u/OwlConfidant2168

The fishing boat rocked gently on the open gray water, far enough from shore that only lonely blinking lights could be seen on the distant horizon.

“Storm is coming on, Nick.”

“Sure is,” said Nick.

“Say, you see that lady on the dock?”

“What? The one with all them kids, fishing with all those kids, wearing that—?”

He paused, searching for the right term.

“You mean the one with the bikini top on?” he said with a mischievous grin.

“Mm-hmm. Hard to miss,” the other man replied abashedly.

“It’s gettin’ dark now. Feel the wind? I don’t like it. Only felt it once like this, and that was a bad night.”

A long silence passed between the two men, one older than the other. The sea was still calm. Nick was the younger of the two. Short, broad-shouldered, windswept. He smelled vaguely of the outdoors and fish.

“You ever, you know, been with a woman like that?”

A pause. An unconscious play of fingers on fishing line.

“Yeah, once. When I was ’bout your age, I guess.”

“Was she pretty?”

“Yes…no…she was kind of lonely, I think. She had a man, but he didn’t treat her well, you see? I was engaged at the time. I was working at the Old Harbor marina.”

The smell of the sea.

“I don’t recall how, but we ended up in my room. We weren’t kissing or nothing. Just talking. I think we were both just lonely. And then her shirt was off and she was naked.”

“If you don’t want to say no more, that’s okay,” Nick added, feeling slightly embarrassed.

“No, it’s just, I told her ‘no.’ I couldn’t do nothing with her, no matter how bad I wanted to, you see? I had been telling her how her man, he was no good for her ’cause he was running around cheatin’ on her, and if I did the same thing, why, I’m not better than him, cheatin’ on my girl.”

“But you wanted to?”

“Yes, I wanted to. Wanted to real bad.”

“But you didn’t?”

“No, no I didn’t. Never saw her again after that.”

“Do you regret it?”

Waves crashed against the boat.

“Yes and no. I never married, you know that.”

“If you could go back, would you?”

“That answer changes every time I ask myself that.”

A hard wind.

“Well, what should we do? Get out of this storm? Go through it?”

“That time has passed, I think. It may be a long night. Best start getting ready as best we can.”

***

Thank you for reading. If you’ve been hesitant to share your writing, I’d encourage you to try. It isn’t about attention—it’s about being able to say, “This is done. Now I can write the next thing.”

He punched, he grunted.

He grunted and punched.

The Pig grunted and punched back.

“Bad piggy,” he said.

The Pig, with its little piggy eyes, looked at him.

“You have little piggy eyes,” he said, hoping to make The Pig even angrier. It worked—maybe because The Pig had always hated that line, maybe because it was outright plagiarism. He couldn’t remember where he’d read it, only that he’d stolen it.

The Pig grunted again. It was that sound pigs make when they hear a cliché.

He threw another twisting combination. His elbow connected with a crunch.

“You know what they say about good writers—they don’t borrow, they—”

He didn’t finish the line. The Pig made him pay for that one with a cloven fist to the mouth.

He spat blood on the floor, tasting iron and rage.

Now he thought he knew how to get inside The Pig’s head.

“I know a lot of Oscar Wilde one-liners I can screw up,” he said, grinning through split lips.

The Pig’s eyes flashed. Small. Angry. Piggy.

“Either those curtains…” he began.

In a rage, The Pig charged—and got a sharp knee to the throat.

The creature crumpled, wheezing.

Now it was his turn to add insult to injury.

“I can resist everything but—” he started, then stopped.

The Pig lay sprawled on the ground, it had had enough.

***

Thank you for reading. Is this story about a man fighting a Pig man while misquoting Oscar Wilde? Yes. Yes, it is.

She was most likely naked.

The sheets were thin; they draped her smooth figure in a very sensual way. She certainly wasn’t wearing a bulky woolen turtleneck—he felt confident about that; he could see her neck and bare shoulders. He made a mental note: No turtleneck.

Her clothes hung neatly from the back of the hotel’s office chair. Her suitcase, still in the car, further supported his conjecture. She had also hinted at sexual intercourse before he got into the shower when she said, “Let’s have sex.” In his experience, that activity was typically performed without clothing—another check in the “Naked” column of the “Naked vs. Not Naked” tally chart.

He reviewed all this evidence carefully, worried he might still misconstrue her intentions. Yet the data led him, stubbornly, to one conclusion: it was highly likely she was not wearing clothes under the sheets. Refer to observation number one, he thought. No turtleneck.

