Fierce Blue
The World Trade Towers held the sunset’s reflection when it was time to leave work. Crowds departed though revolving doors, pushing their way to subways and buses.
The closest window to Diana’s desk looked out over the Hudson when she worked on the 50th floor. Close to the shoreline, the water was a dark and forceful blue. The view was like a postcard.
Monica, Diana’s boss, stayed late when the team did, having pizza delivered though a labyrinth of hallways. Her reedy voice and ready smile convinced Diana and her co-workers to do any amount of work she asked for. She stood by each of them in turn, tall and svelte with short blonde hair.
Something about the building was disquieting, especially at night. The sheer magnitude. The stark white tile in the ladies’ room leaked a hygienic deadliness.
Once, Diana rode up in a blue-lined elevator with a toddler and his mother. As soon as they started moving, the boy wouldn’t stop screaming. If Diana had not been a civilized adult, she would have joined in. The vastness of the place flummoxed almost everyone.
Eventually, Diana resigned to take a job in midtown. The pre-war office building was tiny compared to the towers. On that clear day in September more than ten years later, the towers disintegrated in a cloud of smoke that filled the sky. Until that day, Diana could see them when she looked down the avenue where she and her toddler son lived.
Dust rained down on lower Manhattan and settled over everything. When Diana took her boy out in his stroller, she tied blue bandannas around his mouth and hers for protection. On the way to the supermarket, he’d torn off his bandanna and started crying because he had no words for the scorched odor that was everywhere. Afterwards, Diana sat with him on the couch and told him a story that he could not yet understand.
Elizabeth B. Morse won first prize for flash fiction in Cardinal Sins. Her poetry collection, Unreasonable Weather, published by Kelsay Books, was a finalist in poetry for the 2026 International Book Awards. Her work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
The Flying Machine
This story was written before 1914.
An Ingenious Man who had built a flying-machine invited a great concourse of people to see it go up. At the appointed moment, everything being ready, he boarded the car and turned on the power. The machine immediately broke through the massive substructure upon which it was built, and sank out of sight into the earth, the aeronaut springing out barely in time to save himself.
"Well," said he, "I have done enough to demonstrate the correctness of my details. The defects," he added, with a look at the ruined brick-work, "are merely basic and fundamental."
Upon this assurance the people came forward with subscriptions to build a second machine.
Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (1842 – c. 1914) was an influential American author, journalist, and poet. His book The Devil's Dictionary was named one of "The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature" by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration. His story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" has been described as "one of the most famous and frequently anthologized stories in American literature". In 1913, Bierce told reporters that he was travelling to Mexico to gain first-hand experience of the Mexican Revolution. He disappeared and was never seen again. (Biography borrowed from Wikipedia.)
Hardboiled
She was a devious dame with legs that wouldn’t quit and a past that haunted her big green eyes.
He was a whiskey-swilling gumshoe who had been knocked on the head a few too many times, but he was still alert enough to notice that her husband was paying all the bills.
“You haven’t been straight with me,” he growled.
“I can’t be straight with anyone,” she retorted, and slapped him.
He slapped her back, hard, and she took it like a man, because she was a man, as he realized when the blonde wig fell off.
Suddenly, he understood why nothing made sense any more, and what was behind the endless sequence of incoherent plot twists and unrelated clues, the artificial dialog, his jumbled thoughts, the throbbing headache.
Spillane was having a seizure.
Wanda Farr is the pen name of a retired English teacher who lives in another place.
Modern Literature
Oskar gave the chatbot a prompt. The prompt was, “Write a story in which a man tells a chatbot to write a story about a chatbot that is instructed to write a story about a chatbot writing a story.” This was exactly the kind of thing the chatbot could handle with ease. The second part of the prompt was, “Make the story exactly six sentences.” The chatbot began collecting words and putting phrases together until it had completed the assignment. This is that story.
Oskar Greenblatt hastens to assure everyone that this story was written by a human being with no AI assistance.
Cirque du Silly
One summer, I went to Circus Camp. As an acrobat, I was overcome by terror, lost my grip on the trapeze, and plunged into the net before my partner could grab my ankles. Animals hated me. The dancing horse tried to bite me, and the performing poodles peed on my shoes. I looked hilarious in clown makeup, but my timing was terrible, and I was trampled while exiting the tiny car. I tried juggling and hit myself in the face with the balls. Fortunately, the camp staff were brilliant photographers; the shots they posted on Instagram made my family proud.
R.K. West is a Canadian-America writer specializing in very short fiction. @ithinkiwrite.bsky.social
Credit: This story originally appeared at 100 Words.
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