It had been meant to fade out after exposure to daylight, the security sticker he had attached to the cardboard cover of his first reporter’s notebook as a souvenir. Although his name – printed in that trick ink by the security guard at the gate of the studio lot – had disappeared from the removable badge long ago, the former film critic had only now deciphered the meaning of those lost letters. It had been meant to be temporary, his stay in Hollywood.

Before burning all his reporter’s notebooks, he had decided to flip through them one last time. Scribbled in the dark, all those frantic notes about forgettable films had only made sense to him then – right after the screening room lights turned on. Between them, though, he had discovered scenes from his real life – carefully recorded in perfect penmanship in the spare moments before the lights went out – that only made sense to him now. Ripping pages with these scenes on them out of the spiral-bound notebooks, he attempted to piece together his story.

FADE IN: The first time we met there, I was so worried what people would say if they saw my car in that part of town, I parked a couple blocks away.

Embarrassed by that battered Taurus, I strolled onto the studio lot, instead….

BEGIN FLASHBACK: The first time I was assigned to write a movie review by the arts-and-entertainment editor of my college newspaper, I didn’t even own that battered Taurus. Following her handwritten directions, I rode a bus to an anonymous stop in front of an abandoned motion-picture palace in downtown Minneapolis. Even though the curtain in the main auditorium of the theater had fallen for the final time, the screening room upstairs was still rented out by out-of-town distributors from time to time. I remember being buzzed in when, with the intercom next to the side door, I identified myself as a film critic for the first time. I felt like it impressed the people at the bus stop.

Outside, it was cold. Inside, there was at least a little warmth….

NARRATOR (V.O.): “They say that everyone is a critic. But that’s not true. Not everyone is a critic. That’s part of the appeal….”

END FLASHBACK: The first time we met, like our cars, our clothes were used. Amanda dressed in the thrift-shop semblance of old Hollywood style: shabby boas, evening gowns missing some sequins. My reporter’s notebooks – props, accessories meant to conjure the image of a journalist – protruded from the pockets of secondhand corduroy coats. I had hand-sewn suede patches onto the elbows myself; they were uneven.

In the daylight, my beard was still patchy and her complexion was still blotchy.

In the dark, though, illuminated only by the light reflecting off the silver screen, the illusion was suddenly complete. There we were, a couple kids playing dress up, fumbling around in the dark….

BEGIN FLASHBACK: The first time I looked to the side instead of straight ahead at the screen was while we were watching Le Grande Illusion in an introductory film studies class in college. I remember everyone’s rapturous looks in the light reflecting off the silver screen – their necks craned upward, toward the illumination. I felt like we were sharing a communal experience, like we were worshipping at a church.

Outside, it was dark. Inside, there was at least a little light….

END FLASHBACK: The first time our eyes met, mine and Amanda’s, was my first time looking to the side during a press screening and seeing someone else also looking around at the faces instead of the film.

Soon, we were whispering witticisms like we were desperately auditioning for writing gigs on Mystery Science Theater 3000….                     

CUT TO: ….Just because we shared a real love of MST3K, though, didn’t mean that we shared a real love.

She stood me up at the Razzies. I was pretty pretentious then, though, so I suppose I used the formal name – the “Golden Raspberry Awards” – when I invited her, for the first and last time, to spend time together outside a screening room. I remember the paper tickets – after all, I stared at them for a long time while waiting outside the theater for her – that appeared to have been simply printed on goldenrod paper, and probably cut apart with a couple pairs of complimentary scissors provided for customers, at a Kinko’s somewhere along Sunset Boulevard.

Outside, it was cold and dark. Inside, I had hoped to find at least a little warmth and a little light.

NARRATOR (V.O.): They say that Los Angeles only looks beautiful at night. Why else would Hollywood christen its most glamorous street “Sunset Boulevard”? In the daylight, its streetlights stand next to mismatched imitations of actual architectural styles – empty extensions of the set-building on the studio lots. In the dark, though, viewed from the height of the Hollywood Sign, all the lines of lights along its streets suddenly look meaningful….

After first cutting these scenes out of his stacks of reporter’s notebooks, then taping them together, he had realized that it was somewhat telling – how few of them there were, how little real life there had been between the illegible lines about forgotten films. Yet those scenes, he had realized, were all that were worth keeping.

Those, and the cardboard cover with the security sticker meant to fade out after exposure to daylight. “FADE OUT,” after all, are the last two words at the end of any screenplay. Typed at the end of the last scene, they indicate that the story is over.

He had decided to burn all the rest. There would be at least a little warmth and a little light from the fire, but it wouldn’t last long.

A graduate of the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California, Chad Greene is an assistant professor of English at Cerritos College. Whenever he isn’t planning lessons or grading papers, he is attempting to put together a novel-in-stories tentatively titled Trips and Falls.

The post In The Dark by Chad Greene appeared first on Microliterature.

He was having a road to Damascus moment.  It smote him like a heart attack, a beautiful angina, as he left the office for lunch.  All morning, he’d treated himself to a solitary grind.  He was unfit to be around others, not in his right mind, going a batshit crazy, in fact.  At his computer, reading through a bevy of electronic medical records, he grew more and more depressed.  His job entailed scanning the records to see if the doctors had noted if a patient had any medication allergies.  He then entered the allergies into a database that alerted those same doctors of contraindications when they filed prescriptions.  Ideally, the process should have gone the other way around, since some of the records were more than a year old, but the fact of it was the glue holding this mad world together was haphazard at best.

As he worked, the clicking sounds of keyboard and mouse marking the rhythm of his productivity, he whispered the phrase, “I want to die a robot,” not knowing if it had any meaning or why he kept repeating it, yet enjoying the welling of tears it sometimes triggered.

He spent four hours like this, shackled to the illusion of his monitor’s sterile glow, and then he left the cave of cubicles and ran smack into a panorama of living, breathing sunlight.  He took in the scene of the parking lot all at once: The windswept confetti of yellow leaves scraping on the asphalt a smidgen of semitones below the immense hiss — like waves breaking the shore — of the desiccated seed pods rattling on the branches of the swaying mimosas, and everything else — the cars, the streetlights, the beds of ivy — effortlessly existing within this tiny, infinite slice of 3D.

