Flash Fiction

Any fiction that is too short to be considered short story.


She didn’t give it too much thought at the time because she was too worried. Her grandmother, having fallen ill two years ago, had given her an old rusty key. Since then, it had become like a safety blanket, something she kept in her pocket at all times. She felt it brought her calm when she was about to break. Now that Grandmother had actually died, the key had become indispensable.  It had been a long week after the funeral. People had come in and out of Grandmother’s home, and she’d had to smile throughout all of it. Ever since mother had passed, she was the only one left living in the area, and the only one who’d taken care of Grandmother, so the responsibility had naturally fallen on her. Yet she did everything, trying to act like Grandmother would have acted in this situation. She reassured crying family members, […]

Locks







An old nameless vagrant looked over the edge of a bridge, a sea of cars flowing like water in a river. His clothes were stained with their original owner’s history, a story the homeless man would never know though he fantasized about it. He wore his hair clean, unlike many of the others like him, and took pride in what little he had left, the thin strands combed over the beginning signs of baldness. “Jump,” a man in an all-white suit said. The old homeless man closed his eyes and climbed over the ledge, feeling the wind on his face, the magical breeze giving life to his worn trench coat. “You were not meant to be born,” the man in white said. The vagrant thought about it, realizing how very true it was. In a distant memory, his mother held him by his hand, guiding him through a large group […]

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