Flash of Fiction

“Go get it, Jazz!” I throw a rawhide bone. My dog chases after it, disappearing into the trees. “You’re supposed to bring it back, Jazz! Jasper!” I step forward. Jasper comes tearing back, carrying something too large to be the rawhide bone. He drops it at my feet, and I scream. It’s a human arm.

I always knew I’d die young, but I never thought I’d know which sixty seconds would be my last. A blast rocked the room. One door down, three more to go. They’d have to blow them all. These locks didn’t budge for anything. Except for explosives and the codes, and those codes were damn near impossible to get. I’d spent a year tracking them down, and apparently, I still hadn’t gotten the right ones. The second door blew, and the room rocked, the tables and chairs jumping into the air. I planted my butt in one of those chairs. I had forty-five seconds left, and I wasn’t about to let all my hard work go to waste. My fingers flew across the keyboard as I opened a data transfer link. A message popped up on the screen. Ready for transmission, Empress . My handler, telling me to get on with it. A third bomb went off, and I just about fell out of my chair. The computer skidded across the desk. I slid down to keep typing. Fifteen more seconds, and it was all over for me. I d...

“Do you need help with that, ma’am?” The elderly woman smiles. “Why, yes. Thank you, dear.” “Is this your bus?” “Put it in the middle. It’s the best spot.” He boards the bus, but she doesn’t follow. She hobbles behind a concrete pillar and dials a number. The detonator engages, and her suitcase explodes.

My feet carried me into the hospital, like someone else was controlling them. They marched through the lobby, onto the elevator, down the hall and only faltered when I walked up to the room. Someone was already inside. He rose when he saw me. His eyes glittered in the low light. “I’m gonna go get some coffee.” He slipped by me and disappeared around a corner. My feet moved on their own again and took me to the now empty chair at the bedside. I took in the sight before me, and my heart plummeted through my chest, heavy with guilt. This was my fault. I sat down, taking the patient’s hand in my own. A machine beeped his slow and steady pulse. A tube went down his throat, filling his empty stomach. They’d pumped it to get out a deadly cocktail of drugs and alcohol. A combination he’d put there himself, because of me. “You bastard,” I whispered, tears blurring my vision. “Why did you do this to yourself? I’m not worth all this.” I took a shaky breath. “If I was, you never...

My wife disappeared on August 28, 1998. The world doesn’t know what happened to her. But I do. Like a good husband, I reported her missing. I answered all their questions. I waited until she was legally pronounced dead before getting rid of her junk. The world thinks I’m a good husband, but I am not. I am not because I know what happened to my wife on August 28, 1998. I’m not sorry. For any of it. My wife was not a good wife, you see. She saw other men and spent more time with them than she did with me. She lied to me constantly, saying they were just friends, but I know they weren’t. I know my wife didn’t deserve my affection and nobody deserved her twisted idea of love. That is why what happened on August 28, 1998 happened. My wife brought it upon herself. I deserved better, and she deserved what she got. But, if you ask me, death might’ve been too kind. I wanted to make it long and slow and painful, but the police find it suspicious when you keep going to the ...

She’s wearing red. She always does. She says it’s better for business that she never looks messy, that it comforts people to think hers is not a messy business. And she says the best way to keep the blood from showing is to wear red. Her floor-length gown ripples around her feet as she glides across the room. Her left arm is stiff, hardly moving. When she gets closer to her next business venture, her left palm opens. A dagger slides out of her sleeve. No one notices the dagger falling into her hand. Walking behind her target, she pretends to stumble. She throws out her right hand and catches herself on his back. “Are you okay, miss?” Her target looks over his shoulder. “I will be in a moment.” She presses her dagger to her target’s neck. His mouth opens, and her right palm clamps over it. “It’s nothing personal, just business.” Her right hand falls to his shoulder, holding him in place. “In your next life, don’t cheat on your wife.” She ducks behind his shoul...

“Don’t go out too far, sweetie!” I’d shoot Mom a thumbs-up, but my hands are too busy keeping me afloat. My feet stopped touching the sand ages ago, and I need both arms and legs to stay above the waves. I swim farther out to sea. “That’s far enough!” I glance back at shore. Mom beckons me back to her. I paddle back at an angle, prolonging my swim. Halfway there, a rip current sweeps me out to sea. The beach shrinks, getting farther away by the second. I swim back toward shore with all I’ve got. I don’t get any closer, but I don’t get any farther away either. Wait. This is wrong. They tell you not to swim against the current. I try swimming with it, but that’s wrong, too. I spin in a circle, looking for the beach. When I find it, I swim parallel to it. My arms and legs are exhausted, but I make it out of the rip current. Then it’s a long swim back to shore, which I don’t have the energy for. My head slips under a wave. I flail my way back to the s...

