short fiction Archives - Women Writers, Women's Books

How Objects Inspire Fiction

Anne Leigh Parrish — Wed, 08 Feb 2017 07:42:59 +0000

Just about anything can serve as inspiration for a work of fiction. Often, it’s a person, someone we knew, cared for, or had trouble with when we were younger. It can be a place, somewhere we hold dear, or couldn’t wait to escape. In my own work, a single scene has many times been the […]

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Here’s Why: Short fiction by Anne Leigh Parrish

Anne Leigh Parrish — Fri, 20 May 2016 09:11:05 +0000

Here’s why. You slump, shrink, curl down in your seat, never stand up straight. As if an arrow might pick you off. Not an arrow, a bullet. Not a bullet, a blow. Not a blow, words. Not words, looks. Here’s why. You’re a freak. Four inches in one year? Your father’s colleague says he keeps […]

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Short Fiction: A New Year’s Friendship

Aine Greaney — Wed, 06 Jan 2016 12:05:41 +0000

Elaine Walsh Barrington revs up her white BMW and reverses the car out of the double garage behind the house. “I really don’t mind getting a taxi to the station again,” Lorna, her younger sister, says from the passenger seat. “You didn’t have to leave your New Years Day open house like this.” The clenched […]

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Short Fiction: By The Wayside

Anne Leigh Parrish — Sun, 20 Dec 2015 12:07:20 +0000

She’s a woman who discards anything which causes sorrow or blocks her path. A man she cares for does both, and she leaves him. She takes only what she really values, an old set of books, a few china plates of her mother’s, an abstract painting she’d found in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She abhors […]

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Short Story: A Simple Mistake

Vanessa Lafaye — Fri, 30 Oct 2015 13:08:01 +0000

The dome of an umbrella bobbed along the top of the fence, beneath the dripping horse chestnut branches. Pink, blue, white stripes. Childhood colours, an adult’s height. It had been raining for days, maybe weeks. Lots of umbrellas bobbed along her fence, but she recognised this one. It was him again. Cynthia wheeled herself into […]

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Short Story: The Long Way Home

Vanessa Lafaye — Fri, 25 Sep 2015 06:42:26 +0000

‘Did I defrost the chicken?’ Janice asked Mungo, the small bobbled bear stuck to her dashboard, as she pulled into the stream of going-home traffic. Tom used to do the remembering for both of them. That was before. Before the stroke which changed everything, destroyed his memory, robbed him of control over his left side. […]

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