Flash Fiction Friday: The Dream of Flight

  The young man danced atop the rusted, wingless husk to a song of his own making accompanied only by the beatings of his heart. His feet clanged and clattered against the metal, the roof and frame creaking our a warning beneath his weight. But he was high above and far away lost in dreams...

Flash Fiction Friday: Mrs. Inglethorpe’s Birds

  The birds were all neatly arranged, catalogued, and positioned not according to species, size, or beak but in a system all of her own. Mrs. Inglethorpe was a very exacting woman with a very precise set of standards, ones she was reluctant to share but expected everyone to understand intuitively. The birds were not...

Flash Fiction Friday: The Theater in the Woods (Part the First)

When I was young, they set up a theater in the woods outside my house. I don't know who they were or where they came from. Friends of my father, perhaps. He was always bringing home strays—poets, artists, milliners, cabinetmakers, bee keepers, and on one memorable occasion a pair of aeronauts. My mother was often less...

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: 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 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...