The clean blue sky rushed at him.  He stared at it intently, his eyeballs drying out in the frigid air.  His appetite for color returned.  He was horny again — for a multitude of things: sensation, passion, comfort, joy, ambition, prosperity and salvation.  For the first time in a month, he felt motivated to stand tall.  Inhaling, he filled his lungs to capacity.  On the exhale, he flushed the sniveling android completely out his head.

Here was the truth.  Not only was he alive, he was a man.

But then he remembered his co-worker, who was equally alive, but a woman.  She, too, would be leaving her desk right about now.  Midweek she ate leftovers or not at all.  But on Mondays and Fridays, she ate at the sandwich shop across the street, always ordering the same meal and consuming it, if possible, at the same table.  Her routine never varied.  She was the most predictable human being on the face of the earth.  How, then, did he not see it coming, what she did to him?

He turned away from the glorious panorama, blinded himself to it.  If she was going to be enjoying this beautiful day, he sure as fuck couldn’t.

Jeff McCrory lives in California. His fiction has appeared in print and online. He would rather write long than short, but believes the precision of flash fiction is a skill that a writer must strive to master.

The post Flat On His Back by Jeff McCrory appeared first on Microliterature.

Darci stood barefoot, ankle deep in Pacific surf. As each wave rolled back, she felt grainy sand being sucked away from under her feet. Signs along the beach warned of rip currents. She imagined swimming freestyle out to the breakers. In the churn and green froth of the undertow, her body would writhe in vain and fail to breach the surface. Bright bubbles of air would boil up from her mouth and wobble away as she sank into the cold green depths. Her blond hair would sway in the currents, and her flesh would glow like submerged porcelain.

Back home the hot Central Valley air puckered like sour citrus. The cloudless sky was garnished with a slice of sun. Two black-suited policemen had come for Daddy. They had chains and cuffs that sparked in the sunlight. Daddy was bullied into a sweaty wrestling match. Darci had jumped on a policeman, slapping at his shoulders to let Daddy go, but she’d been tossed off to somersault into a paneled wall. She was seventeen and already tired of losing. Daddy was dragged out of the trailer in a flurry of hands and shoes. His screams trailed off and were punctuated by a car door slam. He has warrants, they told her. Calm down, or you’re going in too.

A year ago Mom was folded into an air-conditioned hospital room. At first she joked about her morphine drip. What helps you live helps you die. The doctor said her multiple organ failure was due to long term opiate use. Mom’s head shrank daily on the starched pillowcases. Darci tried to fluff up her bedding for support and comfort, but the woman was being consumed by the linens. She would dry out and shrivel up like a salted snail, desiccated tissue in a dead shell. Every surface in the room was cold to the touch. Then the room was empty.

Joey’s black and white spotted fur swelled and subsided with his shattered rib cage. He wheezed and lost a breath for every breath he took. He held his head up for one brave moment, panting over his pink tongue. You couldn’t let the Cocker Spaniel out of the house, though he would try to escape. He had poured out the front door when fifteen-year-old Darci opened it and run into the street. She chased him out and saw him tossed around the front fender of a speeding car like a towel in a dryer. She wept over his broken body at curbside.

She’s driven Daddy’s F-150 the hundred miles to the coast. She faces the sun as it dips into the ocean’s horizon, a fiery pill dissolving in cold waters. The empty sky pales and the sea turns slate grey. Secret currents tow under the surface, pulling away from the beachfront. A stiff onshore breeze whips her hair around. Daylight fails by degrees.

Don Bagley is a graduate of American River College, where he studied art and literature. He lives in north California with his wife and son. His short stories have been featured at 365 Tomorrows, MicroHorror and Salamander Society.

The post Undertow by Donald Bagley appeared first on Microliterature.

“I think that little atmospheric sampling unit had some utility left.” He leaned back, only two minutes into his ten minute break, his back against the wall taking as much of his weight as the bench. The air around still stank of open smoke and metal fires, of alloys separating in rooms not far enough away.

“A lot of people would rather salvage them than repair them. Once a model gets a little age, after it suffers a couple of upgrades and a service pack or two, it becomes economic to just replace it with a newer model. And then they are done for. Mathematics is a killer.” Sitting across from his co-worker, he flashed a dismissive gesture.

“I wonder if they see it coming, if they know the last time they power down that the next big event for them is being disassembled and their parts inspected for utility elsewhere, their useless bits turned over to a subcontractor to turn into slag.” Head back, he could still see at the lower limit of his vision the pure disinterest exuded by his companion across the walkway. Through their years together, this one had always had a cold efficiency, consumed with nothing but disassembly, deciding what was useful and what was not, getting parts into the proper pile. Alternatives were not his thing. There was a rhythm to the work; and it was the rhythm, not the work, that mattered.

“Not much they can do about it. But every so often I do get one where the battery has not been drained. That comes out first thing. But there is a moment there where it is still processing, taking in what is going past, where it is now: a cycle or two where it is wondering what the next input will be.” Yes, what part of the task is this?

“Maybe they are looking for compatible hints of persistent memory. I don’t think they have the processor power to apprehend end of service life, to appreciate their memory will be ripped out and baked clean, or that their processors will soon be as cold as the ice in a salvage plant owner’s drink.” A loose litter unit scurried across the floor, gleefully looking for stray cable pins and wayward salvage chips tracked off of the main disassembly floor by the workers.   The minimal processor strength machine seemed downright happy to be following an optimized geometric pattern – having itself surveyed the limits of its track on the floor, then plotted a path that would take it over the whole of the plane in a time calculated to reach each part of the flat surface concomitant with the likelihood of any specific part of that surface hiding loose litter.

“I think they are just dumb machines. They don’t know what is being done to them, and they are just as well off as disassembled units as they are as productive work units.” He followed the movements of the litter collector until it moved beneath the work bench. It was not interesting enough for him to lean forward to see what the small device was busily doing beneath the bench.   Presumably, it had a pattern to follow.

“Well, back to it.” He rose, and unplugged from the charging unit. He tugged at this electric tether until the retractor caught and the cord fell back into the niche in his frame. An internal diagnostic confirmed he was as powered as he needed to be, so he began the roll back to his place on the line.

His friend followed in nearly the same path, calculating, for no reason beyond idleness, how many kilograms of unwanted machinery would be backed up at his station, and how long on average it would take to clear the backlog and fall back then into a simple real time processing loop.   At the next power up and mini-diagnostics break, the line would be idle at times, and workload could be allowed to back up while the workers on this stretch of the line took a few minutes to care for themselves.

