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This week, we proudly bring you yet another round of our One-Sentence Stories. More will follow next week. If you'd like to try your hand at a one-sentence story, please send it to websubmissions@monkeybicycle.net. By Elizabeth Ellen I was five years old the day I learned that forming any great attachment to the men in our lives would prove both futile and, ultimately, heartbreaking; Mother and I were leaving Georgia and Stan wasn't there to tell us goodbye. By Steven Seighman Glenda ran shrieking through the plate-glass window in the bedroom when she walked in on her husband and Marta, the maid, who had him bound and gagged on the floor and was slowly winning him over. By Joe Decker I've got people to save, hanging for my life with one, two, three, four, five fingers on the wall, and they've got money to make. By Rose Gowen I'm reminded of the story of a middle-aged man (once he was a late-teenaged man having formative cheese-eating, wine-drinking, Eiffel Tower-viewing experiences; soon after that, he became an aimless man in his twenties, wandering about the States, hoping to discover what he wanted to do with himself; then, he was a man in his thirties, hopefully moving to France to start an English language school) who lost everything (he had never had much, but he had the language school [which ran out of his apartment, and was a modest success], and a cockatiel [which he adored, and allowed to eat croissant crumbs off his tongue], and cordial--though not quite warm--relationships with the ladies at the supermarche and the old man at the tabac) when he lost the love of his life (amazingly, after many years during which the cockatiel was the female he was closest to, he had fallen in love with a beautiful college girl from Michigan, who was spending her junior year abroad and worked for him to support herself; they had a passionate affair, much to the amusement and embarrassment of his other employees [for he could not restrain himself from sighing to them, and asking their advice, and revealing intimate details of his love when they came to drop off paperwork and pick up teaching materials], but it ended when she returned to Kalamazoo; the cockatiel died not long after, and he left France and moved to Canada). By L. Suzanne Stockman The sperm and the egg agreed that now was not a good time. By Joseph Young Thirty-seven hours later, Tully said, Watch out below! and I looked up into a gorgeous rain of stones, like the red and blue moons of Jupiter, until, falling into the black crease of relief, one stone struck me dead. By Blake Butler With my signature I could save you, passing fragments of my body into yours by the very surgeon who will not keep me breathing past tomorrow, but, no, I have this bile and this skin and this failing sack of organs, and I'm taking the lot of it with me. B By Rick Holland He looked out the window, across the backyard where the kids lay, past the collective silhouette of evergreens a dark pointy row of teeth into the red sky where the toxic debris still drifted about in ash-gray clouds, and he wondered how long it will be before he too will succumb to the indiscernible fumes, double over onto the linoleum floor, his heels kicking, arms flailing, head turning, like an ecstatic in a Baptist temple, and then finally lying like his children and all of his neighbors in the stillness and serenity of death. By Vic Perry In the orphaned hours these opportunists were, are, and will be stranded. By Brendan Kiley Yellow abstracts yourself from yourself--that Catalan color torture specialists proved this during the Spanish Civil War was of no interest to Sister Slashoff, who continued to paint devotionals in ochre, insisting over saltless suppers that God led her to that color because it made her feel whole. By Ed Page At her fiance's military funeral, as the rifles fired, her water broke. By Jon Swan Joey was a rocker; he rocked in homeroom, he rocked in study hall, he rocked on the bus, just sat there rocking back and forth; no one knew why. By Scott Brothers There was an old man that lived alone in a house near a pulp factory who, all of a sudden, no longer received his mail, which made the old man very angry, for it was the mail that he looked forward to most in his advanced years, even bills from the power company were welcomed correspondence, and when the old man arrived at the local post office of the small town in which he lived wearing a ridged scowl and a sweater that smelled of moth balls to inquire about his absent mail, a young clerk informed him that the post office had inadvertently transposed his name with that of another old man with a similar sounding name who had died recently, at which point the clerk promptly apologized to the old man for the inconvenience, ( the clerk had a grandfather the same age as the old man and knew how important mail delivery was to him) any anger the old man felt toward the post office quickly evaporating once he was assured that he would again receive his mail and with that the old man promptly returned to his home to wait for his mail to appear, which it did, the very next day, then, a month later, the old man died suddenly in his sleep, but because he lived alone and had no family and because the smell of his remains was masked by the stench emitted from the pulp factory, it was a few weeks before he was discovered, the neighbors finally noticing numerous pieces of mail spilling out from the old man's mail box and onto his front porch. By Kevin O'Cuinn Because afterwards we couldn't sleep, we made chicken soup and salted it with our tears, and I burnt my tongue and still you called me a fool. By C. Allen Rearick To the best of my knowledge, Jesus never wore a cape. By Tobias Seamon After innumerable medical tests performed by every specialist in Baton Rouge, James Avery's chest pains were finally diagnosed as resulting from a .22 caliber bullet that his wife Jane shot an inch from his heart 15 years earlier during the state fair when he got all religious for a moment while at the top of the neon green Ferris wheel. By Melissa Bell "Gee, Mr. Unterwasser," said young Jared, "your playroom is amazing!" By Matthew Simmons In this sentence is hidden a tiny story, and if you donft read very closely, youfll miss the way it oh-so-subtly renders the character of its narrator. By Timmy Waldron She typed "Awesome" in the email, but didn't feel it. By Charles Taylor Finally. Here is a link to the first batch of One-Sentence Stories. Here is another. And another. If you would like to link to this story, please use this link. |
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