The town plow thunders by with its single headlight. You listen with your eyes squeezed shut, imagining the snow that touches everything—sliding under your mudroom door—powder dusting the floor. You’re warm, curled up in an igloo of quilts; yet, your nose feels cold. You know the woodstove burned out after the late news—only a lingering scent of smoke drifts up the backstairs. You wake, uncertain of the hour’s shade of blue, and look up at the white ceiling where a teensy black speck of a spider scales a silver thread, finding its way in this uncompromising dark.

M.J. Iuppa

An elderly lady made an urgent call to the vet because her cat was off her food.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said through red cheeks. ‘That’s Dewdrop’s brother.’

From Guest Contributor Rick Haynes

Dearest Melanie,

Elliot

From Guest Contributor Amiel Rossin

The cities were brought to a grinding halt by the death of the Great Leader. There was grief and tears, on personal media feeds, the walls, the screens, holograms, everywhere, even the real faces and eyes.

That was the last the world ever heard of the traveling space shuttle and of its crew. XT9 became a haze among the frequencies and disappeared forever.

From Guest Contributor Debarun Sarkar

Debarun sleeps, eats, reads, smokes, drinks, labors and occasionally writes stories and submits them. Recent works have appeared or are forthcoming in Visitant, Off the Coast, The Opiate, Aainanagar, Literary Orphans, Friday Flash Fiction and here at A Story in 100 Words, among others. He can be reached at debarunsarkar.wordpress.com

Matt got the news in time to break up the wedding. Did people actually do that, he wondered, or did that only happen in the movies? Speak now or forever hold your peace. Matt couldn’t remember ever having heard that line spoken at any of the many weddings he’d been to.

Against his heart’s desires, Matt decided to sit the wedding out. Who was he to stand in the way of Carla’s happiness? Instead of attending, he returned to the site of their first date and sat quietly as a piece of the world moved on with his silent assent.

From Guest Contributor Dan Slaten

As the videostream it was broadcasting ended, ComStar-88b paused. The final frame – explosions flowering across the Earth – stood frozen in its buffer.

ComStar-88b broadcast its news to the dead planet below for one more minute, before finally going dark.

From Guest Contributor Simon Kewin
Science Fiction and Fantasy Author

The boy, prescient and wise, child of a dove, knew this day was coming, when the neighborhood man would tear into his school and wave his weapon and laugh like a hyena and cut down everything that stood in his path. The man yearned to be young but lived encaged in the zoo of lost innocence, and given arms and a rare safari he had to take lives, lives that betrayed his by existing where he could no longer be. So the boy absented himself on the dreaded day, warned the principal, who wouldn’t listen, watched the news, and cried.

From Guest Contributor, Curt Klinghoffer

When the clowns first appeared, the media tried to downplay it and sensationalize it at the same time. “When will the clowns strike your home, tonight at eleven!” contradicted with studies that claimed the clowns were simply a result of too many clown schools churning out too many clowns. Where would the clowns find work? It was an epidemic of clowns, but they were mostly harmless.

We eventually got used to them. A few families were killed, but based on how many clowns there are now, a few of them are bound to be bad. Mostly, we just ignore them.

The victims all offered the same sparse testimony. They were each accosted in a dark alley without warning. The last thing they remembered was a man wearing a black coat and fedora.

As you can see, policing the city is hard work.

The Cadillac hurtled through traffic like the driver was at the controls of a video game. He sideswiped several sedans and ran one SUV off the road entirely as he jumped the median and exited the highway from the on-ramp. When he crashed into the guard rail, he brandished a semi-automatic weapon, shot several innocent bystanders, and carjacked a new vehicle. The carnage continued for several hours.

News blogs later reported that seventeen motorists died, including four prostitutes. Journalists speculated on the driver’s motive. No one guessed that he was actually a video game developer who had forgotten his medication.