Story 1
This was the longest Oliver had been out by himself since Brenda died. Four months now.
He ordered his burger using one of those touch screens. He still called them “things”. It had always made Brenda smile.
He sat with his food, turning a cocktail stick between his fingers. It was from the last drink she ever had – he had kept it.
Two boys came in loud, all noise and movement. People avoided their eyes. Oliver didn’t look up until they sat at his table.
‘Alright, Gramps. What you got for us?’
‘Nothing,’ Oliver said.
The manager appeared. ‘Right, lads, time to leave.’
‘Why don’t you go back to your office, fatso?’
The punch dropped him hard. Chairs scraped. Someone shouted.
The taller boy turned back to Oliver. ‘Your turn. Hand it over.’
Oliver finished his burger. Took his time. Wiped his mouth.
Then he stood.
Up close, he didn’t look frail.
He held the cocktail stick between his fingers and looked at the quieter one.
Neither of them spoke.
Something in Oliver’s face made them step back.
He walked out.
At home, he placed the cocktail stick beside Brenda’s urn and left it there.
Story 2
She hadn’t expected the queue.
Forty minutes in the cold, shuffling forward in ones and twos. She hadn’t known the man — not really. A neighbour. Thirty years of brief nods over the fence.
When she finally reached the front, his daughter took her hand.
“He talked about you,” the daughter said.
Margaret blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“Said you were the only one who never asked how he was.” The daughter smiled, tired around the eyes. “He hated that question.”
She looked at him lying there — smaller than she remembered, the way they always were.
Outside, her sister was waiting with two cups of tea from the urn.
“Well?” her sister asked.
“I didn’t know him at all,” Margaret said.
Her sister nodded. “Nobody does. That’s the thing about funerals.”
Margaret wrapped both hands around the cup.
She thought about the young man next door. Sundays. The guitar.
She went home and knocked on his door.
Story 3
John was about to tell his psychiatrist that he had been here before when he stopped himself.
That was what had gone wrong last time.
In his previous life, he had said it out loud. They had listened carefully. Then they had listened too carefully. He had spent the next twenty years in an institution, dying there quietly.
But he had also learned something.
Déjà vu was not a mistake. It was a marker. A gentle nudge from a life already lived, offering the chance to turn a different way.
So this time, John said nothing.
He smiled politely. He spoke about work, about sleep, about ordinary worries. He left the office and went home.
He lived thirty years longer than before.
He was never wealthy, but he was rich in sons, in grandchildren, in noise and Sunday dinners.
In his next life, he never once experienced déjà vu.
He had finally lived it right.
Story 4
Ian asked who was allowed into heaven. The priest was answering gently, but Ian kept drifting in and out of sleep.
Father McIntyre stood to leave.
“No.” Ian grabbed his arm from the bed.
Startled, the priest sat back down.
“Will Frankie Burns be there?”
“Frankie Burns?”
“When I was ten,” Ian said, “we used to play a game called safari. You climbed over every back garden on the street without touching the pavement. The dogs were lions. The sheds were caves. If you got caught, you were dead.”
He swallowed.
“The best route was the dangerous one. Two alsatians and Mr. McCracken. He was always in his garden.”
Ian closed his eyes.
“I jumped the hedge at the low point. I didn’t see the pitchforks. Four of them, stuck in the ground, pointing up. I missed them. I turned to warn Frankie —”
The room was quiet except for the soft hum of the oxygen machine.
Father McIntyre nodded slowly.
“I’m sure Frankie will be fine,” he said.
“I just want to see my mum. My dad. Frankie.”
“You will,” the priest said softly.
Ian’s voice was barely there now.
“I better not see McCracken.”
A small pause.
“I doubt you will, Ian,” said Father McIntyre. “I very much doubt you will.”
Story 5
This was only his fourth trip with the tourists, and he’d been spotted again.
“I suggested that your coordinates would get us too close, like last time,” his assistant spoke up.
The assistant told the passengers that the viewing platform was now open for them to see the planet as it was three thousand years ago. He also had to repeat for the umpteenth time that they couldn’t land as they must avoid being seen, and they, in no way, could interfere with history.
On the ground, it was 1986. The fighter jet spotted the flying object hovering on the very edge of the atmosphere and space. The pilot called it in.
“Contact. Bearing unknown. Lights—thousands of them. Just sitting there, not moving. What am I looking at?”
At that moment, the UFO disappeared. So fast it was as if it had just vanished.
Reveal the AI story
Story 2 is the imposter. Thanks for playing
https://ko-fi.com/flashfictions
If you’d rather swap a coffee for something you can actually keep, the FlashFictions book is there for you.
Same weird ideas, just bound together.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0G34YZ9B2
Flash Fiction 