101 Word Short Stories
By TL Holmes
They will meet you in the lobby. Words about organ donation and making arrangements and bracing for unfortunate outcomes but you will hear nothing. Miranda, you will say. I just want to see Miranda. A doctor will take you to her, warning you not to get your hopes up. Brain damage and blood loss, the…
The palest hues of pink, shaken free, are scattered by the wind and fall—springtime in England when cool blue sky is dotted with whipped-cream white clouds, and when the golden sun shines, all the world is warm. Lacey curls up on the back seat of the vintage MG, bouquet abandoned, tears shocked dry, listening to…
By Ian Rennie
She sipped her martini. “I’m in security.” “Surveillance systems?” “Integrity management.” I grinned. “I assure you I have no integrity at all.” She laughed. “Companies hire me to confirm their employees are still who they say they are. If a different personality is loaded into someone’s wetware, you have no guarantee who’s behind their eyes.”…
By Susan Gale Wickes
He was a loner. A drifter. A guy from the wrong side of the tracks. She was cheap. Easy. But she could sing like a bird. He bought her a guitar and some blue jeans that would make her mother blush. They stopped at a truck stop on the way to Nashville. He went inside…
By Jim Bonnor
He drives the middle road, across The Heath, tarmac edges crumbled like eczema, clamping his cheap car to the centre of the camber; the realm of tractors and pheasants. The Give Way sign is ahead, the vanishing point of hedges higher than a man, set back on geese-wide green verges. He’s going nowhere, just home,…
By Ian Rennie
Parvale wasn’t a haunted house in the traditional sense. No spirit was tethered there, no crime unsolved. Instead it acted as a resonator: manifesting your guilt and sins as shades. People came there, brought by word of mouth: the penitent, the defiant, the masochistic. Some fled screaming into the night. Few found what they were…
By Fred Vogel
I’m not someone who drives around the block buying other people’s stuff. I mean, if you don’t want it anymore, why should I? Why would I want to wear your sweat-stained golf shirts or run on your rundown treadmill? Call me skeptical, but I prefer my things right out of the box or directly off…
