Category Archives: Five Sentence Fiction

Five Sentence Fiction: Harvest

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Photograph by Lisa Shambrook (Please do not use without permission)

His ring gently clinked, an almost unnoticeable sound against the rich, heavy beat of music, as he rotated the glass and studied the incoming crop of sniggering girls, all short skirts and boozy noise and his lip rose in a lazy sneer as he shook his head about to turn away from the brash invasion, but the last girl squeezing apologetically through the door caught his eye.
She quickly followed the gaggle of limbs and peroxide almost as if she was an afterthought, and she carefully pulled up a chair, sitting slightly to one side unconsciously stretching her skirt down over her knees and staring intently at her cultivated nails.
He watched the drinks arrive and the girls gather to leer at the waiter, pinching his seasoned rump and disregarding his tired protest, but from his vantage point at the bar he noted her discomfort and allowed a smile.
He ignored the flirtations and plumped-up pouts, thrusting cleavage bursting out of bra-tops and bare thighs advertising their wares, these offerings were not for his harvest.
Her lips were full and unpainted, hair the natural shade of corn, her eyes bright and sober, and her breast firm and ripe beneath her shirt where only a tiny tease of pink lace revealed itself, blooming like a lost flower against her flesh and he knew…he knew she was the one.

Five Sentence Fiction: Faeries

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Art: Lisa Shambrook (Please do not use without permission)

The sky is the same colour as velvet, dark delphiniums, Mum keeps telling me it’s bedtime, but I’m spinning, round and round and round…and I’m never going to bed!
I’m dizzy, really dizzy, dizzy and fizzy, my limbs are tripping over each other and my head is rolling so much my eyes can’t keep up!
I stop and my hands fly out to balance, and I giggle and she’s there…I stare.
I’ve never seen one before; she stares back her eyes as wide as the rising moon behind us and surprise shining like glitter.
She can’t move, I can’t move, our eyes are locked and there’s nothing we can do until Mum calls again and the spell is undone, and I snap my wings together and flit off into the night, leaving the little human girl wondering who I was…

Find this week’s Five Sentence Fiction here at Lillie McFerrin’s amazing Blog.

Five Sentence Fiction: Medicine

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“It’s bad…” the Sage grimaced, his brow creasing and his head slowly shaking, “I’m losing her.”
He glanced down at her pale features; her forehead was dusted with perspiration glittering in the moonlight and her hands lay limp on the cotton coverlet, and he pre-empted the question with a prolonged sigh, “There is something, it’s a long shot, might not even work…but,” he gestured vaguely beyond the window, “up there, high on the peak, is the montis bellis perennis…the mountain daisy…” his voice trailed and disappeared along with the lad’s hopes. 
But, within moments, the lad had vanished out into the shadowy night, trekking far across muddy fields, weaving through distant forest, cutting a path through murky swamps and climbing through ominous veils of meandering mists up, up and up…fingers blistering as he grasped splintering rock and eyes smarting from the violent, howling winds. 
Nights passed, days passed, and her fading breath passed weakly through her dry and chapped lips; then the lad crashed through the door, disturbing the Sage and the peace, clutching a daisy, a single daisy, petals lost, petals crumpled and petals sticking to his exhausted fingers…he dropped the crushed and broken daisy into the mystic’s open hands. “Use the flower and heal her!” he demanded through his haze of delirium, “Heal her!”
“I can’t,” said the Sage, “there’s nothing left of the flower, nothing…” he watched the weary lad fall to the floor and stroked the remains of the daisy across her ashen face; she stirred, just a tiny movement, but enough, “I can’t heal her, nor can the daisy, but you have…it’s not the daisy, but the journey you were willing to make, your faith and love have healed her…see her eyes flutter open…for you, for love…”

Photograph by Lisa Shambrook

Five Sentence Fiction: Lost

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The music faded and the gramophone’s needle scratched the inner vinyl waiting patiently to be lifted and placed in its cradle, its scratching annoyed the woman who sighed over by the French windows.
She leaned on her walker and stared out beyond the lawns at the dappled shade beneath the beech tree; the wind sighed with her and sent a flutter through the crispy autumn leaves.
A light breeze edged in past the sliding doors and tickled her calves, her nylon dress stretched over her hunched back exposing pale knees and wrinkled stockings as she moved to another place.
In her mind she leaned back, coquettishly, against another tree, a similar tree, and a man, clean-shaven and earnest, whispered in her ear his words wandering, even now, through her body and she exhaled noisily, her chest creaking and wheezy.
Her body, long past its best, gripped the plastic handles of her walking frame and her cardigan hung as loose as her sagging skin, but her mind, as bright as the proverbial button, lost itself amid an onslaught of memories…
Source: Wikipedia. Portable 78 rpm record player from British His Master’s Voice. Model 102, c. early 1930’s. Photographer: Fredrik Tersmeden

