Microfiction

The Fortunate Feint ("L’Heureuse Feinte")
"Pick your death! Bullet or poison?" The maniacal husband held out a glass of squeezed lemon in one hand, a pistola in the other. Before him, Madame de Guissac recoiled in horror on her couch.
By Tom Bakerabout a year ago in Fiction
The Gascon's Dinner Bill
Okay, there’s this Gascon, see—I don’t know what the hell that is, but it’s something big in Louis the Fourteenth’s time. He gets a check for a hundred and fifty pistoles, see? And that’s a fair chunk of cabbage. So he goes to the minister and says, he says, “I need cashed out, doc. You dig me?”
By Tom Bakerabout a year ago in Fiction
Frenemies. Content Warning.
She smiled, her teeth glinting in the light of the single incandescent bulb hanging from the center of the cell’s ceiling. She stood just on the edge of the light, her hands in the pockets of her long black trench coat, just staring at me.
By ThatOne_Girlabout a year ago in Fiction
The Stone Collector
Part 1: The Inheritance of Weight The inheritance was a joke. A cruel one. While my cousins got the house and the savings, I got a rusty toolbox and a shed full of rocks.
By Habibullahabout a year ago in Fiction
Coffee Shop at the End of the World
Maya had always believed that the world would end with fire or ice, maybe a bang or a whimper—anything but the gentle hum of an espresso machine and the soft jazz playing from speakers that had seen better days. Yet here she was, wiping down tables at Brew & Beyond while the sky outside painted itself in shades of amber and crimson that had nothing to do with sunset.
By Fazal Ur Rahmanabout a year ago in Fiction
I TAKE IT BACK
The brakes screeched as Selena grimaced and stayed silent. She did not look at Eric in the driving seat but calmly opened the passenger door and walked away. He peeped the horn in frustration but Selena walked on.
By Paula S.about a year ago in Fiction
The Book
He came to the city in the evening. The streets were narrow and led always upward. At the top, there was the library. The librarian waited for him at the door. He was very old and thin. Without a word, he turned and walked inside.
By Tom Bakerabout a year ago in Fiction
Eyelens: The World Beneath Sight
The first time Kieran slipped the Eyelens into his eye, he expected nothing more than sharper vision. He had read the promotional tagline—“See the world as it truly is”—and assumed it was just clever marketing. After all, every breakthrough in optics for the last century had promised the same thing.
By Princess Ladlyabout a year ago in Fiction
Getting Out
It was after midnight when Lorin stepped out of the police station, peering out at he weather, and pulling her jumper over her head like a hood. It didn’t help. Her sleeves were soaked. Her shoes were worse. Under the shelter a short distance away, three men smoked. One looked at her. She looked away. She hated the smell of cigarette smoke. Acrid and clinging, and the way it brought unhappy childhood memories... She didn’t want to be near them. A snob she may be, but she'd never been in a cell before, and she was rattled. These men, with tattoos on their necks and eyes that she's fancied were cold and sharklike, stood like three middle fingers to the establishment. She didn’t want to be near Jac either, but he was a safer option than those men. Preferable to going back inside, if only just. Better than standing out here in the rain and waiting for a taxi. Jac was standing beside the car, briefcase in hand. Hair plastered darkly to his scalp, that sharp suit soaking through with every moment. Isn't it funny, normally if you saw a computer standing out there in the rain, you'd try to move it somewhere dry. Nona was behind the wheel, watching her through the wipers. Lorin walked to the car. Perhaps, after all, motivated by a desire not to have the machine malfunction in some unpredictable or dangerous way. She got in the back. Didn’t speak. Not so much as a "Excuse me," or "Thanks for getting me out". The car rumbled out on to the main road. "You’re classified now," Jac said. "Cognitive instability. Emergency intervention." Lorin stared out the window, triumph burgeoning in her at last. "It’s enough to have you committed." I knew I couldn't trust him! "Could you email the documents to me, please Jac," Nona asked, as if this were a perfectly innocuous sentences. He smiled a small smile. "Already done." Nona's phone buzzed. They pulled up outside Lorin's flat. "Your home free," Nona whispered. Lorin headed herself out into the rain, and was still fumbling for her keys when Nina's car pulled away. "You're half-right," * Thank you for reading!
By L.C. Schäferabout a year ago in Fiction
Rust Beneath the Skin. Content Warning.
