Laurie's Flash Fiction

  The first thing Celeste noticed was the silence—not the absence of sound, but the total absence of weight . The low-grade hum of anxiety she had carried for eighty years was gone. Her lungs didn’t just draw breath; they inhaled vitality. She stood on a ridge of velvet grass that smelled of crushed mint and starlight. Below her, the New Jerusalem shimmered, a City of Light that defied physics. Its walls of jasper were clear as crystal, and the foundations glowed with the internal fire of sapphires and emeralds. There was no sun to cast a shadow; the glory of the Creator functioned as the atmosphere itself, a seamless canopy of living light.  Celeste did not even have to turn this way or that way in order to behold such beauty. Her New Vision no longer had clung to the peripheral, but is now 360.  She sensed things differently now also in a heightened state. "Behold," a voice resonated—not from the sky, but from the very air—"I am making all things new." Celeste de...

 The envelope sat on the mahogany desk like a live grenade. Inside were the legal documents, the DNA results, and a handwritten confession that rearranged thirty years of Jane’s history into a work of fiction. The woman she called "Aunt" was her mother. The man she called "Father" had paid for the silence. The "truth" she had built her identity upon was a carefully curated set of stage lights and painted backdrops. Jane stood by the window of her small apartment, watching the city breathe. For three days, she had felt the ghost of Young Goodman Brown hovering at her shoulder. He whispered of the darkness in the woods, of the "pink ribbons" of her own life fluttering down to the dirt. He urged her to see the rot in every smile she encountered at church, the hidden agendas in every "I love you" from her family. "It’s all a performance, Jane," the bitterness hissed. "If they lied about your birth, what else is a lie?" S...

  The year is 2030, and the world is terrifyingly polite. Under the rule of the Benevolent Committee Anonymous, conflict has been engineered out of existence. There are no political parties, only the "One Law": Total Benevolence. But the math of this utopia required a sacrifice. To eliminate poverty, the Committee held the Great Lottery. Half the population became "Home Dwellers"; the other half became "The Unhoused"—clean, fed, and smiling slaves who belonged to the homes they maintained. The Gilded Cage Cinda was once a teacher; now, she was simply Cinda, a woman without a surname or a soul of her own. She spent her days polishing silver and practicing the mandatory "Benevolent Grin." To the Committee, this was perfection. To Cinda, it was a graveyard of the spirit. By removing the ability to choose "wrong," the Committee had deleted the ability to choose "right." Without free will, their kindness was merely a reflex—a biolo...

The streetlights in the suburbs had a way of making everything look filtered, but they couldn't soften the ink on Elias. A vertical strip of three black diamonds ran from the base of his ear down into the collar of his shirt—a sharp, obsidian scar that seemed to vibrate against his skin. I watched him from my porch as he methodically checked the lug nuts on his sister’s minivan. He was an odd gear in a clockwork neighborhood. He wore plain navy hoodies and nondescript sneakers, the uniform of a man who desperately wanted to be "Background Character #4." Yet, that tattoo shouted. It was a visual "keep away" sign that made the neighbors cross the street. "You're staring again, Ben," Elias said without looking up. His voice was like low-grade sandpaper—rough but strangely grounding. "Just wondering why you don't just wear a turtleneck if you want to blend in so bad," I joked, though my chest tightened. There was an unpredictable energy t...

The sanctuary was empty, smelling of lemon polish and old hymnals. Elara sat in the back row, her fingers tracing a jagged scar on her palm—a physical reminder of a childhood where words had been sharper than blades. For twenty years, she had been told she was a "broken vessel," a "burden," and "unlovable." Those labels were the skin she wore. Now, staring at the rugged wooden cross at the front of the room, she felt a heavy, terrifying pull. The Weight of the Invitation She had heard the invitation a thousand times: Come as you are. But Elara didn't know how to come as anything other than a collection of mistakes and mirrors reflecting other people's hate. The Quiet Realization She closed her eyes, trying to imagine a version of Jesus that didn't look like the authority figures she’d known. She thought about the stories of the woman at the well and the man with leprosy—people who were socially invisible or "ruined." He hadn't as...

The year was 3026, and the red sands of Mars were no longer a desert, but a sprawling network of glass domes and terra-formed valleys. Below the artificial sky of the New Ares Crater, Senator Quinn Jones smoothed the front of her ceremonial robes. Earth was a memory of suffocating crowds and concrete canyons—a world where, in its final centuries, the soul had been traded for efficiency. In the crush of ten billion people, faith had been branded "divisive." For Quinn, the scars of Christian persecution on Earth weren't just history lessons; they were the reason her ancestors had boarded the first colonial ships. The Threshold of a New Era Quinn stood before the arched entrance of the New Senate. The architecture was a deliberate echo of the old world—white marble quarried from the Valles Marineris, designed to remind the weary of the permanence of justice. "Today, we decide if we are just building a habitat or a home," she whispered to her aide. Her mission was s...