The Chambered Nautilus

He moves by necessity from one room to the next. The passage way closes behind him; there will be no going back. Past is past. Gone. Irretrievable. And he will stay in this room only briefly, before moving to the next, and the next after that. Each one larger. And so it goes. Then one day he shall exit through the final passage, leaving this house forever, never to return. It will have become to small to meet his growing needs. All that remains are the former chapters of his life. He wonders where the next ones shall be written.

Acoustic Shadows

Awakening early in her attic apartment, he stood at the window looking out over the rooftops of the German city.  He imagined the flash and detonation of British bombs dropped here thirty years earlier.  That night she had told him her father had been a Luftwaffe pilot who bombed London during the Blitz.  Staring across the rebuilt city he recalled his grandparents telling him about a night spent in the Covent Garden tube station, coming up the next morning to find their flat a pile of rubble. Fires still raging. Their neighbors dead.  He did not tell her that story.

Shirts

Staring into the mirror, trying on his dead friend's shirts, he would keep what fit, the rest destined for another’s closet. He wanted them all.  They had similar builds, but the cut was often too tight in the shoulders, or they were not long enough.  He was sad leaving some behind.  Memories abandoned.  Each shirt recalls an occasion when his friend wore it.  He smiles and looks at the pile of shirts.  Whether they fit is irrelevant.  He decides to take them all to keep his friend near, whispering to him from the closet about those distant memories they shared. 

Trollin'

 
Heavy poles with sinkin’ line tied to streamers.  Trollin’ began here in the north woods.  It’s sittin’ starin’ at the water ‘tween fish.  You gotta hold on to your pole.  Several sports lost poles cause they was daydreamin’.  Easy ‘nuff to set it aside to light a cigarette or poke through your kit bag.  But if’n a lunker latches on while the mind’s a’wanderin’ your pole’s gone and a day’s fishin’ is over. Trollin’ keeps the fly deeper longer than jackin’ it back and forth overhead.  That there’s beauty but you ain’t catchin’ fish with your fly in the air. 

The Baffled King

Photo by The Toronto Star

These are the first two of a series of flash fiction stories to be posted here.   These are 100 word short stories.  Not 99 words.  Not 101 words.  100 words.
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Raised in staid Westmont, on the other side of Mont Royal, he preferred the bohemian life of Le Plateau, his townhouse in the rue Vaillièrres, a block off The Main, across from Parc du Portugal.  There he sat on his stoop, watching the children play and the passers pass by, sketching poems, song lyrics, his secret chords that pleased the lord.  This was his home although he died on the Left Coast, buried across Mont Royal before anyone knew he was gone from them.  They came to his quiet stoop with flowers.  It was “cold and it's a broken Hallelujah.”

The Tilted Sea

In his dream the sea began to tilt to one side in the far distance. As if the sun was setting heavier in that quadrant of the horizon than in another. He wondered, if this continued, would the waves stop advancing against the shore, shifting instead to that downward side of the sea, taking the tide with them? Seashells would no longer wash ashore and there would be no reason to walk and wonder along the water line. The sea’s mysteries will have found other places to hide, and eventually there would only be desert where the sea once surged.