I snort dying hornets and watch the rest swarm from their honeycomb downward toward the daycare center where sweaty babies are soiling themselves beneath the noonday sun. Some are sucking thumbs, crawling on the triangular lawn.
I snort dying hornets and watch the rest swarm from their honeycomb downward toward the daycare center where sweaty babies are soiling themselves beneath the noonday sun. Some are sucking thumbs, crawling on the triangular lawn.
He kept old passports tucked away at the bottom of a drawer. It was usually when he sorted out his socks they surfaced. Each with the bottom right-hand corner cut off to invalidated them before being returned with a new issue. He had five and not sure what to do with them.
The Drunk Monkeys Summer 2013 Short Fiction Contest is here!
We will consider short fiction and flash fiction pieces. Nothing shorter than 400 words or longer than 2,000.
Caroline was in Key West for the Conference of Advertising Agencies, searching for something–what? Truth, goodness, beauty, more clients and projects? The rose-patterned wallpaper was the meaty pink of the insides of things. Hot light streamed in through the window, and palm fronds waved green in the yard, though it was late October. Back home, kids would be planning their Halloween costumes, pretending they were superheroes or witches. Outside her open window the hues were as bright as a Gauguin painting. The sounds too were coming to her in flat, broad colors, swaths of wind, of palm fronds brushing, whispering to her. When she first saw Gauguin’s paintings, she thought his characters averted their eyes, as if they had secrets to keep. Were the secrets full of doom? She shook her head at the exaggerated thought. On the wall hung the predictable print of ocean and beach to calm the mind of the weary traveler: no pounding surf and thunderous sky, only even, golden light.
Dexter wears full-bib black overalls, stiff as cement. They barely crease when he reaches for his tape measure, stumpy thumb smudging the heavy block carriage. He arcs the measure toward the far wall, a hissing slinky tossed to an inaccurate stop.
She spots us gawking, stands up straight, spins around and glowers at us.
Nathaniel Tower, fiction writer and Editor of the online literary journal Bartleby Snopes, shows off his juggling and writing skills — at the same time!
Nathaniel Tower, fiction writer and editor of the online literary journal Bartleby Snopes, shows off his juggling and writing skills — at the same time!
One day, a cockroach awoke from uneasy dreams to find itself transformed into a giant human. It lay sprawling on its face, dirt and filth found its way into the human’s mouth and it choked on the particles of detritus and coughed. This caused it to spasm, and it quickly started flailing around, thrashing its arms and legs in confusion. In doing so it disturbed many of the thick, shiny brown bodies of its former colony. The other bugs started fleeing from the thrashing human, and although it was dark, the new human was able to see them all scuttling through the gloom. Even though just the previous day they had been its family and colony, upon seeing them now the new human was filled with revulsion, and instinctively tried to crush the invertebrate swarm. Soon its hands were covered in thick brown viscous entrails and squashed insects, and the human began to puke. Since the human was still trapped in a strange crawl space, this vomit had nowhere to go, and ended up running back onto the human’s face, stinging its eyes. The new human started to get desperate, and naked though it was, it began to crawl furiously through the dirt and filth and out towards a beam of light some way off in the distance. After a long crawl the new human found a small crack and was able to haul itself out of the cockroach colony’s den and into the bright, confusing world of New York City.
Just before she slid beneath the anesthesia, Laney decided if she survived, she’d write the great American novel.