I don't get it. You never took the covers before. You never minded about my snoring, about my restless legs. I peek at you with one eye. Your long hair fans out against my pillow. Your perfumed shampoo claws my nostrils. Do I complain? No. "Out!" You give me the shout-and-shove. "Your breath stinks," you say. …
Tag: Fiction
Announcing the Winners of the 5000 Words Creative Writing Contest
It was during my 5000 Words Writing Class that I first heard the news about my brain tumor. I'd be lying if I said it was easy to focus during the weeks leading up to my surgery. I let some things go, like this announcement. The stories that follow were written by my students, all …
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Writing: The Reach that Doesn’t Sleep or Die
I am blessed to have people who believe in me, even (and especially) when I don't believe in myself. Like the ones who scrawled my work-in-progress in the sand while they were vacationing. We thought of you, it said. We love you, it said. I now understand why writers make such a big deal about …
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The Sunshine Blogger Award
Some bloggers reel me in—usually with a strong literary voice and brutal honesty. I'm a sucker for poetic confession. We all struggle inside ourselves, and I appreciate a writer who can fly that flag and call it fiction or essay or Dear Diary... MrHushHush is one such blogger, so when I saw he was looking for …
Fiction: The Colonel’s Last Wish
In the bombed-out shell of a Starbucks cafe, he sat at a buckling and tilted table. What the colonel wouldn't give for a green-smocked barista right now. A US Army truck painted over with his familiar insignia passed by, likely headed to the dump. Halfheartedly, he returned salute, then covered his nose. The dead Americans …
The Most Dangerous Thing We Do
Once this kid—my passenger—grabbed the steering wheel and jerked it hard over while I was driving. Not just a little tug, mind you, but a full-on we-gonna-die! yank. The kind that elicited a blood-curdling scream and a shouted sermon. A 19-year old preaching car safety to a 15-year-old. This kid was all charm and immortality …
Last Touch
A tire spun, the one not furrowed by speed and thrust. Smoke wheezed from the buckled steel hood. Engine guts, half-erupted and splattered with oil, steamed in glossy, iridescent blackness. Beside his twitching foot lay an unwrapped breakfast sandwich. The smells of sausage, cologne, and sharp copper ghosted the car, floated out the broken windows, …
2017 in the Rear View Mirror
2017. Crushed it. Really and truly. Those of you who know me know I beat myself up at regular intervals. I raise self-flagellation to an art form. My friends tell me I'm too hard on myself. If there is no enemy within, the enemy outside can do me no harm. I like to think I have an …
Fiction: Tight Flight
I pressed the call button. Pinned to my window seat by the slumped behemoth of a man, it was the only thing I could do. His flesh oozed beyond the arm rest, assaulting my left thigh with an intimate, maddening pressure. His body heat passed through his polyester pants, through my jeans and ignited a …
5000 Words Fall 2018 Short Fiction Winners!
The 5000 Words Fiction Contest is the culmination of our fall class. Students write stories of at least 1000 words, workshop, edit, and post the final drafts to their WordPress sites. Then the students anonymously judge the stories. All I do is tally them! 🙂 As part of our in-class time, students journey through a …
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KL Griffiths 