“Let’s celebrate that we don’t burn women anymore.”
“Sure. How should we do that?”
“Let’s burn a woman.”
“What?! No! That’s a horrible way.”
“Oh. Okay. Then let’s burn a doll.”
A/N: Another odd, Danish tradition.
Tag: Flash Fiction
Complaints
“I want to make a complaint!”
The receptionist turned towards the man with an hidden sigh. She’d known that this guest would be trouble from the moment she’d laid eyes on him, and it appeared that she hadn’t been wrong. What a shame.
“I’m sorry to hear that, sir,” she said. “Is something the matter with the room?”
“Yes!”
She waited for a continuation, but none seemed forthcoming.
“May I ask what?”
“Everything!”
Getting Dumped
“We need to talk.”
Those four words could only mean two things, and as Nicolas knew for certain that his girlfriend had gotten her period only a few days earlier, she was definitely about to dump him.
Relief washed through him.
He’d been meaning to break it off with her for almost a week now, but they’d hardly spent any time alone together since he made the decision, and he could certainly not dump her in front of an audience. Now, however, it seemed like he didn’t have to dump her at all.
“Sure,” he said, striving to look appropriately glum. It felt like he was at the funeral of someone he hadn’t particularly cared for.
Last Words
A/N: If any of you guys haven’t checked out the most common regrets in life, you might want to do so now. It’s quite thought-provoking. Anyway, here’s my little story centring around it.
It was hard to believe that the frail man lying in bed had once been one of the most feared and respected men in business. By now his skin appeared like parchment, stretched out over feeble bones, and his once booming voice was reduced to the softest whisper.
Around the bed his family was gathered, looking at the man with tears in their eyes. For them he wasn’t a feared business man. For them he was their brother, father, grandfather. Family.
“Alice,” the man whispered, and his daughter hurriedly sat down besides him so that she wouldn’t have to worry about missing what she expected might very well be his last words.
“Yes, father,” she said to the man whom she’d adored despite his regular absence throughout her life. She wondered what he would say. Would he apologize for the times work had come first? Would he tell her that he loved her one last time? Would this be his goodbye?
“Alice,” the man repeated, before sighing ever so softly, looking around at the tearful faces surrounding him.
“I wish I’d spent more time in the office,” he said, and with these last words his eyes fell shut, never to open again.
Hero
He’d always assumed that if he ever got superpowers, he’d be a hero.
And he did become one. For years, actually. At least he tried to be, but people didn’t seem to be half as thankful as he thought that they ought.
No matter how many lives he saved, they always complained. He’d allowed one person to die, saving twenty other. Someone had been hurt when he’d carried them out of a burning building. The cost of the damages of his fights against crime was much too high.
Why couldn’t he fight evil without wrecking the town as he did so? He should look at the numbers, should he. Then he would realise how expensive it was to fix a town. Much more expensive than a funeral or two.
No matter what he did, people were always complaining.
And so he decided that there really wasn’t any point in being a hero.
No, he thought as he slowly put on the mask, relishing in the anonymity it gave him. Being a hero is overrated.
This way he didn’t have to worry about people getting angry, or breaking stuff. He could do all the stuff he wanted. He could have fun.
He could enjoy his abilities for the first time since he’d gotten them.
Yes, he thought. Being the villain is going to be so much more fun.
The Interpretation of Dreams
Her scream was muffled by the gloved hand.
“Shut up, bitch!” he hissed at her.
Crying, she tried to shove at him, but he didn’t even seem to notice, let alone care.
Then she saw the knife. He lifted it high up, before slicing it downwards, and she screamed into his hand as the searing pain hit her.
Then she woke up, gasping for air.
“Are you okay, darling?” a tired, but concerned voice asked next to her.
She looked to the side, seeing the face of the man who’d tried to murder her.
“Just a bad dream, sweetheart,” she told him. “Nothing to worry about.”
Except that her husband kept killing her, night after night, and perhaps that was something to worry about.
Thornhill
A/N: Okay, today’s post, which is a flash fiction, was originally a challenge!
Nothing was allowed to actually happen, I had to mostly just describe the weather, and the narrator had to be omniscient. And yet it had to be entertaining. Let me know if you think I succeeded!
It was a horrendously beautiful day.
The roses had bloomed over the night, and the garden was now heavy with the sweet scent of them. The sun was shining above the people of Thornhill, too brilliant and clear and smug not to sentient, but everyone down there thought it lovely. Self-satisfied bastard.
The lady’s maid hoped that the lady would take a walk in the garden, so that she herself could enjoy the same sunshine.
The stable boy was grinning from ear to ear, hardly able to think of anything better than the warm feeling of the sun on his bare face.
The butler thought it a bit too bright, but it was merely the amount of alcohol that he’d consumed the previous day that made him any sort of sensible.
It was a horrendously beautiful day, and it would only become better from now on.
How dreadful.
Harold Gets a Visitor
A/N: Just a (hopefully) funny flash fiction 🙂
It was one of those instances where a gasp just wasn’t enough.
Still I gasped.
I suppose I should have screamed, looking back. A gasp seems oddly anticlimactic, but I’d never been the screaming sort anyway. That was more Darren’s kind of thing, but Darren wasn’t there.
And so I gasped, and they gasped, and for a few short seconds we could only stare at each other in silence.
Perhaps it was a good thing that I didn’t scream. When one got visitors, screaming hardly seemed polite, and these visitors had sure come a long way.
“Hello,” I said. Or at least I think I said it. I heard the word, and I rather thought I’d felt my mouth forming them.
“Hello,” one of them said in return, but it didn’t sound like a greeting. It sounded like he – she? It? – was merely repeating what I’d said. Tasting the word.
“I’m Harold,” I told them. “And would you mind terribly to get your spaceship out of my backyard? You’re ruining my petunias.”
Horns
A/N: Okay, so I tried writing a children’s novel. Or at least the beginning of one. My first try since elementary school, so let me know what you think 🙂
The day started with an impossibility and it just went down-hill from there.
RSP was currently standing in his room, heart racing and wings flapping in panic as he stared into his bedroom mirror. Staring at what he couldn’t see. His horns. The horns that he should have gotten last night, on the night of his one thousandth birthday, but which were lacking as surely as every one of his future prospects. What kind of dragon didn’t have horns?
He had to hide them. Though they never said anything, he knew his parents had to be disappointed by their only son’s utter failure as a dragon. Not only was RSP the worst flyer in his class, but his flame was so weak that it could hardly light a match. The lack of horns, however, was the worst of it all – what kind of dragon would he be without magic?
Desperately rummaging through his closet, he found a jungle hat that he‘d stopped wearing when Raoul had told him that he looked like a toddler with wings. For now RSP only cared that he looked like a dragon at all, toddler or otherwise.
Mr. X
A/N: Okay, I am quite interested in hearing everyone’s opinion about this piece. It’s a flash fiction, and I think it turned out pretty okay. (If I may say so myself 😉 )
Enjoy
Mr. X was a perfectly normal man, which was quite a rarity nowadays. He wasn’t much of anything really. He wasn’t spoiled, wasn’t selfish, wasn’t generous, wasn’t particularly good or particularly bad. He was a completely average human being and very proud of this fact.
Sure, he supposed that he was rather orderly. Didn’t like a mess if he could avoid it, but that was still pretty normal. It was just such a shame that certain other people couldn’t see that.
“Seriously, it’s just a pen!”
It was his new roommate talking, and Mr. X already knew that this arrangement wasn’t going to work out. It wasn’t ‘just’ a pen. It was a pen on an otherwise perfectly empty table, and Gaby wasn’t even using it!
mariasjostrand 