The Short Answer – a collection short stories in 100 words

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A Poet In The Book Closet

“Take it” said the beautiful woman with the cherubic smile, leaning across the bare wood table, holding out a black ballpoint pen.
I barely knew where to look.
The musty, book-lined library backroom gloom seemed too perfect, paranoia perfect.
“Take it” she said smiling with radiant beneficence.
“And this” she pushed a wiro-bound notebook towards me.
I hesitated. Panic words unleashed into my head.
I’m silently rapping on honeytrap words, glancing at her, but keeping calm.
“Take them” She urged “Don’t worry. Your secret is safe with us”
Her hand gesture drew in the whole room
“We’re all poets here”

More Flash Fiction – The Short Answer a collection of short stories in 100 words.

About Bella Basura

Bella Basura
chronological archive

 

Bella’s new 100-word micro fiction

The Mansplainer
In the sociable, jostling crush of the after-party he felt, once again, that overwhelming urge to pontificate. He glanced out, across the room, seeking an audience.
He thanked his lucky stars that he was taller than most and could easily scan the room without straining his neck. Biological advantages were such a blessing.
His morbid gaze fell on a likely acolyte. At the sight of the pink lace, ruffling around a navel-plunging neckline, his exploding mansplaining gland spurred him into action.
“That one” He said to himself “Doesn’t have a penis”.
And he honed in on her, fulminating fluids a-flowing.

More flash fiction here

Fish Mythology – Flash Fiction

Finally, I have managed to capture in words my tumultuous feelings around the death earlier this year of my one-time Hero, freak out to the Teenage Moon Dream oh yeah! – David Bowie. The piece is a 100 word Flash Fiction story, that has a specifically East-Anglian setting because I live in East-Anglia.The piece, Fish Mythology, is sub-titled “if David Bowie had been born an Eel instead”

 

Fish Mythology By Bella Basura

Eel Bowie-Fish

 Here Eel Bowie-Fish fell, brandy-drunk, face down in the Ouse.
Down where Bulrush buds waver in clear still water, beneath we writhing bottom-feeder shoals, we elvers and catfish, he deep under layers of earthy mud, dark dead debris.

Here in leaf-litter and rot lies the corpse of old Eel Bowie-Fish, who lead us to conquer the Isle of Ely, on the Fen he crawled on his fins, on the floodplain he walked on his tail, like a bishop, into the Cathedral, resplendent in his flowing robes.
But here lies Eel Bowie-Fish , decomposing in slow-motion undulations, while we pick his bones white.

Bella Basura’s in progress Flash Fiction Anthology – The Short Answer

Bella Basura
Feb. 2016

Fiction Flash No.2

Weird Winter Wishes Photo: Phil MFU Cambridge 2012

Weird Winter Wishes
Photo: Phil MFU
Cambridge 2012

Calm Time Charmed
by Bella Basura

It seems I have been here a year, living in this charmed place, a sleepy little bower in the bosom of paradise.

Here, time moves so slowly that it feels never-ending. There, out in the real, grey world time turns gyrations, so that at the intake of a breath galaxies burst into being, only to recede into cosmic void at the beat of the outbreath.

So that by the time I make up my mind to return,
hundreds of thousands of years have passed, and I suspect,
everybody has evolved into a future-race of super-bellicose giant killer-crabs,
walking sideways, angrily.

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New Flash Fiction

 

A Year In The Murder Flat - Bella Basura 2011

A Year In The Murder Flat – Bella Basura 2011

Living at Death’s Door
By Bella Basura

At first the landlord didn’t tell us about the murder,
we found out after the lease was signed,
we’d already moved in.

In the end, I read it in the local newspaper,
she’d lived in the flat across the landing,
her husband stabbed her in a frenzy,
she escaped him but died in the stairwell.
I carried the constant knowledge that the woman  had bled out on my doorstep.

The morning of the murder, he told me later,
the landlord had hidden in the bathroom.
The woman had died screaming and banging on a door nobody dared answer for fear.

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