short story contest

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Flash Fiction Contest Submission 3

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Time for the third submission in our Flash Fiction Contest .

This entry is from Jason Haskins. Thanks for the submission and good luck, sir.

CLOUDY HEART

by Jason Haskins

The snow was cold. There was no ignoring that. It was the irritating itchiness of his borrowed wool jacket that was driving him insane. The man didn’t complain, though. For starters, there was no one nearby to complain to. Secondly, with the sun hidden behind the clouds and a bitter wind blowing from the east, the man was lucky to even have a jacket at all. For that much, the man was grateful.

Small pieces of the white flurry stuck to the man’s brown, scraggly beard. His soulful blue eyes searched the land for shelter, but the white sheet of snow prevented him from doing so. His feet had stopped being cold long ago. He had been on the road for days and though his boots were still in good condition, he had become oblivious to the pain that attacked his feet. Numbness had settled in long ago. Everything from his mother to yesterday’s hot chocolate in Denver crossed his mind. Both warmed his soul. These were the thoughts that carried him forward.

Six years had passed since the man had left home. This Christmas was the one he would make it home. Anger had carried him away all those years ago it was the anger of loneliness that forced him to return. He had adhered to a strict life while growing up and only wanted to break free from it. The chain held by his father needed to be broken. The man gathered what money he had and left. He hopped on the bus and just left. No destination in sight, the man let the spirits carry him away.

It killed him to leave his mother. She was the one light in his dark life. Her energy had kept both of them alive. The last letter he got from her was at Christmas of the second year of his absence. The man’s father had died and the letter was riddled with desperation. The man was a failure. He was a man without a home and he could not return. Even in death, his father had won.

The night grew deeper. The man was close. The arrival in his mind was perfect. His mother would be there, alone and lighting the Christmas tree. The man would walk through the front door; frozen but full of hope. Her eyes would be a waterfall of tears. Minutes would stretch into hours and hours into days. Life would begin for him once again.

The man hadn’t bothered to call. The idea of pure joy overwhelmed him. Nothing provides the body with more sensation than the love of mother and child. The last of his money was spent on a pair of used mittens he purchased from a thrift shop. His fingers, now swollen, now used the mittens as nothing more than decoration. His journey was nearly complete and the heavens could feel his heart grow.

As he rounded the corner and stepped onto Sycamore Street, the man’s legs began to tingle and his feet unthawed. The snow intensified now, nearly blinding the man. His heart showed him the way. Odd memories began to creep in. Good ones, bad ones, sad, happy; all of them. Friends long gone and times well spent. His father was there. His mother as well. She was the fire of his life. He threw his tattered scarf around his reddened face and stopped. Chills attacked his spine as the thought of his return grew closer.

He approached the house. There were candles in the window that illuminated a well decorated room. The man slowly approached the house. His eyes peered in and his heart dropped. Inside this hallowed vault stood a Mother, a Father, and their young child. A lump grew in the man’s throat. The life he once knew had moved on. As the man continued to watch through the frost bitten window, the mother lifted her small child in her arms. On top of a beautifully lit tree, the child placed an angel fresh from its package. As he watched the family embrace, the man’s eyes slowly leaked. For the first time in years, the man smiled.

As always, feedback is welcome and encouraged in the comments section, and if you have a flash fiction piece to submit there is still time. Send all manuscripts to Somedamnfool88@gmail.com

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Flash Fiction Contest Submission 2

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Here it is, the second entry in my Flash Fiction Contest.

Thank you, Michelle for your submission, and good luck!

The Heart of the Woods – A Ghost Story

By Michelle M. Manus

The circumstances of Melara and Beloved’s meeting were not unusual, nor were they typical. It was not a romance novel setting of love at first sight, nor was it any of the myriad ways in which people tend to fall in love nowadays. It was, rather, a recognition of two kindred spirits, and one that should never have come to love. Perhaps that is what made the difference.
They met in the park – not the part by the lake with the picnic tables, but the part in the woods, off the beaten paths, where not even the foolish young venture. The very heart of the woods, where only the searching go, and it was not with excitement that they found each other, but rather with an odd annoyance at a mutual invasion of sacred privacy.

The afternoon passed with silence between them, each refusing to leave a place they claimed as their own. The evening too came to pass, filled no longer with silence but with the quiet expression of things that could not be understood in the harsh unreality of the world outside.

It was not love, understand, nor was it friendship, or hatred, or even respect. It simply was.

Time passed. How little or how much is difficult to say, and for the story here told it does not matter. Eventually the things spoken of above did grow between Melara and Beloved: understanding, respect, friendship, and even an odd twinge of hate. Love was the last to come and it came neither quickly nor slowly.

Melara was young – in college, though that doesn’t matter – a lost idealist who did not even believe in the ability of humanity to possess goodness. She needed a link – a reason to remain in a world where nothing mattered, and nothing made sense. She loved Beloved because he became that reason.

As for Beloved, he was dying. A few days, a few months, no one was quite sure. It didn’t matter because he had died long before that. A lifetime of destroyed illusions had all built up like a slow poison inside of him until finally he woke one morning and understood that they had killed him. To live again Beloved needed honesty – bluntness, sincerity, even pain. Melara was each of these; a flower that showed every color as brightly or dully as it chose to, uncaring of what predators might be attracted to its brilliance.

Each resisted the draw to the other for individual reasons. The disillusioned idealist tends to cling to disillusionment because it is safe there, and the dead rarely ever embrace the pain of coming back to life. Melara’s emotions ran more volatile, more prone to expression than Beloved’s, and so it was that when love found them it was Melara who brought it to fruition.

