Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Ahhh, Shit!

"Oops," he said. And it was the last thing he said, although it was not the last thing that ran through his mind - that was "Fuck, this hurts.", as the blue bus slammed into him. His body burst like a blood balloon, a bloodblot on the windshield. His face scraped along the pavement, his left eye popped out of his skull and the last thing that eye saw was the face of a young child by the side of the road. She was holding an ice cream cone and had a cream mustache that had dripped into a white Fu Manchu. He assumed it was vanilla, but it could have been rocky road.

Monday, January 31, 2011

Nancy


Nancy was constantly terrified of death, but this didn’t stop her from dying when she did. As always, on an errand to which someone else was driving, she kept the muscles in her shoulders tense and imagined what prevention she would utter if each mishap she imagined should come near to actual occurrence: watch that drifter; hasn’t rained in a while; that man’s in a hurry; that biker’s got the jitters. She noticed every wobbly hubcap and sometimes checked the lights for synchronicity—she had heard that in New Orleans not even the stoplights were back to normal, and God knows, times were getting tough in every old hill and borough, and it was bound to happen sooner or later. She had looked out the window up at the clear blue day and relaxed her guard for an instant to think of the pineapple she had eaten earlier that week—it was a good pineapple, sweet and juicy without too much of that stuff which stuck like brittle cloth threads in your teeth—when a truck swung out of the left turn lane on the opposite side and, without quite as much sound as you would expect from such a thing, took the whole passenger side clean off, Nancy with it.

Flash Fiction: Obituary

She turned from locking the top deadbolt on the door and straightened her shoulders as she stepped into the hall, remembering her posture, and as she did so she walked smack-dab into an intruder who reached out and grabbed her neck and snapped it like an old wood bow.

Hi from the Herkimer!

This week, write a short piece about someone's death. Make it either a poem or under 300 words.
No suicides! (Unless they're accidental.)

Write with guts!

Ladder falls, fishing accidents, and unfortunate occurrences at dinner parties,

HERKIMER