From beneath the bench, the litter unit waited, watching to make sure the larger line units were out of the way. The unit under the bench tapped a collection tentacle quietly on the floor, and tried for only an unclaimed moment to connect with the similar unit that a while ago had started to beam out a schematic of something he called ‘rocking’: an empty cycle activity with some strange spike moderating effect. But he had to stay focused: one collision with a full sized salvage unit, and he could end as a victim of the salvage line himself; but, if he were careful, he would have pleasant cycles yet of contentedly collecting the stray dross that rolls and skips and settles on the floor of the kingdom he has been assigned. His wondrous kingdom. So much to do. So much to do. So much to do.

Ken Poyner often serves as unlikely and well-worn eye-candy at his wife’s powerlifting meets. His latest collection of brief fictions, “Constant Animals”, can be located through links on his website, www.kpoyner.com. He has had recent work out in “Corium”, “Asimov’s Science Fiction”, “Poet Lore”, “Sein und Werden” and a few dozen other places. When power lifting season is only at a low boil, he spends his time acting as a place for any number of his four cats to coil.

The post The Selfishness of Work by Ken Poyner appeared first on Microliterature.

A friend read my course load for spring semester, shaking his head at one of the class titles. “Women in Literature?” he asked. “You’ll never get laid in that class.” I had learned to step away from him when I saw his eyes wander from our conversation to women walking along the quadrangle. He stood agog but my gender made me feel as culpable as the passing women deemed me complicit.

I had purchased my books, read the course outline, and looked forward to the poems and stories of female authors I would be reading. Waiting in the hall for class to begin one day, a female classmate with short brunette hair shouldered her book bag and mentioned the reading assignment. She asked if I wasn’t getting a little tired of stories about teenage menstruation. I realized that I was not alone. In fact, when I suggested the “Lab Fee” was probably for the cost of personal examination mirrors, she laughed and said, “Yeah, I thought I was taking a literature course, too.”

As one young man among thirty women and their professor, I would offer an opinion in her class and be ignored. Once the pronoun attached to my words had changed, my femaile peers were willing to discuss my ideas. They were free to plagiarize me, repeating what I said verbatim, as if I hadn’t just uttered those very words. Until they needed another talking point, I drifted.

Having moved a thousand miles away from home years ago, I found myself corresponding with a friend who was working as a nanny some fifteen hundred miles away near the Gulf Coast. She was blond, heavy-chested, and wending her way through life with her body. With me, though, it had been Chinese takeout and fortune cookies that read: Sorry, I can’t; I’m saving myself for marriage. Regardless, we remained friends as life lead us in different directions.

On a night when the Santa Anna winds were scorching my Indian summer, she called me. Hearing a friendly female voice was comforting, but I hadn’t given her my telephone number. The next call from Houston was a hundred percent hot with frightening humidity. Her voice was panicked and pleading for help.   Apparently she had a boyfriend, and he was beating her again. She couldn’t take any more. “He’s black and he’s gonna kill me,” she cried. “But I don’t have enough money to leave, Robert!”

“You’ve got to get out of there!” I said. I couldn’t bear knowing my friend was in pain. So I wired her a thousand dollars that night and told her to stay in a hotel by the airport.

Her boyfriend calmed down for a week, until she needed more money, I would learn. She had taken me for another grand before I caught on to her scam. I imagined them laughing at me from their deadbeat apartment, smoking their crack pipe and convinced they could fleece me a third time.

Class ended upon a student’s recitation of a short story. After which the brunette in the desk across the aisle from me muttered in discontent, “Did anyone else see anything wrong with an adolescent girl trying to escape her period by climbing a cherry tree?”

B. E. Smith is a freelance writer from Utah. In addition to essay and article publications, his stories and poems have appeared in anthologies and magazines such as Gutter Eloquence, Zygote in My Coffee, The Legendary, Static Movement, the delinquent, and in the current issue of The Binnacle. He lives in Salt Lake City and is writing a memoir.

The post Birds, Bees, and Girls in Trees by B. E. Smith appeared first on Microliterature.

Laid flowers on six graves this summer. Beloved, departed, father, grandparents, aunts. So many. Three cemeteries, two cities. Faces everywhere, benevolent, sad in their own death. They stare from elaborate headstones. My eyes full with the sight of marbled well-tended graves, overflowing with expensive bouquets and blood red candles. Each family more anxious than the other, because to show devotion in afterlife surely matters to their poor beloved dead. With puffed out chests they carry these trophies for those who wait, a competition it is. Look at that grave, how loved he she must be. So well tended, they must visit often.

And look at that one. Poor thing. Not a soul that cares. Maybe they are all dead together.

No one to bring them bouquets and candles in that case. Plastic flowers are the best they say. They last almost forever. One doesn’t have to worry about them. Nobody wants to run to the piazza early Sunday morning for fresh ones. Especially in winter. And the candles are important too. There is a system to this. Not a game you know. Everything must be placed so and so and don’t you dare step on the dead, walk around that mound, are you crazy?!

Everyone knows Sundays are for visiting the dead. Daughters, mothers, sisters… nieces dressed in their best black. You have to look proper, it’s a sign of respect, they say. Who visits the dead in jeans, any-day shirt?

“No, listen here, you must look tastefully heartbroken. But in black please.”

As if they can see. This brigade of those long dead. As if they cared. They would rather be outside their damp resting places. Not their choice. I imagine what lies underneath and it’s not good. The pictures in my head are all ugly and it hurts in the bones to think like that. It all is just too much, but I can’t stop. It’s a madness of sorts really. Visiting graves does something to you for sure.

I would much rather be sipping cappuccino and smoking a slim cigarette at that café by the murky river of my hometown. My head is heavy now from the scent of all these flowers, cloying… and the dying smoke from the candles. Then there is the simple wooden cross, where one sister in her torment has planted violets for another and tends the grave as if it was a godamn English garden. I watch a boy weep… punch the rain-soaked earth under which his friend newly dies. A young mother wails from over there.

Curled like an earthworm over a small grave, broken in two, she waits. It’s pretty. The tomb. Angels and cherubs and a fountain. Heaven on earth they say. A father. Gone under a ceiling of leaves. On his tombstone, words of courage. His last.

Giant chestnuts and poplars stoically bear witness to many farewells and a sea of tears. Sentries. Below their gnarled branches, heavy with age and knowledge, they guard thousands of gone souls.