The first touch ever shared in their hidden world was the moment she pressed her lips to his, ignoring his desire to be left alone. She cared not that he spurned connection. She needed him desperately. Needed him to rip down the warped idealism inside of her and mold it into something she could understand.

Beloved fought their first contact. He did not want to live again, and he did not want the responsibility for the pain he knew Melara would feel when his body was dead. But he could not hold out against her. Her fierce determination, her intense desire, destroyed the strength of his resistance, and he could not do what was best for her. He surrendered to his selfishness and to the desire to have what he wanted regardless of the consequences.

To say their love was ill-fated would be to pronounce the death of an over-used cliché, and it wasn’t really so, at any rate. When Beloved died he was more truly alive than he had ever been while his body still worked.

Upon his death Beloved’s ashes were given to Melara in a small obsidian urn. She carried the other half of herself, in her hands in a small black jar, back into the heart of the woods.

She thought of crying, but in this place tears failed her as they had not since Beloved’s death. Being here again, with Beloved in her hands, a sense of stillness enveloped her. The stillness was broken by a harsh wind blowing through the trees, so strong it ripped the jar from her hands. With a cry she flew after it too late. The wind shattered it against a fallen stone and Melara fell after it, her hands sinking deep into the ashes.

The wind stirred and the ashes blended, intermingling with the soft dirt until it was impossible to distinguish one from the other, and she understood then that the world they had made together had reclaimed one of its creators. Looking down she found her body half submerged into mud and she wondered if it had not reclaimed them both. Struck by the moment she lifted her ash covered hands to her face and inhaled, the burnt scent of Beloved moving around her, through her, in her.

Hands covering her face Melara heard his voice whisper in her ear, felt the roughness of Beloved’s hands on her waist, and she realized then that she could never leave. Her love – her selfish desire to keep him – had brought Beloved back here, had tied him to this place, and so she realized that his love would tie her there as well. She leaned back into her lover’s arms and her eyes closed, never again to open.

It is an awkward story: the height of love – the height of selfishness. What actually became of Melara has never been proven. But I’ve heard it told that if one travels far enough – deep enough – into the heart of the woods, that Beloved and Melara are still there, each one’s love too strong ever to let the other leave them.

If you want to submit your own story for the contest there is still time. Send all submissions to Somedamnfool88@gmail.com

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Flash Fiction Contest Submission 1

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May is Short Story Month and in celebration I am holding a Flash Fiction contest on this site.

This first entry by Adam D. Richardson, kicks off the contest. Thank you, Adam, for your submission, and for going first.

“The Kick”

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Adam D. Richardson

“Recognize the situation!” he screamed at his wife. The power lines across the street attracted him and reminded him of a subtle and fragile strength he had over absolutely nothing. His breathing reverberated in his ears and became the only thing he could hear as she spoke. She became a silent shouting face, merely responding to his instigation. But he remembered to breathe. Staring at his toes, propped up on the wall, he noticed he had let his toenails grow far too long, and also that his feet pressed neatly against the stucco. He thought she was in front of him, but she was standing beside him and he hadn’t noticed. He turned and looked at the shouting face and remembered that he hadn’t been listening at all; always a few minutes too late.

“Listen,” he etched, “It’s the wrong time. Neither of us are ready. We’ve been working towards it, but this is too soon.”

“Then when? What will be different a year from now?”

He knew he couldn’t argue this, and he really didn’t want to. He wanted her to agree with him without any convincing required, without making a case based on legitimacy and rationality. He just wanted her to abort. Even if he didn’t want to.

“Money,” he squeaked, “We have no way of supporting a kid right now. We are both jobless, living on just what we have left. In a year we can have jobs and at least a steady income. At least a fucking job, you know?”

She crossed her arms and cut him loose, putting her hand to her lips and biting her nail. “I didn’t want to mention it, but you seem to forget what I have to go through for this. The psychological and physical pain. Again.”

He looked back at his feet and curled his big toes. HIs prostrate toes formed the stunted hands of a composer. “I haven’t forgotten that at all. I’ve been thinking about it all night. I want to have kids, babe, but this is not the right time. We have no jobs, no income, and I don’t want to bring a kid into this world without preparing. We should at least have some kind of income!”

She dropped down on the stool and her tears followed her. “I know you’re right, but I just… it makes me sad.”

His toes inverted as he stood up and went to her. He curled his fingers around her shoulder. “It’s the wise choice, babe.”

She hicced and laid her head down on the table, weeping.

“It’s the wise choice,” he kicked.

Comments and feedback are welcome and remember that there is still plenty of time to submit your own story. Send manuscripts to Somedamnfool88@gmail.com

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Flash Fiction Contest

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May is short story month and with that in mind I have a little proposition. Anybody who wants to can submit me a short story, of the flash fiction variety, and provided it’s not truly terrible (purely subjective on my part) or I get like a thousand submissions (I won’t) I’ll publish it here on this blog. I will make sure you receive the public credit for writing the story. At the end of the month I’ll pick a winner and said winner will be able to brag about his or her triumph until the end of days. Sadly, I don’t have any money to offer the winner of this contest, but what I do have to offer is virtually guaranteed publication and a small, but steady, readership. Also, the winner will get a free signed copy of my novel, target release date in the summer of 2026. Hopefully some of you feel like flexing your writing muscles and send me some stories! Can’t wait to read them.

The only restriction I have is that it is no more than a thousand words.

Please send all submissions to Somedamnfool88@gmail.com