Category: Flash Fiction

Dilemma

Kevin and Carla wouldn’t even dream of hurting Dorothy. They knew, only too well, that the truth would hurt her beyond consolation—and they couldn’t do that to her. Besides, still young and learning to navigate society as a married couple, they didn’t want to become the inhospitable hosts.

Art didn’t pay as Kevin had hoped and everyone assumed Carla’s poetry was a hobby. Regardless of the meagre potions for themselves, they did their best to cope with Dorothy. After all, she’d raised them when they were orphaned. How would they tell her she was a wrinkle in their lives?

All in good time

“He wandered away in wonderment, pondering awondering…”

“Oh, that’s tacky. Writing like that will get you no where—shows how desperate you are to establish yourself as a writer. Don’t do that. Just be cool.

Huh?

Unable to decipher the critic’s reasoning, Julia observed the writer’s crestfallen face from a distance. She was perplexed. The sentence sounded fine to her, even ambitious with the coining of a new term. Writers always took the poetic license—it was their nature.

“Write the way people speak. Be natural.” Came the critic’s afterthought.

Ah! The times they’re a changing, realised the time traveller.

Thrill seeker

It was so typical of her that it surprised no one. Her parents wouldn’t worry much either and her teachers decided to hold off telling them until she returned.

Because she always did.

Merlyn took pride in projecting herself as such—unashamed, unapologetic, and uninterested in socialising. Her unconventional preferences singled her out amongst contemporaries. No one knew what went on inside her head, but they knew she’d run away on her own during every class picnic.

Hours later, with twigs in her hair and mud on her clothes, Merlyn came back from an adventure her friends only read about.

Restrictions

“As quoted above, the directors of the board, in a unanimous decision, have agreed to terminate the alleged accusations placed on it by the self-proclaimed advocates of rights. It is hereby declared that any individual or group, with our without legal advice, can no longer seek or demand the permission of the board or any other decision-level authority for additional time off of premises for purposes including, by not limited to, spring breaks or bearing offsprings.”

Huh?

“Sorry miss,” Julia’s supervisor sighed before raising his voice over the din of machines and hum of laboured men, “No maternity leave here.”

Workplace matters

“It’s upto you. Find a creative way to handle this.”

“But—”

“You’re an adult. This is a workplace. You should be able to deal with petty things like this.”

A lewd co-worker isn’t a petty thing, Meriam wanted to scream. But it was her first week at her first job. She didn’t want to screw things up for herself. She left the HR cubicle ransacking her brain and digging into the flesh of her fingers.

It hadn’t taken long to land her in an asylum. A couple of months— that’s all he’d needed to neutralise her, her reality as imagination.