Love Curse — Part II
Fast & Short is a flash fiction collaboration between eight Literate Ape writers. Each was tasked with authoring one piece of flash fiction that would be combined to create a single short story. The writers’ flash fiction needed to serve two purposes: 1. Stand alone as a unique piece of flash fiction and 2. Serve as a vehicle for building a larger story and driving that story forward. Over the next two weeks, Literate Ape will publish all eight flash fiction stories individually with a link to the growing compilation. We hope you enjoy this literary experiment.
—DH2 , co-editors
THIS GRAVEYARD HAD A REPUTATION for being haunted. But what graveyard wasn’t? By the time they got there, she thought, this van would be haunted with the ghosts of what she’d rather have been doing. Playing old SEGA Genesis video games; binge watching Arrested Development; sleeping on the couch with a partially chewed bite of Tony’s frozen cheese pizza in her mouth. She caved to hanging out only after her boyfriend, Len, promised they’d spend all next weekend at home on the couch.
“Whose couch?” she asked.
“Eh,” he said. He responded this way to most of her questions. Len didn’t have an opinion on much, but he had one on this graveyard. “It’s gonna be fucking awesome! This one grave, a bride is buried there. She died on her wedding night. Fuckin’ ballroom chandelier fell on her head during the first dance. Can you believe that!? If you stand at her grave with your true love and recite that Love is Patient thing from Corinthians, she’ll appear. Still in her dress with shards of glass protruding from her face and everything.”
“Then what?”
“Dunno. We’ll find out.”
He was cute when he got excited about things. But she knew they wouldn’t find out. Not if you needed to be there with your true love.