She was still smiling at him. He frowned.

He ran through the probabilities once more.

“Better play it smart,” he thought.

He cleared his throat.

“How about a game of gin?”

Eddy Pigg was dead for days before anyone thought to look for him. And that was a tragedy. The fact was, he never got out of the town; the fact was, he never really tried to leave. And that was a tragedy.

Eddy Pigg had a girl too, Caroline—but her family called her Candy. Eddy and Candy were close as kids, but when Eddy proposed, it was a shock to her.

The tragedy, though, was that for a brief moment she actually did think about saying “yes.” You could see it in her eyes. She ran through the possibilities like only a woman can: weighing the pros and cons, like some tabulating machine hidden in a university basement. But then she came back, blinking, and said, “Oh, Eddy. I can’t be Candy Pigg. I just can’t be!”

And that was a tragedy to Eddy.

And when he said, without blinking, “No, no—I see that now. No, of course you can’t be ‘Candy Pigg.’ That’s ridiculous. Of course, of course,” he finished almost in a whisper.

And that was a tragedy to Eddy.

The room was dark. A breeze blew through the linen curtains of the little shack Eddy Pigg had gotten from his mother.

“Of course. Of course,” he would say to himself for the next thirty years.

***
Thank you for reading; I hope you enjoyed this piece!

When my daughter was a little girl, I took her to the beach. She wanted to find a sand dollar, but only found small pieces.

When we went home, I manufactured her a facsimile with advanced 3D-printing technology.

When she was grown, she moved away and threw it out. She no longer needed my plastic replica.

Years uncounted passed, and it found its way to the sea.

And for a thousand years, among the waves, bounced my enduring artificial sand dollar facsimile.

***
Thank you for reading. If you’ve been hesitant to share your writing, I’d encourage you to try. It isn’t about attention—it’s about being able to say, “This is done. Now I can write the next thing.”

Soon after she got married, she realized: she had married a monster.

There had been signs.

Subtle, but there.

His preference for sleeping under the bed, for one. The hours spent “just hanging out” in the closet.
The time she found him crouched behind the water heater, eating a raw chicken with his hands.

He’d claimed he was “stress eating.”

Sometimes she’d come down to the basement and find him wedged behind the stairs, humming to himself behind the cat’s litter box.

She insisted he shower before rejoining the family.
Years later, she’d ask herself what took so long to notice.

The claws. The horns. The slavering maw.

How had she explained those away?

She remembered the year they hosted Thanksgiving.

The turkey incident.

The screams.

The stains on the ceiling that never came out.

Classic monster behavior.

She sighed.

She rolled over and nudged him awake.

His breath smelled like open drains and gravel.

“Stop frightening the kids,” she murmured. “I already have a hard enough time getting them to bed.”

He made a low rumble in his throat—maybe agreement, maybe hunger.

“And,” she added, “why didn’t you tell me you’re a monster?”

That woke him. He blinked. Reached for his glasses
on the nightstand.

He squinted at her.

“…Why didn’t you tell me your mother’s Jewish?”

She stared at him. He blinked again.

“…That’s fair,” she said, and tugged the light cord.

The room fell dark.

She rolled over and went to sleep.

***

Thank you for reading. I’m experimenting with short fiction. I appreciate any feedback or suggestions.

Follow-up: If anyone is reading this, are there any suggestions on how I could revise the ending (see comments for why) - please leave a comment with suggestions!

He was pissed at her. But then again, Lexi was pissed at him, and they were both pissed at the world.

Thoreau once said, “The question is not why am I pissed, but why aren’t you—you dumb motherfucker?” It was this type of thinking that eventually landed him in jail.

Lexi had tiger stripes tattooed down her back. She played saxophone, only ate pineapple, and had once had an abortion.

Was this appropriate first date information? In the decades since, he had not landed on a definite answer.

Lexi could drink, but not like her mother. Where one woman played on the office softball league, the other was accepting equipment sponsorships.

The first time Lexi’s mother prepared dinner, she asked, “Who wants shots?” This felt fun for a Tuesday. After a month of Tuesdays, he began to understand how alcoholics operate a bit better.

As far as he could recall, Lexi was the first and only woman who eyed him like a piece of meat.

These were lost days, and these are those stories.

The lost days ended when a gas explosion consumed Lexi’s house and destroyed half of the house next door. Years later, the image still pleased him.

***

Lexi’s youngest brother was named Thoreau. Short, compact, shaggy. He had skipped several grades, studied naval military history, and wanted only to skateboard.

