return to days shelved with memories when you consumed Okigbo’s epics and Soyinka’s elegies. In the storeys of this building, you had written the first drafts for the sample works in your MFA application. 

The bus continues towards Jericho road where you hear a muezzin’s call to prayer from a mosque nearby. Allahu Akbar, you mimic him as you had often done when you were younger. You did not understand the words but that didn’t matter. God hears his creations in all the dialects of their yearning. You remember weeks of the storms on the ship sailing the Caribbean Sea where God was a thin thread you hanged on for dear life. 

You raise your eyes pregnant with tears and tales towards the city’s sky, a country of egrets flying in the air polluted with greenhouse gases from oil factories. At a T-junction in Akinyele, you alight from the bus handing the conductor your fare. He tells you there’s no change. You know it is a lie. But in the end, you forgo it.

Your mother, with hands that you have once abandoned, runs to meet you.

About the Author:

Drawing from Life | Miles Parnegg

Between poses, we eat Oreos and ginger snaps while the animators smoke on the patio. I keep pulling off your hood to run a palm over your buzzed scalp, frosted with bleach. You dip your head as though taking a sacrament. By now, we know the models, not personally or by name, but by their jawlines and hip creases. The drawing saddles are uneven wood, and sandbags still line the studio’s back wall from February’s flood. Paint pigment circles the drain in the bathroom sink, lit by the waving flames of votive candles. The soundtrack is spa-like and ambient, heavy on flute. Spooky, you lean over and jot on my sketchbook. 

You went to art school, offer tips, gentle corrections. I want to learn this without learning, through blind seeing: no books or lessons, no regimentation—but I want your strokes on my page, the impressions of your fingertips and knuckles. You draw only in color, I only charcoal: a difference emblematic of something I can’t quite nail. You shy away from eyes and nose, preferring instead the suggesting shade of a high cheekbone, lifted by a thumb wetted on your tongue. Because you’re late, or you prefer the angle, you’re often on the floor in front of me, away from me. I smear charcoal across disproportionate masses while you hold a fistful of pastels and sit on the floor, cross-legged in your black boots. The bell rings to switch poses, and the model reaches for a stool, and I remind myself she’s the reason we’re here, that it’s foolish to think I can keep drawing you.

About the Author:

Miles Parnegg holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine. He lives in Los Angeles.

Once I Lived in Heaven | Mea Cohen

Remember when we were clumsy and gloomless? New lovers undressing in front of each other for the first time. I want to keep this story there. In the curls of your chest hair, in the uncrossing of my arms from my bare breasts. In the stroke of laughter from your lips as my fingers ran their way across your manhood. Oh, I said, surprised at my own bravery. Oh, I said, when you bravely found your way inside me. I want to keep the story there, in the sunlight that fell across your sweat-dappled forehead in the aftermath of our love. In the damp white sheet we turned into a tent and swore we’d never leave. 

Regarding loss, I’m afraid to bring it into the story, worried what I might bring back to life. Like my marble belly so swollen with time and excellent time. And how I woke one night to find my innards scattered around my knees. They say that blood from the belly tastes sweeter than blood from anywhere else. How we held each other differently that night, how we wept tears we’d never weep again. Christening tears for what wasn’t born right. Can tears christen what wasn’t born right? 

I kept dreaming I was a creature pulling out my wings to sell in a market stall, next to stacks of pomegranates and shovels. Once I lived in heaven with you, because I wanted to. 

We didn’t ask for God that night. Or any night thereafter.

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A Haunted House at the End of the World | Autumn Bettinger

Is this the end of the world?

“It may be, old girl. Are you ready?”

Marigold slid a wrinkled hand up the faded post of her house. The ghosts were heavy with the coming storm—anxiety manifesting in creaky floorboards and swinging tapestries. Marigold leaned over the porch railing as the first plump drops of the apocalypse battered her front garden. The other seaside towns along the bluffs began to wink out, obscured by the storm that ingested the world with a swirling, single-minded intensity. 

The satellite images had been all over the media before the internet went dark—a storm cell so large it covered half the planet. Earth’s own great red spot, only the color of bruised and necrotic skin: mottled purple veined with oily black. Sickly. Contagious.

