Tag: flash fiction

An Acorns Flash Fiction Feature

By: Elowen Dovren

The shears tasted of dry rust and well-water. Maeve spat the grit onto the grey porch boards and wiped her chin with the back of her forearm, her sleeve catching on the coarse skin of her lip. At seventy-two, the November damp settled straight into her marrow, making her knees click when she stood.

Below her, Oconee County was drowning in green. Kudzu didn’t just grow here; it swallowed. It choked out the briars by breakfast, buried the rusted belly of the old John Deere by supper, and now, three soft, heart-shaped leaves were flexing through the split pine of her porch.

Maeve didn’t reach for the blades. Instead, she dipped her hand into the tin lard bucket at her hip, pulled out a fistful of crushed eggshells, and let them snow down around the shoots.

Calcium keeps the dirt sweet, Mae. Thomas’s voice was just a low hum in her inner ear now, dry as old corn silk. She smoothed the soil around the vine with two fingers, letting them sink until the cold mud caked beneath her fingernails.

Inside, the kitchen smelled of stale chicory and the cold iron of the woodstove. At the head of the table, Thomas’s blue-rimmed porcelain mug sat exactly three inches from the salt cellar. A crescent of grey dust had settled into the bottom of the glaze. For twelve months, she had swept around it. To move the mug was to carry it to the sink, and to wash it was to admit that no one was left to dirty it again.

A dry, papery scrape came from behind the plaster. Too heavy for a mouse.

Maeve followed the sound into the hallway where the wallpaper was peeling away in long, yellowed curls. Sprouting from a crack in the lath, a pale vine was reaching toward the

wooden peg where Thomas’s sheepskin coat used to hang. As she watched, the tip didn’t just grow; it swelled. It coiled back on itself, thickening into a flat, heavy disc.

Her ribs tightened. She pressed a thumb against the leaf-shape.

The cold hallway vanished. The skin of her face flared with the high, white heat of July 1974. The sharp stench of hot axle grease and crushed clover hit the back of her throat so hard she choked. Thomas was there, his shirt soaked through at the armpits, laughing as he pressed his silver Waltham watch into her palm. So you’ll always know the hour, Mae.

Maeve gasped, snatching her hand back. The hallway rushed back, dim and freezing. But her thumb still tingled where it had pressed the vein of the leaf.

By noon, the pruning shears were at the bottom of the eighty-foot well. She threw the window sashes wide, unlatched the back door, and sat down in the rocker to wait.

The green didn’t rush; it crept with an awful, quiet purpose. By Tuesday, the tendrils had looped around the legs of the oilcloth-covered table. By Friday, they were braided through the coiled springs of the mattress. Every time her bare skin brushed a leaf, the house filled with him. A touch against the doorframe brought the smell of his pipe tobacco; a step near the pantry brought the low, off-key rumble of him humming Old Rugged Cross over his morning shaving water.

She stopped lighting the stove. She stopped opening the tins of lard. She lived on well-water and the heavy, suffocating warmth of thirty years ago, watching the green twilight slowly seal the windows shut.

By the third week, the living room was a cave of soft, damp breath. In the corner, where Thomas’s corduroy armchair sat, the vines had matted into a thick, humped mass. It wasn’t a man—not truly—but the greenery had filled out the hollows of the cushion, rising into a broad, slumping torso that shifted slightly when the wind hit the eaves. Or perhaps it didn’t need the wind.

Maeve crawled toward it on her hands and knees, her skirts dragging through the wet mulch that now covered the pine floors.

“Thomas?” she whispered.

A wet, tearing sound came from the center of the mass as two leaves parted. A draft of air blew out of the dark split—but it didn’t smell like pine or tobacco. It smelled of ditch-water, stagnant ponds, and the sweet, rotten bottom of a silo.

“…exactly when…”

The voice was a rattle of dry husks. It had the rhythm of his speech, but the throat was made of fiber.

“…coming home… Mae… coming home…”

She leaned her weight against the green knee, reaching up to press her cheek where the chest should be. She wanted the wool of his shirt. She wanted the steady, boring thud of his heart.

The vine-mass heaved. Two thick, fibrous ropes slid over her shoulders, smelling of old graves. They didn’t hold her like a husband; they tightened with the slow, hydraulic pressure of a root system splitting a foundation. Black thorns, long as carpet tacks, punched through her cotton blouse, dragging lines of heat across her shoulder blades.

Below her, the floor-vines were already looping over her ankles, stitching her hem directly into the rotting floorboards.

