#fiveminutefiction

The telephone rang in the hall as the early evening sun illuminated the petals of a bunch of drooping white carnations which occupied a cut glass vase on the small table at the bottom of the stairs. Mother’s house. Untouched by modernity. The same carpet, the same wallpaper, the same appliances, since? Well, since forever. Even before Dad died they hadn’t redecorated for years. “It’s fine as it…

So they sent this bot thing, this bot, was like, a kind of killer program thingy, and I don't have a clue how it worked like, but it just went after the videos. It could identify them somehow, no matter what people did to them, it could find them and just wreck the file. You'd just go back, maybe you ripped it off youtube, like a lot of girls did back when it was just getting big, because people wanted it I think even then people knew it was going to kick off, get banned or something, and of course it did in the end. 

SO there were backups everywhere, all over the world, because there were girls all over the world who had this reaction to it, like they couldn't tell you, I mean you know it was like narcotic, it was like a need for this stuff. 

And anyway people thought they had it safely stowed away but this bot would just come for it, through whatever, whatever, you just had it in your cloud or whatever and then it would be corrupted, totally unreadable file, wouldn’t play in anything. so people hid it, tried to keep it offline, on external drives and those little things people had back then, key things and some people even burned cd's and little tiny cards, I think they were, you know the cards you put in oh flash cards that was it. 

Sherman Turner eyed the couple playing blackjack at a table as he fed the slot machine that had been eating his dollars like a divorced woman eats chocolate. He didn’t mind the cost, as something told him that tonight he was going to hit the jackpot.

The guy looked like an accountant, who’d spent most of his adult life in some grey building, crunching numbers and filing reports, while the girl,…

I saw a sign tacked to a tree outside the library which looked like it had been cobbled together in a few minutes on a home computer, printed on A4, black and white to save ink: “Lost Dog. Patch went missing on 3rd September from Carney Road and hasn’t been seen since. Please call this number. Reward given.” There was a photo of an overweight mongrel with a black patch covering one eye being used…

The salt and pepper haired man stood on the bridge above the dual carriageway, staring towards the vanishing point where cars rushed to and cars rushed from. A perpetual rumble emanated from below, interspersed with a whoosh as unique as a license plate for every individual vehicle, drowned out only by the thunderous trucks. An airplane roared above, as it prepared for reunification with the…

Dessie pitched his tent on a flat grassy area outside a centuries old, derelict hunting lodge known locally as the Hellfire Club. The hunting lodge itself was situated in the apex of a semi-circular clearing at the summit of an otherwise tree covered mountain called Montpelier Hill, which commanded spectacular views of Dublin City. Dessie had been coming here since he was a kid and knew the…