David S. McWilliams

“Two-Minute Tuesdays” are a series of micro-stories written in two five minutes or less. Consider them “public practice,” like shooting free throws in the park.  Prompts are supplied at the bottom in case you want to try your own hand at one of them.

The best way to cut the woman down to size would be to flirt with her husband.

It couldn’t be done publicly—at least, not at first. That would be recognized for what it was, a simple and ineffective strike in retaliation. It needed to begin as something private, so that when the inevitable exposure came there would be repercussions. There had to be secrets to uncover. There was nothing more insatiable than the court’s lust for secrets.

“Lust is the right word, too,” Geraldine muttered to herself.

But she stopped herself after a time. This was a game she had played before—the simple meeting, the unplanned encounter, the moment of shared embarrassment, the deniable but undeniable rush of desire carefully cultivated to be equal parts forbidden and alluring. She had taken husbands before. It would not be hard to do so again. But for some reason her heart wasn’t in it … something inside told her to wait.

The answer came in a rush three weeks later.

“Not her husband. Her son,” said Geraldine in their carriage. The idea had struck her down like a thunderbolt on a clear day.

“What’s that, dear?” Asked her husband.

Could she do it? He was young, but he was a man, wasn’t he? Barring an interest in other men, shouldn’t he function much the same way?

“Nothing, nothing,” she said.

She’d never taken someone’s son before. The thought made her feel old for a moment, a feeling that she immediately extracted and dispensed with.

“Her son’s name is Bartholomew,” said her husband, continuing to examine his paper.

“You always know what I’m thinking, dear.” Geraldine rewarded him with a smile.

“Two-Minute Tuesdays” are a series of micro-stories written in two five minutes or less. Consider them “public practice,” like shooting free throws in the park.  Prompts are supplied at the bottom in case you want to try your own hand at one of them.

The sound of laughter drifted up from the street below, making him feel very alone in this new town.

“Petra?”

She couldn’t hear him, or she was out. He didn’t know. Her violin case was in the corner, instrument inside.

“Petra?”

He tried the bathroom, where water clattered against tile and splashed echos against the tall ceiling. Empty. Same as the kitchen.

She was gone somewhere, but there was no note. And so he had nothing to do but to go back out onto the balcony.

Sleep had come to him so easily in the afternoon, and now it eluded him completely. He sat in the old hammock, watching the people come and go below. The storefront below was open now, and children darted in and out. An old radio played inside. Across the street, two old men played dominos. He enjoyed the crack of the plays, the sharp snap that came each time the ivory struck the table. Though it was getting dark, he could see some of the board, but they didn’t seem to be playing any game he could recognize.

The sun set over the palms.

“Two-Minute Tuesdays” are a series of micro-stories written in two five minutes or less. Consider them “public practice,” like shooting free throws in the park.  Prompts are supplied at the bottom in case you want to try your own hand at one of them.

On the Livingstone estate, flies were sometimes the first indication that someone had died.

The heat was too much for the carrion birds. The drought had been good for them, at first. They gorged until their sick bellies were twisted and swollen, and no small number died to desperate predators that they could no longer escape. Those same predators met an ironic fate in the next few weeks, going into the stomachs of their own prey’s brothers. But then even the vultures and crows could not find food, except for one another. And so they either died or flew on.

But the flies? The flies could never be starved out — only discouraged for a time, maybe. Jack thought it was no small wonder that medieval scholars had thought flies simply arose from rotting meat. He couldn’t fathom where they were hiding between deaths. But they were there—they were always there, swarming in the doorways of the huts in a small, dark cloud, mimicking or mocking the rains that would not come.

The flies would come for him, eventually. And so, after a while, he and the flies were the only ones left.

Jack had a decision to make.

“Two-Minute Tuesdays” are a series of micro-stories written in two five minutes or less. Consider them “public practice,” like shooting free throws in the park.  Prompts are supplied at the bottom in case you want to try your own hand at one of them.

There had been many theories about how she had been murdered — all of them wrong. You see, they’d gotten a key fact of the whole affair wrong from the very beginning.

Lisa Blatner had never been murdered. In fact, she’d never been dead to begin with. She was living quite happily at 29 Whimsbury Lane with two cats and an electric kettle. The mail came every day but Sunday, and when her crossword puzzle was finished it was usually just about time for a cup of tea. She even had a gentleman caller, a wiry old man named Albert who had come highly recommended when her roof began to leak. Their seduction of one another had been a slow, quiet thing, and by the time he finally shucked out of his underwear and stood naked for inspection in her bedroom (with a matter of fact statement like “well, here’s me, then”) Albert had been over nearly every inch of 29 Whimsbury Lane, and some of them more than once. Indeed, the depths of her prodigious bosom proved to be the last nooks and crannies he got to explore on the entire property.

And so they did things to one another that would’ve provoked scandal if they’d been younger, and now generated merely remark. All the while, the Turk never knew that she still lived. And it was better for both of them that way, in the end.

“Two-Minute Tuesdays” are a series of micro-stories written in five minutes or less. Consider them “public practice,” like shooting free throws in the park.  Prompts are supplied at the bottom in case you want to try your own hand at one of them.

The dream of home went sideways.

Sean woke hanging from the wall, wrapped in his bunk sheets. They were slipping out of the frame even as he was slipping out of his dream, and it was enough motivation to get him to let go of the warm dinner that he was about to sit down to in his subconscious.

Oily black water bubbled up through the porthole that was now below him. What in tarnation was going on? Something thumped against the deck next to his head just as he got his arms free. Clinging to the bulkhead, he managed to get up to the fishing boat’s deck just in time to see the bridge that they were hung up on.

Write for two minutes using these three nouns: comfort, fishing boat, bridge

“Two-Minute Tuesdays” are a series of micro-stories written in five minutes or less. Consider them “public practice,” like shooting free throws in the park.  Prompts are supplied at the bottom in case you want to try your own hand at one of them.

Was it possible to see beauty in a cockroach, I wondered?

It was my seventh day of solitude. The doors were still locked, the windows dark. Not much I could do about either.

But as I studied the small, brown specimen, these things mattered less. It clung to the wall, near a piece of plastic moulding, lured into the open by careful inactivity on my part. Now I stared at its almond-like form, the bobbing antennae. How many discarded hamburger wrappers, rotting bird carcasses, literal pieces of shit had that small insect burrowed its way inside over its short lifetime? Could I see beauty in the mindless, unstoppable force of decay and consumption that this bug personified?

No dice; I was still crazy, and solitude wasn’t making it any better.

Write for two minutes using these three nouns: beauty, cockroach, dice