KA-CHUNK. The backup generator kicked in. 

Marigold closed her eyes as the storm consumed, bloating on snapped branches and tsunami waves.

I will protect you.

“No need.” 

The house shuddered. Marigold was nudged back inside by rolling porch boards that nipped along her fuzzy slippers. The door snapped shut behind her, and the locks chunked home. 

“I’m happy to be here with you, at the end,” Marigold said as she shuffled towards the kitchen. The wind exploded. Rain drowned gutters and sloshed beneath the foundation. 

Is it, though? The end?

“I don’t think we’re getting out of this one.”

Marigold settled herself in the breakfast nook. A cup of tea waited on the table. It smelled of garden lavender and lemon balm. The house must have hidden a bundle of those dried herbs from last harvest. Marigold’s favorite tea. The bond she shared with the house lay sticky with memories and murmured adorations. She mourned its destruction much more than the passing of her own unremarkable life.

  We got out of that thing with Ron.

“Murdering my asshole husband was decidedly less complicated than surviving an extinction event.”

But you are resourceful and clever. You fed me so many. 

“Killing men is easy. I’m just sorry you had to keep their weak souls inside you.” 

Once they were a part of me, they loved you, like I do.

Hail whipped through shingles, softball-sized chunks of ice splintering rafters and shattering siding. Marigold sipped her tea as the house crowded around her with every last ounce of structural support. It coddled Marigold, collapsing into just one, tight room. It crumpled offices and bathrooms, slapped hallways against kitchen walls to reinforce this last bastion of safety. The storm sucked up the windows as the exterior shredded.

The kitchen walls were so close, bent so deeply that Marigold could brush the wallpaper with her pale fingers. She smiled, love radiating between them as the roof buckled and plaster rained down, splashing into her tea and dusting Marigold like sugar. The room disintegrated. 

“Buying a haunted house was the best thing I ever did,” Marigold whispered as the wind ripped them away.

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Discovery of Newborn Girl on the Greenway, Newham, London | Leah Mullen

Discovery by a dog walker at 9.13 pm on Thursday, 18 January
junction of Greenway and High Street South in East Ham
child was taken to hospital, without any injuries
police are appealing 
to find the baby’s mother.

The baby could’ve been laboured out of a Dickens novel, born as she was and left like an unexploded bomb on the pathside.  The caul fell foul of the 10p plastic bag charge.  She mewled against it, spiking her newborn panic in the stubby grass. The mother was gone.

The mother was trafficked in an anonymous hospital ward.  The mother was fearing for her life, handcuffed in a cell, in a basement, in a cubicle on a boat.  The mother was sent overseas for daring to come overseas. The mother was anonymously dead or drunk and loving it.

Wise Men?  Too late in the season.  Too far north for storks.  Fortunately for this scrap of prey, too built-up for hawks to be buzzing the wasted verges. In the spring, hollers of sparrows murmured up from the long weeds there, surprising out of poppies and thistle along paths thick with joggers and crabapples. But January sprung almost sudden in the city with its grey promises: a season of steel wool, eczema, grass just stripes of prickle.

But the baby, for now just a collection of kicks in striped plastic, just a collection of scents, of blood, of milk, of meat to a wet and searching lurcher nose in the stubby grass, just a collection of slightly less grey promises: the baby

was found.

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The Cashier | Trish Cantillon

I pulled the wrinkled dollar bill from the front pocket of my too-tight shorts and laid it next to the bag of M&Ms. The Cashier looked at me, then at the candy.  I knew I wasn’t supposed to eat candy because of my diet, but he didn’t.  Or at least I assumed he didn’t.  

I lied when I told my mom I was going to hit tennis balls against the backstop near the courts in the apartment complex we lived in.  My real destination was The Grog Shop, the convenience/liquor store in the lobby of our building.  

He lingered too long with my dollar in his hand, “You don’t need these,” he said, “They’re really bad for you.”  It was as if time stopped.  I was frozen, unsure what to do, but certain I didn’t want to put the candy back.  My humiliation gave birth to another lie, “They’re not for me, they’re for my brother,” I answered and made sure to put my racket on the counter so he could see I was an athlete, not an overweight twelve-year-old girl desperate for the M&M’s she would eat in secret.

