November, 2018 Archives
Nov
Just A Dream
by thegooddoctor in 100 Words
It was just a dream.
One night, years ago, I killed a man in a fit of rage. I immediately felt regret. What if I were caught?
Waking up was a relief.
The next night, I returned to face the aftermath of my nocturnal crime. I was arrested. I stood trial. I was sentenced to life in prison.
This was not over a single evening. It was an episodic nightmare that I returned to repeatedly. I forced myself to stay awake in order to avoid the inevitable but eventually the inevitable won out.
Was it real? It really didn’t matter.
Nov
Sweet Memory
by thegooddoctor in 100 Words
The girls play hopscotch, the one sister’s hair bounces in rhythm to her skips. She giggles and bends to pick up the rock, balancing her leg in the air. She wins, and they play again and again, until the sky opens, drenching them. Hand in hand they run home with their mouths open tasting rain drops. Entering the house, their mother yells for them to take off their wet sneakers and leave them by the door.
They kick off their sneakers and socks.
In the kitchen there’s the sweet smell of chocolate chip cookies.
Eighty-five-year-old Cindy smiles at the memory.
From Guest Contributor Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher
Nov
A Wandering Soap Opera
by thegooddoctor in 100 Words
I feel like a gull getting sucked into a jet engine. Furniture salesmen, spies, serial killers, etc., take turns following me through town. I recognize them by their nondescript appearance. Private lives are now being lived in public. We’re a wandering soap opera. That’s the problem with putting Velveeta on enchiladas. And nobody has to ask what the Kremlin thinks about all of this. Traces are visible from the air. I just want some semblance of normality back in my life, some sort of quiet, and my heart to stop furiously pedaling as if there were actually somewhere to go.
From Guest Contributor Howie Good
Howie co-edits the journals UnLost and Unbroken with Dale Wisely.
Nov
Mary Of Silence
by thegooddoctor in 100 Words
From where she stood, she watched the blood soak into the hard, compacted earth. It was like watching water that has spilled from a glass onto the countertop evaporate in fast motion. Soon it would be as if the dark fluid had never been there, absorbed into this wasteland where it could serve no purpose.
Mary wanted to scream. But her voice had fled long ago. With no one willing to listen futility had eventually won out. The doctors called it aphasia.
So Mary watched her husband die. Here, freedom surely was a bitterness. Alone, she started walking towards sunset.
Nov
Speaker Blowout
by thegooddoctor in 100 Words
Lisa peered through the curtains, watching an unfamiliar man, presumably her neighbor, drag four heavy-duty concert speakers onto the lawn across the way.
She’d never actually seen this man before, despite her moving in twenty-two years ago. But his yard was always well maintained and trash left out every week.
She wondered why he’d appeared now. Two decades of curiosity and, if she admitted it to herself, spying, and she’d learned hardly a thing about him.
As the song, Every Breath You Take, played on repeat for the next 72 hours before a deputy arrived, Lisa never understood the irony.