20 Minute Fiction
Short writing (and some longer things too)
The Small Warmth of the Sun
It was during the last of the good, warm days when Billy went to visit Dr. Duggleby, a check up before the seasons changed in earnest. Billy walked to the doctor’s office with the warmth of the sun on his back, with a lengthened shadow in front of himself and those things around him; the…
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Snippet
Billy watched the valley, and the clouds staggered their passage first on the western mountains and then caught again on the eastern ridge. In between was a space of very blue sky, and the clouds were lit from behind by the western sun that fell away as the world spun on axis in the other…
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The Pull of the World
Before the alarm howls the morning is on their room through the blinds, lines of it against the closet door and into the bathroom. There are doves in the trees cooing, wringing night out of their feathers. Elk move through the park across the street and their wet fur steams in the earliest bits of…
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Naramata Road
“I have water for you. There’s a fountain down the road a little.” “Thank you. You’re being very nice.” “It’s the least I can do after trying to steal your bike.” The two men laugh gently. “I’ll never forgive you for that.” “I can live without forgiveness.” They laugh again. Billy and Jim in…
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A More than Half Full Moon
Billy knew that when the curtains were pulled across the windows of the trailer that he shouldn’t come in. He looked up at a moon that was more than half-full that hung above the pine tree on the land as though stabbed there on the pinnacle branch, and the moon and tree were framed in…
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The Last Bits of Light
“I hope the winds don’t pick up again. That was horrible last night.” Billy was lowering the blinds on the bathroom window. The window was open to let in the air that blew cool down the mountains, and the night before when the winds picked up the blinds shook and slammed against the windowpane over…
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The Small Warmth of the Sun
Billy had gone when the poplars started to bloom, and when they did the last thing he was doing was lying in the winter dead grasses of the hydro cut between the dogs and the dogs laid there with him, Dublin asleep against Billy’s thigh and Maggie at a small distance watching ravens against the…
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7:45
It’s a broad shadow at nighttime. An instant thing. First the blinding sun strong against the horizon. Then it sinks to a small sliver of itself above the tops of the mountains. And then finally, suddenly, it hides behind Mount Rundle and those of us below begin to shiver in the cold and wrap ourselves…
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