flash fiction
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The heat came early in the morning from nowhere, and by the afternoon it was pressing down on all sides. The first day of summer, I called it. Roddy said it was just a phantom. We closed the curtains and sat around without clothes. My back was slick with sweat, and the backs of my…
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I put my book on the sand, lay back, and looked up at the clouds sliding across the sky. At the edges, they swirled like ink in water. After a while, these movements began to have an unsettling effect on me. I felt as if gravity might suddenly fail; that the earth would lose its…
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She said she was bored. Then she shot upright and said that I should paint her. I was cool to the idea, at first, coming out of the blue like that. But as she talked about it, I began to see that it might be quite interesting. She was going to undress, and drape herself on the…
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I almost ran from the restaurant, dropping my dignity with my napkin, and banging my arm on a metal door-jamb at the front. I managed to catch a taxi quickly at the corner of Fitzroy Street. This, then, must be the lucky part of the evening, as foretold by the cookie. As the cab took…
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‘He stopped swimming, and floated. Just held himself there, in the middle of the pool. His body was very long. I watched him closely, just a long thin line of body in the middle of the pool, broken by the blue of his bathers. Then I imagined the bathers gone. It was easy, really, but…
Barry Lee Thompson 