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Drunk Husband Crashes Yard Sale | Alice Kinerk

You decide to hold a yard sale, because it’s a nice thing to do, a homey, all-American thing to do. Also, you’re broke. You place a classified ad, mark the date, start stickering. 

Night before the sale, Drunk Husband goes out drinking, and by dawn has yet to return. Nothing unusual there, but given his recent promises, it hurts.  It’s for the best, you tell yourself. He’s sleeping it off somewhere. With all the hauling to do that morning, all the folding tables to set up.  Linens, CDs, tapes, pot holders, trivets, posters, books, magazines, clothes, garden tools, shoes, clothes, unused wedding gifts and parental cast-offs, beach stuff, utensils, plant pots. Everything out the door, down the steps, onto the front yard for liquidation purposes. 

It’s for the best. It is. It is. It is.

But then, Drunk Husband is rounding the corner. He’s tipping back a paper bag, stiff-legging it. Trespasser! he bellows at the old lady Q-tip who is your first customer. He’s half a block away, bellowing. 

Then he gets close, hovers over her like an interrogator. The Q-tip drops an eggbeater and beelines it to her Cutlass, drives away.

Another customer appears.  Scene repeats.  

You tell Drunk Husband to go to bed, but he doesn’t hear you. Instead he does a King Kong through your cityscape of folding tables, picking things up and dropping them. 

You cajole. He refuses. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

Until finally, mercifully, he does go. He stumbles inside to use the bathroom, some time passes, and he doesn’t return. Peace falls again upon the yard.

More customers arrive. Sales are made. 

But then, from inside the house, the bedroom window opens.

Trespassers!  

It won’t be the final time he hurts you, nor the worst. But one day, twenty years later, remarried, middle-aged, you will watch the sunset through wildfire smoke, and this is the image which will surface.  Drunk Husband’s face in the window that morning, round and red like the sun is now. Just as angry.  Every bit as impossible to contain.

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Not Until Fish Fall From the Sky | Kale Choo Hanson

Nina, I won’t let you marry him until fish fall from the sky, my father says as we sit on the back deck, him on a lounge chair smoking a cigar, and Ian and I standing on the threshold of the sliding glass door. Ian shifts beside me, his ears growing pink. Let’s just go, he whispers. But I’m not ready to leave. I had known my father would say this exact thing. He said it at my cousin’s birthday party when asked to try out the bouncy house, then again at the church auction when offered a cocktail with fruit in it, and then again when my sister Ella had saved up her waitressing money to buy a used Volkswagen Bug. I won’t let you drive that thing until fish fall from the sky. 

Ian is a good guy. He has a job as an accountant, keeps the philodendron in our kitchen alive, and listens to my stories like he’ll be quizzed later. It would all be fine if my father hadn’t caught him in the basement last month, polishing his piccolo. No man plays the piccolo and is proud of it, my father says to me later after a dinner of stony glares and silences. He was in marching band, he’s a great musician, I say. My father shakes his head and points at the sky. Fish, Nina. Fish. 

But today, as I stand on the back deck, clutching Ian’s nimble, piccolo-trained hand in mine, watching my father puff cigar smoke from a smirk, I am ready. Well, we are ready. I snatch my phone from my pocket and send my sister a text. I hear a grunt from the other side of the house, the front driveway perhaps. I brace myself for impact. 

The salmon, silvery and dead-eyed, lands on the side table beside my father. His beer, a gold cigar clipper, and ashes from a tray are launched into the air. His cigar flies from his hand as he jumps to his feet. The fish is much bigger than I had expected and I am impressed that Ella had cleared the whole house and almost landed it in his lap. What the hell? My father says as he stares down at the fish, his eyebrows narrowed and his smirk replaced with a gaping O. He doesn’t lift his gaze until we smell smoke.

We discover later that the cigar had rolled underneath the deck and into a pile of dead leaves. We get a lecture from a soot-covered firefighter. But before the red engines arrive— as we wait in the front yard watching the house erupt into flame, Ella, Ian and I with our chins tilted up in disbelief— my father is behind us, facing away from the house, feet bare at the end of the driveway, holding a 6-pound salmon in his fist, opening his mouth to say something and then closing it when nothing comes out.

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