His fingers fly across the keyboard. Windows flash by on his computer screen. “How much longer?” she asks. “Two minutes,” he says. Two minutes tick by, and he breaks through the final firewall. “Got it.” She puts a code in front of him. As soon as he types it in, they hear the missile launch.

I touch the two live wires together. Nothing. Leaning my cheek against the wheel, I try again. Still no dice. The next try yields a brief grumble from the engine. “Work with me, baby.” I touch the two wires again. This time, the engine roars to life, deafening after the silence of the empty street. I let out a whoop. The passenger door opens. I’m not expecting anybody, so I whip the car into gear. Before I can slam on the gas, a man slides into the car. “Nice work,” he says. “It didn’t even take you two minutes to get in and start the engine.” I swallow. This guy doesn’t look like a cop, but he might pass as a fed. “It was a compliment. No need to worry that I know so much. I’m not a cop.” He pauses, eyeing me. “Or a fed.” “How do I know that?” “If I were, would I have gotten in the car with you?” “Fair enough.” “Word on the street is you can steal any car you want.” Pride puffs out my chest. “Oh, yeah?” “Is this true?” I shrug. “If I prepare, yeah. Every ...

“No peeking!” “I can’t see through the blindfold. Your hands are redundant.” I pull at his hands. They don’t budge. “I want it to be a surprise.” “I know, but this’d be a lot easier if you trusted your blindfold.” “I gotta be sure.” He guides me down a hill. I stumble over a tree root. “This sucks. How much farther?” “Almost there.” I take another step forward and fall into a hole, landing on something that’s not ground. “Is that—?” My boyfriend retches. Taking off the blindfold, I see what it is. It’s a body.

As I chop vegetables, my knife slips and cuts my finger. “Ow! Ow, oh, that’s bad!” “Do you need the first aid kit? Should I turn on the faucet?” “Yeah, yeah, both!” The water starts running, and the first aid kit appears on the counter. Rinsing off my finger, my face pales. I live alone.

I snap a few pictures of the DOA’s head. I take a few more from another angle. “Can we flip her?” Snapping another picture, I nod. The medical examiner rolls the body over. I photograph everything. As I’m taking pictures of her face, my shutter stops. I know this body. She’s my mother.

Two shots. Two students fall. I move further down the hallway. Two shots. A teacher this time. I move into the cafeteria. A spray of bullets. Dozens of students lay dead. The spray continues down the next hall. Ten dead. Two more shots. I didn’t fire them. Blood soaks my chest, and I fall, dead.

They say the house on the hill is haunted. They say bad things happened there. They say the story goes something like this: When the Drummond family wanted to get away from the congestion and stink of the city, they commissioned a mansion in a small town between the two cities Mr. Drummond’s business operated in. But the mansion’s plans never came to fruition. After three fatal accidents, the crew abandoned the project, leaving the Drummonds high and dry. But Mr. Drummond was not the type to give up. If he were, he wouldn’t have amassed his fortune. The same fortune that paid for the bits and pieces of the mansion to be levelled and for a new, smaller home to be built. It was still large by all accounts, but it didn’t quite leak into mansion status. Once the house had been completed, the Drummonds moved in. Mr. Drummond was away on business often, leaving the four Drummond children in the care of Mrs. Drummond and their governess. The youngest Drummond children, ...

“How could you do this to me?” I took a step backward. “I thought you loved me.” He rolled his eyes. “As naïve as ever. This has been a long time coming, you know. I can’t believe it took you this long to find out. Then again, you were never the smart one in the relationship.” My hands curled into fists, my nails digging into my palms. “Says the one who got caught.” He snorted. “Don’t you get it? I wanted to get caught. I wanted you to find out. I wanted this to hurt you.” I ground my teeth together. “Why? Was dumping me like a normal person too hard?” “Call it a social experiment,” he said, watching me intently. “Everybody always says like father like son, but you are most certainly nothing like your father. Mommy dearest, on the other hand, you are very much like.” “Stop it,” I said through gritted teeth. Tears welled in my eyes. “But what I really wanted to know is if you would come crawling back to me, like Mommy to Daddy every time he beat her wit...

The people around me not so much sang as yelled lyrics at the top of their lungs. I could barely hear the vocalist over them, but I didn’t care. Standing there, in front of my favorite band, screaming all my favorite songs back at them, was magical. In front of me, a pit opened up. Guys flooded in, pushing and shoving each other. I stayed as far back from the mayhem as I could. The song reached its breakdown, and the pit raged. Bodies were flung at the crowd around the pit. I held my hands in front of me, bracing myself for the onslaught of sweaty people. A couple guys stumbled my way. I deflected them back into the pit easily enough. The next person who came at me was another story. He lost his footing and fell backwards. I caught his shoulders, and his weight dragged me down into a half-lunge, one foot out in front and bent at the knee, the other knee pressed to the ground. “Help me up.” I lifted with all my strength, and he moved an inch. He looked like a ...