Killer-Extras: Flash Fiction
Welcome to our Flash Fiction area! Here you'll find bite
sized stories to satisfy your twisted appetite. They're
all short because, face it, nobody wants to read "War and Peace"
on a computer screen. But while the tales are tiny,
they're still able to pack mean punch and hit the spot. If
you like anything in particular, or want to get a message off to
one of our authors, just drop an email to
comments@killer-works.com ! All the stories are up for several months before we take them
down. But don't worry, they don't go away for good!
At the end of the year they're all gathered into our annual
Killer-works book!
Please Note: Submission acceptance has been suspended until March 2010. We look forward to hearing from authors then, thanks!
Special Halloween Edition! Richard Pitaniello carves more than just the pumpkin...
Pumpkin Guts
By Richard Pitaniello
At 8:00 PM, the sky turned dark and the streetlights turned on, flaring orange and leaving shadows clinging everywhere like cobwebs that were black instead of white. Lightning popped all over, thunder rattled windows, and the rain bled down, gathering in puddles that shined black in the dark. Nobody would come out on a night like this, no sir, not even trick-or-treaters.
But it was still Halloween and Corbin Baxter still had to decorate his boxy white house and make it all creepy. He'd hung skeletons off the roof by their hands, but the rain had soaked the cardboard soggy and heavy. Some of them had fallen, breaking at the wrists. The rain couldn't touch the scarecrow on the porch though, so his house was still partly decorated and losing the skeletons didn't bother him so bad after he'd sniffed a few lines of white.
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James Dorr brings us a tale of grief, loss, and insanity; in miniature!
The Dollhouse Family
The Dollhouse FamilyBy James Dorr
She's dusting. The dollhouse. She does this on Saturdays, the day her life was destroyed. Several days afterward she found the dollhouse up in the attic -- a relic of childhood. It now brings her comfort. Her old Barbies also, a young man. A young woman. Mr. and Mrs. Dollhouse, she calls them. She talks to them sometimes.
Sometimes they answer back.
"Hello, Mr. Dollhouse," she says. "How are you? And where's Mrs. Dollhouse?"
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Dumpster Diving
By Ronald Sering
Jonah nearly missed the wad of duct tape in the corner of the Dumpster. The warm October sun shone at just the right angle into its grimy maw, highlighting the long strands of hair stuck to the tape. Duct tape is a common item, Jonah said to himself. It was nothing...but there was an unusual amount of it, tangled together in a loose, clump, about the size of a soccer ball. A little duct tape goes a long way. And portions of it were streaked with dark stains that looked, to him, like blood.
The alley in which Jonah made his discovery hosted a uniform row of Dumpsters, spaced at every other home. From within the nearest garage the Sunday football game played on the radio to the sound of hammering. Jim, getting quietly drunk while puttering in his garage. Jonah knew that Jim did not recycle his cans. The discarded mail he unearthed revealed a mortgage in arrears, a subscription to Car and Driver, and several prescriptions for a variety of ailments.
“Hey!”
Startled, Jonah turned to see Jim, framed in the opening of the gate leading from his back yard to the alley. He clutched a bag of trash in one meaty palm. Jonah eyed it with interest. “The hell you doing here again?”
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Fulfillment
By Pete Mesling
When I was a young boy, my grandfather laid a curse on me. I used to crawl up into his lap and listen to him spin the most enthralling yarns. When Mother and Father were present, he narrated his made-up tales in a boisterous manner. He became each character and clutched me for a scare at just the right moments. He spoke in a loud, resonant voice that filled the house with that magic only storytelling can bring.
But when my parents were gone or distracted, Granddad would lean in close and whisper, “One day the rats’ll get you, boy. The rats is what’ll bring an end to your days.”
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The Wrong Suit
By Lisa McDonald
"All right, lay them bags over there." Ronnie spoke gruffly.
Johnny had been working for his new boss for a month when he was partnered up with Ronnie. At the time, he’d looked forward to doing bigger jobs; sweeping floors and polishing knobs was too lonely for a guy like him.
"I'm gonna chop 'em up. You bag 'em." Ronnie pulled the hacksaw out from under a long metal table.
"What? I gotta touch that? It's fucking slimy!"
The body was oversized, bloated from being dead too long, which made the job even more unbearable. Ronnie never paid attention to the sinewy network of veins that lay just beneath the surface of the skin. J ohnny did. It looked as if the corpse had been wrapped in a dark blue web. One mistake and those veins’ would blow out juice and stain forever. Ronnie lifted up one of the hands. . .
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Experiment
By Yvette Managan
Bob cut the tip of his pinky off when he cleaned his fingernails with the dirty pocket knife. The blade was sharper than he'd known, Bob had hardly felt it at all. Just a little accidental jolt and the sudden red blossoming. Mama always said that if you used a dull knife, it would hurt like hell. I’ll save the dull knives for later, thought Bob as the blood collected where the skin had been and dripped slowly down the side of his palm.
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Shadows on the Sand
By Michael Penkas
Mac spit out a mouthful of sand. Dylan and his gang were already walking past him, as if they hadn't even noticed. He was about to sit up, but Betty put a hand on his chest.
"Don't. It's not worth it," she said softly. He felt her hand run across his ribs and sunken stomach. At sixteen, he was already six-foot-one, but only weighed ninety-eight pounds.
"It's not right," he muttered.
"Don't let it bother you," Betty answered.
But two weeks later, it still bothered him. In that time, Betty had dumped Mac and begun dating Dylan. It was the first Saturday night of Summer vacation and Mac was spending it alone, listening to music in his bedroom. Lying on his bed, he thought about the best way to kill himself for a while, then picked up the new issue of Ghost Candles off a stack of comic books. With nothing better to do, he began to read...
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That's not all there is! Click Here for More Stories
Think you can match that? Send us your stuff… For submission guidelines click here.
Our authors are always looking for feedback and kudos - feel free to send all comments to us at Killer-works and we'll make sure they reach the rightful owners! comments@killer-works.com