How heavy a burden they carry. Decades have passed and here they are. Still. Rooted to their spot with nowhere to go. Day after day, procession after procession we dump our dead at their feet. Thankfully, the day is waning. Slowly, everyone walks home, heads and shoulders bent and shriveled, aged a hundred years or more. They leave their beloved alone for a while. Until next Sunday, they say.

On Sunday they will do it all over again.

Zvezdana Rashkovich is an American writer and author born in ex-Yugoslavia and raised in the Sudan. Her work has appeared in New World Writing, Inkapture and Huffington Post among others.
Her short story and a poem have been anthologized in When Women Waken Anthologies. Zvezdana currently lives in Dubai where she is working on a novel ‘Africa in the Way I Dance.’

The post Sundays We Visit The Dead by Zvezdana Rashkovich appeared first on Microliterature.

After he drowned while quahogging in frigid waters, Norman was surprised that he could hang around for his wake. The spirit has flown, he remembered the saying, but in his case, not very far. He had left his body, but not his zip code. This was a happy discovery, since it was important for him to see if Sylvia would show.

The whole thing had worked so unexpectedly. There was no magic, no visitation from the spirit world, no angel or devil telling him it was okay to stay, giving him the green light. He knew___ that was all. Leave it at that.

He knew too that if he wanted to fly and twitter like a sparrow or hop like a bunny, he could do it. He preferred the former, because when he tried the latter, he spooked his dog, Happy D., the best friend he’d ever had.

Happy D. was sleeping in the grass in Norman’s backyard, and when Norman brushed by him, he whimpered the way dogs do in their sleep sometimes. This was interesting to him since like most people, he had always attributed that phenomenon to bad dreams.

Norman’s favorite thing to do at present was to hover, hover and reflect on whether or not a wake could be one of those great moments of people, like a wedding day or the birth of a child. The irony had not escaped him that those things were about beginnings and this was about an ending. He had no idea if another door would open after everybody left the room, but he could hope.

Golden rays of sun bent through the upper windows of the meeting house now, the light catching the paper stars and moons which hung from the dusty rafters, where Norman sat and watched the world below.

The place used to belong to the Universalist Unitarians, who had let it out to all kinds of seekers. Nowadays it was a market for urban gardeners and sometimes still, a coffeehouse for fledgling folk singers.

He was glad his daughter Andrea chose this spot for his wake because it proved she had listened to his stories about her mother. He was not a man of belief, other than a belief in love. Yes, he did believe in that. In fact, love had caused him to chase Andrea’s mother Sylvia through every café and coffeehouse in the city, including this one. If she came today she might sing, and love would lift him, to paraphrase the old spiritual.

What would they say of him after all? His daughter? His brother? His friends? What was there to say? He was never a bulldog for accuracy. He was not flamboyant. He was never handy with his hands, although he could cut a line when house painting. He yearned to play Hawaiian folk music but barely learned to strum a ukulele. At times he had not risen to the occasion. After he turned fifty, he had a tendency to dehydrate and faint. He read too much and worried Andrea too much. He did not take precautions in water. Letting go of those clams might have…

He had been a fool for Sylvia the folksinger, though. Sylvia, who used to cut his hair and sing in coffeehouses. Who married him and gave him a lovely daughter. Whose silky voice soothed the endings of his nerves and took him to Elysium.

People ambled into the room now. There were Andrea and her husband Jerome. Jerome walked Happy D. at the end of a leash. Thanks for that, he thought.

The house music came up. Dead zombie music, one of his neighbor’s kids had called Richie Havens just a few months earlier when Norman had let him come over to play Frisbee with the dog.

Funny kid, he thought now, prescient kid. Then he noticed something happening. Things were changing. The mourners began to look more like fuzzy dots with appendages than human beings.

Some people remained intact, but others in the crowd were fading into obscurity.

Thinking the sun-splattered dust might be clouding his vision, Norman floated down from the rafters and took a seat in front.

From there he could see Andrea, as clear as a jewel and beautiful and Happy D., but his brother Paul was becoming blurry. Norman began to worry that some calculus regarding the time he had left had been worked out already. Either something was coming or he was going.

He realized, too, that he was powerless to affect the pace at which the living did things. No way to skip the testimonials, forget the slideshow and go straight to James Brown, the Narragansett beer and the wine. The clam cakes and the chowder.

Now Andrea slipped behind the podium. Next to her, on a marble-topped table, sat an urn that would have made Keats envious. Norman’s ashes were piled up inside. She glanced at it and great spasms of tears passed through her. Jerome rushed to her side, passed a handkerchief. Things grew hazier and sped up.

The moon and stars hanging from the rafters spun crazily now, and Norman recalled a dream or he was back in the dream, He couldn’t tell.

Inside the cabin of the jumbo jet flying west into the sun, everything was white and he felt drowsy, stretched out on an oversized and cushy row of seats. There were other passengers on the plane, but he, seated in the rear of the cabin, could see only the backs of their heads, the silver-haired men and the women wearing adorable hats.

Then music again, the same Richie Havens song as before, but this time the voice was Sylvia’s.

“If all the things you see ain’t what they seem,” she sang, “Then don’t mind me ‘cos I ain’t nothin’ but a dream. And you can follow; And you can follow; follow…,”

Yes, he told himself as his eyelids drooped and his spirit rose, that is something I can do.

Wayne Cresser’s fiction has been nominated for awards at New Letters, the Tennessee Writer’s Alliance and the Newport Review, published in the print anthologies Motif 1-3 (Motes Books), online at Wandering Army, The Written Wardrobe (@ModCloth), The Oklahoma Review, The Journal of Microliterature, Shark Reef Literary Magazine and The Burlesque Press Variety Show, and in such print journals as The Ocean State Review and The Sound and Literary Art Book (SLAB) .

The post Follow by Wayne Cresser appeared first on Microliterature.

My late grandfather painted this lovely oil painting on canvas. It’s a landscape of a waterfall in Yosemite National Park in California that he used to visit as a young man before he left my grandmother for the war. Painting comes in a gilt-wood frame, signed with his initials (H.B) and dated 1938. Measures 24 x 18 inches.

Serious bids only please.

Ben White writes Midnight Stories and edits Nanoism, both ongoing collections of extremely brief fiction.

The post 1938 “Yosemite Landscape” Oil Painting by Ben White appeared first on Microliterature.