The year was 1899, and the sea pressed itself endlessly against the coast of Whitcombe, a village where salt clung to the air and iron settled deep into every man’s bones. Fishermen cursed the waves even as they depended on them. Wives scrubbed clothes raw on the stones, while children hauled baskets of coal to homes already blackened with soot. And among them moved Clara Whitcombe, daughter of the late foundry master, who wore gloves even in the height of summer. No one questioned her once, when she was small and pale and quiet. But as she grew, her habit became the subject of whispers. Those who had glimpsed beneath the gloves did not forget what they saw: veins darkened like corroded copper, skin flaking faintly as though touched by rust. Clara had not always been thus. Years ago, a fever gripped her so fiercely that her father summoned doctors from three towns. When she recovered, it was with arms scarred by strange metallic veins that gleamed faintly in the light. Her father never spoke of it. Within a year, he was dead—crushed, they said, when the old foundry’s roof gave way. But villagers muttered that he had dug where no man should, dredging ores from the seabed that carried curses in their shine. The rust did not stop with Clara’s hands. Each year it crept further, spidering up her arms, tracing across her collarbone. She hid it, yes, but she could not hide the faint metallic tang that followed her through the lanes. Dogs snarled when she passed. Infants cried at the sight of her. And in the still hours of night, Clara woke to the sound of chains dragging and doors groaning, as though something vast stirred in the dark beneath the earth. When the first body washed ashore, no one thought of Clara. A fisherman, swollen with brine, his face half eaten by crabs. But when the second arrived—his chest marred with strange, reddish stains—the village grew uneasy. By the third, a boy of fifteen, his flesh splitting like brittle iron, suspicion sharpened. Their eyes turned toward Clara, who grew more withdrawn each day. Unable to bear their stares, she climbed the cliffs to the ruin of her father’s foundry. The building crouched over the sea like a beast gnawing the waves, windows shattered, its furnace long cold. Rust coated every girder and beam, yet the scent of iron was stronger here than anywhere. Clara pressed her gloved hands to the great doors and felt a pulse answer her touch. Inside, amidst beams and rubble, she found a ledger, its pages warped with damp. Her father’s handwriting filled the margins: sketches of veins branching into metallic roots, notes about a strange ore hauled from the seabed—an ore that never dulled, no matter the salt. A living metal, he had written. Resists decay. Hungers for vessels. Her hands trembled as she turned the pages. The fever that nearly killed her had not been illness at all. Her father had bound the ore to her blood. She was not cured; she was claimed. The dragging she heard in her dreams was no figment. It was the call of the source, still lying beneath the waves, patient and endless. As weeks passed, Clara’s condition worsened. The rust spread visibly across her neck and face, cracking her lips until they bled faintly orange. When she scratched her arms, flakes of reddish dust clung to her gloves. She tried to scrub herself clean, but the water in the basin shimmered with metallic film. The villagers grew bolder. Children hurled stones at her window. Men muttered that she had brought a curse upon them. Even the priest, who once blessed her, stepped aside when she walked by. One evening, storm clouds rolled over the coast, and Clara, restless, wandered the shoreline. She thought of her father—his eyes fevered with ambition, his ledger filled with dreams of immortality at a terrible cost. She thought of the bodies that had washed ashore, their flesh splitting like corroded armor. She thought, above all, of the weight beneath her own skin, as though something vast and heavy pressed against her veins. The tide surged higher than she had ever seen. Waves crashed against the rocks with the roar of iron chains breaking free. Clara felt her knees weaken. Beneath her skin, something moved—grinding, gnashing, like gears turning in the marrow of her bones. She fell to the sand, clutching her arms, and when she pulled away her gloves, she saw her hands were no longer hands at all. The flesh had hardened into ridged, metallic plates, cracked and bleeding orange dust where skin had split. The sea answered with hollow thunder, and she knew then: the ore was no mineral. It was a parasite wearing the mask of metal, seeking host after host until it consumed everything it touched. Clara rose. She could not go back to the village. Already she imagined their faces twisting with horror, their fear spilling into violence. She was a vessel, yes—but she would not be their curse. As lightning split the sky, Clara walked into the waves. The water surged around her, bitter and freezing, but she did not falter. With each step, her body grew heavier, her joints grinding with unnatural force. The storm swallowed her cries. By morning, the tide had receded. The beach lay scattered with driftwood and seaweed. Clara was gone. In the weeks that followed, no more bodies washed ashore. The villagers whispered of deliverance, some calling it a miracle, others a bargain struck. Yet fishermen sometimes pulled strange fragments from the sea: shards of metal twisted like bone, scales that gleamed faintly red. And when they spoke Clara’s name, they swore they tasted iron on their tongues. And on storm nights, when the tide battered the cliffs, the crash of waves carried a hollow echo, as though iron rang against stone in the depths below.
By E. hasanabout a year ago in Fiction
5 Minute Fiction: Smoke
“See that’s the thing,” the guy with a cigarette perched between two fingers slurred. “You think you’re smarter than me.” Serafina rolled her eyes as she stared at the glimmering string lights behind the liquor bottles at the bar. She wasn’t here for this kind of interaction. Her dark fingernails impatiently drummed against the counter stained with a thousand rings from wet glasses and beer bottles. On the television above the bartender, the news—all bad news—rattled on and on. The closed captions blurred together, but she watched the words appear then vanish, taking it all in.
By Valerie Taylorabout a year ago in Fiction
Roman Rance: The Unyielding Storm
Roman Rance was born on the fringes of the Empire, in a small settlement where the stone walls of Rome’s power were more rumor than reality. His father was a soldier who never returned from campaign, and his mother a weaver who taught him the rhythm of patience, but it was in the wild fields and ruins near his home that Roman truly grew. He was a boy who fought the wind, shouted against storms, and swore that he would one day be more than just another forgotten name.
By Princess Ladlyabout a year ago in Fiction