r/Microfiction

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 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.”

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.