Flash Fiction

It sat — always sat — on the highest shelf in the hallway alcove, where the sun never reached and the wallpaper peeled. It was there when he was born. He remembers this, though the memory is impossible: the cracked white forehead, the perfect flaking lashes, the faint rosiness at the lips.

1. Open your eyes. I know you don’t want to. Remember, sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to do. This is one of those times. Open your eyes.

Whenever he and his wife Rawia had friends over, or would go to theirs for dinner, Brian liked to imagine beforehand how the conversation would go.

“Mom!” Kayla knew right when she yelled it, trouble would soon follow. Trouble always did, especially when her mother had started her liquid dinner around lunchtime.

Sarah Whitechapel was currently struggling to imagine life without her ring finger. The knuckles of her left hand ached as she drew her fingers into her palm for the thousandth time that morning.

Marty flinched under his covers when the door slammed out in the living room, but that slamming door, followed by the muffled cries of his mom, meant that it was over. The curse words, the yelling, the breaking of things, it was over.

I really liked his grave. The cemetery overlooked a deep lake where birds flew all around. The little grove around the church was also perfect. It wasn't too thick, too wild, too sparse, or manmade.

The feathers started as the coarse black hairs that grew out of the mole between my human shoulder blades.

The mouth jutting out of the pillow had the teeth of a piranha, snapping its jaws, dripping thick, gooey yellow saliva, and making tiny squeaks that echoed like distant screams.