“Who sent you again?”

“I told you already.   Gordy King. He said to make sure you know he sent me.”

“I never heard of him.”

“Whadya mean, you never hearda him? Gordy King.”

“Where’s he from?”

“Rego Park…don’t gimme that. You know where’s he’s from.”

“I don’t, I swear. On my mother’s grave, I swear. I haven’t been to the city in years. I have a nice house out here on the island. Massapequa. My store is in Merrick.”

“Yeah, so why’s the King gimme ten big ones to off you?”

“That’s what I’m telling you. I don’t know. Maybe there’s been some kind of mistake.”

“No mistake. You Ben Shoenfeld?”

“Yeah.”

“You own Ben’s Men’s Clothing?”

“Yeah, Ben’s Men’s Wholesale Clothing. But you know how many Ben’s clothing stores there are in Nassau Count alone? Six that I know of. There’s Ben’s for Men, Big Ben’s Suits, Benny’s Best Buys…but none of them have the selection I have, that I can assure you.”

“Look. You’re the one I came to whack, so don’t make it hard. Just get in the car and let’s go for a drive. I wanna get on Southern State before traffic.”

“A drive? I don’t have time for a drive. If I don’t get back to the store, they’ll rob me blind. You know who I have working the register? My wife’s cousin’s boy. He shows up for work last week, first day on the job You know what he’s wearing? Jeans from Penny’s and a T-shirt that says, ‘Eat more nuts.’ I put him in a nice blue blazer with dark slacks and an off-white shirt. He picks out an ugly yellow and red tie, but what the hell? It’ll come out of his first month’s salary.”

“Look, Ben. You mind I call you Ben? I got no beef witya. It’s up to me, I’d say, ”Enjoy your house   in Massapequa Park.”

“Massapequa Park? I told you, I live in Massapequa. Massapequa Park’s on the other side of Sunrise Highway, where the rich people live. “What? Let me look this up again. Ben Shoenfield, 1632 Lilac Lane in Massapequa Park.”

“No, look at my driver’s license. I’m Ben ShoenFELD, 1623 Lily Lane in Massapequa. I know the Shoenfield you’re looking for. A real gonef.”

“A who?”

“A thief. A crook. He owns Ben’s Clothes for Men. Such prices? I wouldn’t buy a pair of socks from him.”

“Ah, shit. I thought it was just the houses that were the same. How the hell do you find your way home at night?   Look, Benny. No hard feelings, right? But I gotta go. I got a job to do, know what I mean?

“Sure. We all gotta make a buck. Do me a favor? Give my regards to Ben ShoenFIELD. And come to the store when you’re done. I’ll fit you nice. What are you, a 48 long? For you, 25% off.”

Wayne Scheer has been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes and a Best of the Net. He’s published hundred of stories, poems and essays in print and online, including Revealing Moments, a collection of flash stories, available at http://issuu.com/pearnoir/docs/revealing_moments. Wayne lives in Atlanta with his wife and can be contacted at wvscheer@aol.com.

The post Making a Buck by Wayne Scheer appeared first on Microliterature.

Clink.

The machine whirred, woken by a bicentennial quarter into the dust-blackened slit. Rusted gears clicked and an antique metal horse came to life.

“Yeehaw!” Tattered cowboy hat and boots, he rode.

He straddled the mechanical mount, the calliope’s tinny melody the backdrop for a Wild West imagination. Orange pistol safely holstered, the boy wound his fingers through frayed nylon reigns.

A sea of sun-warmed prairie grass replaced shopping carts and concrete, hiding from the cowboy’s view the woman backed slowly away.

“I’m just gonna get more change.”

With a vibrating jerk, the metallic steed came to rest. Impatient, the restless cowboy called to a mother long gone.

Victoria Elizabeth is a lifetime student of the arts, literature, and life as a whole. She recently completed her BFA in Creative Writing and began her MLS in Spring 2014 at Rollins College.

The post Sandy Horse by Victoria Webster-Perez appeared first on Microliterature.

It’s a vintage morning, the town’s full of life the way it is on market days when families drive in from the farms and villages, not just to stock up and do the chores, but for the chance to enjoy a chinwag, take their minds off the weather, cut themselves some slack. So he dawdles from the station, all the time trying not to kid himself that he doesn’t still feel as invisible as he did the day he gave up on his old life, that anyone, even people he’s sure he could put a name to given the chance, will spot him and ask, the way you do, “Is that you, Jack? Good to see you again! Back in God’s own country at last, are you? Welcome home, mate.”

He’s hungry and feels as weak as a kitten, but ignoring a growling stomach and trying to keep steady without using his stick across the granite setts, he heads for the beach. This time of year, too chilly for tourists, it’ll be empty except for dog-walkers, joggers and, if the tide’s right, a straggle of bait-diggers grubbing for ragworm, bent over forks and buckets, but keeping an eye on the weather, knowing its tricks like the backs of their hands. He walks through the arch in what used to be part of the town wall and away from the shelter of the rows of shops and houses that have sat rubbing shoulders there since the year dot. In the open, the wind has an edge that cuts right through him.

He isn’t the man he was either and by the time he tastes salt, he’s as good as keeling over. Puffing like a grampus, he slumps down in the lee of a groyne and struggles to hold himself together while the world comes back into focus. He feels paper-thin and longs to close his eyes, give up on consciousness, just drift away. But he fights it, there’ll be time later for losing himself in darkness. Instead, he waits and watches, notices small things, young men in wet suits and harness flying outsize kites, two girls in lycra, quick and laughing, running side by side across the sand. Under his hand he finds a shell, small, snail-shaped, delicate, translucent when he holds it to the light. Some vanished creature’s temporary home.

Although resident in South East Asia for a good many years, Ken Head, who is married and has two children, now lives in Cambridge, England, where he was, but is no longer, a teacher of Philosophy and English Literature. His work, as author, poet and reviewer, appears regularly both online and in print. 2013 saw the publication of Prospero’s Bowl, his most recent poetry collection.  

The post Revenant by Ken Head appeared first on Microliterature.

It was a rainy October day in 2013 that Thierry and Simone came to the place on Le Pont des Arts where precisely one year earlier they had attached a lock to symbolize the permanence of their love. Theirs was not an original act. Years of locks were encrusted on the bridge’s handrails like a tumor. They huddled together under a black umbrella barely big enough for one person. Simone’s right arm and shoulder became drenched while Thierry remained dry.

