Posts Tagged ‘Midnight’
Aug
Midnight
by thegooddoctor in 100 Words
Nancy Botkin loves midnight. She stands on the porch, wind whispering. She watches moon drifting. Luminous, motherly, never leaving. A new day awakens. Possibilities rise.
She imagines a father who doesn’t burn her stories. Crinkling creation. Flames consuming.
A father who doesn’t demand her to clean. Buy booze.
She conjures leaving. Like Mama, selfish, enviable. Going wherever whims call.
Nancy can’t imagine the shape of winning. What a miracle truly feels like.
Dad always emerges, demands she get inside. She slinks in, weary, unable to find words. Leave me alone.
She hides pieces of dreams, waits for the next night.
From Guest Contributor Mir-Yashar Seyedbagheri
Mir-Yashar is a graduate of Colorado State’s MFA program in fiction. The recipient of two Honorable Mentions from Glimmer Train, he has also had work nominated for The Best Small Fictions. His work has been published or is forthcoming in journals such as 50 Word Story, Molecule Lit Mag, The Write City Magazine, and Agony Opera. He lives in Garden Valley, Idaho.
Dec
Graveyard Shift
by thegooddoctor in 100 Words
There was an emptiness to everything. Even the space between the minutes lacked connective tissue, so that time no longer flowed with any regularity. Josey was left with nothing but her thoughts to fill the void that descended upon the convenience store after midnight.
She’d divide each 15-minute chunk into 91 cents. That’s how much she made, after taxes and withholdings. It hardly seemed worth it, and she’d stare out at the empty highway and live an entire lifetime during every span, dreaming of a life where she’d never married, had never given birth.
Until even her imagination was empty.
Oct
Happy Halloween
by thegooddoctor in 100 Words
I’m driving home from Lori’s Halloween party when the car engine dies. It’s after midnight, the road is desolate, and I’m tired. I reach into my purse for the cell phone, but it’s not there.
Leaning back in my seat, taking a deep breath, I close my eyes. A knock on the window startles me.
“Miss, are you okay?”
It’s a man dressed as Count Dracula, his fangs scarily realistic.
“My engine died.”
“Let me look at it for you.”
As soon as I exit my car, Count Dracula grabs my purse and drives off in his truck.
Happy Halloween.
From Guest Contributor Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher
Feb
Homage To Discworld King
by thegooddoctor in 100 Words
The tall caped figure dismounted the midnight horse and negotiated cracked paving to knock on nondescript door.
Bright dancing eyes and grey beard yanked it open. “Well?”
Taken aback, Death cleared his throat. “HELLO.”
“Bugger ‘HELLO’, what kept you?”
“UM!”
Author pushed past the cowled figure.
“ER… DON’T YOU WANT TO DRESS?” Death waved a skeletal digit at the grimy T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops.
Author pointed his beard aggressively. “That would be rather pointless now, wouldn’t it?”
Death sighed and followed the little man to the waiting steed. He was sure he’d forgotten something.
“OH YES.”
He raised the scythe.
From Guest Contributor Perry McDaid
Jan
New Year’s Eve
by thegooddoctor in 100 Words
Charlie and Shannon had been expecting a crowd at their house for New Year’s Eve, but ten o’clock approached and still no one showed.
“Charlie, where is everyone? You did put eight o’clock on the invitations, didn’t you?”
“Of course, I did.” Charlie went to the counter for a glass of wine, when he noticed something sticking out from under the piles of papers. All the invitations he was supposed to mail two weeks ago, under a stack.
“Shannon, it looks like it’ll be just the two of us at midnight.”
Charlie threw the invitations out and gulped his wine.
From Guest Contributor Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher
Apr
After Midnight
by thegooddoctor in 100 Words
After midnight, we climb the cemetery fence.
The sky is black as ink, but Gordy’s brought a flashlight. He’s been out of juvie for two days now.
I follow him to the far corner of the plot, wind brushing my clothes like ghosts.
“This is it,” he says.
His dad’s name is on the headstone along with this year’s date, him having died while Gordy was locked up.
I’ve seen the stripes on Gordy’s back, his broken nose, of course, but when Gordy takes out a sledge hammer, winding up, I grab his arm, saying, “Do that and he wins.”
From Guest Contributor Len Kuntz
Len is a writer from Washington State, an editor at the online magazine Literary Orphans, and the author of I’M NOT SUPPOSED TO BE HERE AND NEITHER ARE YOU out now from Unknown Press. You can also find him at lenkuntz.blogspot.com
Feb
Love Be The Devil, But It Won’t Get Me
by thegooddoctor in 100 Words
We were watching the show from a splintered, weathered picnic table in front of the big stage at The Shack when she told me she was leaving me. It was midnight, but it was still a hundred degrees out and sweat rolled down my face and into my eyes as she walked away. The Burnside boys were singing their brand of gritty, corn liquor soaked blues. My heart thudded in my chest like it was threatening to make an appearance but the toes of my boots kept tapping the dirt and eventually I threw my head back and sang along.
From Guest Contributor Sarah Reddick
Sarah Reddick is a writer who is currently in the MFA program at Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Missouri. Her work has appeared in Cattywampus Magazine, Salt Zine, The Local Voice, and the Mid Rivers Review.
May
What Patti Smith Gets Up To
by thegooddoctor in 100 Words
“I saw Patti Smith in concert once. It was quite recently actually. I like to think that after the show she went to a late night beat poet meet where they gave beautiful spoken word renditions through the fug of cigarette smoke whilst drinking sour wine. Or she went to keep candlelight midnight vigil over an altar of Allen Ginsburg, a vigil unbroken by his devotees since his death in the 90’s. More realistically I think Ms. Smith went back to her hotel with her band and caught an early night, she was getting on a bit at the time.”
From Guest Contributor George Aitch