Category Archives: Kelly Grotke

He picked up the three pebbles that lay on the desk, cupping them in his hand and rattling them around like dice as he stared out the window. She’d accused him once of caring more about things than people. It … Continue reading →

He picked up the three pebbles that lay on the desk, cupping them in his hand and rattling them around like dice as he stared out the window. She’d accused him once of caring more about things than people. It … Continue reading →

In Sidon, there is a mound of ancient debris high as a fifteen-story building, chiefly comprised of broken shells belonging to the family Muricidae. Long ago and far beyond the realm of fact, a dog, possibly even the dog of … Continue reading →

You may say a crowd Surges and ebbs like water, But the crowd is gone. . Return to This Week’s Flash

The matching pair of bronze statues, each of a son transfixed in the act of hurling a blade toward the neck of his father, disappeared sometime during the French Revolution. They had adorned opposite sides of a bridge in Ghent, … Continue reading →

It’s a true story, I read it in Life magazine soon after the war, in between the ads. One of the ads was for some new packaging that would keep Mr. Lobster moist and happy all the way from Maine … Continue reading →

We stand beside each other and your shoulder brushes against mine like a wing and I remember as it passes how long ago, a monarch butterfly with five legs found me and stayed for two days when I was very … Continue reading →

They left that morning before the dew had vanished in the blue summer heat. She’d tied her friend to a fencepost behind the house where the two brothers lived, talking all the while and telling him to be good and … Continue reading →

He went out the front, turned the corner past the garage and climbed up the slight hill until he reached the bench. A quick dust-off to the planks as he thought, sometimes it’s good just to sit down. A light … Continue reading →

He’d just missed the bus. Half an hour then for another, according to the screen. His friends were still around the corner at the bar but the weather had turned damp and he didn’t feel like crossing the park again … Continue reading →

The mind creates reasons, maybe this was one. See if it sticks, see if it can survive the exacting standards of a child dredging the bottom of a pond with a branch. Interesting? Or is it pitched back where it … Continue reading →

What sort of character am I? A man with a bad haircut and perhaps a bit of dandruff, worn down by life and forever rubbing his bodily particulars against the ill-fitting suit that clings to him like some lifeless shedding … Continue reading →

I hadn’t thought about it, until you asked. Late in the year, since it’d already begun to snow. Winter. Dark blue night, coats and coverings and everyone hurrying against the threat of cold, retreating like turtles into their shells. One … Continue reading →

She dreamt that night of a silent and predatory force gliding beneath the still dark surface of the narrative, a wayward ripple had reached her for warning and her nerves raced to the shore where she now lay heaving with … Continue reading →

This is where I will build my web, near the light from an open window, and wait for my meal to come.   Amor fati.  A mere spider, not very widely read but I did read once that we are born … Continue reading →

I knew he’d come. There, by the doorway, the middle-aged guy, the one with the red jacket over his arm– see? No, he won’t recognize me, I was always behind the camera. Now. He’s going over to that newspaper somebody … Continue reading →

Ah, but they are stubborn, these two. She sat at the river’s edge and began to fold the piece of paper she’d carried down, over and once more and just another time will be enough but no, so again and … Continue reading →

“This family moved to the city after the war, and we’ve hung on like ticks on a dog’s ass ever since,” his father would say. “Someday, one of us is going to explode. You’ll see.” Maybe that’s what happened. The father’s … Continue reading →

“What is interesting today will not be tomorrow.” “Your statements are like stones thrown into a conversation.” “Nothing is now proven or disproven by words.  All words are like stones, and conversations are merely the ripples that remain as the … Continue reading →

“It’s a shame,” she said softly, shaking her head. “I can’t make any sense of it, no one can.”  She turned to look out the café window, watching the Saturday street as her companion waited in silence.  “Did you see … Continue reading →

He lived in the city, and always cut at an angle, but never against the grain. The slightest trace of a wince around the eyes, and it was done. The obscurity of his compulsions did nothing to diminish his pleasures, … Continue reading →

Watery sweet-salt linden sea, I am, I am still, thought the dreamer.  Closed and still my eyes, an eternity below me and above, and so what is the need for eyes at all. In time her unnerving stillness exerted a gravitational pull … Continue reading →