99 words Stories

 The first time she might have died came at age 17, when a saddle horse reared and threw her, breaking her back. Over the years, she survived many more life-threatening events, each worse than the last: Guillain-Barré syndrome and its accompanying complete if temporary paralysis, pneumonia, spinal stenosis requiring two surgeries, an aneurysm (two more operations, and yes, they were brain surgery), a stroke, a heart attac...

“He would never forget those hands.” Frowning, Karen crossed out the sentence — too ambiguous. She shifted nervously in the waiting room chair, trying to concentrate on her creative writing assignment to “craft a complete, unequivocal story using six words.” “Screw you and your impossible assignment.” Probably wouldn’t fly. Eventually, just one line remained: “Relief came, then tears: ‘It’s benign.’” Perfect. With a wan s...

“That won’t fly.”“What won’t?” she asked.“From the third line on,” he replied, reading over her shoulder as she typed. “A story full of obscenities won’t ever win a writing contest.”Exasperated, she considered how to sanitize her micro-fiction entry, a gritty drama rife with blue language. Then inspiration struck, and she believed her ingenious editing would yield a surefire winner.“All the profanity’s been bleeped out. W...

“I’m sorry.”“That’s it, you’re sorry?”“What more do you want from me? Yes, I screwed up, and I apologized. Can we please just go to bed?”“You screwed up all right.”“Oh, c’mon, are you going to blow this all out of proportion? I told you, nothing happened. We exchanged a few e-mails, big deal.”“E-mails containing naked pictures, so yeah, I’d say it is a big deal.”“But they didn’t mean anything!”“So then why’d you send them...

Okay, so we’re supposed to write this ninety-nine word story and — well, it doesn’t hafta be exactly ninety-nine words, it can be less — but anyway, I don’t know what to write about and it’s due tomorrow, so I’m thinking maybe I could tell about the time Grandma took me to tea at a fancy hotel and they served strawberries and cream mixed with maple syrup, but I don’t know if I can describe it in ninety-nine words, it was...

The instructions said to wait, so she waited. It was something she did quite well; Lord knows she'd had plenty of practice. Sometimes it seemed she did little else besides wait.Just a few more minutes now. But how many minutes, hours, days, years of her life had she wasted waiting, hoping, praying — all for naught? Enough! Today it would stop. Today she would move forward, no matter what. Her phone played a marimba to cel...

"Honey, I'm ho-ome," Matt warbled as he entered the kitchen and tossed his keys into a bowl on the table. Loosening his tie, he made for the bedroom, where he expected to find his wife changing from her work clothes.Instead he met her in the dining room, glaring at him from behind a laptop computer through eyes red from crying. She knew. To deny or rationalize the affair would insult her intelligence and make matters wors...