“The four 12-inch guns of the main battery were mounted in two twin-gun turrets, one forward and one aft of the superstructure—”

Lexi had fallen asleep beside him wearing only pink panties. He pulled them up to look at her butt, just to confirm something to himself.

What? That she had a nice butt?

“Their secondary armament consisted of twelve Canet six-inch quick-firing guns…”

***

“Are you gay?” Lexi asked.

“What?” He wasn’t offended, more surprised. After all, this was not a standard question after having very standard heterosexual intercourse.

“You’re just very…”

“What?” he pressed.

“No, it’s just, you seemed like you cared about me. That’s not how sex is supposed to work.”

He thought about this as he drifted to sleep.

What a thing to say.

He thought about it again when Lexi’s house was consumed by the gas explosion, taking half of the neighboring house with it, and he grinned to himself in the dark.

What a thing to say.

***

Over Easter dinner, his mother asked, “What happened to Lexi? I liked her.”

He perceived this as a challenge.

“You weren’t supposed to, Mother. Do you know we made love on playground equipment one evening?”

Now he had her. She would be delightfully appalled.

“Yes,” his mother said. “That’s what I mean. She was a free spirit. She was good for you.”

“I…did you understand we had sex on the playground?”

“Were there children present?”

“Well, no.”

“Well then. She was fun.”

He felt himself being gradually outpaced.

“Mom, I saw her snort cocaine using a credit card.”

“I would have still liked her as a daughter-in-law.”

***
Thank you for reading. This piece was written in the PTI Regional airport where my f***ing plane was delayed for 5 hours and if they cancel my flight, I’m going to be so pissed off. But, seriously, I hope you have a good day.

There once was a man who loved an indie rock band.

He listened to them while he worked. They reminded him of a girlfriend he’d had years ago, and of spending summer nights in her arms. The smell of her hair.

He always thought it would be nice to meet the band members. He wondered if they would be friends.

He would hum along to those old songs as he worked.

He smiled recalling those fond memories as he worked on the next generation of atomic weaponry, which eventually led to the deaths of over 50 million people.

The Union Army was steadily making its way south, fighting the Confederacy every step of the way.

The cannon fired.

There was an ear-splitting “Neigh!” that faded into the distance. A moment later a dull thump came from somewhere beyond the horizon.

The position they had taken was admirably suited to this sort of attack.

Major Everett nodded with satisfaction. “Excellent, my boy—reload.”

Private Scott shifted uneasily. “Sir, that was the last one.”

The Major’s long, curled mustache twitched in annoyance. He surveyed the surrounding countryside.

“Then fetch those cattle. They shall do just as well.”

A few moments later, another shot sailed overhead, accompanied by a terrified “Mooooo!”

Private Scott was beginning to suspect there had been some confusion about the use of horse artillery.

***

Thank you for reading. Good lord, why would subject yourself to this? If you made it this far, I sincerely apologize. Maybe you should go for a walk outside instead?

On a frozen, barren Martian landscape, as a chilling wind spins dust devils of orange sand across the plain, a team of archaeologists carefully sweeps rust-colored dirt from the mummified remains of a space marine.

What makes it uncomfortable—even to the archaeologists—is that, due to the lack of microbial life, the bodies are extraordinarily well preserved, making the excavation feel more like a crime scene than a dig.

A few feet from the grave, a kneeling figure gingerly lifts a rusted cylinder from the ground and places it in a dust-smeared box labeled “Caution: Unexploded Ordnance.”

“I don’t know. I don’t feel right about this,” the site manager’s staticky voice says over the interlinked comms in their suits.

Another voice—an administrator—replies, “Yeah, I know. We just have to do as much as we can, as fast as we can.”

“But this is from the Great Terran War—these men literally gave their lives for humanity. They’ve been here for almost a century…”

“Think of it this way: we’re giving them a chance to go home. Back to Earth.”

“I suppose…”

She thinks about this for a moment before replying.
“But for a strip mine?”

***
Thank you for reading. I’m experimenting with short fiction and appreciate any feedback or suggestions.

Bedroom. His.

Her eyes.

“Squeeze—my throat.”

Damn.

She’s one of those.

With a groan, he rolled over. Something dark dripped from his forehead.

She thought about how it started: Was she the victim? The villain?

“Maybe,” she said aloud. “Maybe I’m a little bit of both,” and she brought the hammer down on his skull.

