Grandpa Al radioed coordinates during the Korean War.
He was quiet, loved his Yankees, and sipped O’Doul’s in the summertime.
He had a fake leg and owned a ukulele, too –
A sweet, beautiful instrument boxed up in his basement.
I can see him now.
He’s smiling. Sipping. Strumming and plucking.
“Grandpa Al” was originally published in Fifty Word Stories. Click here to see the original publication.
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When the lightning danced across the sky and the deep thrum of thunder carried out across the plains for the fifth night in a row, he knew the end had come.
Torrents of rain and softball-sized hail pounded all around him, devastating his crops, ripping through them like swinging scythes.
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When John entered, he was thrust back into his old world, forced to live out his new life firmly rooted in the ground.
See — John became a tree.
As he aged, he understood tranquility. He became home to animals and insects alike.
He still stands.
***
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Blaise watched his wife from the cabana. She was ankle-deep in the Caribbean, collecting seashells – a perfect memory.
When he gulped the thin mountain air, trapped in an icy crevasse, he inhaled her. Hypothermic, somewhere above Camp 4, he’d surely die. But the summer breeze would take him home.
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I write a fair amount of content over on Medium.com. Admittedly, I used to post more work during 2019, but I still create weekly writing prompts over at The Friday Fix – and serve as the editor of the publication.
Recently, the publication has been receiving over fifty prompt-based stories on a weekly basis, and somewhere around twenty to twenty-five original works of microfiction. In total, I’m seeing seventy-five submissions roll in every single week. It’s both incredibly fun and daunting at the same time!
As the person behind the scenes doing a lot of the nitty-gritty work, I’ve realized I haven’t been writing as much microfiction lately. It also feels a bit strange to post my own stories on The Friday Fix, which has evolved into a niche community on Medium with almost 1,500 followers – not to mention over 200 writers.
For this reason, I’ve decided to create my own personal publication on Medium called Story Well. I’m in the process of transferring all of my old fifty-word stories from The Friday Fix archives (wiping some cobwebs and grime off them, too) to Story Well in an effort to rejuvenate my love for this genre. Maybe this will get some new eyes on my work, as well.
As I go about this, my plan is to simultaneously share my stories here on my recently polished WordPress site. I’m interested to see if this will bring on new readers. More importantly, I hope to create more fans of the microfiction form of writing. Who knows, maybe by this time next year I’ll have a collection of my very own stories to shop around to publishers.
Hmm…might there be a chapbook in the not-so-distant future? Only time will tell.
Justin Deming - Writer 