Five Sentence Fiction: Orange

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I’ve been here twenty minutes, sat staring at the screen and very nearly bored to tears, though the boards and dials surrounding the monitor are lit up like a fairground and amuse me as I pretend to know what everything does and means.
I’ve been ordered to “be quiet and don’t touch anything…not anything.” I sigh. I shouldn’t be here, but I’m  small enough to sit right out of the way and Pop says it’s okay.
It’s the orange button that intrigues me, not the red one or the green one, nor the dials and flashing yellow lights on the left hand display, it’s the orange one on the right that has my finger hovering.
When I finally press it there is no click, no flash, no beep or warning, nothing, only the pale and horrified stare that my father wears, the one that usually means I’ll get a thrashing…then all hell lets loose…
Source: wikipedia Control Panel

Five Sentence Fiction: Silence

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Nothing happened…
He kissed her again and waited…and waited some more, but her hand remained limp and her face still deathly pale. Silken locks spilled across her satin pillow entwined with paper-thin, fragile and brittle dried roses, nothing like the wicked tangle of vicious thorns and miles of malevolent briers that he’d fought to defeat.
His armour dripped with sweat and he was late.
His princess had slumbered within her royal bedchamber for one hundred years, one hundred years and…just one day. 

Five Sentence Fiction: Foggy

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I plummeted, yes, that’s the only word for it, I plummeted through the thick and chill early morning air unravelling coils of mist that attempted to snare me as I fell. Buffeted and pummelled, I felt goose-pimples erupt across my exposed skin, and there was time enough to feel my damp hair whip back and forth in the funnel of turbulence left in my wake.
I closed my eyes.
My body shrieked and my mind fogged as I smacked into the water, and panic rose like a phoenix from ashes, and as I swirled down, embraced, welcomed by the depths of the lake, I wondered…for the first time, I wondered.
Had it really been a good idea to pack so many pebbles into so many pockets?

Photograph by Lisa Shambrook

Five Sentence Fiction: Sombrero

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Winter’s sun, forever on the horizon, cast tired rays across the virgin snow as they ran, giggling and flushed and happy; their pace slowed and bemused confusion fell across their faces as they came to an abrupt halt.
Baffled, he kicked it and it jerked up into the air with a flurry of snow settling before them like a gigantic upturned saucer.
He moved to kick again but she raised her hand and bent to retrieve the object, shook away its frosty coating and stared at it in puzzlement before placing it with a flourish, the right way up, on her head atop her chunky, fur-fringed Eskimo hood.
She giggled, girlishly, and posed, one hand holding the now droopy monstrosity and the other pointing to her pursed lips in a coy fashion; his bewildered laugh made her frown as he shook his head and grabbed the floppy base whipping it off her head.
A moment later his hunting-knife had cut two holes big enough for his thick-gloved hands and his oily catch of the day was placed within its cone, and the sides gathered up in one hand to form a sturdy, straw basket then he leaned forward to brush his cold lips across the cheek of his other catch of the day.

Source: wikipedia File:Siberian Eskimo Nabogatova

Five Sentence Fiction: Candy

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They say no good ever comes from eavesdropping, “Major Ingleby is quite fond of her…and Lord Farrell has made his partiality known…” but from behind the door Amelia Lockwood could bear the talk no more and charged, in a most unladylike way, into the drawing room.
“I will not be spoken of as if I am sweetmeats to be offered on a silver tray, like sugared mice at Christmas-time…” she paused trying to keep her fury neatly restrained beneath her tightly bound corset and skirts, her bosom heaved and fell within the confines of her bodice and she stepped towards the window overlooking the vast estate’s immaculate gardens.
“Both would be acceptable matches…” her mother began calmly patting her perfectly coiffured, icing sugar hair and raising one eyebrow at her wayward daughter.
Amelia placed her unsteady hand against the cold glass pane and stared across the manicured lawns; in an unusually wild stretch of bedding stood the gardener leaning on his spade and returning her gaze, she took in his unruly mop of hair and unbuttoned shirt and smiled. “The Major…and the Lord for that matter, have nothing on the raw, unrefined sweetness of nature…”

Photo by Lisa Shambrook

Five Sentence Fiction: Explosive

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Her t-shirt soaked through in the downpour, stuck to her back, “Got…to get him…away from here…” she puffed, her words whipped out of her mouth as she spoke.
“Where to?” groaned her friend spitting her hair out of her mouth as the wind swept a sheet of rain across the lane.
“Is he dead? Really dead?” the third girl could barely feel her hands as she clutched the man’s sodden jacket as they dragged him through the muddy track.
The first raised her head and nodded, ignoring the rain dripping off her nose, and the three of them heaved succeeding in hauling the dead weight a few more feet towards the ditch.
As they paused for breath and to regain grip, the street light above them exploded and sparks flew through the torrents of rain…and the heavy bulk within their grasp opened his eye…

Photograph by Bekah Shambrook