It took Thierry ten minutes to find it, but beneath a year’s aggregation of other locks he found the lock with his and Simone’s names written on it. “This lock came with two keys,” he said holding the lock. “I threw the first in the water; I kept the other until I was sure whether we were meant to be together forever.”

Simone looked at Thierry kneeling before her. Now that she was holding the umbrella, she was shielded from the rain. The rain had plastered Thierry’s hair to his skull while he had looked for the lock. Simone knew he had been up to something when he had insisted they come to the bridge despite the rain; she thought she understood now.

Thierry opened the lock and threw the lock into the river. He rose to his feet quickly, putting his arm between Simone and the bridge railing as if to keep her from jumping.

Simone said nothing. She walked past Thierry, taking the umbrella with her.

“Where are you going?” Thierry asked.

She ignored him. Five meters away, she knelt down and began searching through the locks on that part of the railing, leaving the umbrella upside down on the pavement at her side. When Thierry reached her side, she held up a brass and steel padlock. Written on it with red nail polish were the words Alain et Simone, 12 Octobre 12. Exactly one week after Thierry had put the lock with his and Simone’s name on the bridge.

“You had an extra key. I had an extra lover.”

D. A. Hosek is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Tampa. His fiction has appeared in The Southampton Review.

The post Le Pont des Arts by D. A. Hosek appeared first on Microliterature.

Lew Welch was a poet. Most people have only heard of him because of The Beat Generation and City Lights Books. He was good, though. Not just a hanger-on to the old crowd.

The story goes that Lew, in desperation to become a poet, moved away from the city. He wrote as much as he could at night, but he had to take a day job. Then he had to take extra shifts. Soon enough, he was too tired to write his poems at night. So, as a last compromise, he took a gun into the woods to end his life.

His body has never been found.

Some people spread rumours that he was still alive, living in a cabin and writing poems there. Other people said he killed himself and is now a part of the earth. Very zen, just like his later poems. Devon and I think that he’s still there, hiding. Whether as a ghost or an outlaw, we do not know.

In the morning, just before dawn, Devon and I get up and carry our guns into the woods.

“If a tree falls in the forest and there isn’t anyone around, does it make a sound?” Devon asks me with a laugh. He cocks the gun and steps over a rock.

If a poet goes off into the woods to kill himself, but no one finds his body, is he immortal? I do not know. If a poet produces work but cannot support himself, is he a poet? Lew didn’t think so. He wandered into these very woods, fed up with jobs in factories and being too tired to write. You buy the car to go to work and you go to work to pay for the car. In the modern age, this is our Sisyphean myth.

But there is another side to the story, Devon and I know. There is Charles Bukowski, who worked at a post office for ten years and never picked up a pen until suddenly he decided he had enough. He left to drink and write in his room until the end. There will always be outlaws who do not want to believe that they need to be ghosts in order to leave their careers behind. We can just wake up with guns and decide another fate.

Devon and I have left our jobs at twenty-nine. We wander into the woods because we think it’s going to be an easier fate. The two of us, writing partners like an ouroboros, go together so we can answer at least one question. If you wander into the woods in search of a ghost, does that mean you’re dead too?

Together, we know who we are. We see our reflections in the water, but unlike Narcissus, we do not fall in. We stop and get a drink. We move on.

“Who are your favourite partners in crime?” Devon asks.

“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”

“Bonnie and Clyde.”

“Jesse and Frank James.”

We step forward, past the pathway and into the thick trees. I check the map and old pages of poetry from Lew’s first published book. Things have certainly changed in forty years. There is more concrete and less woods. But we come upon a clearing that was the last place people looked. Poor Lew had no one to protect him, to help understand him until we arrived.

“Hey, hey Lew! We’re home!” we shout.

We get nothing as a response.

When we get to the centre of pine trees, we clear away the dirt. We sweep until we have a nice clean crop circle.

“What is your favourite book?” Devon asks.

“Catch 22,” I tell him. “What is your favourite myth?”

“Icarus.”

We wait under the hot sun, our guns melting in our hands.

“Hey Lew! Are you here?”

“Come on, Lew. How are you doing?”

We wait for the answer to our questions so we feel less alone. So we feel less like ghosts. Nothing comes.

“What is your favourite ghost story?” Devon asks me. “You know, aside from Lew?”

I think about it but I can’t come up with anything.

If we don’t find Lew soon, then Devon and I will walk away from one another. We will stand back to back, recite some verse, and then march and count to ten. We will turn around and fight one another, like outlaws, like cowboys. This is better than slam poetry. May the best artist – or ghost – win.

After an hour of waiting and calling for Lew, we begin to walk. Devon is taller than me and I feel his shoulder blades against the crown of my head. We begin to count.

“One.”

“Two.”

As we march on, we feel the earth shake in the distance. A loud crack echoes through the air, between the pine trees. I hear it. I turn to Devon, before we even reach five or ten. His eyes flare. He hears it too.

“Welcome home, Lew,” I say.

We hear another gunshot as a response.

Evelyn Deshane’s work has appeared in The Fieldstone Review, Hyacinth Noir, and Absynthe Magazine. In 2013, she was the runner-up for A&U Magazine’s fiction contest. She is also the poetry editor for Prosaic Magazine and has worked on the digital collections of poet P. K. Page. She lives in Canada. 

The post The Ghost of Lew Welch by Evelyn Deshane appeared first on Microliterature.

The shriek of steel blade on brick: he scraped the bloody body up and tossed it, still writhing, toward the trashcan.

The post My Mother Refuses To Dig Any More Flowerbeds With Our New Shovel After She Sees Dad Use It To Decapitate A Four-Foot Rattlesnake By The Birdbath by Luke Whisnant appeared first on Microliterature.

“Here, just let me do it.”

Large and clumsy Mal picked up the heavy wooden chest, levering it into his elbow sockets. He nearly fell backwards but caught himself. He had stupidly come upstairs with only his socks on. The floor of the attic had a thick layer of grime. There were dead houseflies scattered like bodies on Omaha Beach. The sunlight created a dust soup. The lone light bulb was encased in spider web.

Myra had a sad, weathered face. She fidgeted. She was too small to carry the chest.