***
Thank you for reading. I’m experimenting with short fiction and appreciate any feedback or suggestions.

Far off in the distance, a farm dog barked. Furtive chattering came from the trees above. The sun, only a hand’s length from the horizon, was visible through the lower branches of the forest canopy. There was a faint smell of woodsmoke.

He paused to take it all in: the birdsong, the hum of crickets, the low buzz of the early morning cicadas, even the almost imperceptible chill brought on by the summer breeze. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

After a few moments, a metallic clang reminded him that the scene was not entirely idyllic. The heavy, steady crunch of caterpillar treads against the forest floor announced the approach of a squat robot descending the embankment along the trail he had taken several minutes before.

It rolled past him, and he took in its square body, metal-domed top, and the rust appearing around its edges. Clearly, these things had never been designed to look impressive, only functional—almost economical. They gave the impression that not a single cent of taxpayers’ money had been wasted on an unnecessary flourish.

The machines had simply become part of the trappings of outdoor public spaces, like trash cans or water fountains. Unlike those things, however, these machines had no discernible purpose, and he had never bothered to ask.

When it was about twenty paces ahead of him, he decided to seize the opportunity.

“Excuse me,” he called. “Uh, excuse me?”

He did not wait for an acknowledgment; he sensed none would be forthcoming.

“Excuse me,” he repeated as he jogged toward it.

The machine stopped. He could hear the internal whir of rotating gears. Was it considering him?

“Uh, yes. Hello. I was wondering if you would mind telling me, uh, just what you do here?”

Several clicks came from the machine. If the little metal box had eyes, he imagined they would have narrowed.

“Patrullando en busca de fantasmas,” came a high, metallic voice. A few more clicks came in rapid succession. “Por favor, hágase a un lado.”

He swallowed involuntarily. The shadow of a bird moved across the forest floor and was gone.

Click. Click. Click.

Then the machine rolled away.

***
Thank you for reading. I’m experimenting with flash fiction and would welcome your reactions or criticism.

His name was Ben Been, but it wasn’t anymore.

Ben Been had been honest, patient, and dependable—a man of unquestioned integrity. He was also predictable and, in his own estimation, rather boring.

So he invented a new identity. From then on, he would be Ben Rightnow. Still honest, still courteous, but someone who didn’t waste time standing in lines or waiting on hold until someone picked up.

The principal drawback was that people kept asking whether Rightnow was really his last name. And because Ben Rightnow was still an honest person, he always admitted that it wasn’t.

In this way, Ben Been never entirely went away.

He bought an air purifier for his home office. He wasn’t entirely sure why—there was an HVAC register right above his desk, vented to the rest of the house—but he bought it anyway. It felt like a good purchase.

The purifier displayed air quality as a colored circle: purple was bad, red poor, orange fair, green good, blue excellent. Each morning, when he turned it on, it was reassuring to watch the circle move from orange to green to blue. It was a good purchase.

But because he bought an air purifier, they also built an app. The app let you turn it on when you weren’t there and let you monitor the air even when you weren’t home. And so, even thousands of miles away, for the rest of his life, he would quietly spend his limited moments on this earth checking the air quality in an unoccupied room, in an empty house.

***

Thank you for reading. I’m experimenting with short fiction and would welcome any reactions or criticism.

He bought an air purifier for his home office. He wasn’t entirely sure why—there was an HVAC register right above his desk, vented to the rest of the house—but he bought it anyway. It felt like a good purchase.

The purifier displayed air quality as a colored circle: purple was bad, red poor, orange fair, green good, blue excellent. Each morning, when he turned it on, it was reassuring to watch the circle move from orange to green to blue. It was a good purchase.

But because he bought an air purifier, they also built an app. The app let you turn it on when you weren’t there and let you monitor the air even when you weren’t home. And so, even thousands of miles away, for the rest of his life, he would quietly spend his limited moments on this earth checking the air quality in an unoccupied room, in an empty house.

***

Thank you for reading. I’m experimenting with very short fiction and would welcome your reactions or criticism.  

His name was Ben Been, but it wasn’t anymore.

Ben Been had been honest, patient, and dependable—a man of unquestioned integrity. He was also predictable and, in his own estimation, rather boring.

So he invented a new identity. From then on, he would be Ben Rightnow. Still honest, still courteous, but someone who didn’t waste time standing in lines or waiting on hold until someone picked up.

The principal drawback was that people kept asking whether Rightnow was really his last name. And because Ben Rightnow was still an honest person, he always admitted that it wasn’t.

In this way, Ben Been never entirely went away.