The thing in the chair began to shudder violently. The leaves rhythmically clacked together, mimicking a sound she had spent a year trying to forget: the wet, rattling gasp of Thomas’s lungs filling with fluid in the county ward while the machines beeped in the dark.

“…coming… home… coming…”

It wasn’t a memory. It was an echo chamber that required her blood to keep humming.

The adrenaline was cold and thin, but it cleared the green fog from her head. Maeve didn’t scream; she had spent her life saving her breath for the work. She wrenched her right arm back, leaving two inches of skin behind on the briars, and dug into her apron pocket. Her fingers found the horn-handled paring knife—the small, hooked one she used for coring winter apples.

She didn’t try to stab the chest; there was nothing there but leaves. She drove the small blade horizontally into the split where the voice came from, sawing through the wet, stringy pulp until her knuckles hit the bark.

The creature didn’t cry out, but the pressure in the arms slackened as the sap ran black and thick over her hand.

Maeve dropped to the floor, her knees cracking like pistol shots in the enclosed room. She sliced through the tendrils at her ankles, her breath coming in ragged, shallow wheezes. She didn’t look back at the chair as the green mass began to slump sideways, losing its shape like melting tallow.

In the kitchen, the main taproot had lifted three floorboards, thick as a fence post and slick with white fungus.

She didn’t use the poker. She took the heavy, double-bitted axe from the wood-box by the stove. It took her three swings just to raise it over her shoulder, her old wrists trembling under the iron weight.

The first blow bit into the meat of the root, spraying her stockings with sour fluid. The second split it to the dirt. The third buried the blade into the earth beneath.

A long, slow sigh seemed to pass through the walls as the leaves dropped their water. They didn’t disappear. They simply died—turning the dull, grey-brown of winter silage, filling the kitchen with the ordinary, suffocating stench of rotting weeds.

The silence came back, but it wasn’t the heavy silence of an empty house anymore. It was just the quiet of November.

Maeve sat on the edge of the wood-box for a long time, watching her blood drip onto the dead mulch. Thomas’s mug was gone, buried under six inches of brown chaff. She didn’t dig it out.

After an hour, she stood up, her joints protesting the movement, and walked to the pump. She washed her arms until the water ran clear, then she found a broom. There was a lot of rot to move before sundown.

About the Author:

Elowen Dovren is an emerging writer whose work spans multiple genres and explores diverse perspectives. Her writing has been published in InterrobangLit and she also has work forthcoming in PinholePoetry. Currently, she is channeling her creative focus into a new collection of short stories. You can find her on Instagram at Elowendovren.writes and follow her updates.

An Acorns Flash Fiction Feature

By: M.D. Smith IV

The French Quarter never sleeps. It dreams. And I walk its dreams. My paws touch the cracked cobblestones, slick with last night’s rain, each step echoing softly between shuttered doors and balconies dripping iron lace. The gas lamps above hum and hiss like watchful spirits, their yellow light bending in the fog.

Humans call me Bright Eyes. I belong to Tarantulena Tolbert, or so they think. In truth, she belongs as much to me. She is my keeper, my anchor, my shadow, and I, hers.

Tarantulena is a witch, but not the kind the storybooks warn you about. She saves her craft for the desperate. I have seen her whisper into a jar of camphor until a sick child’s lungs drew breath again, and I have watched her stroke a feather along a dying man’s limbs until his bones knit whole beneath her touch. She works quiet miracles, never seeking thanks, never leaving a trace but relief.

We live small, as witches must. Our house keeps to itself behind peeling shutters, wrapped in the Quarter’s noise, jazz rolling down the alleys, drunks spilling wine and secrets, and fortune tellers scratching cryptic patterns in chalk. The air here is thick with memory, swollen with spirits.

But peace never lingers long in New Orleans. The Quarter’s dreams are restless, and tonight, they stir with something darker.

I felt it first, before the humans, before even Tarantulena. The air changed. The rain-slick streets, usually spiced with rum, sugar, and fried dough, turned bitter, as though someone had burned sage but left the smoke soured. My whiskers twitched. My tail lashed once.

“Bright Eyes,” Tarantulena murmured from the upstairs window, her shawl pulled tight around her thin shoulders. Her voice, usually steady as the river’s flow, carried a tremor. “You feel it too.”

I blinked up at her, and in my golden eyes she saw her answer.

The Dracor clan arrived on the Mississippi, their barge creeping down like a plague. The father, Corbin Dracor, was a sorcerer from Darkwoods, Kentucky. His daughters, five of them, with hair black as crows and eyes cold as tombstones, spread through the Quarter like rot. Shopkeepers who refused their “levy” found tragedy at dawn. Explosions in kitchens, fires leaping from candles, wagons toppling into ditches. Coin bought survival. Defiance bought ruin.