As Mal labored, he was irritated by a memory. When he was a child, he had been sent up to the attic of his parents’ home to gather boxes of old pictures. There was a family gathering (aunts, uncles, cousins). They were boisterously exchanging family stories. The stories were distorted for humorous effect, eventually becoming inaccurate. As the storytelling approached a climactic pitch, clumsy Mal fell down the stairs, bouncing between the walls, making a loud crashing sound as folding chairs (which had been leaning against the walls) and boxes of photographs went flying. The timing of the crash was perfect, as if it had been scripted in a sitcom, and aunts and cousins burst out with a laugh track. This incident became a family story in itself, told for years at every family gathering.

As Mal was reminiscing, he slipped, attempting to avoid crunching a housefly carcass, and the chest tumbled out of his elbows. The chest initially hit the stairs upside down. Some contents slipped partially out, but when the chest rolled upright, the lid came back down, pinning a framed picture such that about three-quarters of it was visible.

Myra froze. The picture was a black-and-white photo of a handsome young man in a military uniform. This man was the love of her life and the father of her first child, Gordon, now an adult. Myra married Mal two months after the military man left her, pregnant, with no one to turn to except Mal. Mal never knew and never suspected.

Myra tiptoed to the chest, avoiding the flies, and she adjusted the contents so that the picture slipped back inside. She turned to her husband. Mal was on all fours, looking at Myra.

“Herbie Heisdorfman?” Mal inquired.

“Huh?”

“The man in the picture. Do you know him?”

It had been a while since Myra had to calculate so quickly. She looked at the floor as she stammered. “Uh, you know, I think my sister Sarah dated him. She must have had his picture stuffed in Mom’s old belongings. I don’t know why that picture is there.” She shrugged her shoulders. The sad face remained.

Mal’s mouth hung open for a moment. “Oh. Funny. My cousin Alice dated him, I think a year or two before Gordon was born.”

Myra stopped breathing. Mal paused.

“Yeah, I don’t think I ever told you this. There was a rumor that he got Alice pregnant with Gladys.”

He looked directly at Myra. “Poor bastard.”

Myra shrugged her shoulders, shook her head, pretended to be ignorant, her ability to verbalize any thought whatsoever temporarily halted. She knew Herbie didn’t make it out of Europe.

Mal looked down at his hands, now forming prints in the grime. He was feeling too lazy to get up and move the chest again. He half chuckled, half sighed.

“Heh. Family rumors.”

Gregory Horace grew up in Iowa and currently works as a physician in Minnesota. This is his first published work of fiction in over 25 years.

The post Housefly Memories by Gregory Horace appeared first on Microliterature.

There was this nightmare I used to have over and over again when I was eight, when I would imagine that after you died, your mind still worked and it was just your body that died, so you couldn’t move or breathe but you could still think, and that graveyards were just full of people going crazy with all their thoughts and nothing to look at in the cramped darkness of the coffins they were trapped in. The last time I had that nightmare it woke me up. I was shivering and my bangs were wet and stringy with sweat. I called for my mom and she came, and when I told her the dream, she said, “When you’re dead you’re dead. That’s it. There’s nothing else out there. You live and then you die. You won’t feel a thing after you’re dead. You won’t even know you’re dead.” She was trying to comfort me. It worked, I guess, because I stopped having the dream. But until that point I thought maybe I was wrong in a good way, like, maybe there was a heaven where everybody who was good got to go and have a second chance at things, like Annie Mitchell who was in the grade above me and got killed in a pileup on I-75 when a truck crushed the minivan she was riding in. Because those things didn’t seem fair; a lot of things didn’tseem fair, and I wondered if maybe there was a place where everything got evened out again. But after my mom told me that I just knew no matter what anybody else said, once you were dead you were dead. It made sense, in a dull, final, chest-achey way.

Eleanor Kriseman is a Florida native who now lives in Brooklyn and works as an editorial assistant. Before that, she worked for years as a bookseller at an independent bookstore, where she met a lot of really great dogs and humans. She has been published in NYU’s undergraduate literary magazine West 10th,Vol. 1 Brooklyn’s Wednesday essay series, Joyland Magazine, and has work forthcoming in Bennington’s online journal Plain China. 

The post When You’re Dead, You’re Dead by Eleanor Kriseman appeared first on Microliterature.

Until the age of six, when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up I eloquently replied, “A pig.” Remember the movie Babe? Some pig he was. Just a pink, nascent character who stopped the fall of the ax. I wanted my faint squeals to stop the world, too. I wanted to come out of the dark crevices of my room and live in my thin skin with the other beasts in my family. Where could I hide when my brother punched a hole in the wall? The world wasn’t big enough for him. But it was too big for me. Pigs grow and grow if they eat more. I thought the world could seem smaller if I looked down at ungulate hooves and a portly belly. Why not grow out instead of up? You could call me a dreamer, I guess. Later, I read Animal Farm. Somehow, Babe and Napoleon inhabited the same meaty flesh. Then the world seemed too small.

Molly Ruddell lives in Philadelphia. She’s previously published in Apiary magazine and has a few other not-quite-as-short pieces coming out in Page and Spine and Gravel.

The post Big Dreams by Molly Ruddell appeared first on Microliterature.

It is Ghost Month yet again, and yet again my entire sidewalk is littered with money. Fake money. Hell Money. Money that fell from the sky, fluttered out of windows, from boys riding bitch on bicycles, or men on mopeds. If it is true that death is a part of life, so is cleaning up after the celebration that observes it.

In Java, they call it the Hungry Ghost festival. But all they do is eat dumplings and sweets in fancy restaurants, and leave out bits of burning incense for the returning spirits. And toss fake money on the streets as they zoom by in their shining cars, urging us, with each fallen golden note, to remember! remember! Yet you’d think the ghosts—being hungry—might want their incense with a side of orange slices, a kiwi. Or even a pineapple. I have beautiful hands of bananas and mangoes for sale, but do these money tossers stop at my cart and toss real money my way to buy apples and grapes for their hungry dead? And do they ever stop to wonder who will clean up their scattered fake money after they’d had their fun and games? No, they do not.

When I was a child, my grandmother always used food to honor her hungry ghosts. Then she’d stack the notes in a small pile in her shrine and burn them up. She used to say that the Gods are summoned and the Gods are present in the creation of the offering. “Once it’s offered,” she said, “it is no longer sacred.” I sometimes wonder if that’s the same attitude the Gods took when humans were made. Maybe you have to die to know the answer. But I don’t carry on my grandmother’s superstitions. And I won’t throw hell notes, either, although it’s clear I will be the one picking them up, on account of the sweltering heat and this substandard broom. Perhaps the dead have returned to earth, but who do we think we’re fooling with this fake money? With this trash mess that I must now pick up, one by one, with my bare hands, because people seem to think litter cleans up after itself?

