Flash Fiction Friday: The Stargazer

He had always loved the stars, ever since he was a little boy. When he was four years old, his father had bought him a telescope kit and brought him out to a field. They were miles away from home, far from any road, only he and his father. And the stars. There were hundreds...

Flash Fiction Friday: Full Fathom Grave

They lowered him to the ocean floor slowly and with great deliberation. The rope twisted and swayed in the cold and the current, but held firm. Down, down, down the man fell, encased in iron and brass. He couldn't hear anything but the silence raging in his ears, or see anything but the fog of...

Flash Fiction Friday: The Hospital of the Dolls

No one ever went into the doll's hospital. It had been there for years, perched grotesquely on Main Street between the post office and the ice cream shop. Children hurried past, casting grim, curious glances at the dismembered doll heads and little bodies, the same morbid collection as ever. One of them even seemed to...

Flash Fiction Friday: Dreams of Snow

They slept in two tents side by side, the scientist and her wife. It had started as a joke back at base camp. Like those poor married couples in old  Hollywood films doomed to spend their onscreen marriages in separate beds. But the joke had taken on a life of its own. The ground was...

Flash Fiction Friday: An Apocalypse of Alpacas

Where were you when the apocalypse came? When the alpacas descended in their thousands and lay claim to our cities, our homes, and our fields? Do you even remember the time before? My brother is too young. George was only three when our alpacan overlords arrived. He has known no other world but the mist...

Flash Fiction Friday: The Needle and the Haystack

I. The Haystack "We're looking for a white van," the policeman said, looming out of his patrol car in with a glare. His face was made for frowning and he had the weight and bulk of a boxer in his full and violent prime. "Well,"  the attendant said nervously, "y-you've certainly come to the right...

Flash Fiction Friday: The Pickpocket Queen of San Francisco

San Francisco 1900. It had been five hours since Big Tilda had been arrested, and she was very upset. The police had locked her in an interrogation room without any respect for her status or so much as a by-your-leave and had promptly forgotten her. It was downright disrespectful. Insulting even. She was the Pickpocket Queen...

Flash Fiction Friday: The Greatest Detective in the World

In a long, narrow building at the end of a long, narrow street lived the Greatest Detective in the World. He had never solved a single crime, but in his long life he had read countless mysteries, and devoured every true crime novel and newspaper report he could get his hands on. And he had...

Flash Fiction Friday: In the Silence of the Muse

Alice always wore a mask when she played. Pure white porcelain, unadorned, and perfectly sculpted to her face.  She loved that mask. The coolness against her skin. The way her fingers danced. She was not Alice in those moments. There was no Alice. There was only the music. The mask gave her that. It freed...

Flash Fiction Friday: The Great Fire

The old man watched as the house burned. The fire spread from room to room in a crackling orgy of smoke and flames. The smell. The noise. The heat. There was a strange beauty to it—a fatal, blackening dance that consumed everything in its path. The old man was not sure how long he stood there...