Even I felt it. The Quarter’s dreams grew fevered. Dogs howled at corners where no one stood, and the air smelled of burned copper.

One night, when the moon sat thin and mean, Tarantulena stroked my back by the window. She smoked a long, scented cigarette, her eyes hard and tired.

“They’ll starve this city, Bright Eyes,” she said. “Folk are afraid, and fear feeds monsters.”

I purred, though my black tail twitch quickened. She knew what I could do, what lay hidden in the golden fire of my gaze. Anyone foolish enough to look straight into my eyes when using my power, found their will unmade, melted into wax that Tarantulena and I could shape. Rage turned soft. Malice turned meek. The mighty fell to their knees, eager to please.

But the Dracors were no common thugs.

“They’ll come here sooner or later,” Tarantulena murmured. “And when they do, we’ll need to decide to run or stand.”

I blinked at her, slow as a promise. Stand. Always.

The Dracors came at dawn three days later. I smelled them before I heard them, rot, blood, and swamp water. Corbin Dracor and daughters strode into the Quarter in a crooked line. They wore dresses like mourning veils and carried charms that hissed like snakes trapped in bottles. The shopkeepers bowed, trembling, as he barked his decree: double the levy, or double the suffering.

That night, he came to us.

Tarantulena sat calm at our table, sipping chicory coffee as if expecting company. I lay curled in her lap, my eyes half-closed.

“Madame Tolbert,” Corbin said, voice slick as oil, “you’ve lived here long enough to know the way of things. Pay your due, and perhaps your pretty little house won’t burn.”

Tarantulena flicked ash into a dish. “I pay no thieves. Not in coin, not in kind.”

One of his daughters hissed like a serpent. Another fingered a knife.

The hair on my back stood at attention.

Corbin sneered with fists clenched. “Then I’ll take your house, your bones, and your familiar. What’s a witch without her black cat?”

My tail stood straight up, tip flicking. Tarantulena smiled thin as a razor’s edge.

“Don’t look into my cat’s yellow eyes,” she warned.

But pride makes fools of people. Corbin laughed and met my gaze.

The moment his pupils touched mine, I let the sun blaze out. My eyes burned molten. I poured into him causing his fury, greed, and violence to all twist into something harmless, something soft.

His grip slackened. His shoulders sagged. When he spoke again, his voice was that of a child.

“What… what would you have me do?” he whimpered.

“Fetch the garbage can from the street,” Tarantulena said coolly. “And sweep my porch.”

And he did.

Corbin’s daughters screamed, their spells writhing, but one by one they made the same mistake. One by one, they stared into my eyes, and one by one, they became husks of their cruelty, cooing like pigeons, bowing to Tarantulena as if she were queen.

But witches know curses don’t die; they’re only redirected. Tarantulena stood, her shadow long on the wall. “You’ve poisoned the Quarter long enough. It’s time you took your rot back where you came from.”

That night, under cover of storm clouds, I padded ahead, my tail high, their puppeted bodies stumbling after me as we marched the Dracor clan to the river. The shopkeepers gathered, whispering, watching as Tarantulena raised her hand and pointed. A barge waited in the mud, ropes creaking.

She spoke in the old tongue, the one that smells like iron and lilies. The Dracors climbed aboard, docile as lambs, still under the prison of my gaze. When the last daughter stepped onto the deck, Tarantulena cut the rope.

Corbin whimpered. “Where are we going?”

“Out to sea,” Tarantulena’s thundering voice echoed. “And you’ll never come back.”

The current seized them, carrying them into the dark. The barge drifted, slower, smaller, until the Gulf swallowed it whole.

The Quarter exhaled, and air felt lighter, the dreams calmer. People cheered Tarantulena’s name, but I knew better. She glanced down at me, and I leaped to her shoulder, my soft purr against her ear.

“Good work, Bright Eyes,” she whispered. “But remember, power like yours leaves scars. Every will you break, every mind you bend, it changes the world. We saved them tonight, but someday, we may pay the price.”

I licked her cheek, and she laughed, though her eyes stayed grave.

The Quarter rested peacefully again. Yet I watched the river. Tarantulena watched my golden eyes glowing in the dark, waiting, always waiting… for the next shadow to rise.

Because shadows always do.

About the Author:

M.D. Smith of Hunstville, Alabama, writer of over 350 flash stories, has published digitally in Frontier Times, Flash Fiction Magazine, Bewilderingstories.com, and many more. Retired from running a television station, he lives with his wife of 64 years and three cats. https://mdsmithiv.com/