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.
___________________________________


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.