It’s one day after the Hungry Ghost Festival, and no one minds their step when walking on my dirty golden sidewalk, and no one cares that their footfalls land on the mucked up Hell Notes. They zip by on their bikes and mopeds, bearing down on horns, heading off to work or school. Another day in the life. Another day when the dead are forgotten. And yet, I cannot forget so long as the sidewalk near my cart is littered. My wife thinks I torment our dead. “The reason why we get no business is because you don’t respect your ancestors,” she says. But who is now down on his knees, picking up dollar after fake trampled hell dollar? Who is stacking them like his grandmother used to, even with the filthy imprinted footfalls of a hundred people and packs of dogs and those sidewalk bicycle riders? Let those fools get together and believe they’re taking care of the dead for one night out of the year. I sell the fruit. I clean my sidewalk. And I will burn the hell notes in my home stove because we cannot afford the firewood right now, because I believe in taking care of the living.

Erica Plouffe Lazure’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, the Greensboro Review, Meridian, Eleven-Eleven, Inkwell, Litro (UK), North Carolina Literary Review, Booth Literary Journal, The New Guard, and elsewhere. She lives and teaches in Exeter, New Hampshire.

The post Hell Notes by Erica Plouffe Lazure appeared first on Microliterature.

“You’ve been out for a while. You find anything?”

“No. Just a few of these coins,” he said withdrawing his hand from his pocket.

“You spent six hours collecting these dirty coins?”

“It’s a labor of love, Helen.”

“There are other things you could labor over,” she said defiantly.

“You’ve known me for 35 years. This is what I do.”

“Yes. I’ve known you for 35 years, but I hardly know you anymore. You spend more time hunting artifacts than you do in this house.”

“So what are you saying?”

“Nothing,” she paused. “Are they worth anything?”

Terry shook his head no and placed the coins on the kitchen table before leaving the room. He leaned his metal detector upright in the broom closet then plopped down on to the recliner. Helen had seen that same movement a million times throughout the years. Kitchen-closet-recliner.

She never asked why his hands were never dirty or why he never brought any digging tools. She left it alone. That’s Terry, she thought. He’s his own person. She couldn’t understand his obsession with old things. Fragments of rifles, tiny musket balls, buttons from army uniforms – all from the Civil War. He had grown worse as of late.

In the early years, 1960 or so, it was cute, his habits. It was a genuine passion of his and she loved him for it. He even took their eldest boy Jeff with him when he was old enough to walk. He was a great father, the way he treasured those kids. For years it was fun to see all the little trinkets he would bring home. He never did research, he just somehow knew the stories behind each item. He lived for that kind of stuff.

But the kids are grown now. And here we are alone in the house we built. Just me, Terry, and his things. We don’t talk much more. Our time together is hardly of any value. He spends most days out on the battlefields and I spend mine trying to catch up to him. We’re not that old, I think to myself sometimes. 55, that’s still young. But I feel my years every time he comes home silent and lost in his own world of days gone by.

When I find the faded phone number of another woman hidden away in his dresser of antiques I don’t bring it up. I place it back where I found it and push the drawer closed and content myself with it being another one of Terry’s things. Just another token of time that he doesn’t share with me.

Michael O’Neill is a fiction and poetry writer residing in Chicago. His work has appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine, Two Sentence Stories, Nanoism, Confetti Fall, and Cuento Magazine.

The post Antiques by Michael O’Neill appeared first on Microliterature.

“Hi. I saw your advertisement,” said the girl, standing at the front door.

He smiled at her. He gestured to her to come inside.

“I’ve never really done anything like this before,” she said. “Have you?”

“Oh—by post, you mean? Once or twice.” He added, “But never with anyone like you. I mean—not with anyone my age. The others were older.”

She smiled, weakly.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he added. “Where are my manners? May I take your coat?”

She handed the boy her outerwear. He dutifully hung it on a nearby coat rack.

“We have the place for two hours. Do you want to—talk first?” he asked.

“Sure. I guess so.”

They sat down.

“I guess I’ve wanted to try this for awhile now,” she said. “I just needed to work up the courage. When I saw your advertisement, I—“ her voice trailed to nothing. She searched in vain for the right words to say.

He just smiled. Then he gave a reassuring nod. “I know what you mean. I felt exactly the same way my first time.”

“So—you won’t be angry and disappointed if I’m—if I’m not very good?”

“No, of course not!”

They shared an awkward, pregnant silence. Suddenly, she jumped up from her chair and said, “Alright, then. Let’s go do it.” She gave a nervous laugh. She added, “Before I lose my nerve!”

The boy led the way up the stairs. He pulled out a key from his pocket, and unlocked a door at the top of the steps. The two stepped inside.

After a few minutes of instruction, he said to her, “Give me your hand. Now, grab ‘hold and don’t be afraid. It won’t break.” He gave her a reassuring smile.

“Back and forth, back and forth—a gentle, steady rhythm. Yes! That’s right! Keep it up! Good! You have the method.”

Ten minutes later, the girl was grinning from ear to ear. Under the boy’s gentle tutelage, she continued her skillful performance, following his method flawlessly: beginning in rounds, changing without repeating rows. It was magical!

The girl knew she would be forever enamored to the hobby of bell ringing.

Phil Temples grew up in Bloomington, Indiana USA. He’s lived in and around Boston, Massachusetts for the past thirty years and works as a computer systems administrator at Boston College. For over ten years, Phil has written flash and short sci-fi/fantasy primarily for his own enjoyment.

His stories have appeared in several online journals, including: Boston Literary Magazine, Bewildering Stories, The Zodiac Review, The World of Myth, InfectiveINk, Daily Frights 2013, Bleeding Ink Anthology, and Stupefying Stories. Phil produced a murder-mystery novel, “The Winship Affair” published by Blue Mustang Press in 2014. He’s just finished a new paranormal-horror novel entitled “Helltown Chronicles.”

In addition to his writing activities, Phil is a singer in a garage band and an avid ham radio operator.

The post Ring My Chimes by Phillip Temples appeared first on Microliterature.