Readers seem to enjoy these, so here’s another handful of fifty-word fiction pieces.

Lint 

The last things she’d washed had been his:  shorts, socks; the slate-colored sweatshirts he wore to bed in winter, neutral and identical as prison uniforms.  She pulled grey fuzz from the dryer screen, and rolled it into a soft bullet.  Ten years of love, reduced to a handful of trash.

Surprise 

He came home early; an unfamiliar car was parked.  He saw a light flare and dim upstairs.  He sat watching the house, his fists clenched.

 

She turned down the lamp in her son’s room, and smiled at the babysitter.  “He doesn’t know I’ve planned this,” she said.  “It’s our anniversary.”

 

 

 

Destroyer 

He couldn’t have said when he first noticed the hairline crack.  It looked like someone had drawn a line on her shoulder with a ballpoint pen.  He pressed on it slyly when she slept, and watched its insidious spread and blossom.  And yet he professed surprise when she fell apart.

 

Morning 

His hand trembled as he drew the blade across his face, destroying the evidence of another day passed, another night.  Her pillow was dented, and he laid his cheek against it, wondering if her warmth remained.  There was no warmth  – there was nothing but a stain from his aching skin.

 

Declaration 

She held her secret tenderly in the palm of her hand, sheltering it, warming it for a moment before she took a deep breath and blew it into the wind.  She waited, expecting a bird, a butterfly, a fragrant blossom.  Drops of cold rain fell upon her hair.  She waited.

 

 

Reprieve 

She had known he would notice the bruise, a dirty smudge against the white skin of her thigh.  He didn’t ask her how it had happened.  She shuddered as he traced its outline with his fingers and the tip of his tongue.  Perhaps he felt she had already suffered enough.

 

Cannibal 

When he kissed her for the first time, she was surprised at his passion; his mouth was thin, ascetic, and did not hint at his hunger.  As his lips enclosed hers, she sensed his greed.  He meant to strip her bare; then, sated, he would spit out her bleached bones.

 

Power 

The pale coral blossoms of her nipples contract to pointed buds of desire.  She opens to him, wet and silky around and beneath him, her soft arms around his neck, her warm lips against his ear.  He holds his breath, a little fearful of being so much at her mercy.

 

Idol 

He bowed deeply when she entered his domain, and showed her to the marble altar where she was to stand.  He gave her a gold-embroidered silk gown to wear, and a diamond crown.  Each day he knelt reverently before her.  He was astonished when she leapt down and ran away.