One-Sentence Stories
A Seaman’s Lament: The Essential Biography of Captain Cecil Higgenbotham
by
Drew Jackson
In ever waning light of his golden years, the venerable Captain Cecil Higgenbotham often reflected upon his all-too-brief affair with Mabel, Princess of the Undersea Realm, (thinking, “great Poseidon’s foamy discharge!, if only we had made a proper go of it!”) but Pragmatism counseled him to turn on his lead-shod heels and vanish from her aquatic life forever, for Princess Mabel’s primitive gill slits were ill suited to life on land, and Higgenbotham’s time below the tumultuous waves was limited by the physical endurance of Kidogo, the diminutive cabin boy whose job it was to pump the bellows that breathed sweet, life-sustaining air into Higgenbotham’s diving helmet.
Torn
by
Aaron Burch
When asked, he grabs a piece of paper, slowly pulls it in two; he stands still, mouths her name, looks in her eyes, shrugs his shoulders, puts one half of the paper in each pocket.
Underground
by
Meg Pokrass
The man came up behind me and locked me backwards with his arms in a grip and I could feel his cock or gun against my low back when he told me if I moved he'd hurt me and did I know what that meant, but I was already watching from far away (sort of interested in this, sort of not.)
Codes and Signals
by
Tiff Holland
The things they had in common had to do with work, with language that is not language: a forty is a gun, a fifty-three is a mental case, nineteen means land-line telephone, code sixteen is a dead body, and twenty-five is home or station.
The French Lover
by
Kyle Hemmings
She was trying to leave her special imprint on her French lover, told him her uncle was a mean marksman and could play a bagpipe, and he said lagniappe. . . kind of, she said, cutting zucchinis in chunks and crumbling oregano leaves for the ragout, made her think of sex on a hard floor.
Still Falling
by
Judy Cabito
In brief moments, Michael feels life is too long or too short, too black too white, whichever comes first, and this has become reality and his reality a dreadful truth, where he works long hours and is paid better than his friends or those he had and now his peers have become his only friends and they can't be, they are competitors, ruthless to a fault; he has looked for a way out, falling in his dreams to his death only to wake at his desk shuffling papers, with two different earplugs attached to two different phones, talking to two different clients and waving both hands for his aides to run, run and get something, anything because he is still falling like the robin redbreasts he can see out the window and those that soar with him in his dreams, plunging to hell, and again he finds himself sitting, but now on the commuter, and the girl next to him is humming to her iPod; he leans forward but suddenly at the next stop, she’s standing on the platform, looking back at him, her hand raised in a gesture of goodbye or hello, and it is precisely then that he realizes he has many more falls to go as the train chug, chug, chugs off.
Untitled
by
Michael Hemmingson
I decided to leave the bodies as I found them.
Don't Read the Yellow Snow
by
Frayn Masters
The stray ate the apple whole, seeds, core, everything, then later on when we were all asleep he lifted his leg and pee-wrote the most beautiful haiku I’ve ever seen into the moon shadows of the fresh snow.
Reveille
by
Bonnie ZoBell
First he hog-tied her, but once they finished and he removed the silk lanyards, they languored in the dusk of Sunday evening like any reasonable folk, even if locals thought there was something off about the two; but when Benny played the bugle during reveille the next morning, standing at alert with the other soldiers, people saluted him, too.